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Culture War Roundup for the week of June 3, 2024

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Simply find examples of parties on opposite sides of the political spectrum cooperating to actively pass bills or do other positive work together, while centrist parties vote against it.

Several people have cited examples from countries with multiparty systems, I guess it was proved.

I think the attempts to come up with consistent "theories of left and right" fail because ... while it is not fully arbitrary random whether any particular party of random time period and historical circumstances is considered left or right, it is a result of partially random path-dependent process of self-sorting to tribal groups. People assign these labels to themselves and others according to what makes sense to them at the time. Then the next generation self-sorts again, in updated circumstances. Their thinking may have been influenced by systematic theories of politics and ideological treatises, so there is some amount of consistency (to the extent the systematic theories were self-consistent) ... but surprisingly often, the rank-and-file did not read the lengthy treatises. Sometimes the popular theories people acted upon turn out to be poor at modelling world, and lead unanticipated outcomes. If the process is not governed by systematic laws, attempts to draw systematic theories to explain the process will fail.