There is no arbiter for the median set point, as you know. I think the problem latent in both the point you respond to, and your response is the lack of desire amongst us all to agree the position of the left-right needle. It's just much more useful to be able to fling the terms/directions around as a pejorative, than to be particularly factual.
It's a very odd time. The USA is emerging into a combination of a Kleptocracy, a Kakistocracy, Autarky and Technocracy. It's like somebody's dream pivot fractured into every ocracy under the sun.
I don't have to subscribe to a belief in a conspiracy to advantage Russia, to beleive the SITUATION will advantage people who benefit from an unstable US polity.
I also don't have to subscribe to a belief it was "the plan" to believe the super-rich will ride over this wave, and pick the cream off as it floats upward. Thats what they do, all the time. This is just a particularly active milk churn and there's going to be a LOT of cream.
I agree on most parts of your respnse, but I was aiming at precisely at how the commenter I responded to tends to make absolute claims for what, it seems to me, are relative to their position and attempt to instate as more common and common-sense than it really is, and betrays a certain blindness to a simple psychological fact that people usually react more strongly to things that pressure them more (a relative phenomenon) and ascribes to this reaction some political valuation (an absolute).
I myself do not find left-right divide that much useful, at least to describe this melting pot of our time.
I enjoyed the question you posed immensely because it goes so strongly to the perceptual bias we bring to the table. I know I look with outrage at how strongly my left wing government has swung right, not for a minute believing I might have got more left wing as I got richer, older, and less exposed to the risks. "Of course I've always been left" I mutter, putting decent french butter on my croissant.
It's a very odd time. The USA is emerging into a combination of a Kleptocracy, a Kakistocracy, Autarky and Technocracy. It's like somebody's dream pivot fractured into every ocracy under the sun.
I don't have to subscribe to a belief in a conspiracy to advantage Russia, to beleive the SITUATION will advantage people who benefit from an unstable US polity.
I also don't have to subscribe to a belief it was "the plan" to believe the super-rich will ride over this wave, and pick the cream off as it floats upward. Thats what they do, all the time. This is just a particularly active milk churn and there's going to be a LOT of cream.