![]() ![]() ![]() Libertarianism is a fringe ideology, but it has a small foothold in American politics. Interviews with titles like “Matt Stone & Trey Parker Are Not Your Political Allies (No Matter What You Believe).” Academic articles with titles like “Pseudo-Satire and Evasion of Ideological Meaning in South Park.” If an ideology does not fit within either of the boxes I have in front of me, it must not exist at all. Even more bizarre is the common idea that South Park has no ideology at all. Yet there are countless posts and articles debating whether South Park is secretly liberal or secretly conservative, as if it’s secretly anything. I find it hard to imagine a show more upfront with its ideology than South Park. Worse, when you lose the words to describe them, the possibility of other distinct political philosophies can disappear. ![]() If you only see things in terms of liberal and conservative, you can deeply misunderstand things happening in front of you. A lot of the time, this leads to weird semantic problems – calling Bernie Sanders “very liberal” when he’s not a liberal at all, calling Donald Trump a conservative when his ideology has very little to do with conservatism – but the way we talk about ideas informs what ideas become. American politics, for the past couple of decades up until just recently, has operated on a binary: liberal/conservative. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. Archives
December 2022
Categories |