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andthatstheword2009-07-30 08:09 pm
erinptah) wrote in andthatstheword2009-07-30 08:09 pm
Entry tags:
What I Think About When I Think About Liberal!"Stephen"
Check it out, I wrote some actual organized meta :D
Okay, semi-organized. It's a collection of thoughts on liberal!"Stephen".
Background, for those of you just tuning in: On October 2, 2007, TCR flashed briefly into an alternate universe. The Wørd: Troops Out Now. The host: a pipe-smoking long-haired peacenik hippie version of the straightlaced conservative character we know and love.
There's obviously a wealth of possibility with this guy. (Fellow liberals, ILU, but you know we are totally mockable.) But there's only so much characterization you can get out of one short clip.
So this is where I get the rest.
Please note that, in the following, "conservative" and "liberal" are used to make gross generalizations about two broad swaths of thought that dominate the American political system. Variations are unaddressed. Smaller groups (where my Libertarians at?) are ignored. Non-U.S. schools of thought are right out. Got it? Good.
Okay, so you're going to make a satirical liberal caricature. Where do you start?
One solution would be to take the regular Colbert character and just flip all his viewpoints. Hard-line hawk becomes hard-line dove, etcetera. But that doesn't match up with reality. You'd get a loud and bombastic pundit shouting uncompromising liberal views, and how many of those have you seen on TV lately? (Say what you will about Olbermann, but one angry liberal does not an equivalent make to O'Reilly and Geraldo and Hannity and Rush and on and on and on.)
Liberals don't just disagree with conservatives on the issues. We operate on a completely different set of assumptions.
So here's what I think about when I think about liberal!"Stephen".
I think about Robert Frost's observation: "A liberal is a man too broadminded to take his own side in a quarrel."
Conservative Stephen will take a stand on every issue possible, from the religion we should spread in the Middle East to the world's best type of sandwich, and then announce at the top of his lungs that anyone who disagrees must also be in favor of setting kittens on fire.
Liberal Stephen has his beliefs, yes; but if you disagree, well, you're entitled to your opinion. And if you really and truly feel that setting kittens on fire is a good thing to do, your belief is still just as valid as his, and who is he to tell you it's wrong?
I think about the related admonition, "If you don't stand for something, you'll fall for anything." Conservative Stephen will stand for nonsensical things. Liberal Stephen will fall for them.
And then there's the slightly graphic variation, "Keep an open mind, but not so open that your brains fall out."
Conservative Stephen has his mind closed and locked in a stainless-steel safe. Liberal Stephen's brains are slopping all over the place. People learn to keep at a safe distance to avoid stepping in them.
I think about this ThreatDown, in which conservative Stephen explains his rigid schedule: "With every second planned, I have no room for self-reflection or doubt. I had a free moment once, back in 1999, and I almost swallowed my tongue."
Liberal Stephen isn't rigidly anything. He's permissive; he's freewheeling; he's late for everything, because he claims that any kind of schedule is tyrannical. (He believes the same thing about hygiene, in contrast to conservative Stephen's no-hair-out-of-place image.)
And he is eaten up by self-reflection and doubt.
I think about that classic phrase, "With great power comes great responsibility."
Conservative Stephen grabs for power, power, power. He runs for president; he orders around the Nation; he claims to rule his household. But he can't stand responsibility. Religion "takes responsibility away from you and gives it to God," he proclaims, in one argument for the merits of faith. And he certainly doesn't have responsibility to, say, care for the environment, or feed the homeless.
(He doesn't actually want power, either, and wouldn't know what to do with it if he got it. But that's another essay.)
Liberal Stephen runs from power. He disavows it whenever he can; he declares himself to be unworthy of it. But if you tell him something is his responsibility, he'll accept that. He's a believer in socialized medicine — not the Democratic plans that the right vilifies as "socialism", but the real deal. While there is a soul in prison, he is not free.
Needless to say, he carries an awful lot of guilt.
I think a lot about Geoffrey Jellineck.
If Strangers With Candy's Chuck Noblet is a proto-Stephen, then Geoffrey contains a lot of the seeds of what could have been liberal Stephen. He's a sensitive artist who emotes all over the place.
In episode 1x07, "Feather in the Storm", convinced that Jerri is suffering from the deadly serious anorexia, desperate to get her parents to understand, he cries, "Let him talk!"
"Him who?" asks Jerri's mother.
"Him me," says Geoffrey earnestly.
Conservative Stephen will open a show with a rousing chorus of "Me-me-me-me!" But liberal Stephen, like Geoffrey, is pathologically unable to demand attention in this way — to such an extreme that, even when he believes it's necessary in order to save someone's life, he can only manage it in the third person.
While the conservative Stephen is suspicious of everyone and everything, the liberal version is intent on thinking the best of everyone, in blatant defiance of self-preservation. This is clear in his lone segment, "Troops Out Now", in which he figures terrorists will all come around if we just sit down and talk. It's the same principle underlying SWC episode 3x09, "Bully", in which Geoffrey cannot seem to process the idea that the new teacher is a raging homophobe.
In fact, "Bully" explores all kinds of weaknesses of Geoffrey's philosophy. "Listen I think we got off to a pretty bad start there," he says cheerfully. "It's probably my fault." (Sense of great responsibility.) "Tell ya what, why don't we head over to my class. I have a blow torch, we'll fire up some crème brulees, have a little rap session and work out this whole misunderstanding!" (Then we'll each share a feeling...) When the homophobe tells him to either quit or fight, Geoffrey's perkiness never fails: "I appreciate your opinion but I won't be doing either." (Your belief is still valid, though!)
"Nothing you do or say will cause me to react or protect myself in any way," Geoffrey declares, when finally called out to fight. He ends up beaten bloody.
Robert Frost, eat your heart out.
I think about Russ Lieber, a TCR character who hasn't been seen for a couple of years (which is really a shame). Judging by the title of his book, he's another Geoffrey type: Raising Your Voice by Raising Your Hand: A Non-Confrontational Dissenter's Guide to Fighting Back Politely.
And I think about Politically Neutral Dog, a meme which, at its best, is liberal Stephen in canine form. (I realize that leads to several dozen pages of macros, half of which are in Portugese, so let me link to a few of the most on-point.)
To Godwin an argument with liberal Stephen, say "You're the kind of person who appeased Hitler." (Witness the ACLU defending the rights of neo-Nazis.) To Godwin conservative Stephen, say "You're the kind of person who followed Hitler." (He's openly pro-fascism.)
I also think about relentlessly cheerful Onion columnist Jean Teasdale. And that, in turn, makes me think about the Serenity Prayer.
Conservative Stephen is completely unable to accept the things he can't change. He will shout at them until they have to change, damnit!
Liberal Stephen — like Geoffrey; like Jean — thinks he has to accept everything.
All of them could use a little more wisdom.
And, speaking of the Serenity Prayer, I think about a scene from Desperate Housewives. (Bear with me, now.) Main character Susan is trying to show off in front of her ex, so she brings out her new husband, Mike. After one-upping each other about salaries and recently-bought houses and how well their kids are doing, the ex notices Mike has a keychain. "Oh, yeah," says Mike casually, "that's for being thirty days sober."
This of course loses the contest for Susan, who gets very frustrated about it later on, in spite of Mike's protests: "But at rehab they tell us we're not supposed to be ashamed about it!"
That's liberal Stephen all over. If conservative Stephen's watchword is repression, then liberal Stephen is the embodiment of too much information.
An example: Conservative Stephen can be on the verge of a nervous breakdown, but he will still refuse to admit that anything is wrong. Liberal Stephen will tearfully spill his innermost feelings, and the probable psychosexual implications of the dream he had last night, to the bank teller who made the mistake of saying "How are you today?"
Another: Conservative Stephen insists that gay sex is vile and disgusting and sinful, and he would never, ever think about it. Liberal Stephen, meanwhile, will happily go into gory detail, santorum and all, about the gay sex he had last night. And he'll do it on Oprah.
I also think about this one scene from Black. White., a short-lived reality show from 2006.
One of the characters, a white girl, has brought home some acquaintances from her all-black slam poetry class. They hang out; they talk; they have a snack; they do some freestyle verse. All is going well.
Then the white girl's mother decides that all these poets have Inspired Her to unleash her own Artistic Spirit. She gets up in front of this group and allows her thoughts to flow freely. Her stream of consciousness, addressed to her audience, includes phrases like "beautiful black creature."
The guests unanimously take this as their cue to leave. The white daughter can barely look them in the eye as they trickle out, so hard is she cringing.
You almost prefer conservative Stephen's refusal to see race at all.
Liberal Stephen is all for programs that involve hiring completely unqualified people just because they're not white and/or male.
It's the same impulse that leads him to buy T-shirts for awful indie bands, only watch mainstream movies if they've been pirated, and run his computer entirely on ragged beta-version open-source software. Sure, his programs crash all the time, but at least he isn't supporting the hegemonic power of Microsoft.
Conservative Stephen only admits to listening to Top 40 artists, constantly admonishes his viewers against pirating, and runs everything on Microsoft products. He's a fan of unregulated monopolies.
I think about the prisoner's dilemma.
The classical form goes like this: "Two suspects are arrested by the police. The police have insufficient evidence for a conviction, and, having separated both prisoners, visit each of them to offer the same deal. If one testifies (defects from the other) for the prosecution against the other and the other remains silent (cooperates with the other), the betrayer goes free and the silent accomplice receives the full 10-year sentence. If both remain silent, both prisoners are sentenced to only six months in jail for a minor charge. If each betrays the other, each receives a five-year sentence. Each prisoner must choose to betray the other or to remain silent. Each one is assured that the other would not know about the betrayal before the end of the investigation. How should the prisoners act?"
Or, to adapt Wikipedia's handy table:
The table makes it pretty clear: if you care only about yourself, then the rational thing to do is betray your partner. It means less prison time for you, no matter which option your partner takes.
However, if you care about your partner's welfare, and you trust your partner to stay silent, the rational thing to do is keep mum yourself. That leads to the best outcome for the team.
Put in this situation, conservative Stephen will always betray. Always. He doesn't trust anyone. ("Jon Stewart and I don't talk," he insists over and over, to Bill O'Reilly or Larry King or whoever else is interviewing him. He's Peter, and the cock is crowing.)
Liberal Stephen will always stay silent. No matter what. After all, he couldn't possibly be so disrespectful as to imply that his partner might not be trustworthy.
As long as we're talking about incredibly nerdy things: Liberal Stephen is a carrier of the Five Geek Social Fallacies, especially the pathological versions of GSF1 and GSF2. Conservative Stephen is the kind of ostracizing, judgmental person who induces those fallacies in the first place.
To keep up the nerdiness: When it comes to liberal Stephen, Tim Minchin has got him pegged.
I think about Nice Guys.
They're diagrammed further in this xkcd strip, and immortalized in verse by this marvelous poem.
Conservative Stephen is (or tries to be) the archetypal jerk. He is In Charge and it's All About Him and everyone must Follow His Orders. He's deeply insecure at heart, but he covers it as best he can with shouting and ego and declarations of authority.
(Secretly, he would love to find someone to tie him up, slap him around, and shag him senseless. But his inability to trust anyone throws a bit of a wrench in that plan. Besides, he can't let anyone suspect that he can be vulnerable.)
Liberal Stephen, on the other hand, tries to be the Nice Guy. He's open about his insecurities; he refuses to shout or get angry; he's always doing things for other people. (Including indie publishers and open-source programmers.) He's afraid that he's selfish at heart, so he goes overboard to compensate.
(Secretly, he would love to find someone he could tie up, slap around, and shag senseless. But he doesn't trust himself enough to go through with that plan. Besides, he couldn't bring himself to be that mean.)
In this lovely parable, it's easy to see at which stage each one is stuck.
Finally, a note about family.
Both versions of this character come from a Strict Father family, archetypal to the point of ridiculousness. (I Am America (And So Can You!) has the details.) It's all there: obedience and discipline, pulling yourself up by your own bootstraps, rational self-interest, the works.
Conservative Stephen embraced this philosophy and never looked back. It's how he relates to his government; it's how he relates to his religion; and these days he is (or claims to be) the head of such a family in his personal life.
Liberal Stephen took this philosophy and ran as far as he could in the other direction. His ideal for everything is the archetypal Nurturant Parent family. If he weren't childfree, it's the model he would be using with his own kids.
So in spite of their differences, they're both cut from the same cloth, using wildly divergent tactics to cope with what are ultimately the same issues.
Okay, a confession.
I'm mostly posting this in the hope that it will strike people with plotbunnies. Because I love this version of the character, and crave more fic about him.
So if anything in here strikes you as possible fic material, take it and run with it. Or, if you think I have gotten some bit of this (or every bit of it!) completely wrong, throw together a fic about the way you think it really is.
As far as I'm concerned, this 'verse is a playground full of shiny new toys. Come on in and play.
Okay, semi-organized. It's a collection of thoughts on liberal!"Stephen".
Background, for those of you just tuning in: On October 2, 2007, TCR flashed briefly into an alternate universe. The Wørd: Troops Out Now. The host: a pipe-smoking long-haired peacenik hippie version of the straightlaced conservative character we know and love.
There's obviously a wealth of possibility with this guy. (Fellow liberals, ILU, but you know we are totally mockable.) But there's only so much characterization you can get out of one short clip.
So this is where I get the rest.
Please note that, in the following, "conservative" and "liberal" are used to make gross generalizations about two broad swaths of thought that dominate the American political system. Variations are unaddressed. Smaller groups (where my Libertarians at?) are ignored. Non-U.S. schools of thought are right out. Got it? Good.
Okay, so you're going to make a satirical liberal caricature. Where do you start?
One solution would be to take the regular Colbert character and just flip all his viewpoints. Hard-line hawk becomes hard-line dove, etcetera. But that doesn't match up with reality. You'd get a loud and bombastic pundit shouting uncompromising liberal views, and how many of those have you seen on TV lately? (Say what you will about Olbermann, but one angry liberal does not an equivalent make to O'Reilly and Geraldo and Hannity and Rush and on and on and on.)
Liberals don't just disagree with conservatives on the issues. We operate on a completely different set of assumptions.
So here's what I think about when I think about liberal!"Stephen".
I think about Robert Frost's observation: "A liberal is a man too broadminded to take his own side in a quarrel."
Conservative Stephen will take a stand on every issue possible, from the religion we should spread in the Middle East to the world's best type of sandwich, and then announce at the top of his lungs that anyone who disagrees must also be in favor of setting kittens on fire.
Liberal Stephen has his beliefs, yes; but if you disagree, well, you're entitled to your opinion. And if you really and truly feel that setting kittens on fire is a good thing to do, your belief is still just as valid as his, and who is he to tell you it's wrong?
I think about the related admonition, "If you don't stand for something, you'll fall for anything." Conservative Stephen will stand for nonsensical things. Liberal Stephen will fall for them.
And then there's the slightly graphic variation, "Keep an open mind, but not so open that your brains fall out."
Conservative Stephen has his mind closed and locked in a stainless-steel safe. Liberal Stephen's brains are slopping all over the place. People learn to keep at a safe distance to avoid stepping in them.
I think about this ThreatDown, in which conservative Stephen explains his rigid schedule: "With every second planned, I have no room for self-reflection or doubt. I had a free moment once, back in 1999, and I almost swallowed my tongue."
Liberal Stephen isn't rigidly anything. He's permissive; he's freewheeling; he's late for everything, because he claims that any kind of schedule is tyrannical. (He believes the same thing about hygiene, in contrast to conservative Stephen's no-hair-out-of-place image.)
And he is eaten up by self-reflection and doubt.
I think about that classic phrase, "With great power comes great responsibility."
Conservative Stephen grabs for power, power, power. He runs for president; he orders around the Nation; he claims to rule his household. But he can't stand responsibility. Religion "takes responsibility away from you and gives it to God," he proclaims, in one argument for the merits of faith. And he certainly doesn't have responsibility to, say, care for the environment, or feed the homeless.
(He doesn't actually want power, either, and wouldn't know what to do with it if he got it. But that's another essay.)
Liberal Stephen runs from power. He disavows it whenever he can; he declares himself to be unworthy of it. But if you tell him something is his responsibility, he'll accept that. He's a believer in socialized medicine — not the Democratic plans that the right vilifies as "socialism", but the real deal. While there is a soul in prison, he is not free.
Needless to say, he carries an awful lot of guilt.
I think a lot about Geoffrey Jellineck.
If Strangers With Candy's Chuck Noblet is a proto-Stephen, then Geoffrey contains a lot of the seeds of what could have been liberal Stephen. He's a sensitive artist who emotes all over the place.
In episode 1x07, "Feather in the Storm", convinced that Jerri is suffering from the deadly serious anorexia, desperate to get her parents to understand, he cries, "Let him talk!"
"Him who?" asks Jerri's mother.
"Him me," says Geoffrey earnestly.
Conservative Stephen will open a show with a rousing chorus of "Me-me-me-me!" But liberal Stephen, like Geoffrey, is pathologically unable to demand attention in this way — to such an extreme that, even when he believes it's necessary in order to save someone's life, he can only manage it in the third person.
While the conservative Stephen is suspicious of everyone and everything, the liberal version is intent on thinking the best of everyone, in blatant defiance of self-preservation. This is clear in his lone segment, "Troops Out Now", in which he figures terrorists will all come around if we just sit down and talk. It's the same principle underlying SWC episode 3x09, "Bully", in which Geoffrey cannot seem to process the idea that the new teacher is a raging homophobe.
In fact, "Bully" explores all kinds of weaknesses of Geoffrey's philosophy. "Listen I think we got off to a pretty bad start there," he says cheerfully. "It's probably my fault." (Sense of great responsibility.) "Tell ya what, why don't we head over to my class. I have a blow torch, we'll fire up some crème brulees, have a little rap session and work out this whole misunderstanding!" (Then we'll each share a feeling...) When the homophobe tells him to either quit or fight, Geoffrey's perkiness never fails: "I appreciate your opinion but I won't be doing either." (Your belief is still valid, though!)
"Nothing you do or say will cause me to react or protect myself in any way," Geoffrey declares, when finally called out to fight. He ends up beaten bloody.
Robert Frost, eat your heart out.
I think about Russ Lieber, a TCR character who hasn't been seen for a couple of years (which is really a shame). Judging by the title of his book, he's another Geoffrey type: Raising Your Voice by Raising Your Hand: A Non-Confrontational Dissenter's Guide to Fighting Back Politely.
And I think about Politically Neutral Dog, a meme which, at its best, is liberal Stephen in canine form. (I realize that leads to several dozen pages of macros, half of which are in Portugese, so let me link to a few of the most on-point.)
To Godwin an argument with liberal Stephen, say "You're the kind of person who appeased Hitler." (Witness the ACLU defending the rights of neo-Nazis.) To Godwin conservative Stephen, say "You're the kind of person who followed Hitler." (He's openly pro-fascism.)
I also think about relentlessly cheerful Onion columnist Jean Teasdale. And that, in turn, makes me think about the Serenity Prayer.
Conservative Stephen is completely unable to accept the things he can't change. He will shout at them until they have to change, damnit!
Liberal Stephen — like Geoffrey; like Jean — thinks he has to accept everything.
All of them could use a little more wisdom.
And, speaking of the Serenity Prayer, I think about a scene from Desperate Housewives. (Bear with me, now.) Main character Susan is trying to show off in front of her ex, so she brings out her new husband, Mike. After one-upping each other about salaries and recently-bought houses and how well their kids are doing, the ex notices Mike has a keychain. "Oh, yeah," says Mike casually, "that's for being thirty days sober."
This of course loses the contest for Susan, who gets very frustrated about it later on, in spite of Mike's protests: "But at rehab they tell us we're not supposed to be ashamed about it!"
That's liberal Stephen all over. If conservative Stephen's watchword is repression, then liberal Stephen is the embodiment of too much information.
An example: Conservative Stephen can be on the verge of a nervous breakdown, but he will still refuse to admit that anything is wrong. Liberal Stephen will tearfully spill his innermost feelings, and the probable psychosexual implications of the dream he had last night, to the bank teller who made the mistake of saying "How are you today?"
Another: Conservative Stephen insists that gay sex is vile and disgusting and sinful, and he would never, ever think about it. Liberal Stephen, meanwhile, will happily go into gory detail, santorum and all, about the gay sex he had last night. And he'll do it on Oprah.
I also think about this one scene from Black. White., a short-lived reality show from 2006.
One of the characters, a white girl, has brought home some acquaintances from her all-black slam poetry class. They hang out; they talk; they have a snack; they do some freestyle verse. All is going well.
Then the white girl's mother decides that all these poets have Inspired Her to unleash her own Artistic Spirit. She gets up in front of this group and allows her thoughts to flow freely. Her stream of consciousness, addressed to her audience, includes phrases like "beautiful black creature."
The guests unanimously take this as their cue to leave. The white daughter can barely look them in the eye as they trickle out, so hard is she cringing.
You almost prefer conservative Stephen's refusal to see race at all.
Liberal Stephen is all for programs that involve hiring completely unqualified people just because they're not white and/or male.
It's the same impulse that leads him to buy T-shirts for awful indie bands, only watch mainstream movies if they've been pirated, and run his computer entirely on ragged beta-version open-source software. Sure, his programs crash all the time, but at least he isn't supporting the hegemonic power of Microsoft.
Conservative Stephen only admits to listening to Top 40 artists, constantly admonishes his viewers against pirating, and runs everything on Microsoft products. He's a fan of unregulated monopolies.
I think about the prisoner's dilemma.
The classical form goes like this: "Two suspects are arrested by the police. The police have insufficient evidence for a conviction, and, having separated both prisoners, visit each of them to offer the same deal. If one testifies (defects from the other) for the prosecution against the other and the other remains silent (cooperates with the other), the betrayer goes free and the silent accomplice receives the full 10-year sentence. If both remain silent, both prisoners are sentenced to only six months in jail for a minor charge. If each betrays the other, each receives a five-year sentence. Each prisoner must choose to betray the other or to remain silent. Each one is assured that the other would not know about the betrayal before the end of the investigation. How should the prisoners act?"
Or, to adapt Wikipedia's handy table:
| B Stays Silent... | B Betrays... | |
|---|---|---|
| A Stays Silent... | 6 months each | A: 10 years B: goes free |
| A Betrays... | A: goes free B: 10 years | 5 years each |
The table makes it pretty clear: if you care only about yourself, then the rational thing to do is betray your partner. It means less prison time for you, no matter which option your partner takes.
However, if you care about your partner's welfare, and you trust your partner to stay silent, the rational thing to do is keep mum yourself. That leads to the best outcome for the team.
Put in this situation, conservative Stephen will always betray. Always. He doesn't trust anyone. ("Jon Stewart and I don't talk," he insists over and over, to Bill O'Reilly or Larry King or whoever else is interviewing him. He's Peter, and the cock is crowing.)
Liberal Stephen will always stay silent. No matter what. After all, he couldn't possibly be so disrespectful as to imply that his partner might not be trustworthy.
As long as we're talking about incredibly nerdy things: Liberal Stephen is a carrier of the Five Geek Social Fallacies, especially the pathological versions of GSF1 and GSF2. Conservative Stephen is the kind of ostracizing, judgmental person who induces those fallacies in the first place.
To keep up the nerdiness: When it comes to liberal Stephen, Tim Minchin has got him pegged.
I think about Nice Guys.
They're diagrammed further in this xkcd strip, and immortalized in verse by this marvelous poem.
Conservative Stephen is (or tries to be) the archetypal jerk. He is In Charge and it's All About Him and everyone must Follow His Orders. He's deeply insecure at heart, but he covers it as best he can with shouting and ego and declarations of authority.
(Secretly, he would love to find someone to tie him up, slap him around, and shag him senseless. But his inability to trust anyone throws a bit of a wrench in that plan. Besides, he can't let anyone suspect that he can be vulnerable.)
Liberal Stephen, on the other hand, tries to be the Nice Guy. He's open about his insecurities; he refuses to shout or get angry; he's always doing things for other people. (Including indie publishers and open-source programmers.) He's afraid that he's selfish at heart, so he goes overboard to compensate.
(Secretly, he would love to find someone he could tie up, slap around, and shag senseless. But he doesn't trust himself enough to go through with that plan. Besides, he couldn't bring himself to be that mean.)
In this lovely parable, it's easy to see at which stage each one is stuck.
Finally, a note about family.
Both versions of this character come from a Strict Father family, archetypal to the point of ridiculousness. (I Am America (And So Can You!) has the details.) It's all there: obedience and discipline, pulling yourself up by your own bootstraps, rational self-interest, the works.
Conservative Stephen embraced this philosophy and never looked back. It's how he relates to his government; it's how he relates to his religion; and these days he is (or claims to be) the head of such a family in his personal life.
Liberal Stephen took this philosophy and ran as far as he could in the other direction. His ideal for everything is the archetypal Nurturant Parent family. If he weren't childfree, it's the model he would be using with his own kids.
So in spite of their differences, they're both cut from the same cloth, using wildly divergent tactics to cope with what are ultimately the same issues.
Okay, a confession.
I'm mostly posting this in the hope that it will strike people with plotbunnies. Because I love this version of the character, and crave more fic about him.
So if anything in here strikes you as possible fic material, take it and run with it. Or, if you think I have gotten some bit of this (or every bit of it!) completely wrong, throw together a fic about the way you think it really is.
As far as I'm concerned, this 'verse is a playground full of shiny new toys. Come on in and play.
no subject
(The description of "Stephen" is "well-intentioned, poorly-informed, high-status idiot." It's an improv stock character.)
I like your general idea about flipping the stereotypes, but a lot of your specifics just seem off. Most notably, "The GOP doesn't stereotype Liberals as wishy-washy..." Since when? You remember the buzzword "flip-flopper", right? There are 7.5 million results when you google "Bush" + "you know where he stands", and only 2 million for "Kerry" + "you know where he stands" - and most of the results on that first page are actually applying the phrase to Bush. Sarah Palin had that whole schtick about how you have to make decisions and "you can't blink." Certainty is one of the GOP's major selling points.
And you can't really lump "socialism" together with "fascism". Most socialist governments are democracies, and were elected to be that way.
no subject
"Certainty" as it relates to quick action is a buzz word for Neocons, less so for other Conservatives. "Certainty" mainly relates to how Conservatives (are supposed to) have a firm grounding in the principles of expanding individual liberty. The left is portrayed as less certain in contrast because it appears they lack a grand unifying theory of their own (not saying there isn't one, just that Liberals aren't very good at publicizing it).
The idea that either side is more "unified" or "certain" than the other is a false image, of course: Conservatives are supposed to be united behind the liberty ideal, but Neocons and Social Conservatives have advocated restrictions for the sake of "national security" and "public decency." The right isn't solidly together - it's just better at looking like it. The 2008 election primaries demonstrated how many different factions there are in the GOP and how they don't always get along. One of the main observations about McCain was his high level of uncertainty in his policy proposals (mainly because he was a Liberal mouthing faux-Conservative words fed to him by strategists).
The key point I'm trying to illustrate with my approach to AU!Stephen and r!Stephen isn't how to caricature the left and right in the US, but the process in which they create their satirical characters. I'm commenting on the way real people tend to poke fun at their own ideology and opposing ideologies through the use of contrasting the two "real world" Stephens. It's satire of satirists.
Socialist and fascist governments are both authoritarian regimes. Socialism, like Fascism, believes individual liberty can be readily discarded for the sake of the greater good and that order must be maintained through central planning with the government and/or corporatism. Contrast this with Liberalism, which holds that a country needs big government to defend individual liberty from external oppressors; and Conservatism, which says individual liberty is best maintained with a small government and free market. Socialists and Fascists occupy the same relative position on the political map relative to the US left and right. That's why I lump them together.
no subject
If a majority of the people vote for socialist policies, that's still democracy. If there's no organization at all, but everyone spontaneously adopts socialist policies just because they feel like it, that's socialist anarchy.
L!Stephen is a socialist anarchist. C!Stephen is a capitalist fascist.
(You've got a streak of the socialist anarchist in yourself, for that matter - in the way you think charity and volunteerism are important, and put effort into them, although they're for the good of society as a whole rather than your own personal interest.)
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On the matter of socialist democracies, if people lack the power to discard socialist policies through their vote, it's more an oligarchy than a democracy. That is, if the system has been set up such that the ability of elected officials to alter it into a non-socialist oriented alternative system is infeasible, then the people are no longer at liberty to decide how power is held, only by who. This is akin to a concert audience being free to vote for who performs, but not to leave the auditorium. I'd say that's how most European socialist systems currently operate - the ugly side to what TDS tried to make light of. Socialist dictatorships (Cuba, Venezuela, Congo, etc.) carry this to the logical conclusion (if the people can't change the system, why should they get to change the leadership?) and drop all facades.
Note that I'm not saying the people have to *use* this ability (that is, it's fine for them to keep voting in socialism as much as they like), only that the option must be present for it to considered a free democratic society. Contrast this with America, where we have the choice on whether we want to vote ourselves into a socialism, corporatism, or a laissez-faire capitalism. Even if we don't pursue those routes, we are at liberty to do so if we wanted.
I lean closer (dangerously so at times) to the anarcho-capitalists than anarcho-socialists, because I believe the means of production are best suited in the hands of entrepreneurs not unions. My volunteerism stems directly from my Libertarian views: in a system of minimal government, it's the job of private charity to fill the role of caring for the unfortunate. Charity doesn't get more private than the individual.
If l!Stephen is an anarcho-socialist, then the person he most closely parodies would be Noam Chomsky (who is one and has helped define that political field). However, Chomsky very much falls into the "arrogant academic" stereotype, since he believes the GOP is run by Neo-Nazis (no, seriously) among other things.
"Capitalist fascism" is better known as "corporatism." It's the system Mussolini used.
I think now I see the difference in your and my take on l!Stephen. Using Authoritarian to mean "supporting less individual liberty" and Libertarian to mean "supporting more individual liberty" and left to mean "supporting big gov't, less free market" and right to mean "supporting small gov't, more free market," we'd get:
c!Stephen: Authoritarian right (into corporatism, since he's a Neocon)
l!Stephen: Libertarian left (all the way to anarcho-socialist territory)
l!AU!Stephen: Authoritarian left (the embodiment of Jonah Goldberg's "Liberal fascism")
c!AU!Stephen: Libertarian right (but not into anarcho territory)
So your wishy-washyness is intended as a parody of the anti-authoritarian left, while I focus on the "Give us more power!" left.
I wonder what a far out Libertarian right parody would be like (a!Stephen?). Making him a conspiracy nut would be too easy - in fact, I'd require any good anarcho-capitalist parody to be completely above them, just to avoid cheap gags. It'd require reading Murray Rothbard and others to get a good understanding of where they come from so it could be skewered properly.
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Contrast this with how Gore and Obama were portrayed: elitist know-it-alls. They weren't accused of being indecisive, but as thinking themselves as "better" than the average American. And that's the thread I get l!AU!Stephen from.