Collect them all!

[nancylebov]

Barry Deutsch created this....



It showed up a time or two on my friends list, but I didn't repost it because I still believe someone's got to be ideologically opposed to the war on drugs.

But then Davi Bark came up with



I'd have called it 24 types of statist, but considering that there was argument about whether "authoritarian" was clear enough, "statist" would have presumably counted as obscure libertarian jargon.

More discussion, if you like.

And now, behold



Posted here. Deutsch introduces it here.

Comments

[richardthinks.livejournal.com]

as a guide to US political rhetoric I declare this perfect as-is.

Of course, now there will be "24 types of cat owner" and the point will be lost.

Cross-posted from Alas regarding the Progressive parody

[bradhicks.livejournal.com]

I'm going to go along with comments #6 and #9: anti-UN paranoia is a right-wing thing, the Progressives who are equally nuts are the 9/11 Truthers. (Michael Moore's only completely indefensible movie, Fahrenheit 9/11, comes to mind.)

Illustration-wise, I think I would have swapped Creepy and The Red Guard, given the guy now used for Creepy some line about how Stalin wasn't so bad, those dead peasants were probably right-wing religious nuts anyway; the glum, furtive body language goes well with the last remaining old-school Marxists on the American left. (Who are, fwiw, so rare they probably ought to be on display at the Smithsonian; there aren't enough of them left to sustain the species.) The left-wing gun nuts I know are all anti-capitalist survivalists, eagerly trying to bring down the state so it'll be legal to kill and eat rich people.

Actually, given how tiny a fragment of the Progressive coalition the Marxists are, unless you're just THAT determined to perpetuate the Glen Beck/John Birch Society "anybody to the left of GWB is a commie, including Ronald Reagan!" belief, the angry, back-turned body language of panel #6 might go better with the Glen Greenwald and Lawrence O'Donnell fans (like me) glumly insisting "Obama's first term turned out to just be Bush's third term."

But you know, here's the nature of coalition politics for you. Let's grant as a rhetorical device, or for the sake of the argument, that what we have here are the three most significant political alliances in America, all fairly represented, and that you have to pick between one of the three if you want to have enough people working alongside you to achieve anything more than bitter complaining. Let us further grant (although I'm not even vaguely sure that it's true) that there's a grain of truth in all 72 attacks. Even if I granted all of that, I'd still rather ally myself with the 24 Progressive cartoons than with the 24 Authoritarian or Libertarian cartoons; they seem saner, smarter, and better intentioned to me, if only by comparison. Coalition politics, anywhere in the world, is more often about who you're against than who you're for; I'm unashamedly enthused to be against the Libertarian coalition and the Authoritarian coalition.

Re: Cross-posted from Alas regarding the Progressive parody

[avram]

Except that the "Authoritarian" collection seems to be a parody of both Democrats and Republicans.

Re: Cross-posted from Alas regarding the Progressive parody

[bradhicks.livejournal.com]

From where I sit, here's how it looks to me: the Progressive one is a parody of what outsiders think of Democrats, that's easy enough. The Libertarian and Authoritarian ones nicely capture, though, the fight for the soul of the Republican Party these last two years, between the Country Club Republicans and their (sold-out, or maybe bought-in) Libertarian allies, and the Tea Party Republicans (and their Democrat-identified, but basically just authoritarian, "swing voters").

What makes it fair, in my opinion, to mash together the worst of the Republicans and the worst of the Democrats in one Authoritarian cartoon is that there isn't much operational difference, especially on foreign policy and economic issues, between "Third Way Liberalism" and "Compassionate Conservatism:" both of them silent-racist, militarist, anti-feminist, police state, winner-take-all, Christian thearchical, and above all corporatist factions that occupy what's called "the mainstream" in status quo politics and "all serious people" in status quo favoring punditocracy.

Re: Cross-posted from Alas regarding the Progressive parody

[avram]

So your three political alliances are Establishment, Progressive, and Libertarian?

[matt-ruff.livejournal.com]

They pulled a lot of the punches -- "new" instead of "naive," "enthusiastic" instead of "holier than thou," "clueless" instead of racist, and, oh look, there are *reasonable* lefties -- which weakens the satire I think. I'd rather have the P.J. O'Rourke version.

[bradhicks.livejournal.com]

P.J. O'Rourke has his good days and his bad days, but it's hard to improve on his Parliament of Whores and Eat the Rich.

[rysmiel.livejournal.com]

the authoritarian one does not work for me because a number of the things it seems to think are funny caricatures are things I sincerely believe in so many words.

From Michael V

[(Anonymous)]

I enjoyed that. Sympathetic to 1/3 of the libertarians, 1/8th of the authoritarians and 1/3 of the progressives.

Re: From Michael V

[nancylebov.livejournal.com]

That could be a handy update to the "are you a libertarian?" quiz.