Don't know what to call my political beliefs

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I generally regard myself as having a strong egalitarian bias. I believe that the freest and most morally righteous society is one based on mutual respect where everyone enjoys social and political equality and no one arbitrarily dominates or oppresses others. I oppose authoritarian political theories like fascism, capitalism, Stalinism, and theocracy, which I see as rooted in unjust and arbitrary domination. I would even go so far as to declare the majority of authoritarian ideologies outright evil. Most if not all evil in the world stems from domineering impulses or beliefs in our superiority over others.

On the other hand, I don't know if I can consider myself 100% egalitarian on every issue. Pure egalitarianism works brilliantly for small bands of nomadic foragers with Paleolithic technology, but since agriculture and industrialization have swelled the human population, I feel we need some kind of managerial leaders to coordinate other people's activities in modern society. However, I would prefer that these leaders, whether political or economic, earn their position entirely from popular election rather than money or heredity. What would such a system be called?

Dreaming or a fantasy. Man's competitive instincts must be harnessed and directed.

Social Democracy.

Social Democracy. What is it? It is two wolves and a lamb sitting at the dinner table and voting on what to have for the evening meal.

ruveyn

Although I agree with every single one of your beliefs, I would call them aspects an overly optimistic fantasy.

Unfortunately, the human race probably won't ever reach such a level of sophistication.

Anarchist Communism

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anarchist_communism

You sound like a libertarian socialist.

f**k labels

Like in that cesspool Denmark?

The technical term is meritocracy.

That may be an apt term for it technically, but even if meritocracy would be my ideal, implementing it would require that everyone had equal opportunity to develop their skills and earn their prestige. The fundamental problem with current American society is that certain segments don't enjoy as much opportunity as others for unfair reasons. Take African-Americans for instance; they disproportionately suffer from terrible poverty and lack of socioeconomic assets relative to whites, largely because of America's long legacy of institutional racism (including not only slavery but also Jim Crow, the sundown town phenomenon, policies favoring white people's socioeconomic growth over everyone else, etc.), contemporary racial discrimination and stigmatization, and conservative opposition to any policies that would counteract this inequality.

In fact, if I may briefly digress from the topic of my own thread a little off-topic, I despise the majority of opponents to affirmative action with a flaming passion. They either don't even comprehend what affirmative action is meant to do in the first place (for instance, as the late Steve Kangas explains here, it does NOT mean quotas), fail to grasp the true persistent racial inequality which affirmative action is designed to remedy, or cannot explain that inequality without regurgitating racist stereotypes to blame the victim. It's one thing to ask whether affirmative action programs are the best method of bringing about change, and that's all right by itself, but the conservative approach to it invariably has roots either in ignorance or racism.

America has the potential to shine as a great beacon of liberty and equality, but the very conservatives who brag the most about America's greatness are the main obstacles to realizing that greatness.

Advocates of meritocracy would generally agree with you. A meritocracy is a form of applied egalitarianism.

Since the best are better than the non-best meritocracy is the antithesis of egalitarianism. Human talents are not equal of the population. If the best succeed and the worst do not, inequality is at work.

I suggest you ponder the issue of words actually having a meaning.

ruveyn

When did I say that words actually have a meaning?

Success is not, in capitalism, a good measure of anything - except for capital.