Reflections of a stormy petrel

The term ‘left-wing’ in American discourse does not mean what it means in Europe. In America, which never possessed either a landed aristocracy nor an ethnic nationality, there has never been any significant collectivist-nationalist movement of the kind that forms the extreme Right in Europe. All forms of collectivism are ‘Left’ in the U.S., and by that standard it is quite correct to describe Fascism and its various offshoots as left-wing.

I must say that in functional terms, this manner of dividing the political spectrum has more to recommend it than the twentieth-century European system, in which the extreme Left and the extreme Right pursued indistinguishable policies, differing for the most part only in their rhetoric. In practice, for the great majority of people, there is little to choose between a totalitarian state founded upon class-hatred and a totalitarian state founded upon race-hatred.

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bdunbar.livejournal.com

I re-read those articles so I know what you're talking about .. but

I'll echo superversive left and right don't mean what they mean in Europe.

Maybe we need a Babel Fish to translate Continental political cant into American and visa-versa.

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You may ask the great Italian and German industrialists whether they found the Nazi and Fascist policies so indistinguishable from Communism. You cannot speak so glibly of the difference between a form of government which not only safeguarded private property but exalted the figures of industrialists and one which wanted them dead and free enterprise suppressed.

Edited Date: 2008-05-21 07:42 pm (UTC)

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Maybe we need an edict against ignorant American journalists rewriting European history to suit themselves. But more important, we need loud and steadfast protests to avoid this sort of uncomprehending cultural imperialism from messing up intercontinental relationships even further.

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That’s only because a police state founded upon class-warfare persecutes different people from one founded upon race-warfare — or at least, it goes after a different set of victims first.

As for safeguarding private property, the case of I.G. Farben is instructive. The Nazis were quite content to let industrialists alone, as long as they obeyed orders. But they were quick to make an example of any industrialist who did not run his firm as an instrument of state policy. There was nothing resembling free enterprise in Nazi Germany. In fact, all companies with a capital less than a certain figure — I seem to recall offhand that it was something like 100,000 marks — were simply outlawed, and the formation of new companies was strictly regulated. The corporatist structure of Fascist Italy (though never really implemented) was supposed to turn each major industry into a compulsory cartel. Monopoly firms carrying out the orders of the state are not socialist in the ordinary sense of the word, but they are not free in any sense of the word.

You must also remember that there was a radical wing in the Nazi Party, led at first by the Strasser brothers and later represented by Goebbels, which did want German industry nationalized immediately the Nazis took power. Hitler stopped them only because he wanted rearmament above all else, and he knew from the Russian experience that shooting the factory-owners was a quick way to wreck the economy. In effect, he left the same people running German industry because they knew how to do it and Party hacks did not: a lesson that Lenin did not live long enough to learn, and Stalin came too late to profit by. Late in the war, Hitler expressed regrets that he had not listened to his radicals, nationalized heavy industry, and purged the officer corps as Stalin did.

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Oh, get off your high horse. Sowell and Goldberg are not writing for the benefit of Europeans; they are writing polemics for an American audience, and it is both right and necessary that they should use political terminology in its American acceptation.

You want to forbid Americans from talking about politics to other Americans in the American language. That’s a much worse form of ‘uncomprehending cultural imperialism’ than anything you’re accusing Sowell and Goldberg of.

Maybe the edict we need is against people convicting others of ignorance because the others fail to obey their prescriptions regarding terminology.

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That does not begin to compare with Communist state capitalism.

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When it is European politics, yes, I bloody well do. Since you insist that there is no difference between Communism and Fascism, I can see the need for it even more. Have the goodness to remember that you are speaking about MY COUNTRY AND MY PAST.

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What does not seem to penetrate here is that the degenerative process of mutual ignorance and contempt is already so advanced that it is hard to even explain to the average European that the average American is not in fact a knuckle-dragging gun-worshipping lynch-mobbing six-day-creationist moron. If you do not like this kind of stereotyping, do not encourage it by having "Americans talking to Americans" about Europeans in terms that are not only uncomprehending but arrogant, not only arrogant but with a clear subtext of superiority (since the movements in question are not only given a common identity which they did not have, but also opposed to American values in terms that make it clear that they must be regarded as European and typical). Besides, if you imagine for one minute that what is said in English in the United States has no impact in the rest of the world and is not noticed there, you are living, not in Canada, but on the Moon.

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goreism.livejournal.com

All forms of collectivism are ‘Left’ in the U.S.

Except when they're not, of course. Nixon expanded the welfare state and supported affirmative action, Reagan drastically increased federal spending in real terms, Bill Buckley supported national service, many people in the current administration support expansive notions of executive power, and the current Republican nominee brags about serving "for patriotism, not for profit." It was the American Right that supported segregation and school prayer, while the ACLU advocates for broader First Amendment rights.

To the extent that the US political spectrum differs from Europe's, it's because both sides generally accept the broad-sense liberal consensus of flexible labor markets, liberal free-speech rights, and private ownership of industry. Our political debates center around whether the minimum wage should be $8.50 or $0, not whether the government should own the telecoms.

In short, the degree of collectivism a political movement espouses isn't a very reliable indicator of its position on the political spectrum. I don't think those terms pick out a well-defined set of ideological principles, especially over time. Instead, they refer to family resemblances and historical origins. That's why we call the Labour party "democratic socialist" even though they've long since given up any pretense of wanting collective ownership of the means of production.

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Merci bien.

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No difference between Communism and Fascism? I have not said any such thing. I have said that they are both forms of totalitarianism, which is unquestionably true, and that if you are not a member of any of the particular groups they prefer on ideological grounds to oppress, it makes small odds which system you live under; which is supported by abundant eyewitness evidence — I have read a fair bellyful, and have furthermore known people who lived and suffered under totalitarian rule of various kinds, and in some cases risked their lives to escape.

Your second point does not even deserve an answer, but I am in sufficient dudgeon to give one anyway: If I am not allowed to say anything about YOUR country and YOUR past, then you should shut the hell up about the Americans.

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The viciousness and cruelty of Communism in terms of economic suppression is unique. There is a difference between State intervention in the economy and total State possession of everything, and that can be certified in a dozen different ways. I read, for instance, a book that described the brief impact of Soviet Communism on the parts of Romania, Poland and the Baltic countries that the Russians occupied in 1939 and from which they were driven in 1941. The difference that two years of Communism made to the daily lives of everyone, and to the societal leadership (this was the period of the Katyn pits) was immense. Statalization of everything began on day one, and within a few weeks British diplomatic personnel were reporting empty shops, devastated properties and a general air of sullen despair. And all of these people had come to Communism from various kinds of tyranny, which, especially in Romania and the Balts, had strong Fascist connotations. And what about the Cuban experience? Are you telling me that the Cubans never felt a difference between the tyrannies of Batista and of Castro? The difference between Fascism and Communism is exactly in the far more profound and annihilating penetration of the latter. And Communism begins with the murder of capitalists (or landowners), just as Fascism begins with the murder of Socialists. In places like China, the public slaughter of identified local land or business owner was the rite of introduction of Communist power to the local peasantry. If this does not seem to you to make any difference....

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This is sheer nonsense from beginning to end. I hardly know whether to ignore it completely or take it apart clause by clause, but I shall at any rate attempt to do the latter, because you have mortally insulted both my intelligence and my intellectual honour.

What does not seem to penetrate here

You are habitually very quick to assume that anyone who disagrees with you does so out of intellectual incapacity. This is a foolish and demonstrably false assumption, and unspeakably rude besides. I advise you to stop.

is that the degenerative process of mutual ignorance and contempt

Which you seem to regard yourself as immune to, in spite of the fact that you reveal your ignorance and contempt of American politics, history, and culture, almost as often as you mention them.

t is hard to even explain to the average European that the average American is not in fact a knuckle-dragging gun-worshipping lynch-mobbing six-day-creationist moron.

For this idiotic belief you blame the Americans? The same logic, rigorously applied, would cause you to blame the Jews for pogroms. If ‘the average European’ chooses to be an uninformed and knee-jerk bigot, that is not the fault of the people whom he is bigoted against

If you do not like this kind of stereotyping, do not encourage it

Isn’t it fun to blame the target of prejudice instead of the perpetrator? if Europeans are as culturally and intellectually superior to Americans as so many of them like to let on (and as the bigots you speak of genuinely believe), they ought to be sufficiently rational to be immune to this kind of idiocy. If they are not immune, whose fault is that?

by having "Americans talking to Americans" about Europeans in terms that are not only uncomprehending but arrogant,

It happens that I have read a great deal of writing by both Thomas Sowell and Jonah Goldberg. You can accuse them of arrogance if you wish, but I find very little to fault in their comprehension either of history or of present-day international politics. That they disagree with you in their conclusions does not prove that they are idiots; it proves that they are working from axioms different to yours. I don’t always agree with them myself — Goldberg, particularly, strikes me as a person of narrow views and straitened sympathies — and, like all human beings, they are apt to make errors of logic, but I have not found cause to complain about the quality of their comprehension.

not only arrogant but with a clear subtext of superiority

As John D. Macdonald has said: ‘Subtext is the false and erroneous claim that the critic can know anything about the personality, beliefs, or moral state of the author based on the work — sometimes as little as a paragraph or a sentence.’ Subtext, he goes on to say, does not exist. I happen to agree with him. In cases where I know by first-hand evidence what a writer’s intent was, and compare it with the intent that critics have claimed to find in the so-called subtext, I find no useful correlation between the two. As a means of divining the author’s mind, subtext is no better than reading tea-leaves.

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(since the movements in question are not only given a common identity which they did not have,

Mussolini was a left-wing Socialist until the outbreak of the Great War, at which time he took the bait of nationalism; Hitler was an open admirer of Stalin’s methods of government. It is a pity that the left-wing orthodoxy concerning Fascism and Nazism has never been fundamentally re-examined since 1945, when it ceased to be a current issue. The Communist Party line, for instance, was nearer the truth from 1939 to 1941, when it viewed Hitler as a fellow-socialist and Germany as an ally against the decadent imperialist West, than later, when it drew a largely phony diametric opposition between Nazism and Communism based purely on the fact that the two countries ruled by these systems happened to be at war. Orwell has written a great deal of sense on this topic, but I don’t suppose you have much time for Orwell, as he does not confirm your own biases.

but also opposed to American values in terms that make it clear that they must be regarded as European and typical).

There’s been a lot of this going on since the ‘typical’ Europeans nearly destroyed themselves by two gigantic fratricidal wars; and not just among Americans. It is certainly true that the U.S.A. has never succumbed to anything resembling a totalitarian form of government. Woodrow Wilson imposed a centrally-planned police state, not terribly unlike Ludendorff’s ‘War Socialism’, in 1917-18, but it was promptly dismantled as soon as the emergency of war ended — a thing no other country ever managed without outside intervention, and a sufficient testament to the resilience of the American political system and the democratic habits of the American people.

I do not say that American values are superior to European values; such a statement would be meaningless in any case, unless I specified some third standard of values by which I proposed to judge the first two — for which this is not the time or place.

Besides, if you imagine for one minute that what is said in English in the United States has no impact in the rest of the world and is not noticed there, you are living, not in Canada, but on the Moon.

Given that political cartoons printed in an unimportant newspaper in an unimportant Scandinavian country can cause rioting and bloodshed all round the world, I do not imagine any such thing. But I do deny indignantly that the Americans, or anyone else, have an obligation to censor their own political discourse to assuage the tender feelings of foreigners.

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If you’re comparing Nixon and Reagan with either the Communists or the Nazis, you’re out to lunch. As Orwell said, all such arguments amount to saying that half a loaf is the same as no bread. The political spectrum is just that — a spectrum — not a binary disjunction. Nixon, in American terms, was a long way to the Right of any party (democratic or not) that described itself as Socialist; Reagan was to the Right of Nixon; Buckley was to the Right of Reagan; and the current administration, except in foreign policy, is not on the Right at all.

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I do not deny for a moment that there is a difference of degree between Communism and Fascism. The difference in kind has been greatly exaggerated. Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia were both brutal, tyrannous, aggressively militaristic police states. The principal difference between them, as I have already tried to point out, is that in Germany economic collectivization was aborted in the interests of military efficiency, whereas in Russia it was pursued above all else (and the state was almost destroyed by invasion as a result). If Nazi rule had lasted for seventy years, as Soviet Communism did, I doubt you would be able to speak so glibly of the ‘freedom’ of German industrialists.

I could quote Hitler himself on his reasoning and intentions, and why he considered himself a genuine Socialist — a thing, please note, that I do not grant, except in the sense that he had as much right to call himself a Socialist as Stalin and his thugs. But I have not time; I have an appointment across the city in less than an hour.

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goreism.livejournal.com

Where did I compare Nixon and Reagan to the Communists or Nazis?

You claimed at all forms of collectivism are "Left" in the States. I responded that the degree of collectivism a political movement espouses isn't a reliable indicator of its position on the political spectrum. Nixon was more "collectivist" by any measure than the modern-day Labour party, whether you look at marginal tax rates, government spending, or tariff barriers. But we call Labour "left-wing" and "socialist," and call Nixon a man of the Right.

The reason is that the words "Left" and "Right" aren't defined in terms of policy positions, especially over time. They're not short-hand for describing how collectivist a movement is. The American Right has often been just as "collectivist" as the Left—only in different ways.

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Is that why you have not made the least effort to understand what I was trying to say? If so, I would ask you, next time, to take more time and actually read.

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Who is "demonstraby wrong" here? First, have the goodness not to lecture me about my own country's history, with which you are evidently less than perfectly acquainted. Second, read what I have already written on the subject. This note is a brief continuation of the protest against Goldberg's disgusting thesis, which I started here http://fpb.livejournal.com/286650.html and continued here http://fpb.livejournal.com/290645.html. YOu repeat arguments to which I already gave answers, which is something I do not enjoy.

Second: what you say about the American administration is wrong twice over. Wilson's wartime administration morphed into the ugly "red scare" phenomenon, which was only ended by his incapacitation. Far, however, from being shut down, it left the country the double-edged heritage of the FBI, led by the man Wilson had placed there, the young former lawyer Edgar Hoover, who continued his fight against reds, and later against the mobs, with the illegal methods he had learned in 1919. By comparison, France, the leader of the Alliance and the country that had given most to the defeat of the Boche, dismissed its war dictator, Clemenceau, almost as soon as the guns had ceased firing, and reverted immediately to its pre-war constitutional arrangements. (In this, in fact, it acted very much like Britain in 1945 with respect to Churchill.) So I know nothing about America? I know at least enough to know that Wilson never went back to constitutional ways, as you wrongly imply.

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Suuurrrrre Hitler was a true Socialist. He also was a true Christian and a true Pacifist - and I could quote you long and eloquent passages on both from his own speeches. To quote CS Lewis, I did not realize that I would have to deal with the disarming naivety of critics who quote as gospel things said by the master of lies to his army during war speeches. In all your readings about Hitler, did you never come across anything that suggested that truth was not exactly sacred to him? Have you never realized that he was always using words as weapons, and primarily to displace his enemies, deprive them of the ground to criticize him, and possess this ground himself - however unsuited he may have been to it? Hitler was out to destroy Christianity, but also to claim its mantle for himself. Hitler was out to create a militarized world, but he repeatedly made the most ardent, the most touching confessions of love for peace, and never stopped trying to pretend that he had simply been forced into going to war. And if you think that your way of taking Hitler seriously in his claim to Socialism is any different from that of anyone who would take his claim of pacifism seriously, compare your attitude to that of NIcholson Baker - a writer who has recently published an anthology (!) of contemporary texts trying to prove that Britain and Churchill were the warmongers and that Hitler was left with no choice but to react to their aggression.

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What JOhn D.Macdonald says is evidence of nothing, and if you are telling me that subtext cannot be read in a text, I can tell you that the subtext of your own boiling anger - reducing your usually formidable intellect to a mere tool in the service of prejudice, dragging red herrings across every track, and, God have mercy on us, taking Adolf Hitler's word as credible - can be read all too clearly here. And yes, I am angry too. I am angry because my country (who has more claim to speak about Fascism and Communism than Italy?), my history, my personal as well as collective past, have been seized upon by an ignorant alien and reshaped into the shape that pleased him in order to serve for his own party political battles. This is something that I can talk about from 45 years of life experience, and of which, frankly, you have no idea whatever. Goldberg is crassly, contemptibly, abysmally wrong; wrong on the basics, wrong on ABC, wrong as CS Lewis' Scotsman who thought that the Greek royal guard must be sound Presbyterians because they wore kilts. And nothing you say or do can change that - although it can, alas, do something to change our friendship.

Who said that Americans have to do anything? What I am asking for is an improvement of the level of debate. In other words, if someone talks trash, for the love of Heaven and of all the saints in Paradise do not allow him to go unchallenged; and do not approve his thesis only because it flatters your local concerns. There is another case going around right now, that of Ben Stein's documentary. It is essentially a stupid documentary, done by someone who has no notion of science or of argument, and as such it damages in any impartial eye the very side it claims to take. Let me just give one instance: someone discovers that two human species, which had been thought to be successive to each other, may in fact have overlapped in time. Stein claims that this means that "evolution has something to answer". Is he out of his mind? Does he seriously, as he seems to imply, think that evolution plays like chess, with a limited number of slots, and that when one of them is filled by one player, there is no place for another? Does he realize that species of vastly different ages cohabit the world today? That is the sort of reason why Expelled has been treated with contempt by the scientific community, and has thrown into despair those of us who hope for a more intelligent attitude than that of Richard Dawkins. But among conservatives, because it flattered their position, it has been taken up uncritically. The result is that the negative view of Christians among the scientific community is reinforced. That is what I was trying to say. Of course, if passing party politics and wholly inadequate systems of explanation are so precious to you that you prefer being despised by those whose minds you ought to be trying to convert, that is your business. I tried to warn you.

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dustthouart.livejournal.com

You can't really think that Goldberg et alia are calling Fascism and Communism left-wing for that reason, can you? No, they are calling them left-wing because they wish to call all bad and unpopular political philosophies left-wing.

I think this is a horrible idea for many reasons, not least of which that the concept that going into opposite extremes can have identical results is a profound truth that every person needs to carry in his or her heart. To lie and say "Well they are all left-wing and we right-wingers have no such tendencies" is dangerous.

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BTW, I would remind you that the USA, in the thirties, sprouted a good few perfectly orthodox Fascist movements: the Bund, the followers of Gerald Smith, and those of Father Coughlin. In fact, this is the reason why outdated leftist nightmares ascribe to all popular conservative preachers the desire to create their own stormtroops; because in the dark backwards and abysm of time, when feminists were feminists and men smoked, the most popular right-wing preachers in America did exactly that. Both Smith and Coughlin were full of Jewish conspiracies, hatred for Roosevelt, admiration for Hitler and Mussolini (Coughlin especially remained an unrepentant Mussolini fanboy to his death, and was still in the seventies publishing newsletters extolling Fascist notabilities such as Rachele Mussolini), and IIRC, it was one of them, not Hitler or Goebbels, who invented the slander that Roosevelt was Jewish and his real name was "Rosenfeldt". Of course, lots of water has flowed under the bridge since; and even the old leaders now outgrown by a more mature and politically adept conservative movement, such as Falwell and Oral Roberts, were far on the right side as compared to these lunatics. But Fascism with its uniforms and flags did find a home in certain areas of the US, and I assure you that these were not the trades unions or the progressive movements.

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What about for the sake of intellectual honesty? The blindness of the Europeans to the major disasters of intellectual history in the Twentieth Century is astonishing.

This insistence that fascists and Nazis are somehow alien to the progressive school of thought, but are right at home with the small-government, separations of powers, rights-of-man, free-trade and free market types has distorted European thinking for more than half a century. It causes you routinely to lump together things that are perfect opposites, and react to freedom as if it is oppression, and to welcome loss of liberty as is it is freedom.

The madness of lumping Nazis and fascists "on the Right" instead of on the Left where they have twin brothers in motive, policy, deeds, and methods continually manifests itself as a philosophical, verbal, and intellectual confusion -- a fundamental dishonesty to which the Left is wedded.

Come now: the "Right" to you merely means anyone who is not a socialist. A republican, a monarchist, a national socialist, an imperialist, a papist, or for all I know a Guelph, a Ghibelline: don't you classify them all as "Rightwing"? A libertarian semi-anarchist like Ayn Rand is "rightwing" to you, but so is a militarist totalitarian dictator thug.

Which side favors gun control; the Right or the Left? Well, the Right is opposed to Gun Control, except for the national socialists. Who is in favor of free trade, Right or Left? Well, the Right is in favor of free trade, except for El Duce, who wishes to organize all industry into one state syndicate, mandate working and labor hours, define pensions...

Who the hell are you kidding, my angry friend?

You cannot come out and say what you really stand for (totalitarianism) and what you really reject (human liberty). Calling republicans members of the same party as the national socialists allows you to propagate a mental smokescreen, where you can claim to be friends of liberty, by claiming to flee from the evils of reactionary Nazism, and seek safety in the arms of egalitarian, cradle-to-grave socialism, those friends of peace and justice.

It is all an outrageous lie, and it is high time Jonah Goldberg called you on it.

Until Europe rejects Communism with the same finality it rejected Nazism and Fascism, she will not be healed of the psychic trauma dealt her since World War One. A deeper retreat into a fantasy world of newspeak and political correctness will not do it. Admitting what socialism really is, where is comes from, and what it means, will be a healthy first step.

Otherwise, you have to embrace ever increases doses of unreality. The European Union dare not even mention Christianity in the preamble of its charter documents. That is the type of huge falsifications these accumulated small falsifications lead to.

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What nonsense. And I have already answered it. You do not seem to remember the very passages you praised only a few weeks ago. And frankly, I am tired of trying to make you understand that water is wet and that the sky is blue. You are like the proud mother at the parade who claimed that everyone else is out of step except for her Jimmy. For your information, if America disagrees with the rest of the world, it does not prove that the rest of the world is wrong. Especially when it is only one part of America that does.

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luckymarty.livejournal.com

Oh come now, John, this is undeserved. A man of calmest temper might react with wrath to accusations of dishonestly concealing support for totalitarianism and opposition to liberty. Posting such a charge here -- when you know our host's temper as well as anyone -- is an example of internet trolling, and thoroughly unworthy of you.

Having said that, I suppose I must add that the English-speaking world has not restricted itself to the Italian meaning for "fascism" since before Goldberg was even born. George Orwell pointed that out in 1946 ("Politics and the English Language"), and the situation has not improved since.

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luckymarty.livejournal.com

The left-right spectrum is largely useless as a tool of analysis, and has done a great deal of actual harm in distorting not just thought but actual political alliances. It has several competing definitions, far more often assumed than stated, within American political discourse. I doubt that there's a more stable definition in Europe.

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And I heard it said - by a convert from the left. Immediately after, I found an atrocious instance of mob behaviour in a right-wing site. This was my comment: http://fpb.livejournal.com/278501.html.

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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?

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Since you have not yet begun to explain your position, I find it hard to believe you are already weary of it.

But since I am finding it difficult to follow you, perhaps you could explain to me in simple terms, as simple as telling me water is wet, by what logic a political classification scheme puts, let us say, Reagan, who stands for limited government, the Rights of Man, rule of law, and free trade, in the same classification ("on the Right") as, let us say Mussolini, who stands for absolute government, secret police, political thuggery, centralized economic planning. Explain in simple terms, as you would explain that water is wet, how you place Mussolini in the opposite classification as Stalin ("on the Left"), when Stalin stands for absolute government, secret police, political thuggery, centralized economic planning.

Explain that to me. Keep it simple, so I can understand.

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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.

Edited Date: 2008-05-23 07:20 pm (UTC)

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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.

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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.

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mosellegreen.livejournal.com

No one else has ever gotten any constructive results out of arguing with you, no matter how overwhelming the facts against you, so I won't bother. Though this post did have the comic relief of you referring to Thomas Sowell as "arrogant".

I defriended you a long time ago. I saw the warning signs when you made silly comments on my LJ attacking my heroes Reagan and Thatcher, but all I did at that time was remove you from my political filters. I didn't defriend you altogether until, in a comment thread on my LJ, you told an Eastern Orthodox Christian that her church was guilty of "the heresy of Hebraization", I believe you called it. That was hardly antisemitic, but nonetheless a tactless remark to make on a Jew's LJ, and more to the point, if you believe that the Eastern Orthodox Church is committing heresy, you need to talk to Orthodox bishops about it, not some chick on my F-list. I'm sure you can set the Orthodox Church straight in no time.

I haven't cruised by your LJ in a long time, except once to defend one of my other friends from a highly ungentlemanly post you made about her, but I followed a link to this post today. If you're saying stuff like this on a regular basis, it makes being on your F-list highly embarrassing.

I ask you now, please do me the kindness of defriending me.

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As I recall, I warned you when you asked me if you could friend me. If you cannot bear such things as criticism of Ronald Thatcher, good luck with the world - you'll need it. I thought you had a little more guts than that.

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"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.

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" 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?

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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?

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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.

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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.

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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.

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"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.

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"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.

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