THE DISCOVERY OF ZERO
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Synapsia

Political Values & Motivations Across the Spectrum

10/7/2025

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​I’ve been trying to get my head around some of the foundational structures of thinking that motivate our political thought and put together this chart.
I'm open to this being a straw man of the right.
However, I'm convinced moderate conservatives are only so to the degree they've accepted tenets of liberalism. The degree to which they identify as conservative is their rejection of core liberal values. "Smaller government and deregulation" they would argue are about freedom - ostensibly a liberal value.
However, in practice it is anything but, as it is an oligarchic freedom, as historical and sociological evidence overwhelmingly demonstrates that while something like "free market entrepreneurship" has focused investment in growth areas of the economy and contributed to human flourishing in health and comfort, this has also come at a terrible cost in terms of generational poverty which by definition is the opposite of freedom.
If, in aggregate, even more have been brought out of poverty by this "rising tide", this is a moral proposition in which millions are essentially being sacrificed to live in chains for the benefit of some future wealth created elsewhere - hardly a burden any individual ought to be asked to bear.
Furthermore, the bargain rests upon the premise that this "law of the jungle" type scenario is the only choice. It is one in which, let's face it, an upper class will continue to ride out comfortably (born out rather garishly in the proponents of this philosophy having always been the owners of capital who themselves bear the fruit in their lifetimes while the poor suffer for some future generation. "Yes, I know you live stressed out in a dangerous neighborhood next to the toxic plant we just deregulated but we really can't raise your wages because that would impede the growth that will lift your great grand-daughter out of poverty.").
They enjoy reminding us that the only alternative is totalitarian communism and look how that turned out, ignoring of course the entire concept of a mixed economy and the myriad ways in which economies might be designed in which everything is on the table from socialized healthcare to daycare, to groceries to sectoral bargaining, to free college education to extremely high marginal taxes on wealth, etc., etc.
So what then is this position if not a fig leaf over the deeper motivation which is basically self-interested comfort with the status quo, invariably involving personal privilege and acceptance of all manner of bigotries that serve to lubricate the gears of oppression and order amongst the hierarchies propping up the powerful. Of course, the dismal science of economics allows all sorts of bunk to creep in, padding the walls of the tunnels through which the charlatans bore, coming in not with liberal intent but with greedy, unwittingly motivated self-interest.
 
 
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