You've been looking in the wrong direction, the dangers are coming from the right.

I’m not sure if you get my point:

left wing/right wing, it means nothing nowadays, it seems to be a US concept, trump or Biden, we’ll they’re both right of centre.

Chinese “communist” party, wealthy elites.

large American corporations, wealthy elites.

the only difference I can see is we have a few more freedoms in the west, but by and large they’re similar models.

The whole left/right separation is fairly pointless if you leave out the authoritarian/liberal axis. While Cuba and Norway could be considered left wing, there's a big difference in their levels of authoritarianism. Both left and right can tend towards authoritarianism or liberalism.

From this thread, I've seen loads make the assumption that left or right leads to authoritarianism which isn't much different from claiming that walking east will take you further north. A country's level of authoritarianism doesn't necessarily depend on how their internal markets or social safety nets work although I'm not saying that there aren't synergies there. Both left and right have in the past exploited anti-immigrant sentiment for their own ends. You can be just as authoritarian as a Castro or Pinochet using vastly different economies and values. Heck, the CCCP have shown that the one entity can flip from communism to free markets while retaining their authoritarianism.

In terms of the topic of this thread I think it boils down to where the threat of authoritarianism is coming from and that varies by where and when you are in the world. For example, in Cuba threat of authoritarianism is obviously coming from the left while in places like Poland, it's from the right. That's at the moment and could change over the years.

Here in Ireland now, our main centre-right parties are just about hanging on but they don't have an authoritarian streak or as much deference to the church as they used to. The more rabid authoritarian types don't get much of a voice outside of social media and even there, their influence isn't much. Our traditional left parties have gone away leaving Sinn Féin as the main party of the left these days. It's difficult to know what they would be like in power, but how they've handled the levers of power in the North hasn't been too bad. Anecdotally, from conversations with shinners, I would be a bit concerned with their ability to justify and excuse authoritarianism in places like Cuba and murders here, in the North and UK. Time will tell.

One place abroad where this question will have tangible results is in the US. They don't have an economic left to speak of so their main parties are right and further right. Their less-right party is socially liberal while their more-right party is socially conservative and claims to want to override election results to ensure that the personality that they've built their party around retains power. The less-right party has their own silliness going on too but pronoun usage and overriding elections aren't comparable. Where I see this as a potential threat here is that the guy that the more-right party have built themselves around has repeatedly praised Putin, deferred to him, acted in his interests and has views on NATO that could have come straight from Putin himself. That has the potential to change the world order from one where democracies dominate to one where autocracies take the top spot, at least in the short term. A disjointed west just won't have the same power and that won't be good for us in terms of favourable trade and security.

Yeh, the modern right are incredibly eager to get rid of the so called "left/right paradigm" aren't they. 😐️ Makes it easier to pull the wool over people's eyes.

As for "nationalism" and "globalism", they're both right wing ideologies in the main. Nationalism, although it can manifest on the left too, usually belongs to the hard right and can raise its head in truly ugly forms, as we've seen over the last 100 years or so in its most extreme incarnations. Globalism is a right wing, neo-liberal, idea that places the benefit of corporations over that of the common man. As things stand, if we're to believe your assessment of the "real political divide", it's a right vs right paradigm, where various shades of right wing thinking vie for control.

The "left" isn't really in power anywhere at present and has been reduced to a bogeyman. A phantom that is pulled out by the various flavours of the right to wave about because it scares its adherents. The fact of the matter is that the Left lost, which should please those on the right no end.

Here is an example from our own doorstep where a succession of left-wing politicians - Wallace, Daly, MLMD - have started suing newspapers and other media in relation to stories about them. The Council of Europe is sufficiently concerned to have raised these issues.

Threats to our democratic freedom can come from right or left, you are indeed correct that both are equally terrible when you get to the extremes.

Support and admiration Putin has got from the right?

Like Fianna Fail and Fine Gael?

Seriously?

Well, I gave the example of the Irish and European extreme left who have been supporters of Putin right up and through the war with Ukraine. Wallace and Daly are still at it, even if SF have run away scared.

That is a fact which blows away your thesis that only the extreme right is wrong. The problem isn't left-wing or right-wing, the problem is extremism.

To the left, to the left. Everything you own is in a box to the left. Which by the way things are going ain't going to be a lot

The issue with countries like Russia and North Korea is they prove that far right and far left are the very same ... N Korea is officially a communist thus leftwing country but the Kims act exactly like a medieval hereditary monarchy (rightwing) ... they like Stalin can combine the far left communist ideologies with the far right nationalism .... Putin's Russia is very much a far right son of a far left USSR ... similar to Milosevic's Serbia ... It is probably true that most evil regimes ... Hitler and Pol Pot too ... are a mixture of far right and far left ... and use both ideologies to brainwash their people ... the very name Nazi comes from Nationalism (rightwing) + Socialism (leftwing) and then taken to the extreme ...

Venezuela and Brazil are not in the same extremism league whether left or right ... they are certainly not menaces on the world stage ...

There was 7,800 applied for it, you cant even get your figures right.