Political Memes

let me shock you left and right are terms determined by a country's individual elections and the terms, as relating to politics, are only about 150 years old. they come from revolutionary france referring to the political parties The Mountain and i forget, i haven't had my coffee yet. it refers to who sits on what side of the aisle in parliament. in statesia, yes, democrats are Left. They sit on the Left Side of the aisle. SHOCKER.

now when you want to think about greater political movements, we start muddying terms. Leftism and who sits on the left side of the aisle? Really easy to get your terms confused. Pretty sure that's intentional. Kind of how you have the communism in the book and the Communist Party and how different those are in practice. It would be pretty easy to use different words to describe them, but mass media has an oversized influence on language so we tend to use the language they use. And who owns the mass media, and what do they want? Thus we use the language with connotations that benefit them.