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Stop calling white supremacists “far right” — 46 Comments

  1. The whole concept of “left” vs. “right” needs to be re-evaluated. Historically it derives from the Ancien Regime, where the right wing of the French parliament was the section for the authoritarian, pro-Church-and-State royalists; while the left wing is where the rebellious dissenters sat. If any group is authoritarian these days, it’s the modern so-called “left.”

  2. Jonah Goldberg, in his “Liberal Fascism,” argued convincingly that the fascists, including Nazis, were the “right wing” of the socialist movement, national socialists, and the Soviets were the “left wing” of the socialist movement as international socialists. The term “right wing” stuck. It came to be identified with the ugly racist Nazi genocide, forgetting the economic central control aspects of the movement. The identification of economic conservatives as the continuation of the fascist and Nazi racist movements makes no sense at all. It was done deliberately as a political ploy, back to FDR. “Right wing” or “fascist” meant “our opponents” without regard to their actual beliefs.

  3. Jonah Goldberg wrote a book on fascism. I only skimmed the first few chapters, but he explains that its use as an epithet was largely a creation of Stalin to use as a cudgel against the Axis leaders.

    Not mentioned at this blog previously I think, was the weird claim in the El Paso shooter’s manifesto that he is pro diversity, but anti racial mixing. He thinks that the diversity should stay diverse and not mix into an increasingly homogeneous society. He even cuts a break for Hispanics who’s families have lived in the U.S. for a couple generations or more. But he doesn’t want more to come into the U.S.

    OK, I agree with Neo that he likely doesn’t know what he is talking about, but my point is that he not a typical Dylan Roof white supremacist. He is a eco-footprint worrying eco-terrorist who also happens to be a racist, though not exactly a white-supremacist.

    Need I mention that this guy had not the slightest respect for the sanctity of human life; something that used to very commonplace in the U.S. and probably isn’t anymore?
    _____

    When I moved to central coast CA a few decades ago, I subscribed to the SF Chronicle back when investigative journalism was still popular. They ran a multi-part series on big non-profit environmental groups. One theme was the big-business aspect of it, but another was the two faction war raging within the Sierra Club.

    One faction wanted unlimited immigration to the U.S. to promote Democrat political dominance. The other faction saw each migration from some poor farm in Oaxaca or Guatemala to the U.S. as another big expansion in humanity’s global eco-footprint.

  4. In the end, I believe that Hitler actually is unclassifiable as either right or left. He advocated a unique combination of extremely bad and even evil ideas

    completely wrong… it means you have not read him or such things but more of the apologetics… ie. the molded story in which lots of things are left out to create a self serving narrative for each group trying to exploit it!!!

    ie, how can you have a whole image, if only anne franke is allowed and the rest of it is clipped off to create the image of kim phucs running from the “usa”???

    i even gave you the lineage of waht to read!!!
    but by NOT reading it, you get to make bad wrong claims like above

    you confuse the hiding of the socialist program that came after to rehabilitate “the dream that would not die”!!!!!

    in fact, they have confused what it is so much, that you cant point to it any more
    they have confused you so much, you thing hitler is indescribable? how so?
    he is a fascist… the third way.. the marraige of communism and capitalism..

    he is CLASSICAL… not inscrutable

    in fact, its a repeat… but for 10 years you have yet to read one thing i suggested!
    in fact i am quite sure that the stuff below, is unknown to you…
    This despite my careful adding more and more information, terms, words, etc..

    Magyarization the autonym of Hungarians—was an assimilation or acculturation process by which non-Hungarian nationals came to adopt the Hungarian culture and language, either voluntarily or due to social pressure, often in the form of a coercive policy

    WE ARE IN THAT PROCESS NOW…

    it was from THAT engels wrote the MAGYARR struggle..
    Neue Rheinsiche Zeitung No. 194 January 1849

    “the struggle” was how to change the people… and engels thought hte maguars would do it with a world war… whipingo out the Volkenfaille… AFTER The wars to do that failed, they switched tothe long march, abortion, etc..

    In the era of national awakening, the Hungarian intellectuals transposed the concepts of the so-called “Political Nation” and Nation State from the Western European countries (especially the principles of the similarly highly multiethnic 18th century France), which included the idea of linguistic and cultural assimilation of minorities.

    these minorities were racist for not wanting to give up their culture… the SAME DEFINITION being used against white men and america who doesnt want to change into communist state… you just dont understand their terminology, usage and HIDDEN HISTORY you dont want to read

    During the long nineteenth century, the Hungarian politicians and intellectuals stood firmly on the contemporary liberal conception of the nationality question, which was based solely on individualism. With the idea of individualism, they tried to reduce the minority question to a simple linguistic rights question; thus they denied the collective nationality rights and any plans for ethnic autonomous territories

    By the end of the 19th century, the state apparatus was entirely Hungarian in language, as were business and social life above the lowest levels.

    [ah, so its akin to the caucasians making it white culture.. and wanting people to assimilate… the process of moving people to cities to change them.. read below how the people in flyover are not so smart cause they were on the periphery]

    The Magyarization of the towns had proceeded at an astounding rate. Nearly all middle-class Jews and Germans and many middle-class Slovaks and Ruthenes had been Magyarized.
    [snip]
    The percentage of the population with Hungarian as its mother tongue grew from 46.6% in 1880 to 54.5% in 1910. The 1910 census (and the earlier censuses) did not register ethnicity, but mother tongue (and religion) instead, based on which it is sometimes subject to criticism. However, most of the Magyarization happened in the centre of Hungary and among the middle classes, who had access to education; and much of it was the direct result of urbanization and industrialization. It had hardly touched the rural populations of the periphery, and linguistic frontiers had not shifted significantly from the line on which they had stabilized a century earlier

    and compare what they do to change you.. to whats happening now to the target culture
    anyone who resisted Magyarization was, indeed, subject to political and cultural handicaps, they were not subject to the kinds of civic and fiscal tricks (prejudicial court proceedings, overtaxation, biased application of social and economic legislation)

    Hitler picked it up and turned the Magyarr struggle to My struggle
    he is classical marxist except that we dont read marx… we read stuff way way edited and clipped and retold many times which leave out the inconvenient stuff, and leave that as a way for people to indentify fellow travelers

    the problme is that you think socialism and communism are not the same thing
    marx, engels and others had no such mental image put in their heads, they had no such illusions…

    if hitler was so unclassical as to be inscrutable, why were hitler and stalin teaming up to fulfill the prophecies of engels in the magyarr struggle?

    why dont you know that book and other key books?
    not for any lack of my trying to clue you in..

  5. The Nazis were National Socialists – socialist bound together by nationalism.

    The Soviets were International Socialists – socialists bound together by ideology.

    Easy peasy.

    Why did they fight? Well, there’s no fight like a family fight. They fought over who got to be in charge, of course.

  6. Good point, Neo.

    Do you think we could get away with calling Islamic terrorists or terror-supporting Muslims “far left”? Yet, if they vote or were forced to vote in a Western country today, they would no doubt support the most left-wing candidate, even if that meant being on the same political side as groups they regularly outspokenly denounce (homosexuals, Jews, etc). So as much as “white supremacists” are “far right”, pious Muslims (aka “Islamic supremacists”*) are “far left”.

    *By definition, if you are a pious Muslim, you believe that Muslims are superior to the infidels.

  7. “[A]ny political or social movement which challenged the hegemonic position of the Magyar ruling classes was liable to be repressed or charged with ‘treason’…, ‘libel’ or ‘incitement of national hatred’.

    This was to be the fate of various Slovak, South Slav [e.g. Serb], Romanian and Ruthene cultural societies and nationalist parties from 1876 onward

    this is where they get nationalist ideas from.. not patriotism..
    and the term racism was first coined by trotsky talking about the above situation as its lessons were part of the history of the birth of the russian revolution and soviet nation.

    Heavy dominance of ethnic minority elected liberal parties in the Hungarian Parliament

    The ethnic minorities had the key-role in the political maintenance of the compromise in Hungary, because they were able to vote the pro-compromise liberal parties into the position of the majority/ruling parties of the Hungarian parliament. [snip]
    The nationalist Hungarian parties – which were supported by the overwhelming majority of ethnic Hungarian voters – have always remained in the opposition.

    The Hungarian secondary school is like a huge machine, at one end of which the Slovak youths are thrown in by the hundreds, and at the other end of which they come out as Magyars.

    every part we are experiencing that the germans did too was done as mayarization

    In 1881 the “Central Society for Name Magyarization” (Központi Névmagyarositó Társaság) was founded in 1881 in Budapest. The aim of this private society was to provide advice and guidelines for those who wanted to Magyarize their surnames

    you have to spell russians as Rusyns to get anywhere.

    For those places that had not been known under Hungarian names in the past, new Hungarian names were invented and used in administration instead of the former original non-Hungarian names. Examples of places where non-Hungarian origin names were replaced with newly invented Hungarian names

    oh, you mean like we change names of heroes, take down statutes, give streets new names?

    Jews

    In the nineteenth century, the Neolog Jews were located mainly in the cities and larger towns. They arose in the environment of the latter period of the Austro-Hungarian Empire – generally a good period for upwardly mobile Jews, especially those of modernizing inclinations. In the Hungarian portion of the Empire, most Jews (nearly all Neologs and even most of the Orthodox) adopted the Hungarian language as their primary language and viewed themselves as “Magyars of the Jewish persuasion”.
    -=-=-=-
    After the emancipation of Jews in 1867, the Jewish population of the Kingdom of Hungary (as well as the ascending German population) actively embraced Magyarization, because they saw it as an opportunity for assimilation without conceding their religion. (We also have to point out that in the case of the Jewish people that process had been preceded by a process of Germanization earlier performed by Habsburg rulers)
    Stephen Roth writes, “Hungarian Jews were opposed to Zionism because they hoped that somehow they could achieve equality with other Hungarian citizens, not just in law but in fact, and that they could be integrated into the country as Hungarian Israelites. The word ‘Israelite’ (Hungarian: Izraelita) denoted only religious affiliation and was free from the ethnic or national connotations usually attached to the term ‘Jew’. Hungarian Jews attained remarkable achievements in business, culture and less frequently even in politics.

    -=-=-=-

    there are tons of literature that would make things easy to understand
    they are verboten… no need to burn them… unless someone you regard and respect suggests them… no one will read them.. regardless of the calrity they would bring

    this is why the revolution never is prevented
    why it has no brakes
    and why no one can stop it and myst play through

  8. The Russia thing didn’t work on Trump so now it’s he’s a racist/Nazi/white supremacist.

  9. Left Opposition – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Left_Opposition / Part of a series on
    Trotskyism

    One of the primary disputes was on the possibility of sustaining a Socialist revolution without world wide revolution. The left opposition supported the permanent revolution theory, while the right supported Socialism is one country.

    In 1927 the members of the Left Opposition were expelled from the Soviet Communist party (CSPU), and forced to leave the Soviet Union. Shortly thereafter the International Left Opposition was created.

    Right Opposition https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right_Opposition // Part of a series on
    Marxism

    It is also the name given to “right-wing” critics within the Communist movement internationally, particularly those who coalesced in the International Communist Opposition, regardless of whether they identified with Bukharin and Rykov. However, in this case the designation of Right Opposition refers to the position of this movement relative to other communist movements in the traditional spectrum; as relative to contemporary political centrism, the Right Opposition is still very firmly on the left.

    Centrist Marxism – Centrism has a specific meaning within the Marxist movement, referring to a position between revolution and reformism.

    For instance, the Independent Social Democratic Party of Germany and the Independent Labour Party (ILP) were both seen as centrist because they oscillated between advocating reaching a socialist economy through reforms and advocating revolution. The parties that belonged to the “so-called” Two-and-a-half and Three-and-a-half Internationals, who could not choose between the reformism of the social democratic Second International and the revolutionary politics of the communist Third International, were also exemplary of centrism in this sense. They included the Spanish Workers’ Party of Marxist Unification (POUM), the ILP, and Poale Zion.

    this paragraph should let you know waht your seeing…
    For Trotskyists and other revolutionary Marxists, the term centrist in this sense has a pejorative association. They often describe centrism in this sense as opportunistic since it argues for a revolution at some point in the future, but urges reformist practices in the meantime. Libertarian socialists and anarchists also tend to view any reformism as political opportunism because they view reformism as being incapable of effecting structural changes to social organization

    The term centrism also denotes positions held by some of the Bolsheviks during the 1920s. In this context, centrism refers to a position between the Right Opposition, which supported the New Economic Policy and friendly relations with capitalist countries; and the Left Opposition, which supported an immediate transition to a socialist economy and world revolution. By the end of the 1920s, the two opposing factions had been defeated by Joseph Stalin, who eventually gained enough support from members of both factions through the application of various ideas formulated by the factions’ various leaders, notably Leon Trotsky and Nikolai Bukharin.

  10. Artfldgr:

    I’ve read voluminously about Hitler and the Nazis, some of it in their own words. That in the end he is unclassifiable as not right or left does NOT mean he didn’t take many many of his ideas from the left. I have written several previous posts on that.

  11. Right, Cornhead. Out of ideas, they’re going to try to get elected by calling Trump and his supporters “white supremacists.” If anyone who voted for Trump last time was wavering, this slander will make them angry enough to become “broken glass” Trump voters in 2020 (would walk over broken glass to vote for him).

  12. Twenty-one Conditions
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twenty-one_Conditions

    Third camp
    The third camp, also known as third camp socialism or third camp Trotskyism, is a branch of socialism that aims to oppose both capitalism and Stalinism by supporting the organised working class as a “third camp”.

    The term arose early during World War II and refers to the idea of two “imperialist camps” competing to dominate the world: one led by the United Kingdom and France and supported by the United States; and the other led by Nazi Germany and supported by Fascist Italy.

    [bet you have no idea of this term!!!]

    From the 1930s and beyond, Leon Trotsky and his American acolyte James P. Cannon described the Soviet Union as a “degenerated workers’ state”, the revolutionary gains of which should be defended against imperialist aggression despite the emergence of a gangster-like ruling stratum, the party bureaucracy.

    Dissidents in the Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party, witnessing the collaboration of Joseph Stalin and Adolf Hitler in the invasion and partition of Poland and Soviet invasion of the Baltic states, argued that the Soviet Union had actually emerged as a new social formation, neither capitalist nor socialist. Adherents of this view, espoused most explicitly by Max Shachtman and closely following the writings of James Burnham and Bruno Rizzi

    and what your seeing now with the immigration games and sucha round the world?

    Shachtman and his co-thinkers argued for the establishment of a broad “third camp” to unite the workers and colonial peoples of the world in revolutionary struggle against the imperialism of the German-Soviet-Italian and Anglo-American-French blocs.

    [snip]

    With the demise of fascism in World War II and the emergence of Soviet-controlled governments in Central and Eastern Europe, the “three camps” conception was modified. Now the leading imperialist camp was held to be that of the chief capitalist powers—the United States, the United Kingdom and France—with the Soviet Union consigned to a second imperialist camp.

  13. Three Worlds Theory [Mao]
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Worlds_Theory

    The First world comprises the US and the USSR, the superpower countries respectively engaged in imperialism and in social imperialism. The Second world comprises Japan and Canada, Europe and the countries of the global North–South divide. The Third world comprises the countries of Africa, Latin America, and continental Asia.

    In 1974, at the United Nations, the Vice-Premier Deng Xiaoping applied the Three Worlds Theory, at the New International Economic Order special session on the problems of raw materials and development, to explain the PRC’s economic co-operation with non-communist countries

    so at least you can get a clue about china… and why they are working with us economically… its NOT because they are changing.

  14. A more appropriate scale measures freedom and slavery. If you support government control of stuff, you’re a supporter of slavery; doesn’t matter if it’s left or right. If you support the right of individuals to run their own lives, you’re a supporter of freedom.

  15. “Ingot9455 on August 5, 2019 at 3:31 pm said:

    The Nazis were National Socialists – socialist bound together by nationalism.

    The Soviets were International Socialists – socialists bound together by ideology.

    Easy peasy. …”

    International, and National, socialism.

    Yes I think that you and Goldberg and a couple of others here have advanced useful formulations. Many years ago now, back when I was arguing the topic with anti-2nd Amendment types who liked to throw around the term “Nazi” and contrast it with their beloved welfare-statist socialism, I used the clumsier “ethic” and “pan-ethnic socialism” terms in order to try and express the same notion.

    But, as you imply, the Socialist International provides us with a ready made one-half of a somewhat more convenient verbal formulation.

    Even more than statism per se though, what all these socialist ideologies share in common is the denial that the individual the locus of moral value, and the conviction that he is primarily an element of and belongs to – in a possessive and proprietary sense – the community; however that particular collective is conceived of.

    In this sense, “socialism” is a doctrine that expresses a particular philosophical anthropology descriptively on the one hand, and prescriptively, on the other.

    When thought of in this way, the distinction between National Socialism and say, Falangism, becomes bright and clear.

  16. One big reason Hitler and the Nazis are seen as right-wing is that many of them came from the German National People’s Party, the major conservative and nationalist party in Weimar Germany, and also because Hitler forged an alliance with that party.

  17. I believe that Hitler actually is unclassifiable as either right or left

    The Nazis were an amalgam of traditional German nationalism and social welfare with fascist economic ideas and greatly magnified antisemitism. There were far more varieties of fascism than communism in the world, I suspect because the USSR did not tolerate deviation, whereas fascism emphasized national identity.

    Disclaimer, I am not an expert on the subject, but that is my impression.

  18. The muddied waters run deep — “Bismarck Tried to End Socialism’s Grip — By Offering Government Healthcare”:

    It was 1881, and German chancellor Otto von Bismarck had a serious socialist problem. He’d passed the Anti-Socialist Law of 1878, which banned Social Democratic meetings, associations and newspapers, but he couldn’t remove the party outright from the Reichstag. The socialists still found favor with too many constituents.

    The political climate of the era was a result of German unification, the period stretching across the 19th century and culminating in 1871, when 26 small states, principalities, duchies and territories formed the German Empire. But thanks to the German constitution, Bismarck didn’t have to worry about pleasing the populace; his chancellorship was approved solely by Wilhelm I. But with the European economy in free fall, a nearly successful assassination attempt on the kaiser, and a short-lived but bloody socialist uprising in France, Bismarck was determined to undermine a party that he saw as a danger to the volatile new nation state. So the Iron Chancellor came up with a masterful plan: beat the socialists at their own game by offering health insurance to the working class.

    “That was a calculation,” says historian Jonathan Steinberg, the author of Bismarck: A Life. “It had nothing to do with social welfare. He just wanted some kind of bribery to get social democratic voters to abandon their party.”

    Bismarck didn’t care what the program — Krankenversicherungsgesetz — was called or how it was described, as long as citizens knew that the state — his state — coined the idea. “Call it socialism or whatever you like,” Bismarck said during the 1881 Reichstag public policy and budget debates. “It is the same to me.”

    So in 1883, with the passage of the Health Insurance Law, Bismarck made Germany into a welfare state — all to stymie the socialists. The law was the first national system in the world, Steinberg says. Both employers and employees paid into insurance funds, and the German government verified workers’ enrollment by comparing employer records with fund membership lists, threatening employers of uninsured workers with fines.

  19. “The Nazis were an amalgam of traditional German nationalism and social welfare with fascist economic ideas and greatly magnified antisemitism …”

    You and Ann make functionally related points. And though it has been many years since I reviewed the ideological development of anti-liberalism (anti-classical liberalism) in Germany, it is interesting to note that it was an explicit movement in law, philosophy, and politics the mid and late 19th century.

    This explicitly and consciously anti-western, anti-freemarket, anti-Christian ideology, has probably not received consistent enough emphasis when evaluating the mentality that later exploded in Germany.

    It bears review occasionally, with Rechtsstaat ( a rule of law or constitutional polity) and Kulturkampf being a couple well-known keywords in this area.

  20. What!!!!

    LOL

    As I was typing my comment pointing to an edifice … Ann was reviewing the architecture

  21. I continually see references to “right wing fascism” despite the fact that Mussolini, who developed fascism, was a socialist and communist. Fascism was simply the Italian version of communism, communism lite, if you will.

  22. Ray:

    This is the equation from the left and the MSM:

    Everybody knows that the right is racist. So a racist ideology is always right-wing. Once that gets hammered into people’s heads, the rest is irrelevant. It becomes a knee-jerk thing.

  23. The truth of the matter is irrelevant because the left will never acknowledge the truth of the matter. It’s too useful a bludgeon to abandon. The ends justify the means.

    Only the left acknowledging the truth can end the conflict but ending the conflict short of unchallengeable power is anathema because their dogma demands they need that control to shape mankind and the world into their image of how things should be.

  24. I looked briefly at the German National People’s Party, called a “conservative” party in the Weimar Republic, and I can’t see much, offhand, to make it “conservative” in the modern American sense, that is, people following generally the Austrian economic school and advocating personal freedom rather than group entitlements.

    I think much of the problem is the fluid definitions of various schools of thought. In the US, today’s “conservative” is yesterday’s “liberal.” I’m not sure there are very many such conservatives in western Europe today.

  25. Everything to modernists that scares or, literally, triggers them is “far right.” Secular fundamentalists living and breathing right before our eyes … Cute.

  26. Jonah Goldberg wrote a book (named Liberal Fascism). …He explains that (right-wing) use(d) as an epithet was largely a creation of Stalin to use as a cudgel against the Axis leaders.
    TommyJay (3:20 pm)

    Under Stalin, the Soviet Socialists engaged in deliberate liquidation of undesirable ethnicities (e.g., the Holodomor).
    Under Hitler, the National Socialists engaged in deliberate liquidation of undesirable ethnicities (e.g., the Holocaust).

    What else does a college-educated AntiFa need to know in order to prove that the two socialisms are completely different?!

    By the way, as all socialisms converge more and more strongly down at the maximum totalitarianism corner of the Diamond Map political map the conceptual and ideological distance that separates each of them becomes tinier and tinier.

    IngSoc has always been at war with Eurasia, no wait, it’s East Asia, now Eurasia again. Likewise, Stalin could easily flip-flop between declaring the Nazis implacable enemies and eternal friends because the two red-flag-flying* ideologies were morally indistinguishable.

    * Red has always been the color of socialist parties. Both the Soviet Socialists and National Socialists displayed banners that consisted of a logo on a red field.

  27. Left and Right now mean only one thing
    Left: In alignment with Marxists
    Right: Opposes Marxists

    Far-right simply means those groups who will more likely fight Marxists… the white supremacists do so quite strongly compared to the garden variety conservative or libertarian

  28. Right and left are inaccurate ways of viewing politics. A much more accurate way is to view a spectrum with anarchy (no government) on one end and Totalitarianism (all-consuming government) on the other end.

    In the middle is government by law, with protected individual rights and ordered liberty.

    Thus there is little difference between Nazi Germany, Soviet Russia, and Communist China. Why people are obsessed with parsing the differences between them baffles me.

  29. Bilwick has the right (excuse the pun) of it. The political terms “right” & “left” have been broken for over 200 years. Over 90% of the comments in this thread argue over whether Nazis are “really” right or left. It’s angels on pins territory.

    I’ll add that arguing that the NSDAP was really “left” because they put the word socialist in their party name is severely flawed thinking. By that logic North Korea really is a democratic republic.

    The only model I’ve seen that makes any sense are Pournelle’s political axes. He points out that Communism & Fascism overlap in many ways, but in others they’re heterodox. For example, while they’re both statist, Communism is rationalistic (fetishizes logic and science) & pacifistic, while Fascism is irrationalistic (emphasizes fate and the folk) & jingoistic.

    A large number of conservatives love to cite Liberal Fascism because it gives them an excuse to place all “bad” ideologies on “the left,” which is just a variation of Neo’s example of white supremacists are of “the right.”

  30. Left and Right are inadequate descriptions. A better, yet likely still incomplete spectrum, is total governmental control on one end and anarchy on the other. Consequently, Democrats and Republicans are somewhere in the middle.

  31. Ray has it. Ultimately, all else is pandering to those who would like to establish and normalize their pet statist tyranny while demonizing everything else.

  32. Starting with the individual and progressing to state organization, the political spectrum is from anarchy to totalitarianism, with a left-right nexus. In America, it is from anarchy to libertarianism on the right, conservativism in the center, and progressivism (i.e. monotonic) and liberalism (i.e. divergence) on the left. The American declaration and constitution do not recognize diversity (i.e. color judgments including color supremacy). #PrinciplesMatter #HateLovesAbortion

  33. “Communism is rationalistic (fetishizes logic and science) & pacifistic, while …”

    Marxism, you probably mean. Or at least it claims to be; whatever it was that was meant by “scientific” (which was not empiricism) as Marx used the term, and however you explain Lysenkoism

  34. The “Right vs. Left” has always been a huge oversimplification.

    The “Right” as defined by the popular media includes White Supremacists, traditional Christians, Libertarians, Capitalists, Classical Liberals, Nationalists, and probably a few others that I can’t think of right now. There’s no logical connection between any of these groups apart from their opposition to the Progressive agenda. The fundamental principles of these various groups aren’t just different, they’re completely unrelated to each other. What a traditional Christian cares about is not what a Libertarian cares about, and vice versa (although it is theoretically possible for the same person to care about both).

    Meanwhile, the “Left” includes Anarchists, “Social Justice Warriors”, Atheists, Socialists/Communists, LGBTQ Activists… and lately Islamists; and again, there’s no logical connection between any of these groups except their opposition to “The Right”.

    The model is an unfortunate legacy of the French Revolution and probably wasn’t really accurate even them. I’d say it should be abandoned, but that’s not very likely – it’s too convenient to people who’d rather argue than think.

  35. So richf, might one properly analogize these political designations to what astronomers now call asterisims (what we also name constellations, generally speaking)? I don’t see how it’s helpful, really, but still, it does begin to appear an analog.

  36. I agree with commenters above who say that the spectrum should be based on how much government control is favored.

  37. “The terrorists of the far left would like nothing better than to make the President of the United States a prisoner in the White House. Well let me just set them straight. As long as I am president, no band of violent thugs is going to keep me from going out and speaking with the American people whenever they want to hear me, or whenever I want to go!”

    suprise! which president…

  38. Craig Strange on August 6, 2019 at 2:55 am said:

    Left and Right now mean only one thing
    Left: In alignment with Marxists
    Right: Opposes Marxists

    NAIL ON THE HEAD AWARD!!!!!
    actually, it was ALWAYS that!!!

    the point was to change communism from a point on a spectrum
    or a circle or some sort.

    it changed communism into a POLAR ideology…
    setting capitalism as the other POLAR ideology

    so… under this world view, they stand on the south pole and every direction is north
    for them, the question is which north… not what direction

    this is also why they remain unchanged at the core…
    if they change, they move off the pole..

  39. Pingback:Not a bad article, | gregormendelblog.com

  40. sdferr: So that’s the same Jeff Goldstein who blogs “Protein Wisdom.” Interesting guy. Nice to see him getting published.

  41. Yep,that’s him. His piece in The Federalist on the alt-right as mirror image to the identity politics left is also worth a read.

  42. DNW, above at 4:43 pm (my boldface):

    Even more than statism per se though, what all these socialist ideologies share in common is the denial that the individual the locus of moral value, and the conviction that he is primarily an element of and belongs to – in a possessive and proprietary sense – the community; however that particular collective is conceived of.

    Yessss!!!

  43. artfldgr,

    Thanks for the series on Magyarization, and on varieties of communism/socialism. Found the articles and will read all.

    :>))

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