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Seems like you also need to figure that there's a roughly equal chance that the right wing opponent of the left wing guy will catastrophically damage the country in a different but similarly catastrophic right-wing way.

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A bad right wing government will lose power but a bad left wing government will retain power and destroy a country.

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Iran doesn't seem to have done very well with its right-wing revolution, and they've held on for over 40 years. We will see how Poland, Hungary, and Turkey fare.

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This is kind of an over-simplification; in international politics the Iranian regime has often aligned with left wingers (like the Sandinistas or the PLO). Also, the economic policies of the Iranian regime are hard to place on a conventional left/right axis.

Certainly the Iranian regime is socially conservative, but it is very different from the style of Latin American right wing politics that is the relevant comparison for Boric etc.

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You seem to forget that the iranian revoluton was looked with great hope and supported by the progressive west, since they were toppling the hated Shah.

Next you are telling me Daniel Ortega, another darling of the left wing revolutionaries with a return ticket, is also a right winger.

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Yes. There are also people who call themselves leftists who support Putin and Xi, even though they really arenтАЩt тАЬleftтАЭ in any meaningful way. These people treat тАЬleftтАЭ as тАЬanti-AmericaтАЭ.

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Iran didn't have a right wing revolution, they imposed a theocracy of Islamic law.

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Is a theocracy not a paradigmatic right-wing government?

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The term right-wing can generally refer to the section of a political party or system that advocates free enterprise and private ownership, and typically favours socially traditional ideas.

Left-wing politics describes the range of political ideologies that support and seek to achieve social equality and egalitarianism, often in opposition to social hierarchy.

Theocracy is a system of government in which priests rule in the name of God or a god.

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Most people would call the Nazi's far right, but they didn't believe in free enterprise or private ownership (at best they let industrialist retain formal ownership of their capital, but told them exactly what to make, what prices to charge, who to hire, what level of profit and dividends were allowed, and how to allocate capital).

I think the aesthetics of right/left have more staying power then particular policy ideas, which change with context and political coalition building. Right is hierarchical and left is egalitarian. Right is masculine and left is feminine. Right tends to represent normality and left tends to represent abnormals. Right tends to have more status quo bias than left.

Take something like meritocracy. In the 18th/19th century the egalitarian left was pro meritocracy as it allowed a broader class of people to participate in climbing the hierarchy. But in the modern context the left is anti-meritocracy because it leads to unequal outcomes.

The hierarchy/egalitarian aesthetic is there throughout, but the stance toward meritocracy is different.

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The early 20th century left was MUCH more masculine.

Within Iran, the status quo was the Shah, a monarch. That's traditionally considered more right-wing than a republican form of government. The Shah happened to promote various modernization schemes and was more socially liberal in some respects than the theocrats, so that would be one way you'd say he was on "the left", but that's not how politics was conceived of back during the Cold War (where Iran was a western client state that had renamed itself to emphasize how Aryan it was when Hitler ruled Germany).

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ThatтАЩs a better characterization of right/left than IтАЩve seen anywhere else recently! I was starting to become convinced that there isnтАЩt really anything meaningful to the distinction.

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I don't think of free enterprise and private ownership as "right wing" outside the United States. Socially traditionalist is for sure right wing.

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Classically "right wing" just means "traditional" or "status quo bias".

Which could mean religious but doesn't have to. The Nazi's are considered as far right as possible and they were fervently anti-tradition and anti-religion (at least Christianity).

There is a lot of context to this stuff.

For instance the right in America is a lot more likely to be anti-tradition and status quo as relates to the administrative state and leftist cultural hegemony, but pro traditionalist in the sense that they like nuclear families with a mom and a dad and 2.5 kids.

Five minutes ago Ukrainian neo-Nazies loved Hitler. Now they are rebranding as football hooligans that like it up the butt as much as Ernst Rohm did.

Right and left is all context my boy. Who is the friend right now. Who is the enemy right now.

The closest thing I've ever seen to a permanent dichotomy is that right wing is more masculine and left wing is more feminine.

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No, there isn't. Even Hitler didn't have a long-term effect as bad as your typical Chaves-style dictator: Nazi regime collapsed quickly and Germany did great in the long term.

In Latin America there were many dictatorial regimes set up in the 1960s and 1970s but only one remains today: Cuba.

Pinochet regime did not last even 20 years, while at this rate, Castro's regime will last at least a hundred years.

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The worst thing that radical right wing can do is start wars that they lose, but that just doesn't happen that often after 1945. And when they do its usually not some total war where all the cities get destroyed.

East Asia had a lot of authoritarian right wing regimes, they were called the Asian Tigers.

If you have to pick your poison, always bet against socialists.

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Franco's Spain stayed out of WW2, but his regime didn't last beyond his death (rather than Cromwell's Protectorate).

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If Chavez had tried to invade half of South America 5 years after he was elected his regime would have collapsed quickly too. The Nazi regime collapsed because they pissed off half the world not because it was right wing.

Germany (and its predecessors) was great for hundreds of years before the Nazis. While Venezuela (or other SA countries) had some periods of economic success, it was never at the same level as Germany.

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Venezuelan GDP per capita in 1980 was higher than Germany's. ($16,000 USD per person vs $12,000 USD per perosn, if the charts off Google aren't lying).

Argentina in 1913 had a GDP per capita that was higher than France or Germany, twice as high as Spain, and about on a level with Canada.

https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=2ahUKEwiN4buv9Ob4AhXUGVkFHYxbAxkQFnoECB0QAw&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.hbs.edu%2Fris%2FPublication%2520Files%2FLAER%2520Introduction%2520to%2520Argentine%2520Exceptionalism_3c49e7ee-4f31-49a0-ba21-6e2b726cd7c5.pdf&usg=AOvVaw0tkhpsV-95Q-kmukZfaz8c

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Can you elaborate what that would be?

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Better wingless, but right is generally better: more prosperity and fewer murders.

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