this post was submitted on 19 Aug 2025
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sort of, except the right usually (fucking always) fights to protect the rich. while the left (no Democrats don't fucking count) fight for equality and improving everyone's lives.
so it is a left v right, you just renamed the categories.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ratchet_effect
Republicans push us in one direction, weak/complacent democrats don't fight back.
It's part of the two-pronged strategy, and why anyone who supports establishment democrats is tacitly supporting republican policies.
We really needed Bernie in 2016, but it shows where liberals' priorities lie. They become conservative as soon as their wealth is threatened.
While that truism might annoy lovers of !politicalcompassmemes@lemmy.world it isn’t invalid, historically-speaking.
Tell me more…
From their first use in 1789 (long-short: seating positions) the definitions for left and right were fluid, but generally referred to “change” versus “status quo.”In Stalin’s era, left referred mostly to pro-worker policies, the economic change of the communist revolution. That convention was solidified in the US during the red scare, where left-wing came to mean “commie heresy.”
After that period, the definition was gradually blurred again, perhaps by conservatives carrying forth the McCarthyist tradition of lumping any non-conformist view into “commie heresy.” Regardless, the resulting confusion in public political discourse is the reason Wayne Brittenden made the Political Compass website in 2001.
By canonizing the economic-policy definition used by the Bolsheviks/McCarthyists as an actual X-axis spectrum, and the social-policy definitions of most other contexts as a Y-axis spectrum, one could easily map both dimensions as a cartesian coordinate. Quite handy.
Still, as elegant and illuminating as that solution is, it remains a convention.
tbf. those terms have evolved a lot since the French Revolution coined them.
and given how fluid they are, in some conversations they might mean pure culture war issues like "THERE'S A TRANS FLAG IN COMIC BOOK MOVIE!!!!".
but we can agree that in the bigger picture, left v right is about a top v bottom in power structures.
Lol true. In fact, I guess always true for any historical use. At least, insofar as established power wants to keep playing the same game and under dog wants to play a different one. Shrug