(no subject)

[fpb]

Anyone who thinks that I was too harsh about Jonah Goldberg's repulsive and politically motivated rewriting of my own country's history ought to read today's Thomas Sowell column, where it is taken entirely at its own valuation and highly recommended as summer reading for the children of conservatives. This unhistorical, culturally imperialistic propaganda, that distorts my country's and my continent's history in the service of provincial American concerns, is going to enter the bloodstream of a whole American party, If it has not already done so. This will increase further the mutual incomprehension between USA and Europe, because you cannot stand on your two hind legs and inform anyone who knows anything of continental history - France, Italy, Germany, etc. - that Nazism and Fascism were "left wing". This sort of rubbish, especially if spoken with the arrogance of Goldberg and Sowell, will increase European contempt for American viewpoints and culture. Do we really need this sort of trash further complicating our already difficult relationship, and all for the sake of a few Republican votes in the next election?

Comments

Re: You have not actually read the book, have you?

[johncwright.livejournal.com]

I apologize. My post was clearing intemperate, and I know our host often has to struggle with his peppery temper.

Nonetheless, for sixty years we on the Right have had to tolerate the absurdity and the insult of being lumped in with fascists, when we are the opposite of fascists according to any political classification scheme that is not mere nonsense. Putting fascists on the Right is mere nonsense, and always has been, and blatantly ignores both political theory and political history in the most shocking and insolent way. Goldberg merely puts right something that should have been put right immediately when this dishonest terminology was first gaining currency. Goldberg backs up his thesis with facts and history -- a bookful. Our host answers this by (1) waxing wroth (2) calling into question Goldberg's motive.

Well, what if his motive is love of truth and a desire to rectify a long-standing and insupportable error?

[fpb.livejournal.com]

And you answer by refusing to deal with the history I described. This is not only sickening, it is clear evidence of obstinacy. In the same day in which you totally misused the word "idealist" (which is a technical term in philosophy and does not mean what you took it to mean), this shows that your grip of established political and philosophical categories is shaky at best. AT the very least, this does not make you the right man to complain about anyone's usage of political and philosophical terminology. Right: one last attempt to try and drag this discussion out of the quicksand, and if it does not work I will draw the necessary conclusions.

[johncwright.livejournal.com]

"In the same day in which you totally misused the word "idealist" (which is a technical term in philosophy and does not mean what you took it to mean) , this shows that your grip of established political and philosophical categories is shaky at best. At the very least, this does not make you the right man to complain about anyone's usage of political and philosophical terminology..."

If you are talking about the same essay I think you are talking about, I not only defined how I was using the term, but acknowledged that it was not the technical philosophical definition, which I also gave; and I carefully distinguished the two. My use of the term was perfectly proper in that context, since I took the care to both define it and to distinguish it from the way the word is normally meant.

I hope this clears up any misunderstanding or misreading.

At this point, please forgive me if I must speak bluntly. Please stop treating every discussion where we disagree as a personal attack, and please stop belittling me.

Neither your anger nor your condescension nor your expressions of outraged honor nor your puffery about your greater wisdom and learning have any logical relevance to this discussion, or any other. They accomplish nothing. I am neither cowed nor offended by your bluster.

Where I err, please correct me. Where I am ignorance, please instruct me. I would welcome it. But merely scoffing and sneering adds nothing of value to the discussion.

Ad Hominem is an informal logical error; an irrelevance. If I misuse a technical term in one discussion, it does not necessarily follow that I misuse all technical terms; nor does it follow that all your uses of technical terms are correct or are unambiguous; nor does it necessarily follow that I am barred from making any criticism of someone else's use or misuse of a term; nor does it mean that I am not allowed to question someone's use of a term that I do not understand.

You know the rules of elementary logic. Don't bring up such an illogical point again.

You know I respect you, even when we disagree. Return me the same courtesy, I beg you.

[fpb.livejournal.com]

Do not start with an ad hominem attack. It is bad form and bad argument. I admit that mine was not admirable, but it only came at a moment of exasperation where I felt that you were not listening to anything I said. Rhetoric about bluster and all that is simply that - bluster. It does nothing to improve your argument or Mr.Goldberg's. And I claimed nothing more than that no Italian alive or dead would consider the matter in any other light than I consider it. The gross mistakes you made in your account of Fascism - such as missing the small matter of its being protected by the King and the army - certainly do not argue in favour of your knowledge, but the fact that you felt I bragged of something - give me one concrete instance where I bragged of anything, rather than simply pointing out that you were wrong in point of fact - only shows that, as the Italian proverb says, the tongue has this gift of hitting the point where the tooth hurts.

[johncwright.livejournal.com]

"I admit that mine was not admirable, but it only came at a moment of
exasperation where I felt that you were not listening to anything I said."

I accept your apology and forgive you. Let us be friends.

The Left and Socialism

[fpb.livejournal.com]

1a) To identify the Left and collectivism is nonsense. It would make anarchists of the Emma Goldman kind into the purest kind of rightists.

1) Left and right are terms that make sense in ancient established communities. They represent the attitude of the political grouping to the ancient sources of authority: the State in its military and bureaucratic form, the traditional ruling classes, and secondarily the religion of the country (which can however be altered by State and aristocracy, as for instance in England in the sixteenth century). The more a political grouping is disposed to accept and respect traditional authority, the further it issaid to be to the right (in Europe, the words "conservative" and "moderate" pertain to the right). The more oppositional to these things a grouping is, the more it is to the left. At the extreme left are revolutionary groupings, which claim their legitimacy from alternative visions of society; at the extreme right, groupings which wish the power of the established State and aristocracy to last without the hindrance of an opposition or of a parliamentary system. The extreme left wises to remake or destroy the state; the moderate left, to reform it; the moderate right, to preserve it; the extreme right, to make it all-powerful and uncontrolled.

2) In fact, as I argued in my series on American politics, the distinction between left and right applies poorly to American politics even now, altough it is becoming more relevant; and not at all in the past. The issue of the place of traditional sources of authority was not until recent times anything like an issue in the USA. The distinction was rather between populist and legalist politics, which was long efficiently incarnated by the Democrat and Republican groupings.

3) Left-wing politics reached America in the sixties, with the move of much of the Democrat grouping out of the traditional consensus. This made the influence of the Churches, for the first time in American history, a matter of confrontation rather than consensus, and it was followed (an independent development with some common roots) by the rise of an aristocratic class that tended to root itself at the top of society by means of birth and connection rather than achievement. (The traditionally self-made men such as Warren Buffett and Bill Gates escape this grouping and tend to be Democrat.) The Democratic party is at present a recognizably left-wing party, though nothing like a Socialist one. (See my articles on "Socialism vs. Progressivism".)

3a) This actually happens at the same time as left and right politics lose meaning in Europe, because of the disappearance or transformation of traditional ruling classes, the loss of power of the Churches, the great success of the Socialist movement in removing the very complaints that had motivated it, and the effective entrenchment of socialist leaderships among a more amorphous but still recognizable societal leadership.

(N.B.: not all of this comes out in my articles on American politics. But it is all a part of what I said there, or an obvious corollary of it.)

4) The alliance between aristocracy and church forces that was the heart of the European Right until the nineteen-fifties is rather more caricatured than replicated in the modern Republican Party. Relying for votes on the consciously Christian "values voters" and on the so-called "social conservatives", the Republican leadership nevertheless ignored their views and needs, cradling itself in an insular, upper-crust convergence with the "enlightened" top of society. In a sense, they have not realized the implications of the coming of left-wing and right-wing politics. Nonetheless, right and left have come to America.

5) Socialism arises from the threefold demand of the French Revolution: Freedom, Equality, Brotherhood. It represents an attempt to use the power of mass cooperation between the lower areas of society to extend the reach of legal freedom and equality before the law as well as to draw them out of misery. It is inherently egalitarian and inherently representative (in spite of Russian perversions). Its greatest successes are in parliamentary democracies.

Re: The Left and Socialism

[johncwright.livejournal.com]

" In fact, as I argued in my series on American politics, the distinction between left and right applies poorly to American politics even now, altough it is becoming more relevant; and not at all in the past. The issue of the place of traditional sources of authority was not until recent times anything like an issue in the USA. The distinction was rather between populist and legalist politics, which was long efficiently incarnated by the Democrat and Republican groupings."

Since we are substantially agreed on this point (which I also made in an earlier discussion) I extend to you the olive branch.

My objection to calling the American Right (small-government, free trade, individualism) by the same rubric as the European Right (absolute government, economic autarchy, free trade) is that it is misleading, or, as you say, "apply poorly."

The American Right (so-called) is revolutionary when it comes to laws and customs alien to its Enlightenment ideals, seeking radical and immediate change. It is conservative when it comes to laws and customs, and religion, it sees as confirming or upholding those ideals, and in such circumstances seeks to conserve them. As such, it fits nowhere easily on the political spectrum you describe. There is no entrenched clergy or entrenched aristocracy in America, and even the wealthy do not maintain themselves across generations as a coherent class with a uniformity of interests. As you say in your essay, that may be changing, but it was not that way hitherto.

Can we at least agree on this point?

Re: The Left and Socialism

[fpb.livejournal.com]

No. I simply do not accept your instinctive refusal to admit that there can be such a thing as right-wing tyranny and right-wing totalitarianism. There is a subtext to everything you say, which is that, right=freedom, left=unfreedom. That is simply something you have to get over, because you will find nobody outside a part of the American Republican and Libertarian parties who will agree with you. It would make more sense to say, extremes on both sides = unfreedom, moderates on both sides = freedom.

Besides, what I said is that there really never was any such thing as a straight left-right polarity in American politics at all, until the sixties and the rise of the New Left, which took an oppositional position to the whole American system, although for its own political purposes it prefered to infiltrate the established Democratic Party. Until then, there was a basic consensus on the American system, laws, principles and religion. For that matter, it is my view that the current muddle and misdirection of the Republican Party comes in great part from a lack of understanding of the position that the rise of a destructive rather than loyal opposition among the Democrats creates.

The hard right and Fascism

[fpb.livejournal.com]

6) A minority of doctrinaire and vicious rightists, mostly intellectuals and landowners, has never accepted parliamentary rule at all and wishes to destroy Parliament and democracy and reduce the citizen back to a subject. It is a strange fact that some people are seized with a desire for enslavement, and are the first to rejoice in ideas of self-abasement before the all-conquering majesty of the State. Hitler in his early days was such, promising to Ludendorff that he was glad to be the "little drummer boy" of the resurrected Prussian autocracy. There is a continuity between these people and the more law-abiding majority conservatives, as there is between majority Socialists and extreme anarchists and Communists on the left.

7) Fascism is an invention of these groupings, which are the enemies of parliamentary government as much as of Socialism, and is designed to destroy both in one fell swoop. It adopts the trappings of the Socialist movement because those trappings represent power - the power of the new model of mass-membership party - but also because of an ingrained contempt for the very working classes it intends to seduce: what the Fascist thinks of the Socialist is that the Socialist has managed to gather together the working classes not because he has any values (for to the Fascist freedom, equality and brotherhood are not values at all) but because the working classes are ignorant and stupid and easily led with cheap rhetoric.

8) The first attempts to invent a counter-Socialism date back to the eighteen-nineties, when Mussolini and Hitler were children. They are failures, but the tradition and the name stick.

9) The success of Fascism in continental Europe in the nineteen-twenties does not prove any continuity with Socialism. It is a different social class - the petty-bourgeoisie of company clerks, small shopkeepers and petty bureaucrats - which joins it, abandoning the moderate parties that had previously been its home, and it joins it exactly because it looks at the working classes with hatred and contempt. The high-water mark of Fascism is after the economic crises of 1923, 1929 and 1931, exactly because these place the petty bourgeoisie in terror of being reduced to working-class level or worse. They react with terror and fury, and flock to Fascist and Nazi parties in their millions. From the end of the war to the end of democracy in Germany and elsewhere, however, the Socialist and Communist representation in parliament remains static; it is the respectable conservatives that are devoured by the Nazis and by similar groupings.

10) Fascism is in everything the contrary of Socialism. It is anti-egalitarian and classist. It postulates a paternal authority in society rather than the "brotherhood" of equals that has been since the French Revolution the ideal of the left. It is the artificial construct of the extreme right, entrenched in the ancient structures of state, army and police, rather than the natural growth of the entrance of an originally unorganized new class into politics. And when it gains mass membership, it finds it not in the working-class electoral roots of the socialist movement, but in a different and oppositional social class, the non-entrepreneurial petty bourgeoisie that gets its living largely from existing power structures and that regards itself as socially above the despised working classes. Finally, its philosophy is firmly rooted in the giant figure of Nietzsche rather than in the long and squabbling tradition of Socialist intellectuals and ideologues. "National Socialism" has been designed from the beginning to negate and destroy Socialism; and it is anti-Socialist in every way and at every level.

Re: The hard right and Fascism

[johncwright.livejournal.com]

What should I make of the fact that, if Fascism is to be called "Right" and is the contrary in everything in Socialism (Fascism being anti-egalitarian, class-conscious and paternalistic, and Socialism not), Fascism is also the contrary of everything in classical liberal notions of Republicanism (Fascism being anti-egalitarian, class-conscious and paternalistic, and Republicanism not)?

Republicanism, as I have said before, has been designed from the beginning to oppose every form of tyranny over the minds of men, and therefore to negate and to destroy absolute monarchies, absolute fascisms, absolute government in any form; to oppose any imposition on the Rights of Man; to oppose racism and proletarianism and every other form of collectivism; to protect private property, which both fascists and communists would invade; to protect the individual conscience from established churches, compulsory religion, and compulsory ideology -- Do you see my argument? I call fascism as heresy of socialism, a break-away movement. You say it is not, on the grounds that fascism opposed socialism in every way and was its antithesis. My argument is that Republicanism opposes fascism in every way and was its antithesis. I suggest that any political classification, any scheme of terminology, must take into account this fundamental antithesis. To call Republicanism a mild form of Fascism, a "middle Right" form of a "far Right" doctrine, does not take into account this fundamental antithesis.

I humbly suggest that fascism used republican social structures and ideas, the parliament, the industries, with the same calculated ruthlessness as you say it used socialist structures and ideas. Fascists said what they had to say to gain power, not because they were actually politically inclined to favor the traditional monarchic or the revolutionary republican forms of government. They hated Communism, but they had no love for Democracy.

I humbly suggest the fascist attitude toward the Church was equally calculated and insincere: which is why people to this day argue about whether fascism were really a Christian movement or not.

Do we have any leeway for agreement on any of these points?

Re: The hard right and Fascism

[fpb.livejournal.com]

You forget that there are such things as aristocratic republics - states without a monarch but with a limited franchise and a thorough grip of the institutions by an established aristocracy. The Republic of Venice used to be one such, and it has always been my contention that England/Britain has always been essentially an aristocratic republic with very thin monarchic trappings. Where does such a system, which, I repeat, is well established in European history, fit in your views?

Anyway, you almost seem to be arguing as though I had said that Fascism was a variety of Republicanism. That would be obvious nonsense (in spite of the presence in the party of such a man as Dr.Ron Paul, who would indubitably belong to the hard right in Europe). The Republican Party barely scratches the surface of the possible range of right-wing policies.

Re: The hard right and Fascism

[johncwright.livejournal.com]

"Where does such a system, which, I repeat, is well
established in European history, fit in your views?"

Ah, now this is the central question, and one where my views are difficult to explain. You see, I do not believe in the left-right spectrum. The spectrum is a propaganda trick invented by socialist writers for the purpose of putting across the erroneous and misleading political opinion that all politics could be and should be viewed through the lens of a single question: the politics that favored the current unjust powers-that-be, the Throne and Altar, were placed on the Right, and the politics that favored populist socialist progress were on the Left.

The assumption here, the assumption I do not grant, is that there is only one form of progress (pro-Socialist) and only one opposition to progress (Throne and Altar, the established privileges of the possessing and ruling classes, including the Captains of Industry).

For some reason that still puzzles me, the national socialist revolutionaries were placed on the reactionary Right, as if they supported the Ancient Regime, rather than in the moderate Left, as revolutionaries who wished partial, rather than total, destruction of the free market, and were willing to absorb and corrupt, rather than execute, the shopkeepers and factory owners.

You and I do not see eye to eye on this point, and I will defer to your greater knowledge of history. But I will not defer to your knowledge of economics and law, which is a particular area of my study: from a legal and from an economic standpoint, the laws and market regulations proposed by fascists (national socialists) are closer to the laws and market regulations proposed by communists (international socialists) than they are to those proposed by small-government, federalists, separation of powers, right of man style republics.

I would have to invent my own classification system of political opinions in order to capture the complexity of real world politics. Unfortunately, were I to do this, no one could follow what I was saying.

For better or worse, conservatives in America have adopted their enemy's terminology, for much the same reason, and with much the same error, as adopting the socialist terminology that describes the free market as "capitalism" -- as if the market place were a social mechanism designed only to benefit investors, rather than a natural institution which grows up around laws and customs respecting private property, and benefiting, to the degree imperfect human institutions can do, all comers.

To answer your question more directly, I would call aristocratic or plutocratic systems, such as constitutional monarchies with limited voter franchise, "Ancient Regimes", or I would use the term, "Weak Monarchies" or "Aristocracies" or even "Aristocratic Republics."

Or I would say that they are "On the Right" but I would then qualify the statement by saying "On the Right in the European sense of the Term" that is, a regime that perpetuated entrenched class distinctions, encouraged inequalities, used the law as an obstacle to keep the lower classes and the possessing classes separate.

more below

Re: The hard right and Fascism

[johncwright.livejournal.com]

"Anyway, you almost seem to be arguing as though I had said that Fascism was a variety of Republicanism. That would be obvious nonsense."

I think this is exactly Mr. Goldberg's objection, as it is mine. I am tired of being called Fascist and lumped among them, merely because you socialists had a falling out among yourselves, and can think of no criticism to level against a free society, except to liken it to a totalitarianism, when it is the stark opposite of a totalitarianism.

Now, you never made this mistake. You were careful enough to distinguish between the varieties of "Right" even though you continue with the arrant nonsense of pretending Nazism is an extreme form of Republicanism, which is the same as calling Republicanism mild Nazism.

Let me express an objection to that. In order for something to be an extreme of something, it has to have a quality in excess that the moderate form contains in moderation. The quality you have selected is "conservativeness" or "reaction", that is, whether the party is loyal to the regime and customs of antiquity, the class structure, the aristocracy, the monarchy, the established church.

Since republicanism preaches the radical curtailing of government power to the limited sphere, and a radical dismantling of class and church privilege, and radical equality before the law, to the utter abolition of any special laws based on birth, an extreme form the this would be, at best, some form of Libertarianism or even Anarchism. An extreme form of republicanism is not monarchy.

By the normal "right-left" classification system, Nazis are those who use violent totalitarian means to protect the ancient regime against the radical revolutionaries of communism. This classification is false-to-facts. Mussolini supported or opposed Victor Emmanuel III when it suited him, and, as you know better than I, eventually established a rival government in the North under Nazi auspices. I do not doubt the dictator used the Monarchy when it suited him, but I do doubt that Mussolini was a Monarchist, or believe the theory of the divine right of kings or any theory like that. His call was for egalitarian unity: the bundle of sticks bound together so that they could not separately be broken. Fascism was populist and nationalist.

But let us not argue that point: even if I grant that Mussolini was a devoted Monarchist and not a dictator trying to reduce the crown to a figurehead, even if I grant this, it cannot be maintained that monarchists favor limited government, universal suffrage, the Rights of Man, free trade and free markets, freedom and speech press and religion, and the other hallmarks of what is called "the Right" in America. Republicanism is the enemy of Monarchy and Aristocracy, the enemy of class privilege and inequality. (Even if the so-called Republican party in the USA is not the enemy of class privilege and inequality. I am talking about the founding theory here, not the modern corruption.)

So, by this logic, if Nazism is (somehow) taken as an extreme and violent form of reactionary defense of the monarchy and the established church, republicanism cannot be taken as a mild and nonviolent form of defense of the monarchy and the established church, since republicanism preaches the radical abolition of crowns and the disestablishment of churches.

The left-right spectrum is nothing but an awkward way for socialists to lump all of their opponents together. Everyone who is pro-socialists is "Left"; the law-abiding parliamentary socialists are "Middle Left" and the violent authoritarian socialists are "far Left": and then, somehow, all opposition to socialism is lumped indiscriminately together on what is called the "Right", whether the opposition comes from a national socialist, a dictator, a king, a tribal chief, an emperor, a pope, an industrialist, a republican, a democrat, a libertarian, an anarchist, a Guelph, a Ghibelline, a Tory, an Ulsterman, an Eskimo, or an Elf.

It is simply a ridiculous and misleading classification system.