No, left and right ideologies are NOT false distinctions.
If I had a dollar for every time I've heard some variation of this.
How many times have you heard or read something along the lines of “left and right are just labels used to divide people”?? Of course there are many variations of this idiotic claim. Elon Musk at some point apparently tweeted out an especially bad version of this. It was recently repeated by an account that quotes Musk, and then Musk replied to confirm that it was his belief:
I’m not sure what sort of stupid and/or ignorance goes into these claims, but in Musk’s case I’ll assume it’s ignorance because he’s been too busy with so many technical things for so many years. Given his free speech goals, backed up by both restoring accounts banned by the previous far left wing Twitter management as well as his courageous release of the “Twitter Files”, he’s earned the benefit of the doubt in spite of the whopper level stupid in the quote above.
First, it’s not a notion and it’s not remotely silly. Left and right represent vastly different and opposed political beliefs. Second, for the right side in particular, there is nothing random or even semi-random about the policies that people on the right support.
The vast majority of people who are on the right agree with the founding fathers. They agree with the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. They’re for religious freedom, freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, the right to keep and bear arms, etc. And they mostly believe those rights come from God as per the Declaration, as opposed to coming from government. With respect to the Bill Of Rights, most would agree with Obama’s assessment that it is a set of “negative liberties” for the government. People on the right believe in limited government.
People on the left may be a bit more divided in certain areas, even though they tend to be unified in hating those on the right, and in disliking or even hating this country. While they used to be very big on free speech rights, now they are all on board with suppressing the free speech rights of those that they disagree with. Elon Musk knows this first hand. They also used to be big on freedom of assembly so that they could protest. Just as with free speech though, they now want to see those on the right prohibited from assembling for any protesting.
The left has never cared much for freedom of religion at all. While most claim to be “agnostic” or “atheist”, in reality their gods are Darwin and that super special magical chemical blob in the sea however many billions of years ago they now say it was. The left is fine with churches being shut down and they’re fine with Christians being persecuted. This has been true for over 100 years, and it’s always true of leftists all over the world.
The left doesn’t believe in the 2nd amendment either. The left has been out to ban guns in this country for decades. Lately they’ve also been out to punish law abiding people for exercising their 2nd amendment rights, along with exercising their right to self defense. Just ask Kyle Rittenhouse if you doubt this. That guy should have been given multiple medals for taking out 2 complete pieces of crap and seriously wounding another.
The left is also all for baby murder. Conversely and bizarrely, they also oppose the death penalty for heinous criminals!!?? So it’s fine to kill the most innocent, but the most guilty and the most evil must be spared. Left wingers will even express disbelief that people on the right could oppose killing innocent babies while supporting executing evil convicted murderers. There is perhaps nothing more bizarre than this notion, nor a more perfect to exemplify the huge chasm between left and right for many years now. It’s simply brain dead to claim that this chasm is a “notion”, or is “silly”.
Similarly, looking at all the differences across the board, it is well beyond absurd and beyond idiotic to claim that there is anything random involved, or that people on the right only adopt certain views after they “join the right mind tribe”. (My impression is that Musk’s wording there was an attempt to be clever. Many times he is clever, that time was an epic fail.) My parents weren’t stupid so they were republicans, so I didn’t get any stupid left wing influences from them, but it was more than that for me even as a kid.
I was an avid reader of the newspaper even when I was 12 years old. By the time I was 13 it was 1976, and I was watching the presidential campaign and the speeches all the way back into the primaries. When I heard Reagan, I knew he was the man! His ideas inherently made sense to me. I did not have to “join” any “tribe”. I did not have to adopt ideas that I otherwise would not agree with. The arguments Reagan made, which represented right wing beliefs way back then and STILL represent right wing beliefs today, simply made sense to me. And they still make sense to me.
Meanwhile, the arguments made by the left were clearly ridiculous and moronic. The left wanted a weakened US military, they wanted higher taxes, the wanted a bigger and more powerful government, and they supported various kinds of racist policies like “affirmative discriminative action”. The anti Vietnam war left wasn’t just against the war either. They were against the United States and just about everything it stood for. That’s still true today, but today they are actually more open about it. Their arguments and beliefs have also become far more bizarre, far more destructive, and far more evil.
The existence of bought and paid for establishment republicans and full on RINOs who falsely claim to be on the right is NOT a reflection on the vast majority of conservatives, That’s probably true for almost all real conservatives. While libertarians are also on the right due to their desire for smaller and less powerful government, they have some distinct points where they disagree with conservatives. But again, there’s nothing random about those differences, and in no way does it change or weaken my argument here.
There are absolutely, positively, substantial differences in belief systems between those on the left and those on the right. While I can’t vouch for the motivation of those on the left because almost nothing the left believes is correct or makes sense in any way, but I can assure you that those on the right are not “joining” and then suddenly supporting things that they did not believe in before.
Many of us never had to be red pilled. Like I say in my Twitter bio, I was red pilled at birth. The many that have been red pilled later in life have had their eyes opened, so not even in those cases is it a matter of “joining a mind tribe”.