A basic asymmetry between far left and far right is that they fight for different different things at different Maslow levels. Far right fights for recognition at love/belonging/esteem levels, far left for material necessity at physiological/security level.
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There is a bad argument that you can make: recognition hunger only exists if lower-level needs are satisfied, so it is tempting to argue that far left anger is more “justified” because it is more basic. It is bad because Maslow’s hierarchy is not a moral priority stack.
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It is better to stick to argument that far left anger has meaningfully actionable social redressals. Far right anger can only be fed by false mythologies that delay the encounter with the self-actualization imperative. It’s not a hunger that is satiated by feeding it.
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Inequality and global poverty-driven migration may be wicked problems. Solutions like UBI or Georgism or open borders may be utopian dreams. But far right problems are beyond human reach, hence the very strong correlation with religion.
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Morality is at some level related to actionability. If you can do nothing to address a pain, it is not immoral to do nothing. So not surprising that far right and far left try to move things from actionable to non-actionable in opposite directions.
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The irrational moral panic of the far right at a single socialist winning a primary arguing ‘more can be done for people who need the most’ is good data. You don’t have to be a socialist to be broadly supportive of “more can be done” agendas to push far-right moral panic button
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Anyhow, time to ignore centrist and moderate politics. They’re impotent and almost irrelevant for the next few years. Focus on far left vs far right. The middle is just going to sit there like a lump and rot slowly, while the tails wrestle over the future.
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i think this is true in some ways/on some issues, but i'd argue that a foundational part of the right is a pragmatism about the difficulty of actually solving for physical hunger, the inefficacy/unintended effects of naive state solutions, and the fragility of a good status quo
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i like to think of the left/right dichotomy as water vs prune. right-wing epithet for the left is "degenerate" (allowing weeds and deterioration), where the left's for the right is "cold/heartless" (pruning and destroying too much)
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I don't think this is true for belonging. Different social structures make it substantially easier or harder to achieve belonging. Government policy seems likely to affect the overall degree of atomization, the difficulty of forming stable, meaningful communities, etc.
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I don't have any great ideas for intervening in a positive way, but it seems premature to conclude that nothing can be done.
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