Quote from trefoil:
Oh dear Lord.
The left is the left because, in the US, it stands for the regular folks against corporate interests. That would be freedom vs tyranny.
You guys figure it's the government vs the people, which is a completely ahistorical view.
Going all the way back to the dawn of Western civilization, in your average Greek city-state, the aristocracy were from the Indo-European conquerors, and they kept, being the conquerors, their family histories. They made slaves & serfs of the folks they conquered, and since these could be bought & sold at will, they had no family history they could trace. The conquerors did, of course.
So the aristocracy could trace their families all the way back, and each of them claimed descent, when you went as far back as memory permitted, to a god.
So, each city was ruled by an aristocratic elite that could trace its family history back to a god and everyone else lived in the city at their pleasure. Within these elites there were clans, and each clan guarded its privileges jealously. They were, as a result, interested in having as weak a central government as possible.
The slaves & peasants, of course, were interested in having a stronger central government as a counterweight to their power.
Fast forward to today, and the situation is similar. The Bushes, for instance, are part of the American aristocracy. Not surprisingly, they'd like a weak central government, and since the US was founded in rebellion against the powerful central government of England, this has remained as a sort of residual ideology, enshrined in the Constitution in its strict separation of powers among the branches of government.
The regular folks find themselves victimized by stuff like BP oil spills, exploding mines, and poisoned water from shale gas extraction, and look to the government as the only sufficiently strong counterweight to the power of the BP's of the world.
In walk the naifs: folks like RM and GC, self-made, figuring they don't owe much to anyone, and thinking their interests lie with a weak central government. Folks like the Bushes are of course more than happy to use them as a bludgeon to keep the ordinary people from getting too fond of seeing injustice made right by a strong central government.
Of course the government we're talking about is a republic, and its officials are subject to recall every two, four or six years. So the whole idea of a tyrannical central government is, to put it tactfully, nuts.
Abraham Lincoln said we were in an experiment to see whether government of, by and for the people can continue. We're still in that experiment.
It was a powerful central government, using every power at its command, that forced the Southern aristocracy to free the slaves. A hundred years later, it used its powers again to break the power of poll taxes and Jim Crow, both of which were still being used against the descendants of those slaves by private interests that were in many cases the descendants of the Southern aristocracy that had enslaved them.*
That powerful central government ended child labor, forced safety laws that, among other things, keep mine explosions to a minimum, and enforces all kinds of other laws that protect ordinary people from the power of national and multinational corporations with pockets far deeper than any single private person could ever muster.
That's freedom, versus the tyranny of an aristocracy that would otherwise keep us all as their serfs.
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