(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

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.