Comment by eli_gottlieb

> Epistemic status: attempting to point at a thing that I can't fully articulate

Oh come on: stop stealing Scott Alexander's lines.

As to the rest, well yes, the whole point is that levels of contrarianism and meta-contrarianism, the location of a position on today's political landscape, indicate basically nothing at all about the actual merits of the idea.

Except if it's a Republican idea, in which case it's been carefully optimized to be wildly insane. But they're a special case: other country's right-wing parties often aren't like that (say, the Christian Democrats in Germany).