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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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Not a real option. It may feel liberating to give up but doesn’t mean there isn’t a there there or that it doesn’t apply to you if don’t define it for yourself. Even patterns of giving up have left/right/lib/con tells. They’ve gotten convoluted rather than nebulous.
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btw, I’m not saying I’m opting out of choosing a side (although, kinda). Rather, I’m opting out of trying to essentialize the labels. I recognize their validity as flags/banners for the current moment, but not as enduring/stable concepts.
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The conclusion I’ve reached is that they *were* stable and enduring concepts that evolved coherently for 150-250 years each, and have all “died” in the last 2 decades. So I half agree with you. They’re not stable and enduring into the future. They’re decaying corpses.
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I’ve described culture war in private conversations as choosing which of 4 funerals of political personae to attend at the end of history. My labels for the 4 corpses don’t line up cleanly with the 4 labels you’re rejecting but are fairly simple mappings. I’ll blog this soon.
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They are still stable in some parts of the world. Taxi wars and burning trucks in South Africa feel very much like 19th C labor violence. But that is very much not the same left as the US or Euro left.