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“The left” is a joke (thelemmy.club)
submitted 1 week ago by to c/politicalmemes@lemmy.world
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[–] 5 points 1 week ago (11 children)

I really like this way of looking at it.

One thing though, the countervailing force to liberalism is illiberalism. Authoritarians can be liberal even if in theory they oppose individual rights. This is seen in liberal autocracy and ordoliberalism.

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  • [–] 3 points 1 week ago

    That's fair, illiberalism is the proper countervailing force here, it just has some Venn diagram overlap with authoritarianism where the latter curtails political freedoms. It is easy to conflate them!

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  • [–] 2 points 1 week ago (9 children)

    How do you oppose individual rights while supporting the individual right to self determination?

    Liberal autocracy is an oxymoron, unless you define liberalism along the progressive-conservative spectrum. Which is what the capitalists and autocrats and tankies would like you to do.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (4 children)

    I think you may be confusing authoritarianism and totalitarianism.

    As some other people have pointed out liberalism can be across the spectrum and does not really define political leaning.

    I think you perhaps hold liberalism to higher ideals when in reality it has always been the propaganda the wealthy use to obscure their actual goals.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 week ago (3 children)

    Well. Yeah. All politics is the application of high-minded ideals to the real world. Communism is supposed to lead to the dissolution of the state, and it leads to a different group of wealthy people in charge. Capitalism is supposed to give the common man access to wealth, and it leads to a group of wealthy people in charge. Case in point:

    Authoritarianism is the ideal implementation of a hierarchical structure in society. Totalitarianism is what it looks like in practice.

    Liberalism is the idea that everyone should have the right to live how they see fit. Of course everyone is going to try and co-opt that.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (2 children)

    I can agree with a lot of that except for capitilism. A byproduct of small business capitalism is it does an okay job at distributing wealth. This is not the goal of capitalism, but a side effect of its initial stage.

    Liberalism is the propaganda the wealthy class use to maintain control.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 week ago (1 child)

    That's kind of the point. Everything in the ideal sense helps the common man, and everything in reality is co-opted by the wealthy into propaganda used to maintain control. Some things work better than others.

    The concept that people have the right to self determination is, in my opinion, more resilient to co-optation by the wealthy, because even the most ardent modern bootlicker still fundamentally believes it is their choice.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 week ago (3 children)

    Dictatorships which doesn't enforce some specific social order, but which does aggressively stomp out criticism. See - people who moved to UAE and thought it was a free country until their government didn't like what they said anymore.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 week ago (2 children)

    ...that is an example of enforcing a specific social order...?

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