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Comment by kennywinker | Hacker News Reader

lol @ filtering "politically biased content". If you apply this filter you're not neutralizing biases, just adding a bias towards the status quo. The status quo being by definition not progressive, that unfortunately means you've given yourself a conservative bias.

You've also offloaded the decision about what is political material to an AI - which has a biased view of what is politically biased based on its training data.

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Sorry but this just sounds salty and like an anecdote (hn edition). If the status quo was conservatism you would expect to see that reflected in elections globally wouldn't you.

As indeed we do.

No, what we see is popular parties with watered down centric programmes drawing in the same core voters for decades. Parties that actively advertise resisting change almost never win any elections, unless the political system you use as reference sucks so bad that it's a defacto duopoly.

I don’t agree. "Stop this newfangled bullshit and let's go back to the way things used to be" is a very common political message.

Idk if you’ve noticed, but centrists aren’t usually pushing radical reformations of our society to make it better. Centrism is just “let’s have the illusion of progress without adopting any change that threatens existing power structures.”

Are we not seeing a rise in far-right leaders across the globe? Italy, Israel, Poland, Hungary... not to mention growing conservative movements in however many countries not currently governed by far-right populists. (America is certainly one of them. I believe France is another.)

They don't win elections because of their conservative takes but because of protest voters. If you need a concrete statistical example: in the state of Hessen, the far right party AfD gained by far the most new voters from the social democrats which are firmly center left; ten times more than from the largest conservative party. This is an alternative to not voting or destroying your ballot paper because it actually reflects in polls shown on TV (which do not show absent voters). They just want to piss off other parties, it's not motivated by support for the (barely existing) far right's programme for the largest part.

Obviously you also have people who actually support the far right ideologies but lot of these voters were recently found to be willing to switch to a new far left party as soon as it runs at an election (catapulting it to 20 % off the cut at a federal level); same motivation. Protest votes

I'll be honest, I'm inclined not to believe this in the slightest. (Far-right voters voting far-left, or vice versa? En masse? In some kind of ill-defined protest?) But if you have any stats I'd love to see them.

Source for the far right to far left statistic is Insa Consulere, one of the large public opinion institutes. These companies are so reliable that the live results on election days used to announce a winner on TV are actually from their analyses at polling stations throughout the day, not from government institutions. If the figure should change it's because these people have changed their mind afterwards, but as it stands right now, a lot of far right voters consider it a better alternative. Percentage wise, out of all parties, the far right loses the most to this new far left party. This was already predicted before any statistics were in because they just want to flip the bird to established parties.

https://www.berliner-zeitung.de/news/sahra-wagenknecht-parte...

The voter movement from center left to far right is from the official election results from a few weeks ago.

Huh, interesting. (And thanks for the link!) I wouldn't foresee American voting blocs behaving like that in a million years, but German voters apparently have it in them.

That's because politics in the US isn't pluralistic but a static duopoly that's treated like a team sport by a lot of voters. In Germany the opposing player to the far right is the Greens for example because the two parties are both benefiting from the cosmopolitism vs communitarism cleavage that drives a lot of political debate. Voters will hardly switch between these two parties specifically. But if you are in a de-facto two party system where the opposing party is at the opposite end of each cleavage then you'll barely have any voter movement. It's entrenched this way for decades

Most democracies are pluralistic with more parties which is why the Germany anecdote makes more sense than the US one

> Far-right voters voting far-left

Considering the horseshoe effect, this is totally plausible.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horseshoe_theory

> The horseshoe theory does not enjoy wide support within academic circles; peer-reviewed research by political scientists on the subject is scarce, and existing studies and comprehensive reviews have often contradicted its central premises, or found only limited support for the theory under certain conditions

The horseshoe theory 100 % applies to Germany and most certainly to other pluralistic countries too because the far left and far right are fishing in the same pond, for socioeconomically weak voters. They thus end up also sharing some views that you wouldn't expect to resonate on both sides like reducing immigration.

The people who desperately dispute the horseshoe theory are usually politically extreme themselves and hate the thought of having such similarities with the opposite end.

Yikes. Centrist yells at “socioeconomically weak” cloud.

I’ll just say this: horseshoe theory is wrong because when there are similarities they’re inconsistent and shallow. If that wasn’t true, political scientists would be able to write papers about the consistent and deep similarities, but they can’t so they don’t.

fyi good article on where the ends of the horsehoe have bent toward each other I think: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-55957298

I took it as more about definitions: conservatism (in theory) is all about conserving the status quo. It's in the name.

Using traditional (and IMHO more correct) definitions of conservative and progressive, you are of course correct. However, at least in the US those terms have pretty different meanings to most people IRL. For example, the "conservative" position on Roe v. Wade was to change the status quo, and the "progressive" position was largely to stick with the status quo. Conservatives largely want to change the status quo on funding the Ukraine war, while progresses don't. I'm sure there are other examples, but anyway if you limited yourself to the traditional definitions, you'd be utterly perplexed by such a thing.

I think the person you're replying to is using the term in its academic form. Conservatism seeks to conserve [the status quo]. This transcends any colloquial gobbledygook.

You could be right, although given that it is explicitly about filtering contemporary political bias, that would be an unhelpful definition to work with. Also many progressives nowadays will say the same thing about issues at work for example. When people say things like, "let's keep politics out of the workplace" they will say that is impossible because that reinforces the status quo, which is a political viewpoint.

Wanting to undo progress isn’t progress. Going back to “the way things were” (not a real thing) is a pretty central idea to conservatism both in theory and in practice in the US. To your example: calling roe v wade the status quo because it was the law from 1973 to 2023 seems like a stretch to me.

As for the ukraine war example, yeah that one kinda breaks the mold. My best understanding of it is because the conservative position is to seek national strength, rather than the less concrete strength of unity. Sometimes that means war (e.g. iraq and afghanistan, nominally to prevent future terrorist attacks) and sometimes that means not-war as in the case where the benefit of keeping ukraine free, to the US, is unclear.

Ultimately i think you’re right - as a political ideology, conservatism is more fickle than just “don’t change things” - but since that impulse is definitely in there i think my original point stands

> calling roe v wade the status quo because it was the law from 1973 to 2023 seems like a stretch to me.

It sounds like our disagreement is more around "where do we draw the line" of "what is the status quo." 50 years of being the law seems like the status quo to me. For most people that are alive, that's the way it's always been (for anyone born later than 1955, that was the law when you were facing the decision of abortion).

There are thousands of years of history, so if the line of status quo isn't drawn at "how are things today" then we have to pick some arbitrary point and draw it there, and IMHO that makes the distinction between the two largely meaningless as there will always be an argument for why the line is in the wrong spot on any given issue, and moving the line on that issue flips the sides of which person is conservative and which is progressive.

But largely, it sounds like we are agreement. If the labels are more about "impulse" rather than position, then I agree.

> For most people that are alive, that's the way it's always been (for anyone born later than 1955, that was the law when you were facing the decision of abortion).

Unfortunately for us a ton of lawmakers and at least 3 of the members of the supreme court were born before 1955. Which is the problem.

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