left: communists, anarcho-communists
center-left: New Left Democrats / socialists / “progressives”
center: left-liberal Democrats
center-right: “No Labels” liberals, independents, liberaltarians
right: GOP establishment, Rovian “compassionate con-servatives,” JFK Democrats, neocons
far right: constitutionalists, legal conservatives, libertarians, Reagan Democrats
fringe extremists: Birchers, militia-types, anti-government terrorists, Reagan conservatives, TEA Party
so far right they move back left: Paulistas (who share George McGovern’s foreign policy of appeasement), Buchananites (who shared with the Kerry campaign ideas on trade and “outsourcing” of labor), Paleocons, isolationists, anarchists
Notice that what on any realistic political continuum would, in a free market capitalist country bound by our Constitution, come to count as actually centrist — the Reagan Democrats who joined conservatives in a freedom coalition to beat back the leftist that Carter embraced (to horrific ends, both culturally and economically) — has, on the current continuum, been pushed to the far right, under current descriptions and depictions. Which is of course inevitable when the entirety of our politics has for decades now been forced leftward by a progressive infiltration of our institutions.
And that’s precisely how we’ve wound up here: where mainstream GOP and conservative pundits view Mitt Romney as a practical GOP standard bearer while routinely marginalizing as extremist Hobbits those who stand for the first principles essential to the maintenance of our country as founded — that is, as a country in which individual sovereignty is provided us by nature/God/Providence and is to be protected by a government itself constrained by intentional and directed limitations.
Over the years here I’ve shown, on a linguistic and epistemological level, how the ground has been prepared for this inexorable move leftward, and I’ve offered a few ideas for turning back that momentum — which I’ve been at pains to argue is not fait accompli, is not a force of nature, is not reality in any other sense than it is the false reality being created for us by the careful production and management of politically interested and motivated narrative meant to drive perception.
Refuse to accept the paradigm — force its shift, to borrow from Kuhn — and you can change what for a particular period of time appeared to be a permanent state of nature.
The US was founded on ideas and ideals taken from Locke, Smith, and the Enlightenment thinkers. It has been re-imagined, over the last 90 years or so, as progressive Utopia that has learned increasingly to rely on the post-modern / post-structural thinkers for its intellectual force.
But that paradigm is just that, a paradigm. And it can be rescinded by force of exposing it for the construct it is: reveal the brush strokes, and what was once thought to be solid reality is instantly reduced to yet another bit of the palimpsest upon which human intellectual evolution has been layered.
Sometimes, the best “progress,” from a temporal perspective, is a kind of regress.
So I beg you all: find your inner caveman. Or your inner Founding Father. Either or.
I feeling a little Joseph Plumb Martin today, but not as hungry.
Moving the Overton Window. It’s been headed leftward for a century. Time to yank it back.
There is, however, no political common ground held between the left and the right. Hence, a sort of discontinuity is closer to the fact of the matter, than a continuum found in the notes possible on a single violin string, say.
One of the really great things about the Tea Party, and the primary reason why the Establishment worked so hard to marginalize it, is that it showed in undeniable terms just how many people were part of the “Far Right,” and just how normal they are.
While fairly successful at selling the idea that we’re all wide-eyed zealots bent on starving the poor and the old, the fact remains that we’re all still out here, and we’re still working at taking back the levers of government. Yes, the national election is proving too big for us to subvert at this point, but we’re still making strides at the local and state levels.
If we do this right, the MSM will insist that the Tea Party has been defeated at every front, even as we’re parading through the street behind them.
Refuse to accept the paradigm
Here’s an most important one, a narrative I have been pushing back against with no traction, but a critical one to getting back in Obama’s face and making him own this economic catastrophe.
Barack Obama did not inherit a recession. Barack Obama and progressivism are the direct cause of the US depression (just as socialist magical thinking is the cause for the non-US elements of the depression), even though it started before he took office. Markets are predictive; the smart money went Galt in Fall 2007 anticipating progressive rule, adn will not be back until sanity returns.
A humble suggestion?
So Far Left they move back right: anarcho-commie fags
Hard Left: communists, fascists
Left: liberal fascists
center-left: New Left Democrats / socialists / “progressives”, public sector service unionistas
center: left-liberal Democrats, private sector labor unions
Otherwise, all correct.
I linked this before, but I’m going to again, with more emphasis.
I don’t know, maybe it’s just me, but when I found this the other day I was shocked at the parallels between what Russian commies did, and what our government is doing.
What is the greatest political vice today? (Take the question as assuming that there are at least two serious answers to the question, that is, that each position, left and right, as we name them, have their own necessary views, entailed in the axioms with which they begin.)
Where’s the Judean People’s Front?
Where’s the Judean People’s Front?
On a Friday afternoon? Preparing for sunset, I’d say.
What is the greatest political vice today?
Envy for the Left. Sloth for the Right.
What I meant to get at (and obviously didn’t do a good job of making clear) isn’t the vice from which either side may be said to suffer most itself (or not exactly, unless they happen to condemn the very thing they most inhabit, which I wouldn’t assume about them ab initio, anyhow), but the vice they each condemn as most fell.
This question has been swimming around in my head without particular advance for a while now, since John Bradley spoke of Dante’s condemnation of the traitors to the lowest levels of Hades, some months back now.
So at a simple level, say, I’d offer as an example that the right would most condemn tyrannical self-dealing, and the left condemn the “chump”, the innocent unsophisticated doofus capable of being manipulated. Though I don’t think I’ve quit pinned them down: that is, these are merely tacit, notional attempts on my part, not very well grounded as yet, to my way of thinking.
But the left adores the chump, as long as it’s their chump. I’m not sure they have a vice that bothers them particularly as long as one of them is engaging in it.
I’m honored that anyone would remember one of my random utterances. Here’s the comment in question, for what it’s worth.
I don’t think they do adore the chump though Pablo. They despise him. Or her. This is what they’d least think admirable or virtuous.
The Left condemn the “chump,” all right, but it’s not the easily manipulable doofus. Those chumps are what the Left call “voters” or “clients” or “real Americans,” and while they might not have a lot of respect for these dunces, I don’t think they consider that sort of ignorance the worst vice.
No, the worst vice, to the Left, belongs to the “chumps” like you and I, who continue to live and act and speak as though we were free men, all the while handing half our income to the Left to give to the better sort of chump.
I, on the other hand, do consider the first chump to be the worse. Through their ignorance, they encourage and enable my enslavement.
In the category chump, I would have proposed everyone who has dutifully paid their FICA taxes and even now expects some just return on them. Which, who wouldn’t that include, for all intents and purposes?
“Anarcho-Communists”?
That doesn’t even make sense.
No, it doesn’t make sense. It made even less sense after I listened to some tape of an OWSer trying to explain Anarcho-Communism to a Russian. C.L.U.E.L.E.S.S.
Having thought about it some, I’d say the Left considers the greatest vice to be looking at things as they are and asking why instead of dreaming of things that never were and asking why not; of accepting the things that cannot be changed instead of the having the courage to change them; of looking at the human condition as a tragedy instead of the comedy it so obviously is.
Now the Right on the other hand considers the greatest vice to be dreaming of things that never were instead of looking at thing as they are, and not answering ” because” to the questions why or why not; of not having the serenity to accept the things that cannot be changed; of looking at the human condition as a comedy instead of the tragedy it so obviously is.
How’s this: for the Left, the greatest virtue is submission, and the greatest vice is resistance. If everyone would just do what they’re told, everything would be perfect!
And if you dare mention that those giving the orders are hardly paragons of virtue, they’ll explain that they are only submitting to the People’s desire for enlightened leadership. And because you are a wide-eyed child, they’ll explain it gently, with a boot to your throat.
We are become a country of people separated by our philosophies. This is going to be ugly.
I agree with whomever said the OWS was just a warm up for next summer. We all remember the Days of Rage, yes? I don’t want to live through that bullshit twice.
And, yet, that’s exactly what they are.
What is it Chomsky claims to be whenever he’s cornered? “Libertarian socialist” or some such nonsense. This is what he means.
What you’re saying is I should go ahead and order that Springfield M1A and 1,000 rounds?
(I don’t know if the Mini-14 will have the reach I want.)
Chomsky is the very essence of post modernist. He can say whatever he says means whatever he wants it to mean either then or later.
Rob, I didn’t move out to the sticks for nothing. Just sayin’.
Does Ruger still manufacter the Mini-30?
So, roughly speaking Ernst, idealists condemning realists (left condemning right) and realists condemning idealists (right condemning left)? A struggle reflected as an ontological question? This is, that is not.
[I’m unclear about the comedy-tragedy distinction though (this, only a function of my own muddled brain, I hasten to add). Or about the potential of the “wholistic” unification of the two (see The Symposium, on that question). I think, for instance, of Aristophanes as a profoundly conservative sort, where he is, the Comedian par excellence, so to speak, ridiculing the novel in favor of the ancestral. This is all further complicated by my own (possibly idiosyncratic) puzzle over Thomas More’s observation:
And the Socratic obverse, where we see Socrates laughing a time or two, but never weeping. Each instance, I’ve suggested elsewhere, as potentially accountable as put down to an unwillingness to engender fear or alarm in their onlookers.]
It’s the Platonists vs. the Aristolians, sdferr.
*aristotilians* argh
That’s a bad, very bad distinction leigh. Very bad, because insupportable at base.
True enough. I am a poor philosopher.
Not to worry over it, though. It’s also a perfectly modern thing, shared by the vast majority.
Including a number of my philosopohy professors, unfortunately. I haven’t had the leisure to learn on my own without a great many missteps. I’ve found many of your discussions here to be most helpful.
It’s the modern anti-philosophical professors of philosophy who promulgate the stuff, pernicious sophists that they are, after all. They could care less. Or, alternatively, could care more, to bury what they don’t wish to know.
There is certainly no shortage of sophistry.
I’ll be back later. I need to pick up my son from wrasslin’ practice.
Actually it’s the Lockeans against the Rousseauans leigh.
Mostly I’m using Kennedy and Niebuhr to illustrate Sowell’s conflicting Visions thesis. The constrained vision being tragic, I juxtaposed comedic for the unconstrained vision (All’s Well That Ends Well is what I had in mind). It’s possible heroic would have been more on point.
Last I heard, yes.
It’s Year Zero, come back again to ruin the world. Oh, sorry, I forgot my place: Year Zero come again to repair the world.
sdferr, I believe the Obama administration operates on the simultaneous principles of “après moi le déluge” and, “avant moi le déluge”. They “inherited” all their problems, and all will go to hell without them.
I would say the biggest vice for someone from the lefts perspective is personal independence in thought or deed. Perhaps they would think of it in terms of selfishness and greed. Of course they themselves mostly get bent over hypocrisy, but I suspect that is more a tactic and act, than a vice.
For the right, shirking responsibility or duty.
The Left is a secular religion. The greatest vice is the denial of (their) god’s will.
Some quotes from Conquest. My bold.
Who or what is “their god”? is a good question. After the fall of the USSR and the death of Mao it would seem they have only the will to power as a thing of worship. Who ever seizes the power and the “State” is god for the moment till their feet of clay bring them down.
Maybe the eschaton?
Then why do they farm them? Why are they so keen on importing them? What is the chump, as long as it’s their chump, but a useful idiot?
Is the victim the honoree? I’m disinclined to think that’s what the progressive has in mind. Or, put another way, useful for whom? And for what?
Actually it’s the Lockeans against the Rousseauans leigh.
This might be the nub, at least in modernity, Ernst.
To the proglodyte, victims are livestock. The milk they produce is political power.
#27: ernst, they do. I have a Ruger Mini-30 and really like it.
Ernst.
It is my contention that below the top levels the “eschatons” are sold as the end(s) sought. I used a plural because the particulars of heaven are different for different groups. What is important is that they believe that that end can be obtained only by following the precise day to day instructions, orders of the “leaders” (gods) who are believed to be working for just that end.
For the “leaders” those “eschatons” are not ends. They are means used to get the real end, power. This pretense only needs to be maintained until power is achieved. Then it can be dropped.
If you have the book, I refer you to the second chapter, Kiev Garrison Detention Centre, 29 March, 1966, of The Liberators by Viktor Suvorov, for after the pretense is dropped. Heaven arrives but only for the “leaders”.
President Obama, this is your army!
Chumps, the lot of them.
Is the victim the honoree? I’m disinclined to think that’s what the progressive has in mind.
I dunno sdferr, isn’t the victim always the guest of honor at the sacrifice?