Political Ideologies: Difference between revisions

It is in the context of the Enlightenment and Counter-Enlightenment that the following political theories originated.

 

The chief objective for liberalism is human freedom. In liberalism, freedom means the ability to do what one wills with one's own life and property. Liberals stand in opposition to government restrictions on private actions, and tend to be skeptical of authority.

 

It is also worth pointing out that while classical liberals are often painted as being opposed to all government intervention in the marketplace, this is not strictly true. Adam Smith, for example, actually supported subsidies to the unemployed as well as fledgeling businesses (although he was uneasy about the latter due to his fears that businesses would lobby against being removed from the subsidy rolls), as well as progressive taxation, while Milton Friedman and Friedrich von Hayek proposed replacing the existing welfare programs and minimum wage with negative income taxes that would provide living wages to all citizens, not the complete elimination of welfare. Where Friedman and Hayek stopped short of social liberalism was in opposing redistribution of wealth for the sake of bringing living standards closer together, although they have been criticised by others further to the right economically for supporting any redistribution at all.

 

Problems immediately arise when attempting to define "conservatism" because the term does ''not'' refer to any specific single ideology. The word has been used by many different political groups in many different ways, usually peddling wildly-divergent and often flatly-contradictory political programs. Of course, this has to do with the fact that "conserving" the current state of society ''does'' mean a different thing in different countries and, more important, different times. Restoring society as it was in the past is a different thing altogether; that would be ''reactionary''.

 

In short, British-style conservatism is characterized by an aversion to rationalistic and/or ideology-based political programs and instead a preference for proven, pragmatic policies in the pursuit of maintaining social order by protecting established traditions from radical change. Latin-style conservatism is British-style taken [[Up to Eleven]] with a strong religious element. American-style conservatism is based on an unstable coalition of British-style conservatism, religious conservatism, and classical liberalism, in varying proportions depending on numerous variables.

 

Problems also arise when attempting to define "socialism" because the term has been used to refer to a wide variety of different groups which promoted many different sets of ideas that at times flatly contradicted each other.

 

Below are two sub-sections on notable variants or subsets of socialism:

 

Social democracy is [[Take a Third Option|basically a kind of compromise]] between capitalism and democratic socialism. While socialism proposes that all industries come under state or cooperative ownership and control, social democracy instead proposes the nationalising of only certain essential services while still allowing private enterprise for the rest. The rationale is that certain services do not operate in the interests of the public good in a for-profit environment and inevitably result in inequality, but free enterprise is still necessary for innovation and competition (and indeed, social-democratic systems can and do involve private enterprises acting in direct competition with the nationalised services). [[X Meets Y|Essentially it's democratic socialism within a capitalistic framework.]]

 

"Essential services" can refer to education, public transport, health insurance, welfare, water, electricity, and so on. In fact, the truth is that most government systems which self-identify as capitalist are also social-democratic in some way or another: even the USA, which is infamously wary of socialism as a nation, has such programs as Medicare (health insurance for citizens over 65) and so on.

 

One of the most well-known forms of socialism is Marxism-Leninism: the kind of socialism practiced in [[Soviet Russia]] ([[In Soviet Russia, Trope Mocks You|where socialism practices you, apparently]]). This was not pure Marxism, however, but Marxism modified by Lenin's ideas. (Russia at the time of the Russian Revolution had more peasants than proletarians, and Russia has a long history of political theory arguing for revolution based on the Russian peasant: in short, it wasn't the kind of society that ''Orthodox'' Marxism would argue was ready for a communist revolution.)

 

A note for comparative purposes: the Marxist approach to knowledge is very much the opposite to the British Conservative approach. British Conservatism is a highly skeptical philosophy with some leanings to empiricism. Marxism is the opposite; it is highly ''rationalistic'' (in the same Cartesian sense that the French Revolution was). Arguably, all of Marxist ideology can be boiled down to two ideas; ''Economic Determinism'' (which arguably implies methodological collectivism and historical materialism) and ''The Labor Theory of Value''.

 

Fascism is also a complicated ideology to define, albeit for precisely the opposite reason that socialism is. In contrast to socialism, where various disparate sub-ideologies have claimed the label, few regimes which could be considered fascist have actually labelled themselves as such (for example, the ideology of [[Adolf Hitler]]'s Third German Reich was rather euphemistically referred to as "National Socialism", while Francoist Spain referred to itself as being "National Syndicalist"). Additionally, fascism is considered the one irredeemable [[Complete Monster]] of all political ideologies and thus has devolved into a term of abuse, with all other ideologies [[Suspiciously Specific Denial|strenuously denying any similarities with it]]. As a result, codifying a series of essential characteristics that make a society fascist is very difficult to do without setting off a [[Flame War]].

 

However, ultimately [[Pragmatic Villainy|economics in fascism is usually a secondary concern]]; they claim the "Third Position" on the issue between capitalist and communist, but in practice this mainly means that they are just trying to win support by appearing to be different from either.

 

 

The definition of anarchism to most people means "belief that government is bad and shouldn't exist." However, while all anarchists do hold something like this, it is not the only or in most cases even essential part of their ideology.

 

A brief description of the major anarchist schools of thought:

** ''Collectivist anarchism'': Like anarcho-communism, but products would be distributed according to work performed rather than need, with direct democracy. There are also some schools which argue for products to be distributed according to some combination of work performed and need together.

 

In addition to this, there are other different anarchist movements which don't focus on the organization of an actual anarchist society, but rather on the means to bring it.

* ''Anarchism Without Adjectives'', which is [[Exactly What It Says on the Tin]].

 

== Liberalism ==

Note that most of these authors are generally considered classical liberals rather than social liberals, although confusingly, there is a great deal of difference between e.g. the classical liberalism of Adam Smith (who actually reserved some rather strong barbs for the upper class) versus the classical liberalism of Ayn Rand, who was much more right-wing (and therefore much more controversial). Among the writers of non-fiction on this list, Isaiah Berlin, (sometimes) John Stuart Mill, Thomas Paine, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, John Maynard Keynes, Karl Popper, Paul Krugman, Joseph Stiglitz (probably the only person on this list who could be considered a social democrat, although Rousseau is arguable), and to a lesser extent Benjamin Constant are generally the exceptions; they are usually considered social liberals. Amongst the fiction authors, Heinlein is an interesting case because he actually drifted from social liberalism (''[[For Us, The Living: A Comedy of Customs]]'' and ''[[Beyond This Horizon]]'', for example, although these actually border on socialism, advocating an economy called Social Credit which is effectively a mixture of socialism and capitalism) to classical liberalism (much of his later writing with the arguable exception of ''[[Stranger in A Strange Land]]'', which generally doesn't discuss economics) throughout his writing career; ''[[The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress]]'' could actually be considered to advocate a form of individualist anarchism. The only author currently on the fiction list who was consistently a social liberal is Steinbeck.