Oh, wow, oh, oh, oh, wow, oh, oh, wow.

Oh, wow.

Oh, wow. Hello, you're listening to The Science of Everything podcast, episode 71, political ideologies. I'm your host, James Fodor.

So in this episode, we're going to have a look at some of the major political ideologies that exist in the world today and that inform political decisions and government policies around the globe.

It should be noted that this isn't a politics podcast, this is a science podcast,

so what I'm going to do here is just give an overview of what these different positions are

and how they relate to each other and a little bit of historical background,

looking at these views from the perspective of political science. So I'm not going to try and determine

which of them is correct or where they go right and where they go wrong or whatever. That's not

the goal of this, nor am I going to talk about particular policies. I'm just going to look at

these ideologies in fairly general terms to hopefully give you a bit of a better understanding

of what these labels mean and how they fit into the political discourse and how these ideas

shape the way that countries have been governed and continue to be governed in the world today.

So with that caveat, let's get started by talking about probably the single

most important concept when understanding and discussing political ideologies, which is that of

the left-right spectrum. So you've almost certainly heard of left-wing and right-wing and centrist

positions before, but perhaps you don't know where these terms come from, because they're a little bit odd if you think about them.

What does the left and right have to do with politics? The terms originated during the French Revolution.

So, during the French Revolution, there were people who supported the King, the traditional establishment,

and there were people who wanted reform of various sorts. Those who were supporters of the revolution,

that is, they wanted reforms, stood on the king's left, and those who were supporters of the king,

they wanted to maintain the king's powers, stood on the king's right, in the French National Assembly.

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