Dale Carrico on defining left and right
This is how Dale Carrico defines left and right:
“the fact is that you are perfectly intelligible as a person of the progressive democratic Left if you affirm or feel inspired by the following basic ideas, just as you are perfectly intelligible as a person of the reactionary elitist Right if you feel indifference, skepticism, or even hostility to the basic ideas that
[1] All people should have a say in the public decisions that affect them;
[2] People who are not misinformed or under duress tend to be competent and capable of articulating their own interests, of testifying to their personal knowledge, of contributing a worthy measure to the collaborative solution of shared problems;
[3] It is always possible and desirable, however costly and difficult it may be, to reconcile differences and conflicts between people in nonviolent ways;
[4] The act of informed, nonduressed consent is a foundation both of personal dignity and public nonviolence;
[5] The public provision of basic income, education, and healthcare facilitates a scene of consent that is nonduressed, while the public provision of the widest possible access to knowledge facilitates a scene of consent that is informed, and acts of consent are legible and legitimate as such only to the extent that they are so informed and nonduressed;
[6] Progressive taxation of property and income provides the means to meet the basic conditions on which the doubly foundational scene of consent depend, while at once providing a popular check on the dangerous policing authority of government as well as a check on the tendency of individual stakeholders — especially those who happen to be momentarily invested with conspicuous wealth, authority, reputation, or attention — to forget or disavow their ineradicable social and historical inter-dependence in the always collaborative project of creative expressivity and problem solving peer-to-peer.
