About a year ago I gave up trying to define “left,” “right,” “liberal,” and “conservative.” The concepts are too nebulous, and people have strong incentives to distort their meanings. There’s no stable “there” there. This has been wonderfully liberating.
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Replying to @KevinSimler
In a political realignment (as now) the rather arbitrary nature of coalitions becomes clear. Politics is the art of coalition building, bigger coalition wins. So the more inconsistencies you can compress into your party, the better. But then it blows up every few decades.
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Replying to @robamacl @KevinSimler
It's useful to have a name for the dominant political polarization, left and right will do. But it is easy to mistake the constant opposition/competition for a stasis and consistency that does not exist; both are in an unseen plunge toward a high dimensional attractor.
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Replying to @robamacl @KevinSimler
Politics is messy and inefficient because it tries to solve the dynamic intractable problem of getting people to cooperate. I am not anti-politics, but I do roll my eyes at the desperate tug-of-war along the political polarization vector.
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I would add that different classes of players have qualitatively different types of aims. Only a small minority have ideological aims (of whatever ideology), but it serves the interests of some player types to cast conflicts in ideological terms.
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