There is a lot of noise, lately, in regard to the relative positioning of political views along a linear scale. I started thinking about it when I was watching Andy Warhol: A Documentary Film, on PBS. In the film, Dave Hickey, explains how Andy enacted the winning strategy of American business: “Move to the edge, declare it the center and let the world reorganize itself around you.”
It started me thinking about the relativity of the whole left/right debacle. My friend, Max Keiser, styles himself as a moderate [sic] or socialist (depending upon the circumstance, while espousing the destruction of modern capitalism. Max and I originally bonded over the concept of Meritocracy, however our interpretations of how meritocracy is best served are pretty radically divergent.
It is too easy and convenient to put Max and myself on a linear scale of left and right, in fact it’s ridiculous.
My first realization of this was in 8th grade. I had a GREAT history teacher named William ‘Bill’ Stack. Bill was the W.C. Fields of history teachers. He leaned back in his chair and spoke with an affected New England Irish drawl. (I used to imagine him with a cigar and a shot of whiskey, saying “I was in Philadelphia once, it was closed”). Anyway, one day he came into class an drew a single line across the three blackboards that covered the front of the classroom. As he finished moving from the right side of the class, to the left, he wrote the word ‘communist’ on the left side of the line. He moved to the far right side of the line, and wrote ‘fascists’.
He asked the class where they thought Democrats and Republicans belonged. After some discussion, he wrote the two names, next to each other in the center of the board. His point was that everything is relative. If the only part of the political ’spectrum’ that one considered, was from slightly right of Republican to slightly left of Democrat, then the difference between the two are radical. But if one looked at the whole spectrum, the differences are minor.
Tags: Communist, Conservative, Liberal, Manipulation, Nazi, Parties
