The New (Old) Right

On February 1, Useless Eaters said...
"Socialist Right"?

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Yep, the “Socialist Right”. The title fits, and any resemblance to the name of any other current or past group is intentional.

What’s frightening and too familiar about the Socialist Right and similarly named groups out of recent history is how they can manage to make themselves victims of a vicious conspiracy no matter how much political power they actually hold. They need an unseen enemy to justify the fact that some people will still, amazingly, publicly disagree with them. So they’ve got the gay liberal education establishment and media. Progressives holler at conservative politicians and corporate swindlers. These guys go after “people next door”, teachers, librarians, doctors, students, folks who are frightening because they could be in your town, on your block, TALKING TO YOUR CHILDREN!! AHHHHHHH!!

What makes ‘em good “Socialists” is that, unlike real conservatives, they want the state to do their dirty work in forcing everyone to live, breathe, think and do the nasty the way they do. Of course they hate the courts. The courts’ primary job in a democracy is to protect the individual from collective coercion, the “tyranny of the majority’ as the man said. Or as the more contemporary philosopher Larry Flynt said, “You can’t have four wolves and a sheep deciding what to have for dinner.”

The Socialist Right would say, “Why not?” Why should we tolerate people who don’t go to church or make love with the lights on if we don’t want to? Socialism worries about stuff like this. Socialist states spent just as much time trying to control how people felt, thought and acted as the Nazis did, maybe more so because they were trying to build the New Man. Well, the fundies are out to build the New Biblethumping Man, using the same time honored approach of state power to bully individual compliance to a single collective vision.

Real conservatives don’t do this. Heck, George Will is on a one-man crusade to save “true” conservatism from this kind of extension of sort of state power. He’s been real fun to read lately, sort of the conservative version of the disenchanted hippie. But just as conservatives in a certain well-ordered European nation couldn’t break with their native Socialist Rightists, I see it as amusing but not politically significant.

Me, I’d like to form the Blue State Free Militia for the inevitable showdown. But my wife won’t let me buy a gun.