What do we mean when we talk about political correctness?

[stui magpie]

^

I think like Pi said, that depends where you define centre.

If you place the ALP at centre right, then the vast majority of people in the western world would be centre right or more to the right

Does centre move depending on the culture of the society or is it some fixed notional point based on history or academia?

[Pies4shaw]

Stui, I couldn't really care where people say the "centre" is. David is correct to say that the Greens are a Left(ish) party but they're not really a party of the "Left" in any genuine sense, unless you want to get right over with the Breitbart knuckle-draggers and look "Left" from there.

I was trying to make a point that the "Left" is almost entirely out of the contest and has been for many years (if, in a country like Australia, it was ever really in it). The point is, in my opinion, an important one because there are plenty of people now getting about with nasty and ultra-right-wing views who think that their views are acceptable because they're not quite, yet, singing "Tomorrow Belongs To Me" (at least, not in public). In their view, the absence of a genuine Left alternative apparently leaves us to argue at the margins about whether we want to join the Nazi Party or not. Thus, most of the important political ideas of the 20th Century that weren't about the organisation and movement of capital seem to have gone by the wayside.

Does it matter to me, personally? No, of course it doesn't - I am independently wealthy and everything will be fine. For me.

But it should worry the rest of you that the debate is so confined. I think that's a tragedy. It is not, though, perhaps as much of a tragedy as the prevalence of peddlers of snake-oil who think that this is somehow a net social good.

I actually had thought I was completely over politics for about the last 30 years - but I am now concerned that the future is seriously contested by very, very bad people. They won't harm me - in fact, I expect I'll be "better off" with them in charge in a financial sense.

I'll just be diminished as a human being - and so will you all be. You'll just have to put up with it for longer than me.

[David]

I think to be honest (and I'm sure Tannin will correct me on this ) the terms are really quite relative and heavily dependent on how one defines them.

This is not to say that they're meaningless, though. You can get a fairly loose idea of where a party or individual sits based on classic economic (socialist to capitalist) and social (conservative to progressive) metrics. On each of these, I think it's fair to say that Labor have leaned to the right of centre economically since the early '80s (when they embraced a neoliberal/privatisation program under Hawke and Keating), and when it comes to social issues they have often lagged behind public opinion and been overly influenced by their Catholic factions. So, in fact, I think you could argue that both Labor and the Liberal Party have been to the right of the average Australian citizen on issues like same-sex marriage, negative gearing (until recently) and internet censorship.

So, Labor under Rudd and Gillard was fairly objectively centre-right; oddly, while Shorten is personally at least as right-wing as those two if not more, I think they took a more centrist policy platform to the last election. The Victorian State Labor Government, on the other hand, is pretty consistently centre-left. So these things aren't set in stone, and it's possible that future ALP leaderships could fluctuate between those two poles; what is clear, though, is that a genuinely leftist Corbyn-like takeover is out of the question, as such people have long since resigned in disgust from the ALP.

Is the average Australian centrist? That's a really tough question, but whatever the answer is I think it's fairly clear that they don't necessarily need to be; it is not that uncommon for entire societies to be oriented closer to the left or right. My inclination is that the average Australian is somewhere around the social centre-right – socially conservative on more issues than not – and maybe closer to the centre or even centre-left on economics.

[stui magpie]

P4s, I'm not going to argue with most of your post, but to me it's important to understand in this context where centre is.

I'm not a massive follower of politics and my understanding of left and right is rudimentary. I believe what i believe and have formed those opinions over years and experiences. Some of them re apparently right, some are left.

It's easy to call out the extremes on either end, but that too can be subjective. For me, some of what I call the far left wingnuts, you might consider just wingnuts and not left enough and vice versa.

I agree that we need balance, but any pendulum has a fixed centre,

[Mugwump]

I'd say that the centre has moved to the libertarian right on economic matters, and to the libertarian left on social matters - the combination pretty much guaranteed to cause the maximum of human anxiety and unhappiness.

[Pies4shaw]