Political Memes

Practical perhaps for a taxonomy... But politics are philosophy really. The history shifts. John Locke's conception of liberalism is both foundational to the law of the land which is both oppressive but also a radical dissolution of the powers of monarchy... And also created from observations of things that already existed. Our concepts of right and left flow from a history where those where once very physical positions in relationship to powerful people and what individual philosophies of political structure were at play change in their relationship to those points. Libralism was once left when in opposition to monarchism or autocracy...now it is right as the shift of power makes those old power structures obsolete.

The common day to day analysis that places these things in strict opposition to each other is perhaps helpful shorthand for navigation of the very basics... Or a sort of surface level conversion. But every short hand is always somehow wrong because realities hold too much nuance to be really useful. Every topic or study has it's point where you have to discard that riddled with contradictions but easily accessable shorthand given to the beginner because at some point it simply stops being useful. The "commonly accepted" tends to just lend itself to arguments of divisions and sharp delineations where really spectrums exist. Why would one need a universal measure? That lends itself more to tribalism. Economic theory and history has a plethora of words describing many different individual forms societies use to divy up resources. Is the Haudenosaunee confederation's idea of land and favor trading culture Socialism? Or is that simply applying a framework made from a retrospective where a Eurocentric idea of property ownership muddies the waters and crunches everything down into a palatable shorthand we made up to something that it really has no business being applied?

The political spectrum is philosophy but it is also history. Focusing the lens onto the most popular take in the present does a disservice to the idea of a fixed point to really navigate.