Reading Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain for the first time. Naphta and Settembrini duking it out reminds me that many of the debates which so enervate us and our media platforms these days are in fact eternal.
Naphta would perhaps be anti-vax and anti-mask, and Settemrini the opposite.
But: their politics and ideology would be harder to categorize using today’s American spectrum. Naphta would be a conservative at the time of the novel, and some features of this label overlap with today’s definition–his devout Christianity and his belief that the Church is justified to use Terror and murder to achieve its ends, for example. But despite his conservatism in this regard, Naphta is also a Communist and hopes for the “new religion” of Marx to achieve its ends in the same manner as the Medieval Church. This most definitely places him at the authoritarian left end of today’s spectrum.
Settembrini in his day was a liberal, devoted to the evolution of trade into modern financing and opening up markets for entrepreneurs and increasing ownership opportunities for all. He also advocates powerfully for democracy of the republican sort to replace monarchies, and espouses a belief in humanism, enlightenment scientific progress, and individual liberty. Settembrini these days would be a conservative (almost libertarian) in some aspects of his politics, but a left-of-center liberal in others.
So labels and ideologies shift along the left-right political spectrum over time, but the arguments and the topics of disagreement are eternal.
Mysterium Coniunctionis 