You’re right about names meaning nothing. The democrat party should be called the American Communist party if they had any guts to call themselves what they are.
You’re right about names meaning nothing. The democrat party should be called the American Communist party if they had any guts to call themselves what they are.
Can anyone explain where massive government ownership and control has ANYTHING to do with right-wing? That’s the EXACT opposite, and is entirely what the nazis and liberals today are all about.
I think that’s a tad strong, Monty. 
The expansion of governmental control isn’t necessarily at odds with right-wing politics. (For an example of that, see the Bush administration.) Certainly, the Nazis’ support of industry and their crushing of the labor unions would be viewed as a “right-wing” act, if you view “right-wing” as a support of business owners rather than employees/workers.
As Itai has said, the definitions aren’t necessarily clear-cut. There isn’t a black-and-white definition for what’s left wing and what’s right wing – unless, like some of the posters in this thread, you’re an ideologue bent on demonizing the people you disagree with. If you define “right-wing” as libertarianism, then you have a point, because the Nazis were certainly the antithesis a hands-off government. But there are plenty of right-wingers who’d disagree with your definition.
As for the calling the Democrats “Communists,” that makes about as much sense as calling Republicans “Fascists” – which is to say, it makes no sense at all.
monty2, the Democrats could only be called Communists by the most right-wing of American right-wing ideologues. To most of the rest of the world, the Democrats are centrist/right-wing in their politics.
First rule of international message boards: Don’t assume that your provincial political understandings are universal.
So then what will the Communists call themselves?
And whatever the name of the Nazi party might imply, they weren’t too fond of Communists…
AL
The “Socialist” part of “National Socialism” was like the “compassionate” part of “compassionate conservative.” It was simply an empty PR slogan. American liberalism does not bear the slightest relationship to Nazism. The Nazis we do have in the States would certainly characterize themsmelves as on the right and they hate liberals. I think the OP is making a specious, whiny, point based on a hollow semantic argument.
Bunch of leftwing people here I see. Truth really hurts the left.
Yeah, we’re really hurt. Calling all liberals “communists”…that’s just devastating.
monty2,
Oh! Ouch! You really got me there! Oh, my! Perhaps I should just lay down my arms and surrender. I can’t possibly stand up to the wit and intelligence that is Right-Wing Boy in his secret identity of monty2_2001!
You’ll have to try harder than that here, baby. Blind ideology will get you exactly as far as the door.
I have no problem dividing people into a clear cut black and white dichotomy. I just ask one question, “Do you think people are basically good?” If they answer in the affirmative then they are progressive and if not then they are conservative. People on the left believe in people, their opponents do not. It really is just that simple. I have never found anyone unable to answer the question though the answer isn’t always helpful in context. It won’t automatically tell you if the person self identifies as liberal, moderate, centrist, socialist, libertarian, independent, constitutionalist, or whatever. Nor will it inform you necessarily on which side of a policy debate a person stands. There are leftists that support the electoral college and rightists that oppose the death penalty. Still, a progressive will tend to agree with other progressives and their opponents will, in general, similarly stick together.
Anne Frank, as her famous quote shows, is on the left. Her oppressors were not. Authoritarianism is the very heart of the right wing. Conservatives do not trust the people and seek to control them. Leftists put more trust in the people in general than individuals and institutions.
As for the OP’s simplistic semantic argument, y’all are missing the best counterexample. That part of the world used to be called the Holy Roman Empire even though it remained a secular German confederation.
American liberals today continue to share that philosophy. What you are missing is the distinction between the people and individual persons. Liberals are just as concerned with private individuals and organizations restricting the freedom of the people at large as they are about some government officials pulling the same stunt.
And you are wrong about the Constitution being a liberal document; it assuredly was not. While the Country vs Court divide of the 18th century doesn’t fit neatly into the current liberal vs conservative divide as far as the policies promoted by each side are concerned at the most basic level it is the same dichotomy. While the Country/“Antifederalist”/Republican partisans were more agrarian and favored term limits and state’s rights they were progressive and their opponents, the Court/nationalist/“Federalist” partisans, despite being the more nationally and internationally oriented were conservatives. As one conservative historian put it as he began to pontificate upon the formation of the American republic, which party a person affiliated with “depended upon whether they believed in Original Sin… The underlying question was, is man rational and virtuous or is he evil, is he to be trusted or not?” Forrest McDonald’s question remains pertinent to this day and, I suspect, for many ages to come.
( The quote is from the first chapter of E Pluribus Unum. )
The Constitution itself clearly reflects the conservative bent of its creators. The government created was designed to limit the influence of the general population as much as possible. Its legislature was bicameral with a Senate to check the more popular House. For Congress annual elections were rejected in favor of 2 year terms for Representatives and an unprecedented 6 year term for Senators. The president and the Senate were not directly elected by the people. The long term and indirect election were the hallmarks of the Maryland senate which was the only one to completely defy the “levelling instincts” of a state’s lower house ( Cite: Jackson Turner Main The Upper House in Revolutionary America ) a fact that did not go unnoticed during the federal convention ( see Madison’s notes ). Further the judiciary was given a life term to make them independent of the people and their representatives.
Clearly then the “Federalists” didn’t trust the people in general. A cursory examination of Madison’s notes show they were conservative as well as uncounted quotations about the Framers’ fears of democracy posted all too often by ignorant and insecure conservates seeking to show that America isn’t one. If still more evidence is needed I offer the words of renowned historian Gordon Wood:
Hey, I call a spade a spade. You liberals DO tend to be socialistic and in many cases communist. If you weren’t, you wouldn’t be liberal.
Fascism did not have a capitalist economy. Fascism had a government controlled economy. In Italy, they had something quite like syndicalism, in which there is only a single “organization” in charge of each industry, and that organization consisted of both the factory owners and the labor representatives, all of whom answered directly to the government. While it may have maintained the pretense of private property, the property was used at the direction of the government, and the industry’s policies were guided by the government. If the government wanted a wage raise, it was granted. If the government wanted a wage decrease, it happened. This is NOT a “capitalist economy”.
Also, if you think communism created equality between all people at any point in its history, you really need to read some accounts of people who lived under it.
Anyways, on the primary topic…
The problem here is that the way we presently look at the left-right spectrum is completely flawed, and more importantly does not represent the way that spectrum was seen during the rise of fascism and communism.
When fascism rose to prominence, the spectrum looked much different. “Liberalism” in the 1930’s meant a free market economy, a small government, and individual freedoms. “Conservatism” meant the various groups of monarchists and other authoritarians who wanted a return to the older system in which government had almost total control over the people.
A good analysis of this is provided by F.A. Hayek in The Road to Serfdom, published in 1944. He remarks that it was common in the early 20’s for young people who disliked what was then considered liberalism to adopt either fascism or communism, and switch between them with relative ease. These people often didn’t seem to care which they embraced and saw both fascists and communists as brethren, part of a single force of opposition to liberalism.
Once they had established power, fascist parties’ main opposition were liberal democratic parties. When gaining power, the main rival to the fascists was always the communists, because they were fighting for influence over the same group of people, that being the people who opposed liberalism. Fascism and communism were both authoritarian, and thus were anti-liberal on the ideological spectrum of the day, so they had to compete to gain support from within the ranks of those who opposed liberalism.
It was not until the late '30s when the animosity between fascists and communists really grew, and it was more a matter of politics than any ideological split. The Soviet Union during the 30’s was heavily promoting the ComIntern, an organization designed to unify all the socialist parties throughout Europe in their opposition to liberal democracies and free market economy. Meanwhile, fascism was almost always nationalist, and never was able to create meaningful political ties with fascist parties in other states. (The Germans and Italians fought on the same side come wartime, sure, but both flavors of fascism were tied to their own flavor of nationalism, such that there was little real unity between their methods.)
So fascism and communism were both authoritarian, and parties of each considered themselves socialists. (I’ll try to dig up the exact quote, but as late as the mid 30’s Hitler remarked about the Soviets something to the effect of “let us not forget that we are all socialists.”) They both grew out of the same opposition to liberalism. It was only when they clashed politically, and had competing territorial aims (Stalin was looking to add territory between him and the rest of Europe and give added security to the heart of the USSR, Hitler was looking to expand the same direction, tensions ensue.)
The party of that old sort of liberalism today is the Libertarian party, which is neither right nor left by the common parlance of today. Thus fascism, as liberty’s opposite, cannot be labelled in that way.
A private person (or even the government itself) can only restrain freedom by employing the use of force against individuals. Other than perhaps the excessive powers of the police, what use of force against others are the liberals trying to stop from occuring today?
And this is of course where liberalism has gone awry. Liberals target as “oppression” what is in reality simply voluntary action. The trade of labor-hours for money that working-class people freely engage in, in which they can use the market to choose between trading partners, is called “restricting freedom”. The business owner is an individual just like those who supply him with labor, and neither one was forced to deal with the other. What liberals today are really about is not protecting freedom from compulsion, but rather about compelling the few for the benefit of the many.
In intellectual circles, post-modernism has infected liberalism, and one need only look at how today’s liberal organizations speak to see how. Post-modernism strips all reality away from social interaction and defines everything in terms of power relationships. To a post-modernist, no individual account of reality is correct. Reality resides entirely within the perspective of an individual, and groups of individuals with similiar such “realities” engage in power struggles against other individuals’ “realities”, until by brute force one of them wins out and then proceeds to force the others under the awning of the victorious “reality”.
Seen in that context, it is easy for today’s liberal intellegentsia to declare that the business world is “restricting freedom”. To them, the businessman has alot of power and the individual worker has little, so obviously the businessman must be somehow forcing his reality onto that of the working class. In such a lopsided power relationship, the post-modernist liberal would declare no free exchange of value is possible because one party is arbitrarily imposing it’s judgments of value upon the other.
It takes such a looney theory (which I have shown in a rather favorable light by trying my best to make it sound less wacky) to justify how liberals could conclude that my boss paying my salary in exchange for my labor hours is somehow a constraint upon my freedom. But it is precisely this relationship that liberals are most often fighting to intrude upon these days, with the use of force by government as their only weapon.
That is nothing like classical liberalism.
Just like those liberal owners of The Ballpark at Arlington, Texas, paid for by taxpayer money, right? Liberal welfare right?
…which nobody could honestly view that way. The right-wing position on economics, as we define such things today, is for the government to butt out and let the parties settle on agreement between themselves. Using the force of government to act in crushing one side of an economic relationship, thus ensuring the triumph of the other, is definitely not right-wing. Smashing one side or the other by government force is a left-wing idea, though certainly they’d choose to use force to smash the businessmen, not the laborers. But the method is the same. Nationalizing industries, the ultimate goal of today’s liberals, is the ultimate in that, because nationalization allows the government to set wages and conditions to favor whichever side they might. (Thus, apart from a few minor tax cuts, Bush’s economic policies have been very left-wing, note the nationalization of airline security as an example.)
The act of purchasing a baseball stadium with public funds is left-wing. Who it happens to benefit is irrelevant. If America were to adopt a completely planned economy it might nonetheless enact some policies that benefitted rich, white male conservatives. But we would still consider the use of a planned economy left-wing, not right-wing.
First, though the ignorant comments of Monty2_2001 are generally dismissable, he has one valid point – more or less.
Contrary to what JayJay pointed out about whitewash-style nomenclature, the National Socialist German Workers Party (and somebody else can dig out the german for that) was named that because it was in origin a socialist party, formed to provide a German-national-specific alternative to communism and mainstream socialism, which at this time took a very internationalist attitude. Its program was tailored to appeal to the patriotic German smarting under the harsh terms of the Treaty of Versailles and the problems with Germany’s conomy from reparations and the severe recession of 1922. Its organizations and affiliates provided a sense of actually doing somthing to fight back against their problems to its members. Gregor Strasser provided an intellectual program, while Ernst Rohm organized the brownshirts of the S.A. Hermann Goering was a figurehead of sorts, owing to his fame as a WWI Ace. Their intent was more or less syndicalist, trying to conjoin capital and labor to solve the economic woes while providing an organized paramilitary orperation aimed at giving Germany back its pride.
Unfortunately for their plans – and for the world, this charismatic politician from Austria joined the party and moved into a leadership position.