Lmao all the “new” ones already have at least decades if not centuries of baggage piled on them by constant class war waged by owner classes on the people.

This comic is absolutely correct that we need to be more specific with our words, and understand basic political concepts beyond nonsense like left-right, the US federal two-party system, and mainstream ‘default’ ideologies. However, it could go even further with a few of them.

(yes, I know some may think I’m overanalyzing a funny satire, but this stuff really is important!)

conservatives and liberals

It’s important to point out that political science correctly classifies (US) conservatives as ‘conservative liberals’, and progressive liberals as ‘social liberals’. Both are variants of liberalism. Note: many Republicans aren’t conservatives, there’s an important difference between neo-fascist reactionaries and conservatives, although both are atrocious.

Liberalism is an idealistic ideology that aims to impose a vague abstract idea (liberty), rather than a materialistic one which analyzes the world and then draws conclusions as a result, and the contradictions of both social liberalism and conservativism are showing.

human rights

It’s a great idea. But those words are meaningless. If you want a laugh, read the U.N. Universal Declaration of Human Rights and see how long it takes you to walk outside and see them violated. We have privileges, at best. The US have had a blunt wake up call for anyone who wasn’t paying attention, your constitution didn’t save your most vulnerable. But this really isn’t news to those who’ve been facing a rougher life in the country, the Democrat Party didn’t have a great human rights track record overall, it’s just now become too obvious to overlook with an especially tactless and shameless administration bragging about these atrocities.

We only have concrete rights if WE can enforce them. Voting cannot and will not achieve that force, history has made that clear (esp the rollback of the labor movement’s historical wins by nominally labor/left governments).

Constitutional

Human slavery is conditionally legal, as written in the US constitution. (Thirteenth Amendment)

Also, the constitution can be amended. If a government wants to do something illegal, sometimes they just make it legal. The Nazi Party did this plenty of times.

Authoritarianism vs. Democracy

Great idea, but these are such propagandized terms already that it would need to be done carefully. When you say democracy, I think “worker democratic control over their workplace” and “Zapatista direct democracy communities”, not the garbage pay-to-win ‘liberal democracies’ that most people reading this live under - those are systematically influenced by the owning class through dominance of mass media, lobbying and other factors, it’s no hundreds-years coincidence that politicians consistently kowtow to the rich. Democracy is such a varied concept that everywhere from the USA to the PRC and even the DPRK has multi-party congresses and can be argued to be democracies, albeit wildly different forms with different pros and cons from the perspective of voting citizens. In the end, “authoritarianism” and “democracy” are idealistic labels which can only go so far on their own, without even more specific words.

I feel like this wouldn’t be helpful.

The lines have already been drawn. The people who label themselves as either party always associate themselves with the more favorable adjectives and cast their opponents as the opposite.

And that’s why no one would ever use those loaded terms, as it implies that their position is worse than the competition.

It’s actually impressive that we somehow got people to call pro life and pro choice by those names, as opposed to pro abortion and anti abortion, say.

“authoritarianism” is just another buzzword used by xenophobic westerners to demonize anti-capitalist countries and the global south in general, while absolving yourselves of brutality and genocide because you have pointless bourgeois elections