Why people aren’t into politics
2024-07-26 06:00:00 +07:00 by Mark Smith
With all the politics happening all around the world I’ve spent much more time recently thinking about some of the core ideas that underpin it all. One thing that’s very confusing is the difference between left and right, and all the other things you can be, such as liberal, conservative, progressive, authoritarian etc.
In the UK it’s Labour vs Conservative, which sort of implies that Labour is the liberal party. But it’s odd because the 3rd party is the Liberal Democrats, so I guess THEY are the liberals. But isn’t it interesting that they are the liberal DEMOCRATS. That sort of implies that either Labour or the Conservatives, or both, are not into democracy.
Which brings us to the US, that only have two parties, who famously use the red and blue colors, them being the Republican and Democratic parties. Of course the same applies here, the very existence of a the Democratic party implies that the Republicans are not into democracy. And that of course leads you back to the UK because the two major parties also use red and blue, except it’s reversed with the Conservatives being blue and Labour being red.
Then there’s communist vs populist. Communist is about the group so it makes sense they would be on the left, and though populist is it’s opposite so should be on the right, it’s a bit confusing that the word populist has a base of ‘people’ or ‘populace’, which sounds like it’s about the group as well. But I guess populist describes a single person that is popular and leads not in a for-the-people kind of way?
I don’t know maybe I’m the only person that finds this stuff confusing. It’s like some sort of weird game snakes and ladders that you have to play while drunk. It’s almost like the nomenclature is chosen specifically to BE confusing. Is it any wonder people aren’t into politics?
It seems pretty likely that a lot of folks are talking cross purposes much of the time. If this was a legacy software application, any sane programmer asked to work on such a code base, would totally refuse until things were renamed to more sensible things. I’m amazed it works as well as it does.
Also isn’t it a bit odd that there aren’t any parties with the word 'capitalist' in their name?