Talk:Doug Mastriano/Archives/2024/June

Far-Right seems mushy

I don’t like that Mastriano is called far-right in the lede. I’m not speaking from a partisan basis: I don’t care for Mastriano, and in certain contexts it makes sense to call him “far-right.” I acknowledge too that major media outlets call him far-right without qualification, so maybe my issue is more with them. But as someone in an archived discussion noted, it’s not clear what Doug Mastriano has to do with the description of Far-Right Politics in its respective page. Apparently it’s a little broader in scope now than it was two years ago, seeing as it no longer only speaks of Neo-Nazi-adjacent groups. But nonetheless, I don’t know how you can distinguish between “far-right” and just the regular right wing:

1. In the past ten years at least, left-leaning sources call every right-winger “far right,” and right-leaning sources likewise call every liberal “far-left.” I don’t have a quantitative study to back me up, but I think everyone who has watched partisan politics will have noticed this. As a frequent NYT reader, I know that if the paper calls someone far-right, that doesn’t mean very much in itself. They called Paul Ryan far-right, and look at us now.

2. As of 2024 basically the entire American right wing has gotten behind the same ways of thinking that presumably qualify Mastriano as “far-right”: openness to violence, conspiratorial orthodoxy, etc. Does that mean that the entire American right is far-right? Sure, in the sense that they’re especially radical compared to where they’ve been in the past. But what does that mean for us now? Why can’t we just say that, even if it’s more extreme than it has been, the right is where it is? Keeping in mind that the meaning of “right” and “left” is utterly dependent on contemporary context, there’s no use for saying that someone like Mastriano, who is in line with the current popular right, is anything other than just “right-wing.”

But on the other hand, to be fair, we call the Nazi Party far-right with no problem, even though it eventually destroyed any trace of a countervailing left. So perhaps there is some objective meaning of “right” or “far-right.” But Mastriano’s politics are not substantially comparable to Hitler’s, and in the present day, it just seems mushy and lazy to call him far-right, because it seems to imply that he deviates from some imaginary norm of right-wing-ness. What’s more, I don’t know if any major left wing politicians are labeled “far-left”: Rep. Ocasio-Cortez isn’t, for instance, despite being an avowed leftist, and having about as much to do with the page on far-left politics as Masteiano does with the one on the far right. And what’s more, Ocasio-Cortez is observably, measurably well to the “left” of the average in her party, unlike Mastriano. This no doubt reflects the fact that there are many more reliable and citable left-leaning publications than right-leaning ones. But I just want to take a moment to think about what words mean, and what they *don’t* mean, and what terminology is relevant and what is distracting. JGT Webb (talk) 10:08, 23 June 2024 (UTC)