This is a really helpful extension! I notice that in the two examples you gave, the split is qualitatively different from the political one in kind of the same way—the “left” is structurally libertarian / anarchistic, and the “right” is centrally planned. This suggests to me that “left” and “right” may not have an invariant meaning across instances of the broader sort of polarization, like they seem to in Enlightenment-influenced Euro-American democracies.
I wonder whether anyone here understands Japanese politics well enough to explain what’s going on there.
FWIW this post made me want to tag it with a related question (a feature we just implemented for Q&A but haven’t integrated with other posts), something to the effect of:
“Sampling randomly from a bunch of countries and cultures, how do political coalitions seem to be clustered?”
The abstraction you gave here made sense and I’d expect it to be one of the forces affecting coalition politics. But I’m less confident it maps cleanly to what I currently conceptualize as political-right-and-left.
(I think it might have been somewhat better to refer directly to the two strategies as the “big tent” strategy and “monopoly on force” strategy, or some such, since those are more concretely true, and don’t [prematurely] frame the discussion around two dominant strategies, when it’s possible there might be multiple strategies or they might map to different things in different contexts)
The “big tent” vs “hierarchy” dynamic might be somewhat specific to the US, but I don’t think the left is ever more aligned with traditional hierarchy in a country that uses the left-right split.
Well, there are (at least) two ways to approach the question, one of which is explaining whatever happened to be going on with French politics at the time (or, in the US or other countries right now), and the other way is to be exploring the implications of the hierarchy game (which might or might not coincide with what was going on in France, the US or others).
Seems useful to explicitly note that the questions might have separate answers, and meanwhile this particular post seemed more to be doing the latter.
I do wish in hindsight I’d made that more explicit. I used those terms in an attempt to show (among many other things) how “left vs right” isn’t a universally natural schema for political thought, but is instead the product of specific circumstances making a specific pair of coalitional strategies appealing, so that trying to categorize political thought outside the context of that particular coalitional battle as “left” and “right” is confused. But I don’t seem to have communicated that clearly.
This is a really helpful extension! I notice that in the two examples you gave, the split is qualitatively different from the political one in kind of the same way—the “left” is structurally libertarian / anarchistic, and the “right” is centrally planned. This suggests to me that “left” and “right” may not have an invariant meaning across instances of the broader sort of polarization, like they seem to in Enlightenment-influenced Euro-American democracies.
I wonder whether anyone here understands Japanese politics well enough to explain what’s going on there.
FWIW this post made me want to tag it with a related question (a feature we just implemented for Q&A but haven’t integrated with other posts), something to the effect of:
“Sampling randomly from a bunch of countries and cultures, how do political coalitions seem to be clustered?”
The abstraction you gave here made sense and I’d expect it to be one of the forces affecting coalition politics. But I’m less confident it maps cleanly to what I currently conceptualize as political-right-and-left.
(I think it might have been somewhat better to refer directly to the two strategies as the “big tent” strategy and “monopoly on force” strategy, or some such, since those are more concretely true, and don’t [prematurely] frame the discussion around two dominant strategies, when it’s possible there might be multiple strategies or they might map to different things in different contexts)
One relevant piece of evidence: the terms “left” and “right” were invented to describe physical position in the French parliament, where comparatively conservative groups aligned with the old regime sat on the right.
The “big tent” vs “hierarchy” dynamic might be somewhat specific to the US, but I don’t think the left is ever more aligned with traditional hierarchy in a country that uses the left-right split.
Well, there are (at least) two ways to approach the question, one of which is explaining whatever happened to be going on with French politics at the time (or, in the US or other countries right now), and the other way is to be exploring the implications of the hierarchy game (which might or might not coincide with what was going on in France, the US or others).
Seems useful to explicitly note that the questions might have separate answers, and meanwhile this particular post seemed more to be doing the latter.
I do wish in hindsight I’d made that more explicit. I used those terms in an attempt to show (among many other things) how “left vs right” isn’t a universally natural schema for political thought, but is instead the product of specific circumstances making a specific pair of coalitional strategies appealing, so that trying to categorize political thought outside the context of that particular coalitional battle as “left” and “right” is confused. But I don’t seem to have communicated that clearly.