Talk:Political syncretism

Repeated accusations of WP:OR

User:Brat Forelli has repeatedly accused me of WP:OR and refused to elaborate when I have denied these accusations, as the accusations are based on supposedly the citations I used not talking about political syncretism, but rather cultural syncretism. I have explained how that is not the case- and I am actually completely dumbfounded as to how User:Brat Forelli concluded the cited article discusses ONLY cultural syncretism, when ideological syncretism of the New Life Movement which was an ideological product of the Kuomintang, is quite literally one of the topics of discussion. 2605:8D80:6C22:B5E:1A1:C649:7DE5:38F8 (talk) 18:28, 26 June 2025 (UTC)

To be honest I think the entire article is a bit of original research. The word syncretism (borrowed from the study of religion) seems to suggest that any position that can't be neatly categorized as "left" or "right" must be some sort of pick-and-choose from both (as opposed to, say, a coherent philosophy based on different principles from those of either the left or right factions).

Now, to the extent that this idea has been explicitly put forward in reliable sources, it's not unreasonable to have an article about it, but the claim that the referenced positions are "syncretic" should probably be attributed rather than stated in Wikivoice, unless it's genuinely the consensus of sources talking about the referenced positions, which I think is unlikely. --Trovatore (talk) 19:35, 26 June 2025 (UTC)

I agree with Trovatore's comment, especially on WikiVoice. As for the WP:OR problem, you used The Ideological Foundations of the New Life Movement: A Study in Counterrevolution by Arif Dirlik as a reference for Kuomintang being an example of a movement with syncretic politics. Dirlik's work mentions "syncretism" (or "syncretic") five times. Let's have a look:

• Kuomintang political attitudes in the thirties and the syncretic philosophy of the movement heightened the impression of conservatism. In I931, the celebration of the birthday of Confucius was reinstituted, and there was a continuing attempt to revive Confucianism during the decade. Party and government leaders adopted as their political models the leaders of the T'ung Chih Restoration of the 1860's. These men had been prominent for their anti-rebellion activities and their belief in the sufficiency of the Confucian basis of the state, which had confined the value they placed on modern Western civilization to "superficial" techniques. The new synthesis the New Life Movement proposed was reminiscent of the t'i-yung formula suggested toward the last days of the Ch'ing Dynasty, premised on the possibility of welding together Chinese "substance" (t'i) with Western "functional" (yung) learning. Like their Confucian predecessors, New Life ideologues played down the importance of Western learning in the humanities and the social sciences, stressing "useful" learning-which consisted of science and technology.
• Finally, one avowed purpose of the New Life Movement was to counteract the pernicious effects of the wholesale attacks on Chinese tradition of the New Culture Movement of a decade earlier, accusing it of "destructiveness." In the 1860's, cultural syncretism had been a relatively progressive position. After the New Culture Movement, it appeared conservative, if not reactionary.
• Although the views of New Life ideologues ranged from the advocacy of as close an approximation of the past as was possible to its outright rejection,83 the majority were cultural syncretists who favored the combination of those features of Chinese and Western civilizations that suited the needs of the nation.
• It should be obvious from the very term "native morality" that New Life ideology took Chinese tradition as one, abolishing all distinctions between the conflicting currents of social philosophy that had coexisted in uneasy tension within the framework of a complex tradition. Their syncretism was appropriately reflected in the origin of the four principles singled out as representative of the traditional value system. The principles were first stated in the Kuan Tzu, a work attributed to the seventh-century B.C. statesman of that name in the state of Ch'i, who was responsible for the institution of policies that made Ch'i the foremost among the competing states of the time.
• The political assumptions underlying the New Life Movement integrated its various aspects, conditioning its cultural attitudes and shaping the "new citizen" it aspired to create. Its political orientation provided the guiding principle of its cultural syncretism. The content of the movement, trivial outside this framework, was highly appropriate when viewed from this perspective.

It is clear that these fail to explicitly call Kuomintang a politically syncretic movement. Worse yet, no explicit mention of political syncretism is there, and the explicit and implict mention is that of cultural syncretism, as the author delves into discussing mixing Chinese tradition with Western concept of modernity that the New Life Movement engaged in. Hence this source fails to prove the claim, thus it is WP:OR as to argue it shows Kuomintang was politically syncretic would be to reach conclusions that are not explicitly stated in the text - a textbook example of WP:OR. Brat Forelli🦊 19:56, 26 June 2025 (UTC)