Defining right and left wing

[Civil War Man]

Right wing=more market forces, left wing=more government spending. Just stick with those definitions, anything else is too complicated to be useful.

Except the right wing (in the US in particular) is in favor of massive amounts of government spending, so long as that unlimited government money is being dumped into the coffers of the military-industrial complex and not paying for food for poor people.

So I'd argue that your definition is too simplistic to be useful.

[Alyrium Denryle]

Rather than a line, why not think on a 2-D plane, like Political Compass does? The x-axis describes left and right politics solely as an economic measure, while the y-axis measures opinions on government control, from completely libertarian to completely authoritarian. You literally have 100% more descriptive power than before.

Because a 2D plane is woefully inadequate. You basically need an N dimensional graph with something like at least a dozen dimensions.
Just off the top of my hat we have:

• Social issues and welfare
• Civil rights and freedoms
• Economic rights and freedoms
• Political rights and freedoms
• How big the state should be (anarchism vs statism)
• Who the enemy is (other nation, race, class etc.)
• etc. etc. etc.

And you'll find that all left and right wing movements pick and chose sides in this category. Quite often sides you would not expect them to hold. And quite often these are held by both sides. In fact, what constitutes "left" and "right" in a particular context often boils down to two very similar groups with mostly overlapping but in some areas radically opposed views. Hitler vs Stalin being a classic example of this. That's why I genuinely do agree with K.A. on this.

No. You dont. For each and every one of those categories, there is a high degree of covariation between axes that delineate positions within each category. So high that the data can be collapsed into a much smaller parameter space. You lose some information, but sometimes you have to do that in order to do any kind of useful description or analysis.

2. He who thinks anarchism is either left or right wing is wrong on both counts. Anarchism is an ideology independent of sides and accepted by a number of people from each. You can just as easily have anarcho-capitalists as you can anarchy-communists. History is full of both.

Anarchism is arrived at through independent lines of thought on both the left and the right. Anarchocommunism arrives at anarchy by postulating that one day, we will reach a utopian society (through the glory of dialectic materialism) wherein a state is no longer necessary. Everyone lives and works in self-governing communes of the proletariat that operates by consensus. A hebrew Kibutz. Anarchocapitalists arrive at anarchy though the conviction that the state restrains individual liberty and this is evil, thus we ought do away with the state and replace it with voluntary associations and contracts that are enforced by private courts and contractors. Shadowrun style.

[Purple]

So high that the data can be collapsed into a much smaller parameter space. You lose some information, but sometimes you have to do that in order to do any kind of useful description or analysis.

I disagree. Collapsing those categories down to just one or two completely demolishes any chance of getting any sort of useful analysis because it leads to groups with radically different ideals which often conflict being bunched up together.

[Alyrium Denryle]

So high that the data can be collapsed into a much smaller parameter space. You lose some information, but sometimes you have to do that in order to do any kind of useful description or analysis.

I disagree. Collapsing those categories down to just one or two completely demolishes any chance of getting any sort of useful analysis because it leads to groups with radically different ideals which often conflict being bunched up together.

You dont need one or two, you need less than 12. Less than 4 ideally, and the factor loadings on each axis can be examined in order to analyze points of conflict. And no, performing a PCA on political ideologies wont do that necessarily, because it wont collapse axes together that are strongly negatively correlated such that two radically different groups cluster together. That is not how that sort of data reduction technique works.

[Purple]

You dont need one or two, you need less than 12. Less than 4 ideally, and the factor loadings on each axis can be examined in order to analyze points of conflict. And no, performing a PCA on political ideologies wont do that necessarily, because it wont collapse axes together that are strongly negatively correlated such that two radically different groups cluster together. That is not how that sort of data reduction technique works.

Anything less and you start getting categories which overlap one another. And those are worse than useless.

[madd0ct0r]

but plenty of categories do overlap each other. and, to my original discussion point, even separate categories can share the same assumptions about people, which make them fundamentally more compatible then two categories based on disagreeing axioms.

Fuck, maybe should just make a list of political positions and see what shakes out.

[Adam Reynolds]

You dont need one or two, you need less than 12. Less than 4 ideally, and the factor loadings on each axis can be examined in order to analyze points of conflict. And no, performing a PCA on political ideologies wont do that necessarily, because it wont collapse axes together that are strongly negatively correlated such that two radically different groups cluster together. That is not how that sort of data reduction technique works.

Anything less and you start getting categories which overlap one another. And those are worse than useless.

Not if you are talking about different points on the same axis. That is also where you see Republican libertarians agreeing with socialist Democrats that the US needs to act less like an imperialist power but strongly disagreeing on economic and social points.

This is why you compare more than one axis at a time and why it is useful to have only a few, it makes the analysis far easier and actually doable in a practical sense.

[madd0ct0r]

Strictly speaking the maths is the same, and not especially difficult to extend into n dimensions, especially for the relatively few data points we might talk about (<100)

[Simon_Jester]

I find the attempts to do away with the "left and right" division a tactical ploy by the oligarchy to make people apolitical, not interested in finding out the details of what political movements actually mean.

That said, even one axis (without any "planes") with the following points: left anarchy / communism > social democracy > centrism > neoliberalism / right-wing authoritarianism > fascism is quite potent and can describe a lot. Right-wing anarchism - that should have logically followed the end point of this scale - is a non-entity (usually because you can't be holier than the Pope - corporations don't hate government to the point of willing to dismantle it entirely; they usually want to coopt it - minarchism and fascism are not "mutuallye exclusive", Pinochet be my witness. Therefore the right-wing anarchists are just self-motivated lunatics without any real political influence).

True, but they do exist as an ideological position, especially in the United States. And quite a few of the right-wing authoritarian politicians maneuver and act to court the support of right-wing anarchists despite the inherent contradictions in doing so.

I've always thought of anarchism as hard right-wing. I don't really see how it can be defined as left-wing in any way, it's the same position with different reasons behind it. In fact it seems the most right-wing position possible. Even people who self-identify as libertarian agree on funding for police and a defensive military, anarchists want to cut even that.

Because historically, the left is generally viewed as the side of "stop oppressing us!" and traditional 19th century anarchists mostly viewed literally all government as oppression.

21st century American anarchists may be like this... or they may be anarcho-libertarians with deeply conservative social values who just want the freedom to live in the Dark Ages. There's a mix.