a map of political beliefs

After watching this video about the history of fascism, I was surprised to read that people disagreed about whether the Democratic or Republican party is closer to fascism. I realized that we easily confuse these terms, and after some online research, I made this diagram to help me understand how various political terms relate to each other:

TL;DR — Fascism and communism are two vastly opposed forms of authoritarian rule. Republicans are probably closer to fascism, but Democrats are probably closer to communism.

I’d be curious to know how my understanding matches up with yours.

moral vs. descriptive

Warning: unrigorous philosophical thinking ahead.

Specificity matters when you’re making a philosophical argument. Vague ideas may sound true at face value, but turn out to be false or trivial when their concepts are more clearly defined. In particular, I find that some folks don’t consider the possible distinction between a moral imposition on human action and a descriptive state of the world.

Consider the following two definitions of egoism:

  • ethical egoism (moral): a person ought to always act in their own self-interest
  • psychological egoism (descriptive): a person does always act in their own self-interest

Ethical egoism implies an obligation on how a person should act; psychological egoism is an observation of how people operate.

Believing one does not necessitate believing the other. It is possible to believe that people should act in their own self-interest, but that in reality many people choose instead to behave altruistically (for others’ best interests rather than their own). It is also possible to believe that people’s actions are ultimately always in their own self-interest (which would include seemingly-altruistic actions), but that it would be pointless to say that people should be motivated by such an obligation (since they already do so, by description).

Now, consider the following definitions for determinism:

  • determinism (descriptive): all events are ultimately determined by causes external to the will
  • ethical determinism (moral): a person ought to act as though all events are ultimately determined by causes external to the will

In this case, it also seems like believing one should not necessitate believing the other. In particular, believing that we have no free will does not necessitate that we ought to act as though we do not have free will.

To a determinist, this distinction might seem unimportant—if we don’t have free will, why does it even matter what we “ought” to do? Well, whether or not we believe we have free will, we still experience free will, and I claim (hand-waving-ly) that we essentially have to keep operating as if our will is free. And arguably, if believing we don’t have free will doesn’t necessarily impose on our moral decisions, it also doesn’t necessarily impose on how we write legislation.

(You might argue that there should be some principle by which we ought to always act in accordance with our beliefs, but I don’t think that’s a given. Life is a second order chaos system in which new beliefs/predictions can change the outcome.)