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Surely you know that no actual right-winger thinks that Reagan, Thatcher, and Bush were genuinely right-wing, right? Reagan, the guy who signed one of the largest illegal immigration amnesties in U.S. history? Bush, the guy who championed No Child Left Behind? These are your “failed right-wing governments*?
Yes, I do know that. Hence my comment about "No true rightist." I know rightists also believe that Clinton and Obama were left-wing, despite many, many policies they executed which were not remotely leftist.
If you tell me no government to the left of Mussolini or Pinochet is actually right-wing, then of course you won't be able to find many "right-wing governments" in the Anglo-sphere in living memory.
Yes, correct, that is precisely what we are arguing. There has been no right-wing government in the Anglosphere in living memory. Hell, a government wouldn’t even need to be as far right as Pinochet or Franco or Mussolini to qualify; sadly, we haven’t gotten anything even in the same ballpark as those guys. To me that’s just indisputably obvious. So, telling me that right-wing Anglosphere governments have failed in your lifetime is a non-sequitur.
Let's keep in mind the context here--the examples given of rightist/right wing policies are tough-on-crime things like Three Strikes. Whether that's "right wing government" or not is not really relevant: it's a less-progressive stance than the alternative at the time.
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This is the mirror image of a marxist who insists nothing short of immediate full communism is real leftism, and therefore there has never been any real leftist government.
Right and left are relative. Even Mussolini was not especially right-wing by the standards of pre-French Revolution Europe.
No, it’s not, because the difference is that full right-wing governance has been tried. We have actual real-world examples of what it looks like. Therefore, we can draw conclusions about actual examples, and do not need to rely on empty hypotheticals and speculation. We can easily recognize that there are qualitative differences between the governance of Reagan and the governance of Francisco Franco, or, as you astutely note, the governments of basically every European country on earth 300 years ago. So, I don’t have to measure real-world governments against an imaginary utopia; I can measure them against other real-world governments that exist right now, as well as countless real-world governments that have existed in the past.
Okay, replace "immediate full communism" with "Soviet socialism," then. The point is Bush really was right-wing and Obama really was left-wing in the context of the 21st century United States, because those terms are relative, despite the fact that things could always be right-er (or left-er).
If twentieth-century European fascism is your ideal, I don't think that much recommends full right-wing governance, but I suppose that's a matter of taste.
This is incoherent. Khrushchev was more right-wing than Lenin. Does that mean that Khrushchev was right-wing? Obviously not. There were hundreds of other governments on earth contemporaneously with his, and we can measure him against those governments. We don’t have to only measure him in terms of the local political context. Similarly, if one feudal lord was more liberal-minded than another feudal lord - more tolerant and indulgent toward his serfs, more kind toward women, only flogged gay men instead of having them hanged - that still doesn’t make him a liberal. We can actually compare governments between countries and time periods.
Liberalism didn't exist in feudal Europe. But someone like Thomas Jefferson, a slaveholder, was certainly a liberal by the standards of his time (and a pretty radical one), though he'd be barred from any liberal political party today (and most right-wing ones). Even if you wanted to measure Bush or Reagan against other contemporary world governments, it isn't as though there were a surfeit of openly fascist regimes on the world stage, since the end of WWII the vast majority of world governments at least pay lip service to democracy and liberal constitutionalism. Though I wouldn't disagree that there are and were politicians who were more right-wing than Bush and Reagan, sure.
To an extent, yes. But at a certain point certain political perspectives become so marginalized and irrelevant that to insist they be used as anchor-points for the definition of the political spectrum is to treat "left" and "right" as platonic ideals rather than convenient labels. If someone is going to argue that say Eric Zemmour isn't really right-wing because he doesn't advocate for the restoration of the Bourbon monarchy and the reinstitution of manorial dues that would just be ridiculous.
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Okay, well, if your model for a "good" right-wing government is Mussolini or Pinochet, you're doing a poor job convincing me this is a bad thing.
Fair enough, but you have zero good examples to convince me that right-wingers would do better. Arguing that the problem with Reagan and Thatcher is that they weren't right-wing enough certainly doesn't sell me on this.
You’ve already massively moved the goalposts. Your initial argument is that right-wing Anglosphere governments - which you defined as Reagan, Thatcher, and Bush - have demonstrably failed to produce good results. You have now switched to “Alright, there haven’t been any actual right-wing Anglosphere governments, so I haven’t actually witnessed one producing bad results, but *you can’t prove that they wouldn’t have been bad if they had existed.*”
Yes. They're about as right-wing as we've had, and your argument is "They weren't right-wing enough." Why do you expect me to accept your premise, that they weren't "really" right-wingers and had they been actual right-wingers - like Mussolini and Pinochet - they would have been successful? Because your "actual" right-wingers look even worse to me.
There are two separate arguments here: one is the question of whether or not Reagan/Thatcher/Bush are right-wing; the other is whether or not if they had been right-wing, that would have been a good thing. If your answer to Question 1 is “yes, they were right-wing”, then you don’t have to address Question 2, because you can just observe the results of those individuals’ governance and declare those the results of right-wing government. If your answer to Question 1 is “no, they were not right-wing”, then have to grapple with Question 2. You’re correct that I haven’t supplied any arguments in favor of the affirmative answer to Question 2; that’s because I’ve been trying to get you to accept that the answer to Question 1 isn’t “yes” in the first place.
You yourself appear to recognize on some level that the answer to Question 1 is “no”, because you supplied a couple of examples of leaders who were universally recognized as right-wing (Mussolini, Pinochet) and you acknowledged that there is a qualitative difference between those guys and the three people you named. Even if you believe that Reagan was the farthest-right president we’ve had in your lifetime, you also clearly recognize that he’s nowhere near as far-right as Mussolini. So, at this point we’re arguing about how far right on the spectrum a leader has to be before we say he is right-wing. If your answer is “anywhere even slightly to the right of some hypothetical center”, that’s fine, but I don’t think that’s the definition most people here would use to define what makes a government legitimately right-wing. Especially because you’d have to define the center, and that might mean recognizing that the center of the American Overton Window has, for at least 80 years, been far to the left of even the leftmost part of the Overton Window in, say, 1840.
No, I recognize that "right-wing" is a spectrum, just like left-wing. I think Reagan was too right-wing, you think he wasn't right-wing enough. I think right-wing policies have not delivered good results. To me, you are just making a 50 Stalins argument in reverse.
Aside from your complaint about immigration amnesty, how was Reagan not a right-winger? Or is anyone who doesn't want to roll back to the Articles of Confederation not a right-winger? Or have there been no right-wing governments since the Enlightenment?
Yes, the center has moved since 1840. The Overton Window moves in large part because issues change. People in 1840 wouldn't even recognize a lot of our issues. Conservatives who complain about having been fighting a losing battle since slavery was abolished and women were given the right to vote have a point, I guess, but you're still doing a poor job of convincing me that True Conservativism Has Never Been Tried.
Reagan's domestic policies were, courtesy of wikiepdia:
Reduce marginal tax rates on income from labor and capital.
Reduce regulation.
Tighten the money supply to reduce inflation.
Reduce the growth of government spending.
These need to be measured from where the US was in 1980. Marginal tax rates in 1980 were 43% on income over $40k. That could be about $120k now. I would guess that there are people who want to raise taxes that high, but they are no centrists. Income over $20k ($60k) in modern dollars was taxed at 24%.
I don't think tightening the money supply when inflation is at 13% is a right wing idea.
Federal spending under Reagan was about 22% of GDP. This is more then then pre-COVID rate under Trump, but 2.5% less than Biden. In contrast, Obama spent just over 20%.
It is hard to measure regulations.
On foreign policy, Reagan does not seem that right wing, compared to Biden, unless you count being against communism as "right wing."
In hindsight, Reagan looks very centrist. What about him makes you think him more right-wing than Obama? He might have been more right-wing than Nixon (SSI. affirmative action, EPA, clean water act), I suppose. Overall, Nixon looks to the left of Obama on that measure. Obama was very centrist.
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Am I missing something or is the switch primarily a result of your argument? You didn't defend Reagan, Thatcher, or Bush, and said yourself there were no rightwing governments in the anglosphere... like, what else is he supposed to say? Is it ok if he brings up Pinochet or Mussolini as right-wing failure modes?
Of course he can bring up Pinochet and Mussolini as right-wing failure modes, he just can’t use them as examples of right-wing governments that have produced bad results in his lifetime, nor of Anglosphere right-wing governments more generally.
Well, duh - they don't exist!
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