Is Left the new Right?
Has history not taught us enough yet that extremism is dangerous?
I think the problem is that our generation grew up in a time where we were learning through our entire childhood and teenage years about the horrific history and effects of an extremist far right movement in Germany and Europe. This has fostered a stigma in our society that “right” equates to fascist, racist, bigot and sexism, which is utter nonsense in reality. Right is just as good/bad as left is. It is two opposing political views, mostly focused around economical views such as free market (right) vs. socialism (left). Because many people are so scared of being seen as right or sympathizing with political views which would be categorized as right they try to overly act left, which has lead to an extreme far left movement in the last two decades which has reached mainstream populism and the media. The media supports the extreme left movement, because they want people to buy their papers and currently nobody likes to buy a paper which would be seen as “right”. For the media it’s all about revenue and for the mainstream it is the stigma. This goes even as far as people being afraid to express a centre left or centre right view on various topics or just to admit that they don’t want to be labelled as left or right altogether, but because there’s always someone who will hijack what you said, flip it around and label you a racist or bigot it has become impossible to have any meaningful conversations full stop. Then everyone is surprised when election results roll in and nobody wants to think that actually the other 50% of your Facebook friends, who never upvoted or commented on an extreme leftist post you’ve published are probably the same 50% who also voted for the other side. Extremism is and was never a positive thing, but today nobody feels ashamed of acting or being extreme left, even though it is just as damaging, discriminating and horrifying as the extreme right. I fear that it doesn’t matter how often people will bring this issue up, the extreme left movement will escalate into violence sooner or later until a point where it will foster into history that being extreme left is just as bad as being extreme right and then things will turn back into a balance again, where conversations will be more centre left/right focused, pragmatic, democratic and open.
I hope I am wrong though…