Posted by
Andrews on Monday, June 15, 2009 10:47:56 PM
Suppose I were to ask you "Are you a Jew?" and, upon your answering in the negative, I responded "Oh, so you must be a Moslem!" Would you think me brilliant or a total fool? Well, that sort of false dichotomy seems to be rearing its ugly head in American politics. Or, to be more accurate, is rearing its ugly head again. This time by giving too much credence to the absurd excluded middle fallacy we call the "political specturm".
In this case the absurdity is the debate over whether von Brunn is "right" or "left". I will set the scene by quoting the
WSJ Best of the Web, a column with which I usually agree, though not in this case:
Who's Right?
In the aftermath of last week's Holocaust Museum murder, as we noted Friday,
some liberal commentators predictably and opportunistically seized upon
suspect James von Brunn's quasi-Nazi ideology to blame "the right"
generally for the attack. Some conservative commentators, predictably
and defensively, have declared that von Brunn is actually a man of "the
left." As Rand Simburg
wrote for Pajamas Media, von Brunn's nutty ideas were "not particularly
'right-wing'--if by that you mean someone who adheres to individualism,
the values of the enlightenment, and limited government."
Conservative gadfly Bruce Bartlett rebuts this line of argument:
Such redefinition comes in reaction to a facile and
misguided left-wing tendency to throw around "fascist" and even "Nazi"
as pejoratives for conservatives. But asserting that these ideologies
were simply manifestations of the left is also facile and misguided.
Nazism and fascism were very much about restoring an earlier, idealized
order--the very definition of the right, as it has long been
understood. Mussolini harkened back to the lost grandeur of the Roman
Empire. Hitler sought to restore the mythical purity of the Aryan race.
The nationalism of these totalitarians was far more extreme than their
socialism, and their cultural predilections looked largely backward
(build classical columns, ban "degenerate" art). Their appeal to their
followers was in no small part that they would reestablish order
against modern decay.
Latter-day admirers of the Nazis and fascists, such as
James von Brunn, typically emphasize racial or national chauvinism over
socialistic economics by a wide margin. They want to recapture a lost
(and generally bogus) past, rather than remake the world according to a
future vision. As such, they are on the extreme right. It does no
credit to current-day conservatives, and adds nothing to understanding,
to redefine the extreme right out of existence by claiming that it's
just another bunch of leftists.
We'd say Bartlett is mostly right--that is, correct--about this. It
is silly to characterize von Brunn as a man of "the left," even if his
views and hatreds do converge with those of some extreme leftists.
But we quibble with Bartlett's assertion that "it does no credit to
current-day conservatives" to attempt "to redefine the extreme right
out of existence." For all its taxonomical dubiousness, the effort is a
morally defensible one. In fact, it would do modern-day liberals credit
if they were as eager to dissociate themselves from the hateful
elements of the extreme left.
The problem with this argument is that Bartlett latches on to a definition of "right' which misses all essential points and attaches instead a definition by accidentals. Yes, the conservatives wish to restore an older system, that of the Founders, but that is not an essential trait. For that matter, Keynesians want to restore an even older system, 16th century mercantilism. Does that make Obama a conservative? Or does his desire to "restore" FDR style big government? Or Carter's interventionist state?
Almost every political philosophy has precursors, and all but the most ardently technocratic argues that their philosophy has some idealized antecedent away from which we have drifted. So does that make everyone but technocrats and futurist geeks "conservative?"
No, the problem here is attempting to make meaningful "right" and "left". The political "spectrum" has always been a fiction, sometimes more useful, sometimes less. But today it truly is making debate difficult.
Let us look at a simple question. What is Pat Buchanan? He himself says he is "on the right", but in supporting trade barriers, opposing "outsourcing", in opposing action in Iraq, and in seeing politics in terms of immutable, irreconcilable "cultures", he is more akin to Obama than Jindall. And while Bartlett argues that the Nazis and Fascists were "conservative" that ignores completely Mussolini's communist roots, and the Strasser wing of the Nazis which grew out of explicitly communist labor movements. Likewise, his theory ignores many utopian socialists who saw their movement as a return to "pure communism" of the distant past.
No, the true test is not "right or left", but "libertarian or statist". Today that is far more meaningful. Does it matter if your freedom is stolen in the name of the state or the volk? For that matter, is nationalism and racism even a right wing movement any longer? When the Democrats count on the support of La Raza, and elect a president who belonged to a black separatist church, is it right to say nationalism, racism and other theories are on the right?
So, for now, let us call a moratorium on debates over right and left. Let us agree that the terms outlived their usefulness. Let us instead call ourselves what we are. Federalist, libertarian, socialist, "progressive" (if you are a socialist but won't admit it), "nationalist" and so on. By eliminating the near meaningless "left" and "right", and even the slightly more useful "liberal" and "conservative", maybe we can clarify the political landscape a bit.
At the very least, when the Republicans stop identifying themselves as "conservative" and are forced to call themselves federalists or libertarians, at least it will give the RINOs, Buchananites and others much less cover behind which to hide. (Or, if it goes the other way, will tell those of us who love freedom it is time to find another party.)
CORRECTION
Best of the Web has this correction:
Homer Has Added You as a Friend on Facebook
Yesterday we cited an article from NewMajority.com
arguing that Holocaust Museum suspect James von Brunn is a right-wing
extremist, not a left-wing one. The author of the article is Kenneth
Silber, not Bruce Bartlett as we originally wrote (since corrected).
Although the mistake was our fault, it was our first
Facebook-induced error. We found the piece through a link on Bartlett's
Facebook "wall," which did not include a byline, so we assumed he was
promoting his own work.
As we made their error our error, we are making their correction our correction.