Many academics I see online are leftist whereas many laypeople I see online are right wing.

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    24 hours ago

    Well-intended, sure. Everyone is the protagonist of their own story.

    Intelligent, maybe, although that’s always going to push a person towards something a bit more nuanced. Other personality defects have to pick up the slack.

    Educated, well, that depends on what they studied. Engineers and doctors don’t really learn much that prevents you from being a bad person. It’s hard to imagine a (modern) anthropologist buying into whatever fascist nonsense, though.

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        23 hours ago

        It’s true.

        The version that’s going around right now is more like that, though. Reagan is very dead. Free markets are out, blood and soil is in.

        • Pudutr0n@lemmy.world
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          19 hours ago

          The current US right wing leader is destroying any possibility the sensible right wing concerns get any attention, but just because something took a turn to the dark side doesn’t mean there was nothing worthwhile in it to begin with.

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              15 hours ago

              Healthy right wing politics often promote the possibilities of small businesses to thrive in ethical ways, not the defense of unholy monopolies or abusive employment conditions. They are also more traditionally concerned with individual freedoms and right to privacy. What we are seeing now in US and global politics is not a balanced representation of right wing any more than pol pot is a fair representation of the left. It’s a full blown authoritarian police state kleptocracy, and as us in the third world can testify, these can come from either side.

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                6 hours ago

                It seems like it’s worth mentioning here, that personal rights and small business (“libertarianism”, as it’s known in America) has been on the right in recent history, but the French revolutionary left held a lot of similar ideas back in the 1700s. It stayed associated with the left wing through the 1800s, before socialist influence on the left pushed it out, as the century ended.

                Basically, there tends to be two sides of the political spectrum, but what exactly they are, varies over time and geography.