Poll of the Day > Can someone explain what Left and Right are in politics?

(+) Yeah! (+)

I thought it was Liberal and Conservative, like one wants to accept new ideas and the other wants to hold to traditions.
But there's also Liberal and Autoritarian, as in one wants to not be told what to do and the other wants to tell people what to do.
Which makes things confusing when you have a Liberal Authoritarian or a Conservative Liberal.
Are these even the correct concepts that people are refering to when they say Left and Right?

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Do you know why they call it the Left?

Because they're not Right!

TheWorstPoster posted...

Do you know why they call it the Left?

The political terms "Left" and "Right" were coined during the French Revolution (17891799), referring to the seating arrangement in the French Estates General: those who sat on the left generally opposed the monarchy and supported the revolution, including the creation of a republic and secularization, while those on the right were supportive of the traditional institutions of the Old Regime.

This supports the interpretation of modern vs traditional. But it doesn't seem relevant to political parties today. So how do current political parties fit with this division, or if they don't why continue to use these descriptors for them?

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Dumb and Dumber. And switch places at the drop of a hat, or a campaign contribution.

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There's a sorting hat that you were supposed to get that tells you which Illuminati you're supposed to support.

https://www.politicalcompass.org/images/bothaxes.gif

Authoritarian includes people whoe want to control social policies for one reason or another. On the right it's religion, on the left it's probably something like Stalin or that crazy Tumblr girl, and to a lesser extent people who want all guns removed from society, or a moderate gun control reform.

Libertarian means you don't want the government telling people how to live their social lives in any way whatsoever. Guns, sex, marriage, abortions, whatever.

Right means you don't want corporations to be regulated and you want less worker protections, no welfare programs, money must go to the military and America must spread its influence in regime change wars. Heavily pro-business, anti-regulation. Authoritarianism always comes in the form of Theocracy and Oligarchy.

Left means you want regulations on corporations and your tax dollars focused on social welfare programs instead of American Imperialism. Authoritarianism comes in the form of Communism, which generally comes after a collapsed Oligarchy.

Conservatism is generally a placeholder for Authoritarian Right while Liberal is just a useless word that basically encompasses everyone on the left. (and sometimes on the far right, if you're a "classic" liberal, aka confused)

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