I Wrote a Politics!
- Thread starter Death Ray
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This is a very bad assumption and you will find that there is not broad agreement on which wing fascism "belongs" to. Neither really wants it. But fascism is incoherent and borrows liberally (heh) from both left- and right-wing ideologies.
The article is fairly decent overall, but I notice it never uses the word "reactionary," which is a completely apt term for the alt-right as well as the American conservative movement more generally. It's a push and pull that is not at all new. Nixon birthed a war on drugs because he feared the social upheaval the '60s Counterculture had wrought. While that counterculture included many things, common themes were of personal liberation and autonomy, and of racial and gender equality. Some proponents were more radical than others, but in essence it was about throwing out the existing social order in favor of a more egalitarian society. Crucially, these movements were not pro-government but very much anti-government--in other words, not statist.
The conservative reaction resurged with Reagan, who rode into office in large part because of his shrewd courting of the Religious Right--people who love government as long as it's telling women what they can do with their bodies. And of course, he ramped up the Drug War to untold levels. Again, this was all in reaction to what conservatives saw as social forces they could not control and which threatened their political order. Drugs were never seen as a public health problem, but a moral one--the literal argument was (and still is, most of the time) that drugs corrupt mind, body, and spirit, and lead to worse sins. Likewise, women, people of color, and religious minorities agitating for their rights is viewed not as an important component of social change, but an existential threat to the preferred conservative order.
Bill Clinton perpetuated many of the policies of his predecessors and split the baby on some important social issues (think: gay marriage, DADT) and more or less governed like a conservative. I suppose I don't need to rehash the W administration nor the ways in which Obama continued on the work of his predecessor, either.
The point I am getting to is that I think you have the right idea, but you don't look much at the numerous well-documented fascistic tendencies of the right in this country. When leftists/liberals seek redress through democratic means, it is generally to see that their rights are respected and brought in line with what the dominant white Protestant heterosexual male enjoys. Conservatives see this as deeply threatening to the social order and use every kind of authority at their disposal to crush it. Your post seems to take Buckleyism at face value, as if Buckley was anything more than a bigoted racist who couched his bog standard white supremacy in academic language. What on Earth could be more statist than looking at grassroots movements for social justice and sending in the National Guard, or putting police in military gear, or engaging in mass arrests? What is more fascist than treating civil dissent as criminality?
You seem to expect conservatives to wake up and realize their movement has been hijacked, but it hasn't been. The true face of American conservatism was never William F. Buckley. It is and always has been the Richard Spencer of the moment: ignorant, spiteful, full of hate, and dumb as a box of rocks. It is why conservative "thought leaders" continue to recycle rhetoric that was tired decades ago, and pursue policies that history has proven don't work. The ideas you believe were "read out" of the movement never went away--and that is exactly why they are back with a vengeance now.
I hope you don't view this as too harsh. I think this is a very worthy topic! I just find your analysis a bit superficial and lacking in context, and while it hints at the right-wing tendency toward fascism, it does little to elaborate upon it. I realize you probably don't want to make it a scorecard or a case of "whataboutism," though.
Personally, I think you could do without quoting utter cranks like D'Souza anyway. A guy like that doesn't have a mainstream following to begin with, and if you are aiming at a mainstream audience maybe you should use more mainstream conservatives as exemplars of "right-wingers who don't realize how dangerous the alt-right is."
Thanks for the comments, Robert. I will be going into more detail on the nature of fascism as a right-wing ideology in my next post. To do so now would have made the article overlong. I think the various reactionary positions you cite are best described as conservatism, as opposed to fascism, but that distinction will be forthcoming.
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Fascism is not a right-wing ideology, though. It is too incoherent for that.
Reactionary conservatism is compatible with fascism because both are statist philosophies focused on either preserving a traditional social order or recreating an imagined traditional social order. That is the point I was trying to make, basically. But that is not the same as fascism being right-wing overall. It is all over the place and is best understood as a hodgepodge that doesn't fit neatly into one box or the other because it actually doesn't make any sense.
I do understand. The irrationality of fascist regimes not withstanding, I find that fascism coheres well with a majority of right-wing principles as I grokk them. Please feel free to share with me your own definitions of "right wing" and "fascism".
Then you are a scoundrel, sir. Oh wait... you DO like it? Meh. Still a scoundrel.
As an academic concept, there is some ambiguity as to where Fascism falls on the traditional left-right political spectrum; However, in practice, whenever and wherever Fascist regimes have occurred, they have been almost universally right-wing in nature - Germany, Italy, Spain, Hungary, Norway, France, etc. were all certainly right-wing extremist regimes during their fascist period.
The characteristics of left and right can be applied universally to any country. The lengths either side will go to to pursue their programs, and how those programs jibe with their cultures, is what creates the perception that there are different kinds of "left" and "right".
"Left "can always be seen in terms of disruption to traditional power relationships, advancing the agenda of the marginalized, embracing a forward-looking or revolutionary agenda, and deviations from the status quo culturally and/or in terms of growing the political power of some disfavored portion of the ruling elite. When the Left is in power, their agenda is aimed at raising alarms that the Right will re-institute retrograde policies, even if those policies are beyond their capacity to resurrect.
"Right" is best recognized as traditionalism, the reactionary impulse towards changing norms, nationalism (as opposed to cosmopolitanism), and preserving the power of the elite and the political establishment, especially when it safeguards the position of the ruling class, and more-so when it appeals to the weakest fringe of that class. In America, right wing rhetoric often takes the form of xenophobic or jingoistic appeals by wealthy whites to poor whites that they are in danger of losing the only intangible asset they can depend on, that being their tenuous position in the white power structure.
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Indeed. But the nature of Left and Right is, I think, consistent.
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