Liberal vs. Conservative
Political discussion in English can be difficult, but it
really does not have to be that way.
Many of the terms that we use should
have agreed meanings, but in reality, they are squishy at best and outright
deceptive at worst. For example, when
hear folks like Pete Townshend of The Who use conservative in describing themselves in the same way that it is
commonly used in the USA press today I am reminded that Liberal has been co-opted
on both sides of the Atlantic and conservative has been replaced the old term. Of course, these differences in terms also
change across time.
In the Seventeen and Eighteen hundreds, what passed for
Liberal is now called Classical Liberal
or libertarian in the USA, much due
to the misuse of the term by American Republicans in the 1930s to label the New
Dealers as something undesirable.
However, you will never hear a Leftist admit that the Republicans
“started it.” Today the Leftists tend to
label everything they like at any given moment as “Liberal” or “Progressive” in
public and Left in private, while labeling everything else Right Wing or fascist.
To me, the self-identified conservatives are the hardest to
pin down. Many, like Pete Townshend, say
they are conservative (in the American sense) but their self-description
screams libertarian:
When I
sing Won’t Get Fooled Again on my
own, that’s my song. And do you know
what it’s about? It’s about my family,
that’s all that it’s about.
When I
wrote that song, there was a hippie commune on Eel Pie Island, opposite my
house. Anyway, these hippies came and
they changed. Up until that time, they’d
been very gentle and very loving. And
what happened is a couple of them got quite dark. They became addicts, they started to steal
things from the garden of my house. They
would knock at the door in the middle of the night asking for money.
And
one day, I got into an argument with one of them and I just said, “I want you
to go away and I want you not to come back,” and he said, “You know, we will
liberate you,” you know. “Your job is to
support the revolution.” And I remember
saying to him, “No it fucking isn’t.”
. . .
“I’m
going to move myself and my family aside and fight you hand to hand.” So, in a sense when it has been cited as a
reactionary song, or an anti-rebellion song, or a conservative song, um, that’s
true but not quite in the way that it’s been described. I think it’s fair to call me a conservative
today, when I was I suppose quite socialist when I was young, but that’s kind
of what happens to people when they get older, I think.
I do
think that’s true, I do think that’s true.
It’s kind of what happens to people when they get older. They start to think, well “Yea, it would be
great to have a world with no war, but ya know, it ain’t that simple.”
. . .
I
think Won’t Get Fooled Again is a
symbol of human spirit, which is that, you know, just don’t, whoever you are,
don’t bully me. Don’s bully me to tell
me to fight. Don’t bully me to tell me
not to fight. Don’t bully me to tell me
to take drugs. Don’t bully me to tell me
not to take drugs. Don’t bully me to
send me to the Burning Man festival. And
don’t bully me to tell me I can’t go if I fucking want to go.
I’ve
heard all this shit before . . . – Pete Townshend, in a 2006 interview http://youtu.be/8mebWL4PlbA (accessed 25 AUG 2012, also at http://TheWho.Com someplace)
Of course, there are many a conservative who do seek a static, unchanging landscape
propped up with a scaffolding of laws, rules, and regulation, but there are
plenty out there who express the same ideas as Pete Townshend, yet they still call
themselves conservative.
One “test” of sorts I’ve seen around the internet, and I do
not recall hearing it in person, is the Pro-Life/Pro-Choice issue that
allegedly divides conservatives and libertarians. It goes something like this: “I like
libertarian ideas, but I am Pro-Life, so I have to call myself a
conservative.” With the enlightened
libertarian response being: “There are plenty of Pro-Life libertarians. Some of us are scientifically minded and
believe life begins with unique DNA (or some other principled reason).” “Ah!
So I guess I am a libertarian!”
Another is usually expressed around illegal drugs, and that one goes like this: “I am a conservative, but I really don’t care if people smoke pot. Our jails are too full of pot smokers and we need room for the real criminals.” With the enlightened libertarian response: “That sounds very libertarian. If you don’t care if someone smokes pot, then you should care about getting rid of all these stupid laws surrounding the issue and filling up our jails.”
Left vs. Right
The same confusion goes for Left versus Right, and no matter
where I wander in the text of this book, this book is about Left verses Right. One of the problems with the Left vs. Right
concept is that since its creation in revolutionary France, it has developed
two completely different meanings, which teachers and news writers like to use
interchangeably. Back in the late 18th
century, it was positively literal. The legislators who allied with the French
Monarchy sat on the right side of the aisle that ran through the center
of the legislative chamber. Those who wanted to distance themselves from the
Crown, and who advocated individual liberty sat to the left. Pretty simple, eh?
Does this mesh at all with the people who self identify as Left or Right in the USA today? Not a bit, but the mass media and education industries (government, private, and hybrids) keep using that 18th century terminology as if it were still true today. Even worse, they frequently present a mishmash of classical liberal and Mussolini Fascist bullet points and call them “Liberal,” in the next breath call Mussolini “Right Wing.” As much as Mussolini declared himself “of the right,” he was only “right” of certain Socialist sects. His version of “Right” was the opposite of the 18th century liberal, leaving him not right at all about much of anything.
You may have heard similar descriptions before, especially in a high school or college classroom when some teacher was trying to paint a policy they did not like as “authoritarian Right Wing” (like the deregulation of some industry), or they mentioned some authoritarian thing that they embraced (like strict tobacco prohibition) as “liberal” or “fair.” What they never state is that the “definition” changed in 1928 and that is what they use most often now.
Lest you think that it changed because of some gradual evolution in the way people described themselves, it did not. It changed abruptly because one political leader declared himself and his philosophy to be the de facto Left by declaring that everything else in all of politics was to his Right. That leader was Joseph Stalin, the man who perfected the non-hereditary dictatorship system as pioneered by Vladimir Lenin. Stalin, the man who refined a system that properly educated Leftists describe as Totalitarian Communism. I say the properly educated, because the vast majority of Leftists say that Totalitarian Communism is a contradiction in terms, when in reality it is the only form of Communism that has ever existed in reality, the definition is easy as pie to find in the Marxists.Org online dictionary.
By the 1930s, Mussolini was calling his movement “of the right,” solidifying Stalin’s formulation. It also revealed the worldview of many besides Stalin and Mussolini that the entire universe of government consists only of various shades of Socialism.
The State of Political Discourse Today
One of the problems with the people who discuss politics in
the USA is a complete lack of knowledge of this history. Another problem is the set of people who know
full well about this history, yet they intentionally confuse the issue. Yet a different problem is the range, or the
spectrum, that they use when talking politics.
There is the “Political Compass” that professors of everything other than history or political science
use to sell Socialism when they are supposed to be teaching math, or English,
or drum circling. They go through a long explanation, whilst dodging or
ignoring logical hoops, to tell their captive audience that, “Yes, Stalin and
Hitler were both totalitarians, but they were really opposites. Here, let’s imagine that Hitler is over here
on the right side of the circle, and Lenin is on the left side . . . And, oh,
by-the-way, my belief is not totalitarian, just kindness and sharing that every
reasonable person can agree on.” Of
course, his idea of who should be in charge of all this reasonable, voluntary, caring and sharing is someone learned in the
subject, like him and his fellow chalk dust manufacturers.
That Stupid Circle
For this book, I use a political straight line that
represents freedom, with the statist socialists at the extreme left, and the
pro-liberty, anti-statists on the far right.
In my real life I am want to call the Political Compass of Politics the “Stupid Circle of Socialism”
because the only purpose it serves is to make Totalitarian Communism look
“not-as-bad” as National Socialism, and to attempt to make National Socialists
appear to be the “polar opposite” of International Socialists. Never mind that the only observable
difference between the two is: The existence of deeds, titles to property, and
body count. The only place on that
stupid circle that is theoretically
correct is Anarchism. Yes, Marx and many
a libertarian (the polar opposite of the Marxist) like the notion of no
government at all. However, the Marxist
notion that you can grow the state to a point where it disappears is thoroughly
laughable. The libertarian anarchist
notion, of course, is the polar opposite: Eliminate government to the point
where it disappears.
With the Anarchists, you can usually tell them apart by
behavior. The Communist Anarchists are
usually destroying private property (news boxes thrown through shop windows),
yelling, screaming, cursing, and dressed in identical hoodies and bandannas to
show their individuality. The
libertarian Anarchists are usually online discussing things, and if they get
out to a demonstration they are on the quiet side, perhaps sporting a “Smash
the State” sign or banner.
The Nolan Chart
David F. Nolan, the founder of the American Libertarian
Party tried to create a new description called the Nolan Chart. It is indeed more descriptive than a single
line bounded by Left and Right and much more accurate than the Compass, he uses
Economic Freedom on the X-Axis and Personal Freedom on the Y-Axis. It places libertarians off on their own in
the upper right corner of the square, and away from the “Left and the Right”
(upper left corner, lower right corner, respectively).
If you never heard of it, I encourage you to look it
up. However, the obscurity of the Nolan
Chart makes discussion a little difficult.
This can change over time if customers (synonymous with victims) of the
education industry bring the Nolan Chart up every time some teacher starts
making Stupid Circles of Socialism in the air to ‘prove’ that International
Socialist (Communist) Totalitarianism is somehow different from National
Socialist Totalitarianism. However, the
Nolan Chart sets Economic and Personal Freedoms on different axes. Segmenting freedom is usually a bad idea, in
my opinion, which allows anti-freedom forces to impose their will on others
while pretending to “protect” freedom. I
am not going to invent a completely new protocol for describing the range of political
philosophies, others keep trying and those systems never catch on. Since I see Economic Freedom and Personal
Freedom as inseparable aspects of Liberty, they can stay on the same axis, the
Axis of Freedom.
The Axis of Freedom
When given the choice between the French definition of Left
and Stalin’s Left, I will stick with Stalin’s Left, i.e., Socialism/Communism
as the far Left. This is true for many
things, if I am given the choice between Stalin and France. Trust me it is simpler this way, but not
without a few problems. Stalin called all National Socialists (Fascists,
Nazis, Falange, Ελληνικό Εθνικό
Σοσιαλιστικό Κόμμα - Elliniko Ethniko Sosialistiko Komma, União Nacional – National Union) and
others “fascist,” the “polar opposite” of Communists, when in fact they were
only ever so slightly “Right” of the Communists, as I will show in this
book. I define the Right Wing as the
Free-Market, Laissez-Faire, Liberty loving conservatives and libertarians, as
is proper when the Left is defined as Stalinist, authoritarian/totalitarian,
command economy, individual liberty and freedom haters. Hey, I didn’t pick where the Left is, they
picked it themselves!
Social Left vs. Social Right
The social Left
and Right is a completely different animal.
They can appear at either end of the political spectrum and the political spectrum is what we are
talking about here, not the social spectrum.
Some have said that it is impossible to be socially liberal
and fiscally (public finance) conservative, because a liberal fiscal policy is required to support social liberal
public programs. In short, that is a
load of crap. Being socially liberal
only means that you do not care what someone else does as long as they are
doing it to themselves and/or their own property. It does
not mean that the rest of society has to encourage or pay for it. For example, I do not have to care either way
if you use heroin, but I do not want the government supplying it to you. I don’t want you using it in my home or
business either. If the time comes when
you decide to stop using heroin, I don’t want to pay for the treatment program. As for whom you diddle, same deal, that is up
to you. Just don’t do it on my
lawn. Easy, peasy.
Social Conservatives and Social Liberals may or may not bring their likes and dislikes onto the political battlefield, but if they do you do not have to guess about it, they usually announce their desires loudly and proudly. Everybody has likes and dislikes in areas of fashion, religion, sex, and other personal proclivities, but all do not impose their likes and dislikes on others. Yes, we are few in numbers, but we do exist and we are busily leaving you alone and expect the same. Every person who yearns for speech codes, dress codes, religious law, or what have you - enforced by the government - is on the political Left and those who want to keep government out of those, and most other things, is on the political Right.
Frequently this issue raises its head in religion, at least in the USA. Some group, like the Muslim Brotherhood, will get headlines and brief multimedia mentions when they decide the government needs to impose a religious belief on everybody in a jurisdiction. This is statist-leftist behavior. Oh, and if you are under the impression that it is a Democrat vs. Republican thing, you are tragically misinformed. Every single advocacy of a marriage law is a Left Wing proposition. Getting government out of marriage is a Right Wing proposition.
Beyond the passage above, I am not dealing much with social issues other than within the framework of liberty.
Not Much New Here
I am, by far, not the first person to point these things
out. Nobel Memorial Prize winner
Friedrich Hayek said a lot of it in his 1930s masterpiece, The Road to Serfdom, while state Socialism was on the rise. John A. Stormer detailed much of it in his
1964 classic None Dare Call It Treason. Milton Friedman said it throughout his
career. Jonah Goldberg said a lot of it
in Liberal Fascism in 2008, as well
as in his columns in National Review
and the Los Angeles Times (I own the
web domain http://Liberal-Fascism.Com
but I had nothing to do with his book other than reading and enjoying
it). Daniel Pipes at Harvard has said a
lot of it. The Black Book of Communism bursts with it. Brian Doherty, the current top historical
scholar of the libertarian movement, says it in a different way but he still
says it. His seminal work Radicals for Capitalism: A Freewheeling
History of the Modern American Libertarian Movement makes the point that
libertarians are averse to the inclusion into the catchall “conservative”
category. His descriptive approach, like
that of Milton Friedman’s, is what I prefer too. Those sources are not perfect and where I
have found errors, I present you with the correct information.
Even though much of the information in this book is, or was, easy enough to find on the internet, much of it has “evaporated” and is referenced through old-school print material when not available in internet archives. Man cannot research by Google alone. While the internet is a great tool, it is only a tool. Sometimes internet sources are authoritative, like Marxists.Org when the topic is Marxist theory and definitions. Other sources are mostly conjecture, like Snopes.Com, and still others fall somewhere in the middle, like Wikipedia.Org. PBS has excellent facts buried in shows, which are trying to prove something or other, which their own facts do not quite support. You can find leads to plenty of original source material in each, but their conclusions should not be taken as gospel.
For example, Hitler’s speeches in full are difficult to find online. There are many quotes and excerpts, used by different people to make different points, but the full speeches are impossible to find. Imagine my amazement when I found a book titled The Speeches of Adolph Hitler April 1922 – August 1939 from the Oxford University Press - 1942, in of all places, a government university library! One would think someone so despised as Hitler would have his own words strewn across the internet for all to see. Not so. One can easily find excerpts that somehow miss his self-identified Socialism, but finding whole speeches from his early political days and translated in the era when they were delivered still requires a visit to a dead tree museum.
A recent convention in the way people read is on or near an
internet enabled device, so as you may have already noticed, the web address of
sources are given with items referenced, along with the date when they were
found, in all versions of this book.
Since the Senator Al Frankens of the world are so baffled by footnotes
and endnotes (http://lyingliar.com/?p=39
accessed 09 JUN 2012), full context of historical documents and speeches are
given in the body when possible. In the
case of long, rambling speeches/manifestos/platforms, I have placed them online
for the reader to examine in depth. For
example, photographs from a book of a Hitler speech or two can be found on the
blog, Teddy Roosevelt’s Progressive Party Platform has a blog of its own (http://SuperSocialism.Blogspot.Com)
that I maintain, with text and a link back to the original magazine pages. Additionally, I submitted all links to
Archive.Org so they could be crawled (if allowed) and retained for readers to
access as I found them.
One thing you will notice, if you have not noticed already, is that the farther Left a person is the more they will dismiss facts that challenge their beliefs. It is another way the Left and the Right distinguish themselves from one another. The educational and news industries teach this in the opposite way than you or I experience in real life.
In my personal experience, people of the Left who claimed to be my friends from high school and college have gone into online rages for much less than that and here are two mild examples: One college “friend” unfriended me on Facebook after they ranted toward me just because I would not bash Sarah Palin in a discussion. It was not even a topic that I was disagreeing with them about, other than the pathological hatred for the woman, and the female specific profanity laced ‘prose.’ I am not sure what was going on in the broader internet world, but several other people I know had the same experience around that time.
Months later a high school friend, who is Jewish and a
self-identified Socialist, Godwined
himself by accusing me of calling him a Nazi, in a discussion where he was the only person who used the
term. From what I could tell, he was
upset that anybody dare mention that National Socialists were (and still are)
Socialists and he was going to shut me up by threatening our friendship. He did not sound like much of a friend to me,
so I never responded to him again. Note
also, I did not unfriend either of them from Facebook, that is what they did and I did not stand in their
way.
Some recent research indicates that this may be a real trend, but as with much research only time will tell if it is worth banking on: http://pewinternet.org/Reports/2012/Social-networking-and-politics/Main-findings/Social-networking-sites-and-politics.aspx#
This is not to say that people on the real Right cannot be annoying, difficult, rude, tedious, jerks. Ayn Rand was unquestionably a member of the political Right as defined here and the consensus is that she was a royal bitch in person. This seems to be the most obvious trait that many of her fans retain, even emulate, decades after her death.
In the current era Dr. Ron Paul, Republican House of Representatives member from Texas, seems to be a gentle and genuinely nice person. However, his fans (see the online forums of his followers) can be the rudest, crudest people on the internet. Dr. Paul seems to attract more than his share of outlandish conspiracy believers too, who launch into rude behavior when disagreed with. Nick Gillespie, Editor-in-Chief of Reason.TV, is pretty darn close to being the polar opposite of Stalin, yet he does not consider himself to be “Right Wing.”
This is an all too common phenomena through history. A comparable example on the Left would be John Maynard Keynes, from whom Keynesian Economics was born. Keynesian Economics is the theory that drives all but the most extreme Leftist economic though and, in many corners, has displaced Marxism as the preferred system to enslave the masses. At least it is the preferred initial steppingstone. However, John Maynard Keynes never advocated the extreme practices and scale that the Nazis, Fascists, Democratic Socialists, Japanese, or Red Chinese eventually adopted. He even urged the USA and the United Kingdom to stop taking his ideas to the extreme in his last writings before he died in 1946. (Yes, he thought their spending was extreme then.) Yet, this does not stop his fans from being the most liberty-hating people on earth.
A word about conservatives and libertarians, i.e., the Right. While they are not the same, they are not mutually exclusive either and they are substantially on the same “side” of politics. I am an Economic Liberal, a libertarian; on a few issues, I am a conservative, sharing things I like from each and tend to approach things from the libertarian perspective. In the libertarian spectrum, I am in virtual lockstep with the late freedom advocate and Economist, Milton Friedman.
Even when I was on “the Left,” I believed many of the things that Friedman expressed, long before I knew that he expressed them. In recent years, I was convinced by his arguments that some free-market ideas I thought impossible really are attainable if given the right path for implementation. Conservatives tend to approach things from a statist direction, but they do not want the state doing that much. Libertarians approach things from the other direction, they see government as a last resort and whenever a political discussion erupts we ask, “Why should the government even be involved?”
I
never characterize myself as a conservative economist. As I understand the
English language, conservative means conserving, keeping things as they are. I
don’t want to keep things as they are. The true conservatives today are the
people who are in favor of ever-bigger government. The people who call
themselves liberals today — the New Dealers — they are the true conservatives,
because they want to keep going on the same path we’re going on. I would like
to dismantle that. I call myself a liberal in the true sense of liberal, in the
sense in which it means (inaudible) and pertaining to freedom. Now, that brings
me to your second point. One of the great mistakes is to judge policies and
programs by their intentions rather than their results. We all know a famous
road that is paved with good intentions. The people who go around talking about
their soft heart — I share their — I admire them for the softness of their
heart, but unfortunately, it very often extends to their head as well, because
the fact is that the programs that are labeled as being for the poor, for the
needy, almost always have effects exactly the opposite of those which their
well-intentioned sponsors intend them to have. - Milton Friedman, appearance on
The Open Mind broadcast in New York
City on WPIX, Channel 11 Sunday, December 7, 1975, 10:30 – 11:00 P.M. Moderator/Host
Richard D. Heffner
(Transcribed
http://tackyraccoons.com/2009/06/03/milton-friedmans-brilliance/ accessed 17 August 2012)
The easiest path to the book blog is http://Liberal-Fascism.Com or http://SuperDuperSocialism.Blogspot.Com,
which contains more on-topic information along with all comments, pro or con,
minus SPAM.
There is a lot more to this, as you will see in the book that follows.
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