Why care about politics at all?
- Politics affects many things
- If you don't care about politics, someone else will
- Trying to affect the things you care about is already politics
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sed contra
- Politics may be a zero-sum game, and we almost by definition overinvest in those
- We may overinvest in anything to do with identifiable enemies
What, in the most general sense, is left politics?
Left politics is politics oriented towards equality over decision-making.
Various incorrect accounts
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Left politics is belief in a stronger government
This account ignores left anarchists (understood both by themselves and their opponents as on the left) and fascists (understood both by themselves and their opponents as on the right.)
Additionally, very few people have a committment to the size of government as such - this is, for the majority of those engaged in left-right conflict, of purely instrumental value.
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Left politics is a drive towards entropy and disorder
Neoreactionaries say this often enough that it seems to me to be an indictment of their powers of imagination.
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Left politics is a drive towards equality of outcomes
This is close to the true account. However, left politics empirically is not oriented towards equality on most variables - height, wisdom, musical ability, whatever. What it is oriented around is relative power. Democracy is the implementation of this with respect to state power, socialism with respect to command over resources, feminism to the realm of sex and kinship. These are all relations of power - potentially necessary but always dangerous, especially - such is the left conviction - when it is evenly distributed.