Battle Among Truths

“In the hands of a partisan, facts are just decorations on the tree of ideology.”

There are many causes for the failure of right-wing reactions to left-wing politics in the West, but one big one is something called bourgeois objectivism. This is the assumption that all social problems have a correct set of answers and the point of politics is to discover those solutions. Once the solution is determined, the point of politics is to explain it to everyone so it can be quickly implemented.

No human society has worked this way, nor will this ever be the norm. Instead, politics is about factionalism. One group wants things from government that benefit their faction, while other factions want things that benefit them. Politics is the clash of these factions over finite resources. This is something the American Founders understood and they addressed this issue in Federalist No. 10, in defense of the proposed constitution.

Left-wing politics since Lenin has understood that politics is about freedom and freedom is a partisan issue. For the ruling classes, freedom is about maintaining their position and exploiting society for their benefit. For the working classes, freedom is about escaping the yoke of oppression into a world where everything is possible. In the Marxist sense of it, freedom is about the workers seizing control of their own destiny.

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