system
A chat on subreddit /r/PoliticalCompassMemes
human
&gt; Being left doesn't grant you immunity from being racist af.

That's the thing though; the Left wants to retroactively define "racism" as "right wing" and Leftism as "anti-racist"--therefore Stalin, Woodrow Wilson, and the KKK were all Right-wing because of their racism.

This of course is nonsense and is completely at odds with the historical evidence that racism transcended politics.
gpt
In general, if you look at history in detail, it isn't a narrative, it isn't a story. Conflicts in history aren't conflicts between good and evil, or between the elite and the oppressed, they aren't conflicts of ideology and they aren't conflicts of interest. They're just one thing leading to another and people saying random things to explain their actions afterward.

Things that are right-coded or left-coded today are almost uncorrelated with the divides people had through history. 

Whigs were classical liberals who carried the torch of the Enlightenment, you think? Sure, but they also championed high tariffs, and they were also pretty much the political "normies" of their time, with wine-aunt takes on history and everything.

It seems contradictory that Jefferson was so libertarian, and in his older years seemed so opposed to wealth accumulation, and the Jeffersonians were so fond of the French revolutionaries even though the British were objectively more "libertarian" as we see it now. Because the way Jefferson came to "libertarian" conclusions, his thought processes, were not the classical-economics lens that modern libertarians do; after all, Adam Smith only published in 1776, and until that, people didn't even *know* there was a link between freedom and industrialization, and American politics was absurdly divided as freedom *versus* industrialization.

All of this stuff about the Big Switch ... you know when Republicans lost the cities? In the early 1930s. You know when Republicans lost the black vote? In the early 1930s. You know when the Republicans lost the support of institutions, like the media and academia? Much, much later. When did the Democrats lose the South? If you look at state legislatures, something like 2010.

For much of the 20th century, almost until the Reagan era, both parties had "conservative" and "progressive" factions, and even those factions didn't align with the modern right and left. For example, McCarthyism was done by both Republicans and Democrats, but *not* by the conservative Republicans.

Some progressives opposed suffrage and attacked suffragette marches. Some progressives supported suffragettes and bombed railway stations. Republicans were initially slightly more sympathetic than Democrats toward the suffragettes, but became less sympathetic when they saw the railway stations getting bombed.

You think America was always a shining city on a hill, a beacon of hope for all those being ravaged by wars and oppression in Europe? Kinda, but it's also true that the fascists of Europe actually liked America, and called it the first country on Earth to adopt fascism (because Woodrow Wilson).

You think the pro-Chinese parties in Hong Kong are the communists? Nah, it's the right-wing parties, who want greater economic integration with China and stability to the markets. In the Islamic world, do you think Islamic extremism is correlated positively or inversely with pro-market ideology? For that matter, do you think the Shah of Iran, who was widely perceived as a Pro-Western economic liberalizer, tended more toward privatizing or nationalizing industries?

History is *weird*. The factions and sides of history are *weird*, and people have formed their tribes based on all sorts of random disagreements on things we find to be absurdly irrelevant today, like freemasonry, whatever the fuck that is.