Our Center-Socialist nation
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Many on the right repeat the mantra “center-right” nation so often you would think they were parrots. It’s spin of course, designed to try and reign the expectations of an Obama presidency from the left (which shouldn’t be very high but that’s another topic) and to say basically that “conservatism-is-still-popular-we-just-had-a-lousy-GOP-candidate-and-a-lousy-economy-and the-Obama-campaign-turned-out-its-people.” Bill Kristol wrote this screed the other day in the Times. Brit Hume, in his usual bullying way, said as much on Fox News Sunday “This is a center-right nation and the liberals know it.”
Such labels, conservative and liberal, are so meaningless in the context of current politics compared to their historical definitions it almost seems as though Lewis Carroll was writing campaign speeches. The Democrats are not the inheritors of Adam Smith nor is the GOP the descedents of Edmund Burke. Both parties philosophies are wierd mixtures of modernist 19th and 20th century ideologies along with peculiarities of race, economics and culture thrown in. But one thing common amongst them and common among the citizens that vote for them is their acceptance of socialism, meaning that the state can redistribute wealth from those who have to other people whether they already have wealth or not. As George Will noted on ABC’s Sunday’s program, 95 percent of what government does is redistribute wealth.
We are already socialists. The nation believes in it in some form or another and the parties respond to the people. The Federal Government uses such instruments as the tax code, the Federal Reserve, the Treasury Departmenty and the Congress to direct that wealth to favored political constituencies like farmers or AIG. Only a handful of politicians in this country reject such pandering. Most go along because they wish to be re-elected instead of selling insurance or practicing law in family court.
If one talks about a “center-right” nation they are talking about “right socialism” not “conservatism” in any kind of traditional sense. At least they’ve dropped that term from their definition. Right socialism originated in Europe. In fact one could trace it back to Bismarck’s decision to create old age pensions in order to take working class votes away from the German Socialists. Other European conservatives followed. The Fascists improved upon this model starting with World War I as Mussolini and Hitler combined extreme nationalism and celebration or martial values to their socialism. (Franco was more of a traditional authoritarian conservative than someone who imbibed pure Fascist ideology, otherwise Spain would have tried to conquer Gibraltar. Franco wisely did not do this and thus stayed in power until his death in 1975). The Republican Party of the late 20th Century used such elements in its own rise to power until their fall from the peak this year. Republican “right-socialists” used the Federal Government’s purse strings to give money to favored constituencies like farmers, military veterans, religious groups, old people with prescription drug benefits and oil companies with tax breaks. They tried to assert the government’s authority over education with No Child Left Behind and in a private medical case in the Schiavo affair. When the nation’s financial institutions crumbled and buckled under the weight of bad investments, the Federal Government stepped in to prop them up as any socialist government would. And of course, in order to defend the state that does all these things, the right-socialists established police powers that are common in nearly all socialist countries that limit the right to dissent and allows the government to spy on potential enemies, real or not.
Despite such socialism, these right-socialists persisted in calling themselves “conservatives” and lied to themselves while lying to the nation about how they supposedly supported “free markets” and “freedom” in general for political reasons. However, the voters got tired of and saw right through their lies. The present economic crisis has caused the right-socialists to be replaced by the more honest left-socialists who have been enabled by their mortal enemies (socialists often take their intra-ideological splits very seriously and almost to the comical point of warfare as they spend vasts sums of money for political apparatuses and television ads designed to win elections the way nation states spend money on their militaries) to enact their version of socialism having been legitimized by the right socialists in the same way the Reconstruction Finance Corporation legitimized the New Deal.
So we’re left to argue which form of socialism still holds sway over the nation. Despite the squawking of the parrots, Obama’s 53-46 victory and left-socialist gains in Congress have at least moved the nation back to the center socialism, if not center-left. The center-right’s problem is that they have been exposed in their treachery. For years conservatives started out in belief in the actual definition of conservatism until the politics forced them towards socialism. (This is what David Stockman meant in his book “The Triumph of Politics: Why the Reagan Revolution Failed”) The conservative tradition of Burke expounded on by people like Russell Kirk or Richard Weaver simply was politically unsellable to the general public when actually tried. This why the Reagan Revolution failed, this why the Gingrich Revolution failed. The politicians then moved to right-socialism in order to survive all the while trying to fool people into believing they were still “conservatives”. This worked until 2008 when no one believed it anymore.
The way to recovery for the Grand Old Party lies down one of two paths: 1). They can start honestly saying they are right-socialists and govern like an old European Christian Democratic Party or Tory Party and drop any pretensions they are “conservative” so they can be truer to themselves or 2). They can reject socialism altogether steer back to a traditional, honest, conservatism and hope to find a politician and the wonks that can make both the politics and the policy work for them instead retreating to right-wing socialism for electoral survival. Of all the discussions and debates going on now as to what future course the GOP may take, this fork in the road, more than better organization or better tactics or upping their count of the white vote to 70 percent, is more relevent to their future course.
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I honestly wonder what’s going to happen … I keep hoping that true conservatives WON’T vote for the GOP if they don’t rid themselves of socialism … yet at the same time, so many conservative leaning individuals (whether or not they’re really*conservative* in this magazine’s understanding of it) will still vote for the lesser of two evils in fear of the Kingdom of Obama … Take Newt Gingrich for example – he’s on the better side of the GOP as it stands, yet at CPAC last year, he still said it was necessary to vote for the Republican nominee.
There’s just a lot of internal confusion right now. I simply hope that the party will keep being punished electorally if it doesn’t get its act together. That however, may be wishful thinking.
[...] ~ Sean Scallon [...]
Right socialism, liberal fascism, do you guys ever tire of destroying the meaning of words? There is no right socialism, you’re not on the right if you’re a socialist. Just as you are not on the left if you’re a fascist.
Is this just some kind of weird way of saying that conservatism is fine and dandy and not the clusterfuck we’ve witnessed these past few years? Are you playing the ‘communism didn’t fail, the Soviet Union failed’ game? Are you going there? Many on the left predicted that would happen when the inevitable supply side shell game collapsed but I really thought they were wrong.
The reason conservatism failed is because it doesn’t exist. Its an economic policy dressed up in populist sounding rhetoric. All those things you call right socialism is just how they sell the economic policy to people who get hurt by it. It’s not socialism, it’s pandering.
“And of course, in order to defend the state that does all these things, the right-socialists established police powers that are common in nearly all socialist countries that limit the right to dissent and allows the government to spy on potential enemies, real or not.”
The right has been predicting that Government involvement in markets leads to a police state since Hayek was ranting about in 1950. It simply isn’t so. Europe features many democracies with heavy handed intervention in the market (more than I would like really) without any slide into totalitarianism. Instead of trying to scare us with bogeymen it would be much better if you simply argued that the interventions themselves were bad – not the police state the supposedly lead.
[...] Scallon is mostly correct in his diagnosis of What Happened: The conservative tradition of Burke expounded on by people like Russell Kirk or Richard Weaver [...]
Rawshark, if you believe I am simply making up terms I suggest you read up about the splits in European socialism when the first World War broke (who’s ending we are celebrating today) out and creation of a new kind of socialism that was based on the celebration and defense of the nation state and its people rather than the brotherhood of man and celebration of war as a means of national and spirtual renewal. True conservatives in places like Italy and Germany and Austria (the Dolfuss-Schussnigg party) could only stand by helplessly as the Fascists took over either naively believing they could control them or simply believeing the Fascists were the only popular force capable of beating back the Communists.
The one thing that many democracies in Europe have in common is that they do not have Constitutions that enshire freedom of speech or association or preventions on unlawful searches and seizures. Tradition and law, like that of habeous corpus, can easily be discareded, even in Great Britain, if the state feels under threat. Look at the way Canada cracked down on Quebec after terrorist activity from the FLQ during the early 1970s. Canada’s a social-democracy yet it is also state you do not want to provoke.
I think in the very least, reforming themselves into a Right-Socialist party along the lines of Bismarck, would be preferable to what we have now.
Honest, that is, outright socialism, at least holds certain implicit responsibilities. If you are going to openly talk of expanding the Federal Government, you will be held accountable to see that “something gets done”. If the republic party under Bush had run on the platform of the largest increase in the federal government in history, there would at least be the expectation to provide something on the scale that Roosevelt, or Eisenhower did with the Interstate highway system, or in the very least, what Kennedy/Johnson provided with NASA. While not preferable to a non-interventionist policy, these candidates all had one thing in common. They openly advocated an expanded role for the government, and for better or worse, saw that that role was fulfilled in an acceptable manner.
Instead, by arguing for lowered government, while actually expanding it, the Bush administration succeeded in an interesting political feat.
It got its chance to spread the wealth around to key constituencies, while at the same time, lowering peoples expectations for what the government should do for them. For his massive increase in the size of government, has Bush given anything as lasting as Eisenhower, NASA or even the New Deal? Bush succeeded in “Breaking the Brand” of Republican Small Government, but would he not have equally “Broken the Brand” of Right Socialism?
46% of the electorate voted against Obama. A nation with socialist tendencies? Ok, yes. A nation that agrees with Obama’s wholesale acceptance of Marxism? No. I would argue that a larger percentage of Obama’s voters are very much opposed to what Obama will do to this country but they voted for Obama because they are ignorant.
http://rightklik.blogspot.com/
I object to the authors description of ‘Conservatism’. He speaks of ‘real Conservatives’ and ‘right Socialist Conservatives’, hoping that the party will go back down a ‘traditional conservative’ course. Guess what? Socialism IS the traditional conservative course. A little historical research will remind us that conservatives existed traditionally within the Democratic party. We all know the term ‘old southern democrat’ and some of us remember when the majority of conservatives existed in the Democratic fold. Now we use the terms ‘Conservative’ and ‘Republican’ interchangeably. But in the not-so-distant past this simply was not so.
There were, and still are, many who identify themselves as ‘Conservative Democrats’. I’m sure there are even a few ‘Liberal Republicans’ out there. It was during the sixties, seventies, and even eighties that the Republican party sought to recruit these Conservatives away from the Democratic party. This required the Republican party to alter their message significantly.
Instead of being the free-market, anti-union party espousing personal responsibility and self-reliance; They became the ‘family values’ party espousing shared responsibility in a profoundly moral message. The old labor disputes being dead, the Conservative Democrats saw no value in the Democratic Party which was becoming the home of the modern ‘Liberal’.
The old Republicans ( not conservatives) who believed firmly in limited government ( even regarding moral conundrums) were left with three choices; Compromise some of your principles for the perceived ‘greater good’ of the party ( this is what the majority did do ), start your own party ( this is what Murray Rothbard did in the sixties/seventies, its called the Libertarian party), or remain to fight the good fight and become increasingly marginalized.
What we are witnessing today is the culmination of a party that sold its principles fifty years ago ( to the conservatives!). Hence, the modern Conservative. He is as socialist now as he was fifty/sixty years ago, wearing the guise of a Republican who he has been strangling since the day he strode into the party.
“wholesale acceptance of Marxism” – take a few deep breaths and get a grip.
Interesting perspective.
It’s not correct to define socialism as redistribution of wealth. Redistribution of wealth has deep roots in Christian tradition, using church wealth to help the poor and infirm, and in the notion of “general welfare” in our Constitution. Helping the less fortunate is simply part of the American character.
It’s also a practical matter. It is often cheaper to offer basic aid like food stamps, vocational training and government housing than it is to deal with the crime and disease that result from a neglected underclass.
Socialism is defined by ownership. We have a socialist highway system and socialist dams, and for good reason. Some needs can not be met by a free market because competition is impractical or impossible. In those circumstances, treating the commodities as public goods is simply the rational alternative. Only when public ownership starts to creep into competitive industries and markets does it really make sense to call the government socialist.
Jeffrey Friedman already said it here:
http://www.the-dissident.com/friedman.shtml