Is Conservatism just NeoTraditionalism these days?

[Skepdick]

Again, the very terms "left" and "right" are empty and non-descriptive terms. They don't mean anything other than themselves and they are placed on a linear axis and people supposedly sit on one end or the other of that imaginary axis created by two meaningless terms.

These terms may be imprecise or vague, but they are not meaningless in the political context.
Recommended reading:
* Norberto Bobbio: Left and Right: The Significance of a Political Distinction

Recommended counter-reading: The Left-Right Political Spectrum Is Bogus

It might be a division between social identities based on class or region or race or gender, but it is certainly not a clash between different ideas.
--Crispin Sartwell

[Consul]

Recommended counter-reading: The Left-Right Political Spectrum Is Bogus

It might be a division between social identities based on class or region or race or gender, but it is certainly not a clash between different ideas.
--Crispin Sartwell

I have no access to Sartwell's article, but who else (among political philosophers or politologists) denies that there is a left-right clash between different ideas?

[Skepdick]

I have no access to Sartwell's article, but who else (among political philosophers or politologists) denies that there is a left-right clash between different ideas?

Who needs to deny it for your bandwagon fallacy to carry water?

It's not even a left-right issue. The whole of philosophy is the exact same nonsense. Difference in words/narratives - indifference in practice.

[Consul]

I have no access to Sartwell's article, but who else (among political philosophers or politologists) denies that there is a left-right clash between different ideas?

I found the following quotation from the article on another website:

"There are alternatives, and the one I would suggest is this: We should arrange political positions according to whether they propose to increase hierarchy or to dismantle it. Instead of left and right, we should be thinking about vertical versus horizontal arrangements of power and wealth."
—Crispin Sartwell

I read that he calls himself an anarchist, which explains why he is especially interested in such an alternative ordering of political ideologies.

[Consul]

The distinction between the Left and the Right is highly coarse-grained, but more fine-grained maps of the political landscape are available!

"Ideology: The problem-child of political analysis…"

(Freeden, Michael. Ideology Studies: New Advances and Interpretations. Abingdon: Routledge, 2022. p. 11)

"Despite areas of considerable disagreement about the concept’s other connotations, both pejorative (vernacular) and non-pejorative (semantic) understandings of ideology are united in seeing it as concerned fundamentally with combinations and arrangements of ideas."

(Ostrowski, Marius S. Ideology. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2022. p. 42)

"The internal construction of an ideology – its morphology – is determined by which ideas it incorporates and how it combines and arranges them (…). The purpose of creating such an ideological ‘cast list’ of ideas and ‘roster’ of combinations and arrangements is to provide a mental representation of reality, in particular social reality, usually as it is or as it used to be, but also as it is not, as it will be, or as it should be. "

(Ostrowski, Marius S. Ideology. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2022. p. 43)

"A set of ideas and the representations they provide of reality becomes established as ‘an’ ideology by giving the set a collective label as a ‘shorthand’, typically in the form of a pre-existing or newly created term built on a chosen ‘root’ word (‘X’). While this label sometimes takes the form of ‘X ideology’ (e.g., green ideology, queer ideology), it appears most familiarly as ‘X-ism’, to the extent that the suffix ‘ism’ is often (albeit not always quite accurately) used more or less interchangeably and synonymously with ‘(an) ideology’ in a vernacular sense. This ideological labelling imposes the set of ideas, ‘told’ or ‘recounted’ in a certain way – i.e., in the morphological construction into which they have been combined and arranged – onto the chosen term. Naming an ideology by calling a particular combination and arrangement of ideas an ‘ism’ and ‘claiming’ the chosen term as its label is thus a further layer of representation: using a single abstract idea (and its cognates) to ‘code for’ an entire way of making reality make sense to us. Such ideologisation of the ‘root’ word has a reciprocal effect both on its meaning and on that of the ideas it stands for. It expands, modifies, and sometimes even overrides the word’s accepted vernacular meaning by (re)orienting it towards the specific series of ideas to which it is now ideologically ‘attached’. At the same time, it also adds the word’s familiar connotations of meaning to the overall ‘aura’ of its associated arrangement and combination of ideas. The idea of companionship or fellowship connoted by the word ‘social’ gives ‘socialism’ its collective, solidaristic overtones; ‘liberal’ as unrestrained permissiveness or generous abundance has turned into the free openness of ‘liberalism’; and the protective retention implied by ‘conservative’ has lent ‘conservatism’ its sceptical resistance to societal change. Ideological labelling thus creates space for a whole family of cognate terminology, either by ‘ideologising’ other pre-existing words or by inventing wholly new ones. The suffix ‘-ism’ has given rise to a number of derivatives to describe different aspects of ideology’s social presence: ‘-ist’ or ‘-istic’, ‘ise(d)’ and ‘-ising’, ‘-iser’, ‘-isation’, and ‘-isant’ to depict the ideology’s bearer(s) or agent(s), its (increasing) social influence or implementation, and its social tendencies or approximations."

(Ostrowski, Marius S. Ideology. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2022. p. 47)

"The size and density of an ideology together determine its ‘thickness’ (or ‘thinness’), both in an absolute sense and compared to other ideologies. But the respective emphasis on ideas (and the habitus they stand for), and on their combination and arrangement, also informs two further criteria of characterisation, which together describe what we can call a given ideology’s robustness (or fragility)."

(Ostrowski, Marius S. Ideology. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2022. p. 62)

"The range of ideologies present in society that ideology analysis has to consider – i.e., their absolute number and the extent of distinction between them – and their relative places in the societal hierarchy of ideologies varies intensely along these synchronic and diachronic axes of differentiation (Derrida 2001; Koselleck 2002). If we look at both a ‘time-sliced’ synchronic snapshot of the ideologies available and the longue-durée diachronic developments that have taken place in them, we can identify three clear sources of variation.

(1) The same ideology can articulate vastly different claims and possibilities in different geographies and at different points in time, depending on how it interacts with the stages and trajectories of development of various social domains and with the incidence and salience of particular demographic characteristics among the relevant populations. For instance, conservatism has proved notoriously adaptable, shifting its support for religious traditionalism between faiths and denominations across macroregions, moving from staunch monarchism (and absolutism) to contingent alignments with democratism and other authoritarianisms and evolving from resistance to capitalism in 1800s Europe and Latin America to enthusiastic defence of it today.

(2) An ideology’s thickness and robustness (and the evolution of both over time) significantly affect its ‘macro’, ‘meso’, or ‘micro’ status. Its various component elements can make it easier or harder to get disparate individuals or social groups ‘on board’ and render it more or less likely that ideologies will split off into subcategorised variants or strands. Similarly, changes in its popularity and institutionalisation can rapidly shift it from ‘insurgent’ to ‘established’ to ‘declining’, especially as it can be of very different ‘vintages’ depending on how much time it has had to develop (Goldmann 1964). A good example is the ossification of communism in the shift from the 1910s–20s (USSR foundation) to the 1930s–60s (spread to China, Cuba, Vietnam, etc.) and the 1970s–80s (stagnation, transformation, collapse), which saw it rapidly lose its federal, pluralist-democratic elements in favour of centralised ‘party line’ authoritarianism.

(3) Every ideology enjoys contingent ‘points of contact’ and permeation with other ideologies, which can lead to one ‘hosting’ or ‘modifying’ the other, or vice versa. This creates ‘boundary cases’: ideological ‘hybrids’ that do not clearly fit into any of their ‘source’ ideologies but which may not be stand-alone formations either, such as ‘liberal conservatism’, ‘national-conservatism’, ‘national-liberalism’, ‘liberal socialism’, ‘ecosocialism’, ‘ecofascism’, or ‘anarcha-feminism’. Entire new ideologies are often born out of ‘splits’ within and ‘encounters’ between other ideologies, which have an impact not only on the unique onward trajectory of the resulting ‘strands’ or ‘hybrids’ as they become increasingly independent ideologies but also on that of their original ‘source’ ideologies and parallel alternative strands – since ideologies often define themselves in contradistinction to (specific) others.

Together, these effects raise questions over the granularity of ‘what counts as’ an ideology and when the threshold to ‘count as’ an ideology has been crossed, especially where a given ‘thin’ or micro-ideology happens to be wholly and exclusively monopolised by another ‘thicker’ or meso-/macro-ideology. The overall upshot of this is that we need to think of the morphology of ideologies in terms not of fixed characteristics but of ‘family resemblances’ or ‘familles spirituelles’ (‘spiritual families’) and of ‘traditions’ (Freeden 1996; von Beyme 1985; Wittgenstein 1973 [1953]) – and acknowledge that both the ‘time-sliced’ and longue-durée societal ‘distribution’ of ideologies is by definition a ‘work in progress’ that always remains open to challenge."

(Ostrowski, Marius S. Ideology. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2022. pp. 77-8)

"Ultimately, attempts to find universal criteria for ideological categorisation face a trade-off between (1) their heuristic value as a simple, manageable set of scalar or continuum ‘dimensions’, easily visualisable in diagrammatic form, and (2) the impossibility of capturing the full extent of ideologies’ complex and constantly evolving morphology, due to the imperfect correlation between the elements that any categorisation is forced to compress into as low a number of dimensions as possible. One possible solution is to abandon the strategy of trying to mark ideologies’ location on the compass using only single points and instead to reflect them as ‘freeform shapes’ – to capture the concept of ‘family resemblance’ and the suggestion that there is a certain non-infinite ideological space within which the longue-durée tradition moves. Another solution is to develop alternative ways to visualise ideologies entirely, such as an ideological ‘star plot’ or ‘spider-web chart’, or using ‘sliders’ to represent the various dimensions of comparison. But this depends on establishing a more meaningful consensus on what the extra dimensions should be; until this is achieved, the ideological compass and the left–centre–right spectrum remain the stubbornly durable analytical tools of choice for ideology studies to categorise the wealth of ideologies available in contemporary society."

(Ostrowski, Marius S. Ideology. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2022. p. 108)

[Consul]

Recommended counter-reading: The Left-Right Political Spectrum Is Bogus

It might be a division between social identities based on class or region or race or gender, but it is certainly not a clash between different ideas.
--Crispin Sartwell

I have no access to Sartwell's article, but who else (among political philosophers or politologists) denies that there is a left-right clash between different ideas?

I happened to recall that I have a copy of his book Entanglements, in which he talks about the left-right spectrum.
Regarding this linear model of political ideologies, I agree with Sartwell…
* that "it has got to be optional,"
* that "you’ve got to keep open the possibility that it is a flawed paradigm or could be replaced qua explanatory framework,"
* that it "is an historical artifact, like any other taxonomy of political systems,"
* that "any linear account is awfully simplistic."

So, yes, this model is pretty problematic; but I wouldn't go so far as to conclude absolutely condemningly that "the left-right political spectrum must die," because it is "conceptually confused, ideologically tendentious, historically contingent, and disconnected from reality." For I don't think it has become meaningless and useless. Moreover, his negative verdict is grounded in his anarchist perspective, which is itself questionable.

"I refer to the emerging system of government in various parts of the world as "squishy totalitarianism." The left-right political spectrum must die, as shown by the great American reformers of the early 19th century, such as Lucretia Mott and William Lloyd Garrison. Anarchist non-utopia beckons: let people go and see what happens."

(Sartwell, Crispin. Entanglements: A System of Philosophy. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2017. p. 28)

"The arrangement of positions along the left-right axis—progressive to reactionary, or conservative to liberal, or socialist to capitalist, or for that matter Democrat to Republican—is conceptually confused, ideologically tendentious, historically contingent, and disconnected from reality. Any position that is comfortably located anywhere on the left-right spectrum is beset by contradictions. We need at this point to think about the left-right spectrum rather than from it. The thing can seem permanent and inevitable. But the left-right terminology arose in revolutionary France in 1789, where it referred to the seating of royalists and antiroyalists in the Assembly."

(Sartwell, Crispin. Entanglements: A System of Philosophy. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2017. p. 344)

"The left-right spectrum is an arrangement of practical politics, and most political parties in most parts of the world perhaps understand themselves as falling along that spectrum somewhere. But as a framework or taxonomy of political positions, or for the purposes of, say, research in political science, it has got to be optional. You’ve got to keep open the possibility that it is a flawed paradigm or could be replaced qua explanatory framework. If not, then you are yourself embroiled in the ideologies that you’re supposed to be accounting for or categorizing. The left-right spectrum is an historical artifact, like any other taxonomy of political systems. Now, it may be that at this point many of us cannot think about politics without it. The spectrum widely shapes behaviors, affiliations, passionate commitments the world over. But it may also be that many assertions involving it—including characterizations of one’s own position, and attacks on the positions of one’s opponents—have far less meaning or practical upshot than one feels that they do as one is making them. It may be that what sounds clear under almost infinite repetition is in fact garbled nonsense, a kind of inarticulate noise taking the form of a familiar syntax. It may be that even as we, say, conduct party politics, we are engaged in a series of contradictions or have wandered into a limbo of pseudo-sense."

(Sartwell, Crispin. Entanglements: A System of Philosophy. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2017. p. 345)

"Both left and right accepted an ideological framework in which state and capital were opposed; indeed, to a large extent, the left-right spectrum just is this idea. And yet, as soon as this opposition is prodded empirically with regard to any particular fundamental development in practical political economy, it disintegrates."

(Sartwell, Crispin. Entanglements: A System of Philosophy. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2017. p. 351)

"The idea that free markets are historically distinguished from large, powerful states is, in brief, a completely ahistorical ideology, shared by the capitalist right and the communist left and even by almost everyone in between. In this regard and in a number of others, we might think of the left-right spectrum as a single ideology rather than as a taxonomy of opposites. Thus, the left-right split, which defines politics in a hyper-repetitive, mechanical set of partisan bromides about free markets and positive government programs with egalitarian results, depends on a historical mistake.

Insofar as they embody anything definite, both the left and the right are incoherent positions. One place the left runs aground is on its central value of equality: defining it exclusively in economic terms, the left proposes to achieve it by the imposition of extreme political hierarchy; we have seen a mild case of this in Rawls. One place the right runs aground is on its central value of liberty: people who are essentially being forced to labor at a grinding pace for very little in order to enhance the wealth of the people exploiting them are not free. A realization of the vision of either annihilates in the world the ideals that drove it, and that has actually happened over and over to both positions.

The left-right spectrum, since it is linear and not infinite, can be characterized in terms of two extreme poles. One way to see that the thing is incoherent is that these poles can be defined in a number of mutually incompatible ways. So, for example, in the 1930s it was Marxist communism against fascism. It is odd that the left could define the right pole as fascist one minute, laissez-faire the next. The left pole could be a stateless society of barter and localism; or a world of equality in which people are not subordinated by race, gender, and sexuality; or a giant Pentagon-style welfare state; or a Khmer Rouge reeducation-by-execution regime. The Nazi Party, the Catholic Church, hereditary aristocracy, Ayn Rand go-go capitalists, and redneck gun enthusiasts are all on the same side in the left-right conceptuality. So are hacktivists, food stamp officials, antiglobalization activists, anarcho-primitivists, and advocates of a world government.

In my suggested bipolar replacement, there are two political philosophies: hierarchical and antihierarchical, statist and anarchist, totalitarian/squishy totalitarian and resistant. But whereas the squishy-totalitarian side funnels into a single situation—a frozen economic and political and knowledge hierarchy—the anarchist side is thousands upon thousands of possibilities, as many as there are possible voluntary arrangements: a million mutant communities. Don’t think of it as single thing, think of it as all the possibilities but one. On the up/down spectrum, hereditary aristocracy, monopoly capitalism, the Communist Party, military juntas, and American liberals are on the same side, some more extremely or mildly than others. I am a lot more comfortable with that, and I think it’s more plausible. But, of course, any linear account is awfully simplistic.

Ayn Rand and Vlad Lenin, Kim Il Song and Barry Goldwater, Barack Obama and Rand Paul, Francois Mitterrand and Margaret Thatcher, Ronald Reagan and Fidel Castro, Friedrich von Hayek and Leo Trotsky, Slavoj Žižek, and Augusto Pinochet, for all I know, disagreed on several matters. But they agreed on this, or said they did: the state was a force that was historically pitted against private capital. To reduce one was to increase the other and to increase one was to reduce the other. They vary inversely and the balance between them that you recommend constitutes the fundamental way of characterizing your political position. From an antiauthoritarian point of view, this spectrum stretches from authoritarianism on the one end to authoritarianism on the other, with authoritarianism in between. It makes anything that is not that incomprehensible. It narrows all alternatives to variations on hierarchy, structures of inequality, or profoundly unjust distributions of power/wealth. And also as a single ideology, it is merely false. Quite obviously false; throughout the last five centuries, economic and political hierarchies have been massively mutually reinforcing. This is not to say that in some local moment the balance could really shift according to some left or right political program; it is meant to point out that the choice is extremely constructed and incoherent."

(Sartwell, Crispin. Entanglements: A System of Philosophy. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2017. pp. 357-9)

[Gary Childress]

I have no access to Sartwell's article, but who else (among political philosophers or politologists) denies that there is a left-right clash between different ideas?

I found the following quotation from the article on another website:

"There are alternatives, and the one I would suggest is this: We should arrange political positions according to whether they propose to increase hierarchy or to dismantle it. Instead of left and right, we should be thinking about vertical versus horizontal arrangements of power and wealth."
—Crispin Sartwell

I read that he calls himself an anarchist, which explains why he is especially interested in such an alternative ordering of political ideologies.

"Left" and "Right" says nothing any more profound than placing "hierarchy" as the most important determining factor on an axis. In fact, it probably says much less.

You may as well organize a political spectrum that divides people according to whether or not they like Coke or Pepsi. Then there could be "Coke loving leftists" and "Pepsi loving leftists" or "Coke loving conservatives" and "Pepsi loving liberals" and "Coke loving liberals" and "Pepsi loving conservatives". And we could all accuse each other of either being radical Coke lovers or else radical Pepsi lovers.

[Immanuel Can]

Leftists share an affinity for egalitarianism. (But they don't all share the same opinion regarding the kinds and degrees of egalitarianism.)

That's nominal, though. In practice, they don't believe in equality, but in inequality (as in "equity") and in elitism (as in the elite Marxists get to dictate to everybody else). That, too, is characteristic of all Socialisms.

"All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others."
(So say the pigs in George Orwell's Animal Farm.)

The communists created their own privileged nobility.
People often don't practice what they preach, but it is not true that all socialists (including social democrats) are just pseudo-egalitarians who actually practice the opposite of what they preach.

One might wish to believe there were exceptions. Except we don't know of a single such case. In every real-world case in history, Socialism has turned to a devastated economy and piles of corpses. No exceptions. So only when Socialism is not the dominant economic or political strategy in a place is any measure of it even tolerable. And there's a serious doubt that it's ever functional, let alone ideal, even then.

For example, socialized medicine, even in a basically democratic polity like the UK or Canada, bankrupts the medical system. Public schooling turns into a propaganda factory. Social welfare turns out to be beset by freeloaders. And so on. Every socialized program turns out to be more expensive and less efficient than it ought to be, and ultimately unsustainable. That's a serious problem for any Socialist. But I never hear them talk about their own 100% record of failure.

(Note that "the label 'egalitarian' does not necessarily indicate that the doctrine so called holds that it is desirable that people's condition be made the same in any respect or that people ought to be treated the same in any respect. An egalitarian might rather be one who maintains that people ought to be treated as equals—as possessing equal fundamental worth and dignity and as equally morally considerable." – SEP: Egalitarianism)

Two problems, though. One is that in real life, equity is completely impossible. It never exists, anywhere. The other is that given secularism, there's no rational explanation of why we owe it to each other even to regard each other as theoretically equal, even if we admit that, in practice, it remains impossible to actualize.

In what way can a female, black, youthful, able-bodied homosexual be made the equal of a fat, male, Chinese, elderly, disabled heterosexual? What's the recipe for getting that done? And then, what's the rationale that explains why it is incumbent upon our society to try to make the Chinese man the "equal" of the black girl?

Or if we mean that they are, in some value sense, each other's "equals in value," to whom or what is that value delivered, and why should we assume that they have the same value to that?

Generally speaking…

"Equity is another name for just dealing, and must not be confused with equality. While it is tautologous to say that treating people equitably is just, it is certainly not tautologous, although some think it true, to say that it is just to treat them equally."

(Scruton, Roger. The Palgrave Macmillan Dictionary of Political Thought. 3rd ed. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. pp. 219-20)

This is also impossible, for obvious reasons listed above. There is no way to explain what's "equitable" in forcing the black girl to suffer some sort of "equivalent" inhibitions to the Chinese man. What's "just" about crippling or limiting her potential in some way, in order to make sure he doesn't feel bad?

However, there are different kinds of equality; and equity qua social justice or fairness is socialistically associated with equality of outcome/result, the realization of which often requires an inegalitarian "positive discrimination" aka "affirmative action" (as affirmed by the Woke Left's DEI ideology).

Right. Which means force of some kind. The black girl must be excluded, denied access, inhibited, discriminated against in some way, so that some standard of "equity" we can't even agree on is "satisfied" that we have hammered her enough, or bestowed so many unearned privileges on him that our personal estimation of "equity" has been met. But we have absolutely no metric for determining what that point is, or what is just another form of inequity.

All Leftists believe in meliorism at least, i.e. that things can get better, that the human condition can be improved through concerted effort, that existential and moral progress is possible.

Yes, they do. And they tend not to believe in any importance to the fallibility of human nature, either. They see it as remediable by way of social structures. And they never stop to explain how it happens in the first place, except to blame it, rather vaguely, on "social forces" of some kind. But "social forces" are human actions. So they're just deflecting, in that case, and not really answering the question of how such social evils can ever come about among socially-'meliorable' human beings.

Realistic leftists/socialists don't confuse improvability with perfectibility.

Wait. That doesn't answer the fundamental question. The real question is how any faults or "evils," if we can use that word, ever come to exist when people are all essentially good in the first place. They say "society": but society is composed of nothing by good and meliorable human beings, allegedly: so whence this social maladjustment that is alleged to be producing all the problems? Why is a group of supposedly sociable, morally-well-arranged not either properly sociable or morally well-arranged when they combine into a society? And why do they need any amelioration, when they're already good people?

The progressive belief that the conditio humana can be improved a lot through changes of socioeconomic circumstances is not a delusion!

What is our evidence that it's not a delusion? That we don't want it to be a delusion? That it sounds nice, optimistic and humane if we say such a thing? Or that history gives us some evidence that would give us some reason to think that's true?

Where has this "progressive belief that the conditio humana can be improved" been realized, so that we may marvel?

Richard Rorty even declared that…

"[T]here is no such thing as human nature, for human beings make themselves up as they go along.

Then why did they "make themselves up" so badly? How did we get gulags, re-education camps and Auschwitz from good and ameliorable human beings "making themselves up"? Where did that evil come from?

Which "Left" is ardently supportive of any of the three?

Counterquestion: Which (non-/pre-postmodern) Left is ardently unsupportive of any of the three?

Well, you could answer the question before posing the counterquestion, of course. But the truth is that the fact that they have to ditch science, logic and reason has come recently to the Left: but it's because the hopes of what they call "crude Marxism" turned out to be dusty if science, logic, history and rationality were regarded as reliable at all. Hence, the Postmodern critiques that emphasize this are testament from the Marxists themselves to the rational, historical and scientific failure of original Marxism.

Was Marx or is Marxism part of the Counter-Enlightenment?

Marx was a fraud. Not only did he not "enlighten" anyone, his thinking has proved to be a Stygian mess. He was no economist, and none of the theories he tried to sell as "scientific" were in any way scientific in actuality. He was an ideologue and a secular prophet, a self-professed genius, whose chief personal project seems to have been to obtain a free ride. But for some inexplicable reason, the Left loves the guy.

...social democracy...

There's no such thing. For the Left, "social" means "the people," and the only "people" who count are the Socialists. Thus, there's no "democracy," because people have no power not to be Socialists or to choose anything that is not Socialism. So that's just a nonsense term, like "new antique."

Nazis are not on the "right." They're "National Socialists." That means they subordinate the individual to the national collective, such as the Aryan "nation." Communists, by contrast, are "international socialists." But the family resemblance is strong in regards to their mutual contempt for the individual and their preference for groupthink.

The horseshoe model of political ideologies comes to mind, where the two extremes—the far-left and the far-right—are close to one another. However, its name notwithstanding, national socialism is doubtless right-extremism.

No, Fascism is Left. It's Socialism. Libertarianism, individualism, genuine democracy, conservatism, classical liberalism...these are on the right.

There have always been both authoritarian and anti-authoritarian/libertarian tendencies in the Left; and there were many Stalin, Mao, or Castro fans in the Sixties Left. But the Frankfurt School, particularly its first generation (most of whose members were Jewish), rejects both communist and fascist authoritarianism (totalitarianism).

Not close to true. The Frankfurt School was a Communist-reclamation project, essentially. When classical or "crude" Marxism, oriented as it was to "class conflict" could not longer be seen as anything but a historical failure, since nearly every thing Marx had predicted turned out not to be the case, The FS attempted to save Marxism by reorienting it to a cluster of other "oppressed" minorities by way of race, sex, sexuality and so on. But the goal was the same: Marxist revolution, so the magical force of History could dialectically "progress."

"[N]eo-Marxists were usually at odds with, and sometimes profoundly repelled by, the Bolshevik model of orthodox communism."

At odds with, yes: repelled by, no. Orthodox Communism is a universal failure. Even the Neo-Marxists had to accept that. But they tried to save the theory by their bait-and-switch move. See James Lindsay, "Race Marxism."

The Woke left has no more than a nominal interest in individuals at all. Everything it advocates seems framed in terms of the social, from "systems of oppression" and "systemic racism" to "social engineering" and "social justice." Other than sharing the 60s radicals loose view of personal morality, they have almost no interest in the individual or his rights.

Isn't their fight for the right to gender self-determination (through self-identification) a fight for an individual right?

No. It's a fight for group pre-eminence. The individual is of no interest to Socialism, except as a token of the group. That's why they define every individual by his/her race, class, sexuality, disability, fatness, etc., and treat those as socially-determinative of what every individual is. That's how, for example, the can accuse Larry Elder of being "the black face of white privilege," or other blacks of failing to be "an authentic black voice." What else could Joe Biden mean when he said "If they don't vote for me, they ain't black." He couldn't have meant their faces, their genetics, their histories, their culture, or anything else, but that there is a "black" political posture, and those who take exception to it as individuals are to be rejected even as incidental members of their own group.

They stereotype and lock in everyone according to the Socialist ideologues' own conception of class/race/sex/sexuality essentialism. If you're outside of that essentialist conception they impose, if you are a rejector of their Socialist group, if you're an individual, if you're not like the others they expect, then you just don't count. Nothing could be more evident from their rhetoric. You are not "the People," as Mao said; you're "against the People."

[Gary Childress]

That's nominal, though. In practice, they don't believe in equality, but in inequality (as in "equity") and in elitism (as in the elite Marxists get to dictate to everybody else). That, too, is characteristic of all Socialisms.

"All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others."
(So say the pigs in George Orwell's Animal Farm.)

The communists created their own privileged nobility.
People often don't practice what they preach, but it is not true that all socialists (including social democrats) are just pseudo-egalitarians who actually practice the opposite of what they preach.

One might wish to believe there were exceptions. Except we don't know of a single such case. In every real-world case in history, Socialism has turned to a devastated economy and piles of corpses. No exceptions. So only when Socialism is not the dominant economic or political strategy in a place is any measure of it even tolerable. And there's a serious doubt that it's ever functional, let alone ideal, even then.

For example, socialized medicine, even in a basically democratic polity like the UK or Canada, bankrupts the medical system. Public schooling turns into a propaganda factory. Social welfare turns out to be beset by freeloaders. And so on. Every socialized program turns out to be more expensive and less efficient than it ought to be, and ultimately unsustainable. That's a serious problem for any Socialist. But I never hear them talk about their own 100% record of failure.

So, it sounds like what you are opposed to is radical socialism. The idea of doing away with free markets and replacing them with only controlled ones. I assume you don't have a problem with society helping those who need it. You're against people taking advantage of welfare and pretending to need it when they don't. Is that correct?

[Immanuel Can]

"All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others."
(So say the pigs in George Orwell's Animal Farm.)

The communists created their own privileged nobility.
People often don't practice what they preach, but it is not true that all socialists (including social democrats) are just pseudo-egalitarians who actually practice the opposite of what they preach.

One might wish to believe there were exceptions. Except we don't know of a single such case. In every real-world case in history, Socialism has turned to a devastated economy and piles of corpses. No exceptions. So only when Socialism is not the dominant economic or political strategy in a place is any measure of it even tolerable. And there's a serious doubt that it's ever functional, let alone ideal, even then.

For example, socialized medicine, even in a basically democratic polity like the UK or Canada, bankrupts the medical system. Public schooling turns into a propaganda factory. Social welfare turns out to be beset by freeloaders. And so on. Every socialized program turns out to be more expensive and less efficient than it ought to be, and ultimately unsustainable. That's a serious problem for any Socialist. But I never hear them talk about their own 100% record of failure.

So, it sounds like what you are opposed to is radical socialism.

No. ALL Socialism. Not kindness, not mercy, not generosity or community spirit, or voluntary social causes, or anything like that. People are free...and I think morally obligated, as well...to show such beneficence to others in their local communities.

I assume you don't have a problem with society helping those who need it.

Of course not. That's called charity, and for Christians especially, it's an obligation. It's always a good thing, so long as it's wisely and freely done.

"Social Justice," so called, has precisely the opposite assumption. Under Social Justice ideology, helping each other is not charity -- it's considered to be what they owe you, or worse, what they stole from you and now have to pay to you as a reparation, with you allowed to hate and resent them if they seem to fail to give you everything you think you have coming to you. Social Justice ideology is nothing but envy or covetousness in fancy dress. It neither teaches nor even makes imaginable charitable giving. All giving is owed.

You're against people taking advantage of welfare and pretending to need it when they don't. Is that correct?

Who wouldn't be? Who would reward people who take advantage like that?

Socialists, of course.

[Consul]

Interestingly…

"The term social justice as such makes its first appearance in Europe in the writings of a Jesuit advisor to the Vatican, Luigi Taparelli d’Azeglio, writing in the context of the Italian risorgimento in 1840, a political movement which, while promoting the unification of Italy, posed severe challenges to the existing social and political order, including the Catholic Church (Burke, 2011). For Taparelli, the term giustizia sociale signified an attempt to justify the established social stratification (which was highly unequal and based on special privileges of aristocracy and church) while giving credence to “modern” principles of individual responsibility and, in that sense, of autonomy. In opposing the liberalism and the associated demands for equality promoted by the American Revolution in the tradition of Locke (1960), Taparelli emphasized instead the legitimacy of differences as “natural facts” which the principles of social justice have to respect and protect rather than eliminate. “All individual human beings are naturally unequal among themselves in everything that pertains to their individuality, just as they are naturally equal in all that pertains to the species” (Taparelli d’Azeglio,1845, par. 355, quoted in Burke, 2011, p. 37).

In the sophisticated manner of Jesuit argumentation, Taparelli captured the spirit of the revolutionary times with the term “social justice,” only to give it a conservative, order-preserving interpretation. According to this interpretation, social differences can be legitimated and guarded against being perceived as inequalities and injustices when they can be grounded in the factual, “essential” constitution of these differences. In addition, possible weaknesses arising from these differences in natural constitution need to be protected by the interventions of a benevolent “bigger unit.” This idea constituted the core of the principle of “subsidiarity” which assumed a central role not only in Catholic social teaching but also in the social policies of corporatist states such as Bismarckian Germany (Hennock, 2007).

Taparelli distinguished the role of smaller social units, such as the family, from that of bigger ones such as the state to give the smaller ones absolute priority over the latter but obliging the latter to support the smaller ones if their own capacity to resolve problems did not suffice. In this form the principle of subsidiarity as the realization of social justice entered directly into the social teaching of the Catholic Church, initially in the form of the Encyclical Rerum Novarum of 1891 (Leo XIII, 1981) in which Pope Leo XIII, a former student of Taparelli, defined the Church’s social commitment as being both a fight against Communism with its pursuit of equality and its reliance on collective action, and against excessive liberalism which left the individual abandoned by the collective and created scandalous social differences and injustices. In this line of development social justice became a virtue, a striving at all levels of society for the just distribution of personal freedom combined with responsibility and for public support consistent with the principle of justice when individual commitments proved insufficient.

This theme was taken up in the Encyclical Quadragesomo Anno by Pope Pius XI (1931), celebrating the effects and reaffirming the principles of Catholic social teaching at the height of the Great Depression and at the historical start of the confrontation between Communism and Fascism in Europe. The Pope reminds governments of their role in bringing moral order to a society by protecting the weak and warding off Communism. The Encyclical consolidated the Catholic Church’s understanding of social justice. Another Jesuit, Oswald von Nell-Breuning, had worked on its draft. He later became a leading figure in shaping Germany’s post-World War II social policies, which strongly reaffirmed the principle of subsidiarity, which had been a central feature of Bismarck’s first social legislation after the founding of the Second German Reich in 1871 (Krier Mich, 1998; Novak, 2000). West-Germany’s post-war social politics emphasized the freedom of individuals not in an absolute sense but in the form of their being embedded in organisms of civil society which, in that country’s strong anti-fascist and anti-communist orientation, had to form a safeguard against the powers of the state becoming too domineering (Huber & Stephens, 2001).

Social justice, in this typically conservative version, consists therefore, of ensuring everybody’s (different) place in society in such a way that society could become an organic whole where all the different members worked together harmoniously (the organism metaphor also appears in Catholic social doctrine). This interpretation of the principle of social justice does not seek to eliminate differences but reduces them to a level where they do not lead to social unrest. This, in turn, is achieved by relating inequalities back to “indisputable facts,” in which metaphysical evaluations of those facts, such as the religious meaning of poverty or the “sanctity of the family,” play a supporting role. Both the criteria of individual freedom and of equality can thus be respected in relation to each other, albeit in a very specific interpretation. “To each according to his rank” expresses social justice from this perspective.

This conservative interpretation of social justice, which lies at the core of 20th-century corporatist “welfare regime” versions of social policies, emerged as a defense against the arguments of two opposing interpretations of social policy [= the liberalist & socialist ones—added] which equally gave rise to distinct social policy regimes."

(Lorenz, Walter. "The Emergence of Social Justice in the West." In The Routledge International Handbook of Social Justice, edited by Michael Reisch, 14-26. Abingdon: Routledge, 2014. pp. 17-8)

[Gary Childress]

I assume you don't have a problem with society helping those who need it.

Of course not. That's called charity, and for Christians especially, it's an obligation. It's always a good thing, so long as it's wisely and freely done.

OK. So if lots of people were homeless and in desperate need of help and Christians didn't help them enough, does that mean the Christian clergy would step in and force Christians to donate enough to help the homeless at least to the point where they aren't living on the streets? Or would you have a problem with the clergy doing that?

[Immanuel Can]

I assume you don't have a problem with society helping those who need it.

Of course not. That's called charity, and for Christians especially, it's an obligation. It's always a good thing, so long as it's wisely and freely done.

OK. So if lots of people were homeless and in desperate need of help and Christians didn't help them enough, does that mean the Christian clergy would step in and force Christians to donate enough to help the homeless at least to the point where they aren't living on the streets?
Or would you have a problem with the clergy doing that?

If you look it up, I think you'll find that Christianity has historically proved second to nobody in charitable giving, both in quantity and in the sheer variety of causes they've undertaken -- from poverty to penal reform, to health care, to manumission, to addiction treatment, to homelessness, to the Developing World, to public education... But in general, its not because of clergy. It's voluntary. The "obligation" comes from the faith itself, not from any authoritarian solution.

[Gary Childress]

Of course not. That's called charity, and for Christians especially, it's an obligation. It's always a good thing, so long as it's wisely and freely done.

OK. So if lots of people were homeless and in desperate need of help and Christians didn't help them enough, does that mean the Christian clergy would step in and force Christians to donate enough to help the homeless at least to the point where they aren't living on the streets?
Or would you have a problem with the clergy doing that?

If you look it up, I think you'll find that Christianity has historically proved second to nobody in charitable giving, both in quantity and in the sheer variety of causes they've undertaken -- from poverty to penal reform, to health care, to manumission, to addiction treatment, to homelessness, to the Developing World, to public education... But in general, its not because of clergy. It's voluntary. The "obligation" comes from the faith itself, not from any authoritarian solution.

The federal budget increased from $4.4 trillion in 2019 to $6.1 trillion in 2023. Welfare spending increased from $773 billion to $1.1 trillion. These are dramatic increases and stem from Coronavirus relief payments. More.

https://federalsafetynet.com/welfare-bu ... 0from,More.

Americans gave $471.44 billion to charities in 2020, up 5.1%.

https://nonprofitssource.com/online-giving-statistics/

The official poverty rate in 2022 was 11.5 percent, with 37.9 million people in poverty.

https://www.census.gov/newsroom/stories ... and%202022.

Most low-income households do not pay federal income taxes, typically because they owe no tax (as their income is lower than the standard deduction) or because tax credits offset the tax they would owe. Some receive substantial rebates via refundable tax credits. However, nearly all low-income workers are subject to the payroll tax.

https://www.taxpolicycenter.org/briefin ... households

About 10 million tithers in the US donate $50 billion yearly to church & non-profits.

https://nonprofitssource.com/online-giv ... ch-giving/

It appears from the above that Christians do not alone nor even the private sector in its entirety alone contribute enough to cover everyone who lives below the poverty line, since there are still 38 million people living below poverty in spite of all the charitable giving (472 billion from private sources; of which about 50 billion is in church tithes and the government spends anywhere from almost 800 billion to 1 trillion on assistance in welfare; which includes Social Security retirement benefits).

[Immanuel Can]

It appears from the above that Christians do not alone nor even the private sector in its entirety alone contribute enough to cover everyone who lives below the poverty line, since there are still 38 million people living below poverty in spite of all the charitable giving (472 billion from private sources; of which about 50 billion is in church tithes and the government spends anywhere from almost 800 billion to 1 trillion on assistance in welfare; which includes Social Security retirement benefits).

Actually, all studies show that when compared to secularists, people of faith, and particularly Christians, are far and away the most charitable demographic. Then not only give more to religiously-grounded social causes, but even to secular social causes, than any secular demographic does. For example, https://philanthropydaily.com/new-study ... enerosity/. Or https://philanthropydaily.com/new-study ... enerosity/.

But in your response, you're assuming that "social security" or "welfare" of some type is the answer to poverty. It's not. It's never been. As you can see, it's not only never worked: it actually increases dependency and desperation, and it's also become inefficient and horribly exploitative. Even if we ever could make it work temporarily, it's totally unsustainable because it perpetuates the problem it claims to address. Not only should Christians not adopt that strategy, government shouldn't either.