Quote Originally Posted by Rhyfelwyr View Post
I'm not trying to drive the line that people on the left want big government and want to steal our freedoms. The point is just that the left and right have at different times stood for authoritarian measures, and other times they haven't.
It depends on context and points of view plus other things getting mixed up left right and center. The basics of authoritarian measures is the concentration of power to the elite few (or one), opposed to the diffusion of power to the greater number.

Probably the thing that confuses this issue most is the fact we put market liberals and fascists under the one label of being 'right-wing'. Remember, to people in the 30's/40's, fascism was seen as the 'third way' to drive a middle ground between the excesses of communism/capitalism.
Not necessarily. Fascism was a different animal in some ways, but in many ways, it was an updated version of what occurred in the past. Opposed to the absolute monarchy of the Kaiser based on blood, they replaced the blood element with loyalty to the party and the cult fever. So while it makes a marked contrast on this, in many ways, Hitler was simply a neo-absolute monarchist in practice.

In what way could the events of the seventeenth century in Britain be said to have been lead by the left? There was no such things at that time (apart from fringe groups). Even Marxist historians portray Britian's constitutional monarchy as a result of a bourgeoisie revolution.
Since the bourgeoisie were the left of the aristocrats and was more based on wealth opposed to blood-line. it was indeed a change from the left. Through the time periods, there has been a shift to what was deemed left and right, and not a universal constant with what we could do now a days. Any moves towards diffusion of power comes from the left, the concentration of power comes from the right. A true centre would simply be "Keep things the same".

I would say ideology is the best way to measure things, and even then it would require far more than one straight line from left-right. I don't even know why we feel this need to ram everything into one nice and easy black and white worldview, if you think about it its pretty ridiculous to think politics will ever be that simple.
I only said the axis was based on anarchy - totalitarianism as the two extremes of left and right (liberty and authoritarianism). I didn't say that historical axis factored in anything else.

Yes, you can place additional axis and factors, however, I was only talking about the historical usage of the scale.