March 2013 Media Thread

ArisKatsaris

(I decided to temporarily usurp RobertLumley's place in posting this thread. I hope he doesn't mind)

This is the monthly thread for posting media of various types that you've found that you enjoy. Post what you're reading, listening to, watching, and your opinion of it. Post recommendations to blogs. Post whatever media you feel like discussing! To see previous recommendations, check out the older threads.

Rules:

Please avoid downvoting recommendations just because you don't personally like the recommended material; remember that liking is a two-place word. If you can point out a specific flaw in a person's recommendation, consider posting a comment to that effect.
If you want to post something that (you know) has been recommended before, but have another recommendation to add, please link to the original, so that the reader has both recommendations.
Please use the comment trees for genres. There is a meta thread for comments about future threads.
If you think there should be a thread for a particular genre of media, please post it to the Other Media thread for now, and add a poll to the Meta thread asking if it should be a thread every month.

(I decided to temporarily usurp RobertLumley's place in posting this thread. I hope he doesn't mind)

Rules:

Please avoid downvoting recommendations just because you don't personally like the recommended material; remember that liking is a two-place word. If you can point out a specific flaw in a person's recommendation, consider posting a comment to that effect.
If you want to post something that (you know) has been recommended before, but have another recommendation to add, please link to the original, so that the reader has both recommendations.
Please use the comment trees for genres. There is a meta thread for comments about future threads.
If you think there should be a thread for a particular genre of media, please post it to the Other Media thread for now, and add a poll to the Meta thread asking if it should be a thread every month.

From the article:

For example, why do people who want laissez-faire free trade empirically also prefer a strong military and oppose gay marriage?

Data point: In Slovakia the only party ever openly supporting gay rights and marijuana legalization is also the most laissez-faire party. (More info, in Slovak language.) And for many people here it feels these topics "naturally" belong together: we want less state regulation, both in economic and private lives. On the other hand, we have no significantly pro-guns or pro-feminism party. Guns are not a big topic here. Feminists are opposed to the religious party (which is considered right-wing, but many of its opponents are also right-wing), but don't seem to support any specific party.

So it would be interesting to have data from other countries, whether the described connection is US-specific, or typical for most countries. Because if it is US-specific, the most likely explanation would be "somewhere in the past, for whatever reason, people advocating A and B formed a coalition, and since then people perceive A and B to be parts of the same political opinion", and in other countries the historical accident could have been different.

People may have the universal tendency to make politics two-sided ("us" and "them"), but the specific contents of those two sides may be accidental. And if some people are more concerned about choice between A and B, but other people are more concerned about X and Y, over time these choices will collapse into AX and BY, or AY and BX.

Even if the choice is neurologically based, e.g. some people prefer "safety" (right) and others prefer "exploration" (left), what exactly is "safe" and what is "adventurous" may depend on the specific historical context. For example, the first Communist regimes clearly were "adventurous"; something new, never tried before. But what about the post-Communist countries now? Here it is reversed; the "safety-oriented" people dream about the good old times when men were men, women were women, and The Party had everything firmly under control; while the "adventurous" people dream about the endless opportunities of the free market utopia. But we must be careful in such reasoning, because not everything is reversed. For example even in these conditions, the religion still remains the symbol of "safety", and feminists still need state support. So we should expect different coalitions.

EDIT: Another data point, again I don't know how much is Slovakia exceptional here. When making government coalitions, the nationalists always go with the communists. (Only recently, the communists added nationalist rhetorics to their repertoire, so they took their voters, the nationalists did not get to parliament, and the communists now rule alone.) So if someone asks me whether nazis are left wing or right wing, to me it seems obvious that they are left-wing, and I don't even understand how anyone (in my country) can ask this question. But I assume in other countries, the coalitions and rhetorics may be completely different. Again, it could be interesting to collect data from many countries.

Also, sorry for the mindkilling here. I mostly wanted to give specific examples contradicting the analysis in the linked article, to show that even if the basic premise about "safety" and "exploration" is essentially correct (seems plausible to me), some other parts may be results of specific history in USA, not valid universally.

EDIT: Now I realized the link is to the whole blog, not only to the article which was on the top of the blog when I clicked it.

One thing that both Communists/Socialists and Nationalists have in common is that they are both believers in what Peter Drucker calls "Salvation by Society". Obviously, they vehemently disagree about the details of what exactly a savior society would look like, but they both believe in the same basic premise: that it is possible and desirable for humans to be redeemed or purified via political action.

0A1987dM13y

FWIW, “right” does appear to positively correlate with “authoritarian” in this graph. Whether this generalizes to non-Western countries I won't speculate about.

4ArisKatsaris13y

I think the alliance between nationalists and communists is a pan-European phenomenon after the end of the Cold War. My model of European politics says that after World War I and onwards there are three competing ideologies (Communism, Nationalistic-fascism, Progressivism/Liberalism) which concentrate around states and state alliances and shift ideological alliances after major events. If a power center suffers a significant defeat, its ideology tries to ally itself with another formerly opposed ideology. The victorious power center on the other hand seeks to purify itself from internal fractions, and thus becomes "purer" in a sense. Initial ideological players: Soviet Union (Communism), Axis (Fascism), USA+UK+France (Progressivism) World War II ends - Fascism under Germany suffered a devastating defeat, so the leftover nationalists (both as individuals, and as leftover regimes like Franco), allied themselves with the USA against the communists. New ideological players: Warsaw Pact (Communism), NATO (Progressivism + nationalist fascism) Cold War ends - Communism suffers a defeat, so the leftover communists (both as individuals, and as leftover regimes) seek an alliance with the remnants of fascism -- fascism accepts because progressivism holds it in contempt, and USA starts reducing interest in Europe to focus on Arab issues instead. New ideological players: European Union (Progressivism), informal alliance centered on Russia (Nationalist fascism + communism)