When It All Went Wrong: The French Revolution

Chapter 2.1: Liberté, égalité, la droite, et la gauche

Why this book | Title Page | Table of Contents
Preface | Introduction
PART 1
Chapter 1 (1.1) (1.2) | Chapter 2 (2.1) | Chapter 3
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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Chapter 2: What the Left Says the Right Is

Monarchists and fascists and reactionaries, oh my!

2.1

Liberté, égalité, la droite, et la gauche

• Rousseau

• The Fork in the Road

One of the ways that the new statist intellectuals did their work was to change the meaning of old labels, and therefore to manipulate in the minds of the public the emotional connotations attached to such labels. For example, the laissez-faire libertarians had long been known as ‘liberals,’ and the purest and most militant of them as ‘radicals’; they had also been known as ‘progressives’ because they were the ones in tune with industrial progress, the spread of liberty, and the rise in living standards of consumers. The new breed of statist academics and intellectuals appropriated to themselves the words ‘liberal' and ‘progressive,' and successfully managed to tar their laissez-faire opponents with the charge of being old-fashioned, ‘Neanderthal,’ and 'reactionary.'

— Murray Rothbard

If you want to know what a movement is all about, ask its adherents. For all our flaws and variety, conservatives and libertarians are part of the ancient and ever-growing phenomenon of classical liberalism. We have many variants and factions, and plenty of internecine squabbles, but we share that core. That is how we see ourselves; that is what we are. And yet…

Ask someone on the political left where our ideology comes from…

Our inspiring figures?
Hitler, Mussolini, Goebbels. Montgomery Burns. The Creature from the Black Lagoon. 

Our political activities?
Getting together in backrooms with snifters of brandy and expensive cigars and plotting to oppress poor people. And then maybe going out in our luxury cars and running over a few of them for good measure.

Our ideological principles?
Social Darwinism. Forced inequality. Hate.

If that is an exaggeration, it’s not by much. This is roughly how we are portrayed in entertainment, discussed in academia, and shaded in the press. Characterizations that should be rejected as cartoonish garbage have instead become articles of faith. 

Over the last century, the left has made more than a cottage industry out of psychoanalyzing the right—conducting various pseudoscientific studies designed to expose the fascistic motivations lurking in our tiny black hearts. A recent and amusing example “revealed” that people on the right have authoritarian personality traits…until a year later, when it was quietly admitted that the results had been misreported. The study had shown the exact opposite: it was the left-wing participants who had met the criteria for “authoritarian.”¹

One inscrutable artifact is the phrase “to the right of Attila the Hun,” which makes perfect sense…unless you know anything at all about the right or Attila the Hun. Unfortunately, even people on the right use this phrase, buying into a century and a half of utter incoherence on the true nature of the political spectrum.

To get a good look at that incoherence, one need only look to Wikipedia’s entry on “right-wing politics.”² It is rather contradictory. As of this writing, it says