Why are (Some) Socialists and Far Right so quick to Assume they know what you're saying.

Holding Libertarian views puts you in quite a unique position where you seem to spend your time being attacked from all sides (granted I do bring it on by getting involved in some emotionally charged topics) so in the average day I tend to have debates with the Right on topics such as Gay Marriage, Immigration, Equality and so on, whilst at the same time having debates with the Left on The NHS, Austerity and EU Membership to name just a few.  Personally I love having debates like this and I see them as a great way to understand other people’s views as well as challenge the validity of my own held views.

This double attack has lead me to see even more similarities between socialists and far right debaters. I first blogged about how I consider the Far Right and the Left to be the same ideology a few years ago. The latest similarity I have noticed is in their common response to a challenging view which I call the Assume – Anger – Attack response. I should stress that I am not saying that this response is constant and there are occasionally some well reasoned and well articulated debates with Socialists however the level of AAA responses seems to me to be massively higher in the Left and Far Right than in any other group I regularly debate with (Although Extreme Atheists come close) Essentially the AAA response goes along the lines of 

1)      Assume I understand what you are saying, allowing my own bias to cloud my judgement.

2)      Get Angry about what I assume you are saying, this prevents logic from entering the debate.

3)      Attack, Attack, Attack – I have assumed you are bad so must now attack first.

As an example, recently I commented on a facebook post, now I should say up front that I was almost definitely in the wrong as I hadn’t quite understood what the original post was about – To be honest it was something that was so far from my view of the world that it never really occurred to me. One of my more left leaning facebook friends then put on a comment that attacked me, accused me of taking an opinion that was actually at odds to my own and stated that my views were actually dangerous. I was obviously confused (This was after all completely at odds with what I was thinking.) so I queried it and was again met with more assumptions about what I was saying – Assumptions based on the bias of the commenter and quite likely the incorrect assumption that I hold Right Wing social views – I responded with trying to clarify what I had meant and for the first time it was pointed out that my view wasn’t aligned to the original post, it went on for a few more comments until I eventually realised what he thought I was saying and I confirmed that I must have misunderstood. A long conversation based solely on the fact that he had followed Assume – Anger – Attack rather than a model that seeks to understand the other side before responding.  I call this the EEE model, Explore – Empathise – Exchange, based solely on the fact that I wanted three words that started with the same letter.

1)      Explore, Does the other person see the world the same as you.

2)      Empathise, Is there an emotional reason they took this view, why do they feel this way.

3)      Exchange, Now that you understand where they are coming from you can exchange your ideas.

Maybe if we all followed this model we could get a lot more understanding and a little less confrontation.

Why Far Right is more Left than Right

I have been feeling a little bit annoyed recently with descriptions of conservative politics as Right Wing, in fact that is not strictly true what annoys me is when parties such as the BNP and Nazi Parties are called Far Right (I accept that this simply stems for the contempt I feel for racists, and how I hate to have them linked to me in any way.) it is often described as a scale going from Communism in the extreme left through Socialism and conservatism in the centre and out to fascism in the extreme Right, the problem is of cause that this, like most attempts to model a complex system is incorrect, this implies that Communism and Socialism are as far from fascism as you can get where as in fact they are the closest to each other, I would suggest that in fact the system is much more of a circle than a line with Communism and Fascism pulling support from roughly the same areas.

For example, Racism which is obviously a key tenant of fascism is all about pluralism, the dividing of people into constituent parts (Them and Us.) this shares the most parallels with Socialist ideals of a class war, Both of these ideologies share a common factor which can be dumbed down to “My life isn’t good, and it is their fault.” Like fascism, socialism looks not at what someone can do to improve their life rather who can be blamed. This is a theme that similarly binds fascism to communism, whilst on the surface they appear to be polar opposites they are both essentially about the redistribution of resources, in fascism from foreign born to domestic citizens and in Communism from the “Haves" to the “Have Nots" (although I personally think it is more frequently the “Earned” to the “Earned Not”) only capitalism and free market economics stand apart from this trend being purposely devoid of any state intervention of wealth redistribution. In a fully capitalist system there is total equality, no one is persecuted due to race, gender, religion or as in socialism success.

Another similarity of Socialism and Fascism is that they tend to broadly pull support from the same demographic, The BNP for example do not tend to take support from the Conservatives in elections rather they take their support from Labour, this is because they offer mostly an identical message, a message that “if you are unhappy with your life it is someone else’s fault” ties both parties to people who are not as concerned with what they have as ensuring that no one else has more then them. On the other hand the Conservatives promise that they will ensure that all people have equal chances (as opposed to equal output) pulls it support from inwards facing people who ask “How can I make my life better?” therefore it is much more likely that a Labour voter would vote BNP than a Conservative voter (Who is more likely to switch to UKIP) There is a clear link from the globalization of capitalism and the globalization of Human Rights, Capitalism works when everybody is working to better themselves and therefore a successful capitalist country is one with an extensive Middle Class and it is the creation of a Middle Class that drives the majority of democratisation as they ask for more say in their own country. Socialism, Fascism and to the greatest extent Communism look to prevent people from pushing for freedoms by replacing capitalist tendencies towards equality with “Big Government” control.

So next time you hear the phrase Far Right remember that the political landscape is less a line and more a circle.