(Don’t know why it’s sideways.)
We all know American intro to politics textbooks are garbage, but this graph was really funny to me. This is obviously just a rebranded horseshoe theory, but the author makes it very clear that this graph is special because it’s about relative political attitudes, NOT ideology (don’t worry he’s got a bespoke ideology cumpiss too). As if you can remove ideology and still maintain any representation of real world politics.
Basically, this dude legitimizes his theory by arguing that radicals and reactionaries are similar because they both use violence, despite having different goals. Liberals and conservatives, on the other hand, are notorious for never using violence, and have never supported the police or started wars that have killed millions of people. That violence isn’t real because the state says it’s good.
The creme de la creme comes on the next page though, where he shoehorns his horseshoe theory onto other countries. According to him, Xi Jinping is a conservative, Maoists are reactionary rather than Ultras (arguably true but that’s from our perspective), liberals want more capitalist reform (objectively correct, but for the wrong reason), and the real radicals are the ones that want Taiwan to invade.
Overall, 3/10. I feel like I need to learn Chinese to read a good textbook.
Which is ironic because he’s pitching this as an objective analysis free from ideology. I get where he’s trying to go, but personally I’ve never been a fan of these relative systems that share words with actual ideologies, like big L and little l liberalism. Surely there’s another word we could use
Oh sure. Nothing more ideological than claiming to be an Objectivist.
It's useful in distinguishing an active movement from a prevailing ideological framework. The Big L Libertarians are pretty far removed from little l libertarians, for instance. Chinese Communists are significantly different than Western Marxist-Leninists and Latin American native leftists (ie, little c communists).
But this split goes farther, as it really does lose the forest for the trees. Implying that Xi is conservative because he's reversing course on Deng's economic policies in favor of a more Maoist political philosophy really leans hard on the nostalgic aspect of the conservative philosophy while implicitly ignoring the possibility one might be nostalgic for a time predating the solidification of communist party rule. It's just such a myopically selective understanding of history.
It's less a split between lower-case ideological theories and upper-case organizational practice than it is carving out slivers of history and declaring that they anchor the entire ideological framework.
It's like claiming that Leftism is a form of Reformist Monarchism because that's what the French Parliamentarians on the left side of the aisle espoused.
How does a person pontificate about ideology this much without realizing it can't be escaped?