Sure, and the authoritarian left is also authoritarian. Left doesn’t mean “when good,” that’s just a way to hand wave all the bad things any leftist ever does away as “well they’re not really in my group, they’re secretly rightists” so you can make yourself feel automatically moral for simply picking a direction. In reality, bad people exist everywhere, and so do good people, that includes the left and right.
It doesn’t help that “left” and “right” can mean different things to different people, and instead of picking one definition to argue from people will flip them in the same conversation to be intentionally misleading. To some, left means libertarian and right means authoritarian, to others, left means collectivist policies and right means individualist policies, to others still, left is when you don’t support the monarch and right is when you do, to yet others left is when “no hierarchy” and right is when “hierarchy natural,” and there’s probably more I’m forgetting. It helps in these conversations to delineate which definitions one is using and stick with it for at least the duration of the conversation, but people just don’t do that.
Maybe it’s just my definition of left then, but that doesn’t seem compatible with leftist views, at least in my opinion
Well, we are talking about far right and far left, not moderates.
Well most people on the right would say that the extermination of a group is also incomparable with their views.
far right. And I was specifically referring to authoritarianism with my above comment.
Sure, and the authoritarian left is also authoritarian. Left doesn’t mean “when good,” that’s just a way to hand wave all the bad things any leftist ever does away as “well they’re not really in my group, they’re secretly rightists” so you can make yourself feel automatically moral for simply picking a direction. In reality, bad people exist everywhere, and so do good people, that includes the left and right.
It doesn’t help that “left” and “right” can mean different things to different people, and instead of picking one definition to argue from people will flip them in the same conversation to be intentionally misleading. To some, left means libertarian and right means authoritarian, to others, left means collectivist policies and right means individualist policies, to others still, left is when you don’t support the monarch and right is when you do, to yet others left is when “no hierarchy” and right is when “hierarchy natural,” and there’s probably more I’m forgetting. It helps in these conversations to delineate which definitions one is using and stick with it for at least the duration of the conversation, but people just don’t do that.
Yeah, that’s the issue with labeling, although it needs to happen to some degree, as humans find things to identify with