Our Curious Task: To Build a PROPER Political Spectrum

Chapter 3.6: The End of Part I

Why this book | Title Page | Table of Contents
Preface | Introduction
PART 1
Chapter 1 (1.1) (1.2) | Chapter 2 (2.1) (2.2) (2.3) | Chapter 3 (3.1) (3.2) (3.3)(3.4)(3.5) (3.6)
PART 2
Chapter 4 | Chapter 5 | Chapter 6
PART 3
Chapter 7 | Chapter 8 | Chapter 9 | Chapter 10 | Chapter 11 | Chapter 12 | Chapter 13 | Chapter 14
PART 4
Chapter 15 | Chapter 16 | Chapter 17 |
PART 5
Chapter 18 | Chapter 19 | Chapter 20 | Conclusion
Appendix | Works Cited

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3.6
Moving On

This excerpt from The FreedomScale: An Accurate Measure of Left and Right is available in full to free subscribers. This is part of a 300,000-word book 15 years in the making. Upgrade today to read the whole thing!

Moving On…

Fascism and Nazism grew from the same ideological soil as the rest of the movements of the orthodox left. By every metric of comparison, they are substantially similar political phenomena.¹ There are differences, certainly, in both substance and style. But none of these differences are large enough to assert that fascism and Nazism constitute a significant ideological departure.  

By contrast, there is no metric of comparison in which fascism and Nazism are substantially similar to the classical-liberal right. Reality can be contorted, quotes can be misapplied, and tendentious readings can be disseminated as if they were hard facts. All of this is to no avail. Classical liberalism and fascism are, to a substantial degree, ideological opposites.

The only trick left, then, in the left’s interminable effort to cast fascism and Nazism as right wing, is to assert that the right is something other than classical-liberal. 

Setting aside the fact that people who identify as being on the right see themselves as part of the classical-liberal tradition…

Setting aside the fact that we are still reeling from the hangover of the French Revolution, which defined “the right” in terms that were of no value in assessing the true political dichotomy of the modern world…

What effect would this have on a political spectrum? If communism were “the left” and fascism were actually “the right,” where would classical liberalism go? It shares very little in common with communism or fascism. Do we put it in the middle, then? If so, what is this spectrum measuring? What is it that communism has zero percent of, classical liberalism has 50 percent of, and fascism has 100 percent of? Is there a unit of measure at all? Are we only capable of conceiving of a political spectrum in terms of political animosities? Or are such “spectrums” really just about scoring political points?

At some point, human civilization needs to put the final nail in the coffin of the claim that fascism is a phenomenon of the right.

We are getting closer to that point. For decades, scholars and writers have made the case, and the collective weight is dispositive. In terms of the actual facts, the argument is already won. 

Throughout the remainder of this book, we will add some weight to the argument, but it is no longer our primary purpose. In our attempt to construct a proper political spectrum, we are going to travel to much happier places: The infinite miracle of the individual human person. The intersection of rights and nature. The power of cooperation and the interconnectedness of everything. It won’t all be sunshine and lollipops (this is politics, after all), but there’s a lot to be happy about. Especially once we discover just how far-reaching the power of freedom truly is.

Beginning in chapter 7, we will start building that spectrum from the ground-up. We will set aside 230 years of baggage and propaganda. We will look across the breadth of the human landscape to find and justify a unit of measure that actually makes sense. A unit that allows us to measure the most important features of any ideology, system, movement, or policy. A unit that can look at the present or the past, and still be useful at any time in the future. 

We will not create a spectrum to fit the existing definitions of left and right. Instead, we will use that unit to build a spectrum from scratch, and then see how various movements stack up. We won’t be constrained by what we’ve been told about how “left” and “right” are defined—rather, we will try to understand how they ought to be defined. Some of our understandings will remain the same, but there will also be some surprises.

In the meantime, however, we have a terminological problem. Before we can reach they point of determining whether the definitions of “left” and “right” need an upgrade, we still have to use these terms in order to describe existing political phenomena.

The label “left” won’t give us too many problems, as there is not much confusion as to what the left is. It is all the movements that cleave to the principles laid out in the introduction and in this chapter, and that grew from the attempt to instantiate those principles in the real world. To wit,

The early left: 

• French and other early revolutionaries

• Utopian socialists (Owens, Fourier, Saint-Simon, Chernyshevsky, et al)

• Proto-communists (Babeuf, e.g.)

• Leftist anarchists

Revolutionary Socialism:

• Karl Marx/Marxism

• Advocates of revolutionary violence (Sorel, Blanqui)

• Syndicalism (national syndicalism, revolutionary syndicalism)

• State socialism (USSR, China, Cambodia, Vietnam, N. Korea, et al)

• National socialism/fascism (Germany, Italy, Spain, et al)

• Third-world socialism (Latin America, Africa, etc.)

Incrementalist socialism:

• Eduard Bernstein²

• Fabian Society, et al

• Early Western Marxism (transitional figures such as Gramsci and Lukács provide the early blueprint for incremental takeover of the west)

• American Progressivism, social gospel, New Deal

• Frankfurt School (Horkheimer, Adorno, Marcuse, Reich, et al)

• Postmodernism (Foucault, Derrida, Rorty, Lyotard, et al)

• The New Left (Yippies, Weather Underground, etc.)

• European social democracy

• Modern progressivism

• Etc.

As we move through this book, when we use the label left, we will be referring to the above movements, and to the people and leaders who adhere to them. As to whether that changes once we’ve created our new spectrum…you’ll just have to wait and see.

As we have been explained, the definition of the right has been more muddled. Moving forward, when we use the label right…

• We will not mean “the right” as the left has long defined it, as a movement that becomes fascist when dialed up to its extreme. (As we will discuss in the next two chapters, the Marxist continuum is nothing more than propagandistic nonsense.)

• We will NOT mean “the right” as so many since the French Revolution have defined it, as

  • a phenomenon that seeks to preserve any existing order, without regard to what that order is,(i.e., conservative without a classical-liberal substrate),

  • a phenomenon that seeks to restore any past order, without regard to what that order was, (i.e., reactionary without a classical-liberal substrate),

  • religiously conservative without a classical-liberal substrate,

  • socially or traditionally conservative without a classical-liberal substrate,³

  • anything that opposes the left (or whatever is deemed by the speaker to be the official or orthodox left)

• We WILL mean the right as it is understood by those who actually consider themselves to be on the right—primarily conservatives and libertarians, whose ideological provenance lies in classical liberalism, and whose principles and various movements we briefly summarized in the introduction and in chapter 1.

Whether that changes at all when we’ve built our new spectrum…well, you’ll have to wait and see for that too. In the meantime, when we say the right, we mean the classical-liberal right. If we mean otherwise, we will use scare quotes or specify in context.

Finally, I recognize that we’ve grown accustomed to considering resistance to change, respect for tradition, and similar phenomena as being a part of the definition of the right—that these notions need some political “home” and that I seem to be divorcing them from the right. To some degree, I am, but only as a primary (i.e., sine qua non and exclusive) characteristic.

This will all become clearer as we move forward. In the meantime, simply ask yourself this: Why did conservatives like Edmund Burke oppose the French Revolution but support the American Revolution? 

If to be “conservative,” in the modern sense, means 

• to support hierarchies (no matter what those hierarchies are), 

• to oppose change (no matter what the change is),

• to stick with traditions and social norms (no matter what the traditions and social norms are)

• and to seek to preserve existing orders (no matter what those orders are), 

then surely he would have been against both revolutions. Even if he had other motivations that influenced his position, if he were conservative-solely-for-the-sake-of-conserving, then he could not have supported the American Revolution. 

The truth is, there is no such thing as a conservative-solely-for-the-sake-of-conserving. Conservatism always has a context, a substrate—something that is being conserved. A fundamentalist Muslim cleric wants to conserve something very different from an American conservative. Some classical liberals may have a frosting of philosophical or temperamental conservatism—even a thick one—but underneath, the cake is classical-liberal all the way down.

The bottom line: whether we get there through logically derived principles or reverence for accumulated human wisdom, we always reach the same place, and that place does not change with the times: what we are “conserving” is a life-affirming, freedom-loving philosophy that lionizes the individual human person.

1. One of my favorite summations comes from Rand: “That fraud collapsed in the 1940's, in the aftermath of World War II. It is too obvious, too easily demonstrable that fascism and communism are not two opposites, but two rival gangs fighting over the same territory—that both are variants of statism, based on the collectivist principle that man is the rightless slave of the state—that both are socialistic, in theory, in practice, and in the explicit statements of their leaders—that under both systems, the poor are enslaved and the rich are expropriated in favor of a ruling clique—that fascism is not the product of the political 'right,' but of the 'left'—that the basic issue is not rich versus poor,' but man versus the state, or: individual rights versus totalitarian government.” (Rand, Capitalism, 180–181)

2. Bernstein appeared truly to believe it was possible to work within Western democratic systems to make them more "humane" via socialist principles. In other words, he was a genuine "reformist." Most of the Western left since, however, has been more "incrementalist"—perpetrating a slow-motion revolution rather than trying to reform existing systems. Leftism lacks an internal limiting principle that says how far it ought to go, which means that, given enough power, they are unlikely to stop at mere "reform."

3. Frank Zappa was one of the most radically brilliant musicians of the twentieth century, but he really missed the mark when he said, "Rock music was never written for or performed for conservative tastes." Most political conservatives I know love rock music. Zappa’s comment reinforces the point I have been making. If by someone with "conservative tastes" he’s picturing some dowager, bedecked in pearls, eating canapés at a reception for wealthy donors to an opera house, then perhaps he is correct. But what does that have to do with the typical political conservative? This is why the label "conservative" is beyond problematic for political discourse—it is far too bogged down with misleading meanings.