Ed West wrote: "And if they don’t succeed, the radical Left’s excesses pave the way for the Right, as they did in the past when the rise of fascism would have been impossible without the terror induced by communist violence." That is true enough, but in Germany National Socialism, as its name rightly conveys, had far more Left than Right in it; it had hardly anything in common with Conservatism, which in Europe was the old 'throne and altar" Right. National Socialism is best understood as a Left variant. The characterization of fascism as being "far right" and a manifestation of Marx's "capitalism" is an artifact of Bolshevik propaganda after Hitler broke the Molotov - Ribbentrop Pact by invading Russia in June, 1941. That mischaracterization continues to serve today's Left very well by attributing the characteristic Leftist crimes and abuses in history to the Right. As an aside, Hitler in his Tabletalk (tischrede) had said that everything in his system derived from Marx, and Mussolini had written a laudatory book on Marx before quitting the Italian Socialists to form his Fascist Party. Today's Conservatives should not fall into the trap of acknowledging National Socialism and Fascism as being on their side of the political divide.
It's basically impossible to have a productive, high level conversation on any subject regarding fascism because no one will agree on a dispassionate doctrinal definition to ground the discourse. What is clear is that even before it became subject to Orwell's description as little more than a content-free pejorative, the communists correctly identified the fascists as their most formidable rivals (unlike the weak liberals) who posed the greatest modernists threat to the political and social goals of internationalist leftism. Because of that rivalry, it is both true and false whether one says that the (doctrinaire) fascists were on the right or on the left. As Payne wrote, fascism was against everything else, conservatism, communism, and liberalism alike. In truth they were "far everything" and "far nothing" being enemies to everyone else.
Things that seem like examples of aligning with any of those other political movements are mostly tense and temporary alliances of convenience (as indeed was the pact between the nazis and soviets), or else simple mischaracterization by (usually leftist) writers attempting to smear distinct elements of the conservative or nationalist right with the fascist label (as with the Spanish Civil War).
The fascists were certainly authoritarian / totalitarian and dirigiste centralizing "planers" economically, which looks leftist. But they were also extremely hierarchical and imperialist nationalist as opposed to universalists.
To make discussion even more difficult, it is not actually very clear to what extent the recent convergence in the de facto operation of social governance across most of the economically important nations (regardless of what they call themselves or pretend to be) can be said to be clearly distinguishable from a softened version of the notions posed by early fascist intellectuals.
It's totally obvious by their various geopolitical- technological accomplishments despite lack of other economic resources that the North Koreans are endowed with a lot of human capital on par with the South and like China and some Soviet Union nations in the past are only poor because actually Communist and profoundly isolated from global information and markets. This is like how it's totally obvious that Venezuela has a lot of fossil energy capital and is also only poor despite that because of how ineptly, corrupted, and ruthlessly socialist is the regime.
Referring to Ed West, it's disappointing that people still label fascism as "right." Everybody knows that fascism was socialism and, as totalitarian socialism instead of free-market socialism, it was essentially communism. What made Nazism stand out, it seems, was the genocide. But the communists do this too, e.g., the Holodomor in Ukraine and, of course, the Cultural Revolution in China. It seems past time for people to stop referring to socialists as far right. "Cultural conservatives" might be a more reasonable label.
The regime that controls China still calls itself "Communist" and while the definition is pretty fuzzy, there is nowhere in that whole space which even remotely maps to how the Chinese economy actually works today. Likewise, the Nazis called themselves socialists, but they didn't mean or implement ideas about that that are in the same universe as Soviet / Maoist communist command economies. To them socialism meant what an American would call a mixed economy welfare state with private property and businesses but with lots of regulation, taxation, subsidy, redistribution, and import and export controls, also some "anti- inflation" price controls and rent control. No more economically leftist than in most of the free world today. There are plenty of German private corporations which existed before the nazis came to power and which came out the other side of the war still in business, some continuing in operation to this very day. Would it surprise you to learn that one of the first things the nazis did when coming to power was embark on a major program of privatization of sectors and industries nationalized by the Weimar Republic during the early Great Depression, with the position that such activities should be owned and managed by private persons to the maximum possible extent consistent with "the national interest"? And that they understood themselves to be doing so and were completely explicit in their public explanations that these moves were in opposition and contrast to those imposed and favored by the left in general and the communists in particular?
At the time, before the war economy made all this moot, this was understood by everyone as a economic movement to the markets- favoring right, relative to the previous context. Whether they were left or right in any absolute sense depends on one's own perspective, but again, in practice, they didn't even get close to what was imposed on the Soviet Union and nor were they ever trying to do anything like that.
So you’re saying you agree with me? Yes, Xi’s China is more fascist than communist. Yes, the Weimar Republic was a disaster. The point is that it’s time to stop lying that cultural conservatism equals fascism. Please don’t try to equate the two. Obviously, the socialists are the fascists (because socialism is fascism) but not all fascists are “like Nazis.”
I'm intrigued by the use of the word Bolshevik instead of communist. One could see it as identifying as an intellectual but it seems more like the left calling Trump a Fascist, even if the prior is more accurate. It's dismissing the other side with the strongest language possible.
We all have our biases and let them show in various ways but this is a small example of the type of thing I like to avoid and I think this substack mostly does avoid.
What's the difference between the word Bolshevik and communist? Is it just that communist is a less pejorative (more charitable!) term than communist, or does the semantic difference imply that there may have been a kinder, gentler and 'more democratic' road to the communist utopia than that taken by the Bolsheviki? Is Maoist more acceptable? How about Khmer Rougest? Might as well call a spade a spade.
“In short, the French center, personified by Macron, sided with a Bolshevik in order to freeze out a “far right” party.”
First off, do they self identify as communists or Bolsheviks? Can you see how it might be a little rude if not mean-spirited not to honor that? To what benefit?
Maybe it's a mistake but when I hear Bolshevik I think Stalin, who was nothing less than a murdering thug. When I think of western European communists, I have a very different picture of misguided but mostly well-intentioned people. Certainly not murderous thugs.
You kind of inadvertently make a good point. Would it be any more accurate to call them Maoists? And then there's this WP article from 2017 calling various people on the right Bolsheviks.
It is of continuing interest to me how news media invariably refer to RN (and many other organizations) as far right, but almost never refer to anyone as far left. I don't really know anything about RN, but it mystifies me why many people still don't see how destructive communists and even socialists are.
I suppose "almost" never would mean you could take any amount of such references and still say "it almost never happens", but these may be of interest. The Times is a mainstream publication.
"Friday’s letter, signed by both Ms. Tlaib and Ms. Bush, highlights how frustration on Capitol Hill has begun to spread beyond the far-left flank of the party"
Again, my guess would be the organization and the congresswoman would not categorize themselves as centrists, and would agree to the extent that 3-dimensional people can be cast on a one-dimensional line, this is an accurate characterization.
I don't dispute that the frequency of one is higher than the other.
Their hypotheses also sounds reasonable.
"It is conceivable that far-right activity in society could have increased more markedly than far-left activity, justifying news media concern about it. It is, however, challenging to establish an Archimedean point of political neutrality to use as a reference for determining precisely what counts as political extremism.
That is, while it is indisputable that groups which are labeled hard-right have been increasingly prominent in U.S. and European politics, it is also plausible that the center of gravity in established media newsrooms, as in other elite professions (Heterodox Academy 2017), has been shifting leftwards, especially as prestige news media is increasingly organized and edited by graduates from elite universities who tend to hold increasingly socially liberal beliefs."
More substantively, a part of the appeal of such political parties is they are not the mainstream, that the current state of affairs, in their telling, is so untenable that drastic or extreme measures are needed. By definition they are far-X for some X. I doubt they themselves see it as pejorative.
I really didn't want to spend any time on this, especially since I don't have any way to find out what specific articles I read about the French election, but here are a couple of examples that seem like the kind of thing I remember:
BBC (https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cgrlxn4ngdgo) refers to the "far right" and "disparate parties of the left". They talk about "a multitude of political forces: three major blocs (left, far-right and centre); plus the centre-right." No real mention of far left.
The idea that "lack of material resources" is the key environmental factor in cognitive ability is a stupid straw man view. The real explanation, whatever it is, is clearly much more complicated. Eg the culture surrounding academic achievement and holding children to high expectations could be a big factor.
I'm going to guess he means by grudgingly holding their noses and strategically voting for Macron's party as the lesser evil like American conservatives vote for establishment Republicans reluctantly with a bitter taste on their tongue.
But the context is different in France, the far left is not actually the lesser evil.
I think Camp of the Saints got the general cultural phenomenon better, in part because it didn't focus on islam, but about the total collapse and relentless leftist elite denigration of cultural pride, confidence, devotion, and courage. The French cannot be for a France that is for the French, "The French State", and so it has been up for grabs for several generations and the contest for their terrain is between the Muslims who showed up demographically and American Progressivism which showed up ideologically. It is actually an alliance that makes sense, since the philosophical mortal enemy of every other party is a party that is about France-for-the-French, which they will band together even as bedfellows to crush by any means necessary and at all costs.
A similar thing plays out in the US. American GOP-Establishment Republicans - and especially the leadership with consistent applause from the WSJ - have never missed an opportunity in 20 years to keep trying over and over to give the left what it wants on immigration - despite facing intense opposition from and occasionally getting seriously punished by their own voters every time, the ultimate example of which being Trump's being able to - get this - at least promise to give Republican voters what they want - to win the primary and reset a good amount of the party dynamics, which he continues to do.
The GOPe has likewise recognized this possibility as an annoying characteristic of their frustratingly unenlightened voters and thus potentially undermining their ability to maintain control over the party's policy and direction for a long time. Their mistake is that they thought their control over the money and marketing and thus who would get a chance to run as a Republican was sufficiently strong to prevent anyone from breaking the cartel silence on the matter and making hay on the issue. But they were not prepared for Trump plus the social media revolution. The Europeans, however, are prepared to stop such possibilities.
Interesting because the first time I saw Tony in that hat was when we were both checking in at the Fort Worth hotel at which the 2019 Mont Pelerin meetings were held.
Never put Lenin on a train because you hate the Tsar
Ed West wrote: "And if they don’t succeed, the radical Left’s excesses pave the way for the Right, as they did in the past when the rise of fascism would have been impossible without the terror induced by communist violence." That is true enough, but in Germany National Socialism, as its name rightly conveys, had far more Left than Right in it; it had hardly anything in common with Conservatism, which in Europe was the old 'throne and altar" Right. National Socialism is best understood as a Left variant. The characterization of fascism as being "far right" and a manifestation of Marx's "capitalism" is an artifact of Bolshevik propaganda after Hitler broke the Molotov - Ribbentrop Pact by invading Russia in June, 1941. That mischaracterization continues to serve today's Left very well by attributing the characteristic Leftist crimes and abuses in history to the Right. As an aside, Hitler in his Tabletalk (tischrede) had said that everything in his system derived from Marx, and Mussolini had written a laudatory book on Marx before quitting the Italian Socialists to form his Fascist Party. Today's Conservatives should not fall into the trap of acknowledging National Socialism and Fascism as being on their side of the political divide.
It's basically impossible to have a productive, high level conversation on any subject regarding fascism because no one will agree on a dispassionate doctrinal definition to ground the discourse. What is clear is that even before it became subject to Orwell's description as little more than a content-free pejorative, the communists correctly identified the fascists as their most formidable rivals (unlike the weak liberals) who posed the greatest modernists threat to the political and social goals of internationalist leftism. Because of that rivalry, it is both true and false whether one says that the (doctrinaire) fascists were on the right or on the left. As Payne wrote, fascism was against everything else, conservatism, communism, and liberalism alike. In truth they were "far everything" and "far nothing" being enemies to everyone else.
Things that seem like examples of aligning with any of those other political movements are mostly tense and temporary alliances of convenience (as indeed was the pact between the nazis and soviets), or else simple mischaracterization by (usually leftist) writers attempting to smear distinct elements of the conservative or nationalist right with the fascist label (as with the Spanish Civil War).
The fascists were certainly authoritarian / totalitarian and dirigiste centralizing "planers" economically, which looks leftist. But they were also extremely hierarchical and imperialist nationalist as opposed to universalists.
To make discussion even more difficult, it is not actually very clear to what extent the recent convergence in the de facto operation of social governance across most of the economically important nations (regardless of what they call themselves or pretend to be) can be said to be clearly distinguishable from a softened version of the notions posed by early fascist intellectuals.
It's totally obvious by their various geopolitical- technological accomplishments despite lack of other economic resources that the North Koreans are endowed with a lot of human capital on par with the South and like China and some Soviet Union nations in the past are only poor because actually Communist and profoundly isolated from global information and markets. This is like how it's totally obvious that Venezuela has a lot of fossil energy capital and is also only poor despite that because of how ineptly, corrupted, and ruthlessly socialist is the regime.
Surely you understand that if NKorea had the right leader life there would be far better than the south even if the economy weren't as big.
Referring to Ed West, it's disappointing that people still label fascism as "right." Everybody knows that fascism was socialism and, as totalitarian socialism instead of free-market socialism, it was essentially communism. What made Nazism stand out, it seems, was the genocide. But the communists do this too, e.g., the Holodomor in Ukraine and, of course, the Cultural Revolution in China. It seems past time for people to stop referring to socialists as far right. "Cultural conservatives" might be a more reasonable label.
The regime that controls China still calls itself "Communist" and while the definition is pretty fuzzy, there is nowhere in that whole space which even remotely maps to how the Chinese economy actually works today. Likewise, the Nazis called themselves socialists, but they didn't mean or implement ideas about that that are in the same universe as Soviet / Maoist communist command economies. To them socialism meant what an American would call a mixed economy welfare state with private property and businesses but with lots of regulation, taxation, subsidy, redistribution, and import and export controls, also some "anti- inflation" price controls and rent control. No more economically leftist than in most of the free world today. There are plenty of German private corporations which existed before the nazis came to power and which came out the other side of the war still in business, some continuing in operation to this very day. Would it surprise you to learn that one of the first things the nazis did when coming to power was embark on a major program of privatization of sectors and industries nationalized by the Weimar Republic during the early Great Depression, with the position that such activities should be owned and managed by private persons to the maximum possible extent consistent with "the national interest"? And that they understood themselves to be doing so and were completely explicit in their public explanations that these moves were in opposition and contrast to those imposed and favored by the left in general and the communists in particular?
At the time, before the war economy made all this moot, this was understood by everyone as a economic movement to the markets- favoring right, relative to the previous context. Whether they were left or right in any absolute sense depends on one's own perspective, but again, in practice, they didn't even get close to what was imposed on the Soviet Union and nor were they ever trying to do anything like that.
So you’re saying you agree with me? Yes, Xi’s China is more fascist than communist. Yes, the Weimar Republic was a disaster. The point is that it’s time to stop lying that cultural conservatism equals fascism. Please don’t try to equate the two. Obviously, the socialists are the fascists (because socialism is fascism) but not all fascists are “like Nazis.”
I'm intrigued by the use of the word Bolshevik instead of communist. One could see it as identifying as an intellectual but it seems more like the left calling Trump a Fascist, even if the prior is more accurate. It's dismissing the other side with the strongest language possible.
We all have our biases and let them show in various ways but this is a small example of the type of thing I like to avoid and I think this substack mostly does avoid.
What's the difference between the word Bolshevik and communist? Is it just that communist is a less pejorative (more charitable!) term than communist, or does the semantic difference imply that there may have been a kinder, gentler and 'more democratic' road to the communist utopia than that taken by the Bolsheviki? Is Maoist more acceptable? How about Khmer Rougest? Might as well call a spade a spade.
“In short, the French center, personified by Macron, sided with a Bolshevik in order to freeze out a “far right” party.”
First off, do they self identify as communists or Bolsheviks? Can you see how it might be a little rude if not mean-spirited not to honor that? To what benefit?
Maybe it's a mistake but when I hear Bolshevik I think Stalin, who was nothing less than a murdering thug. When I think of western European communists, I have a very different picture of misguided but mostly well-intentioned people. Certainly not murderous thugs.
You kind of inadvertently make a good point. Would it be any more accurate to call them Maoists? And then there's this WP article from 2017 calling various people on the right Bolsheviks.
https://wapo.st/4f58fpd
Using the term communist seems better to me in so many ways and worse in none.
It is of continuing interest to me how news media invariably refer to RN (and many other organizations) as far right, but almost never refer to anyone as far left. I don't really know anything about RN, but it mystifies me why many people still don't see how destructive communists and even socialists are.
I suppose "almost" never would mean you could take any amount of such references and still say "it almost never happens", but these may be of interest. The Times is a mainstream publication.
"France’s Far-Left Firebrand"
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/09/world/europe/france-election-left-melenchon.html
"The alliance includes four left-wing parties: Communists, Socialists, Greens and the far-left party, France Unbowed"
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/07/world/europe/france-election-new-popular-front-far-right.html
"The left-wing coalition is pushing a heavy tax-the-rich and spread-the-wealth agenda inspired by the far-left France Unbowed party."
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/02/business/france-economy-macron-national-rally.html
And likewise across other mainstream publications. I have "almost" never seen a reference to France Unbowed without the "far-left" qualifier :)
If applied to the US would MikeW's comment be more accurate?
"Others claimed on social media that any shooter was a member of the far-left Antifa group"
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/13/us/politics/trump-rally-disinformation-x-social-media.html
"Congressional Democrats on the far left like Representative Rashida Tlaib of Michigan have openly criticized Mr. Biden"
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/28/us/politics/biden-israel-netanyahu-gaza.html
"Friday’s letter, signed by both Ms. Tlaib and Ms. Bush, highlights how frustration on Capitol Hill has begun to spread beyond the far-left flank of the party"
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/05/us/politics/democrats-israel-aid.html
Again, my guess would be the organization and the congresswoman would not categorize themselves as centrists, and would agree to the extent that 3-dimensional people can be cast on a one-dimensional line, this is an accurate characterization.
Thanks for the pointer.
I don't dispute that the frequency of one is higher than the other.
Their hypotheses also sounds reasonable.
"It is conceivable that far-right activity in society could have increased more markedly than far-left activity, justifying news media concern about it. It is, however, challenging to establish an Archimedean point of political neutrality to use as a reference for determining precisely what counts as political extremism.
That is, while it is indisputable that groups which are labeled hard-right have been increasingly prominent in U.S. and European politics, it is also plausible that the center of gravity in established media newsrooms, as in other elite professions (Heterodox Academy 2017), has been shifting leftwards, especially as prestige news media is increasingly organized and edited by graduates from elite universities who tend to hold increasingly socially liberal beliefs."
More substantively, a part of the appeal of such political parties is they are not the mainstream, that the current state of affairs, in their telling, is so untenable that drastic or extreme measures are needed. By definition they are far-X for some X. I doubt they themselves see it as pejorative.
I really didn't want to spend any time on this, especially since I don't have any way to find out what specific articles I read about the French election, but here are a couple of examples that seem like the kind of thing I remember:
BBC (https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cgrlxn4ngdgo) refers to the "far right" and "disparate parties of the left". They talk about "a multitude of political forces: three major blocs (left, far-right and centre); plus the centre-right." No real mention of far left.
The Guardian (https://www.theguardian.com/world/article/2024/jul/07/frances-progressives-keep-out-the-far-right-but-what-could-happen-next) talks about the "far right" and the "New Popular Front (NFP), a left-green alliance dominated by Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s radical left France Unbowed (LFI)". OK, they do call France Unbowed radical, but what about the rest of them, which are apparently going along with it? I suspect I would consider most of the NFP far left.
The idea that "lack of material resources" is the key environmental factor in cognitive ability is a stupid straw man view. The real explanation, whatever it is, is clearly much more complicated. Eg the culture surrounding academic achievement and holding children to high expectations could be a big factor.
Well, Le Pen supporters could have united with Macron to freeze out the far Left.
How?
I'm going to guess he means by grudgingly holding their noses and strategically voting for Macron's party as the lesser evil like American conservatives vote for establishment Republicans reluctantly with a bitter taste on their tongue.
But the context is different in France, the far left is not actually the lesser evil.
Marcon could simply have formed a government with the right and changed his policies on things like immigration. He chose not to do that.
I continue to believe that "Submission" got the scenario down to a T.
I think Camp of the Saints got the general cultural phenomenon better, in part because it didn't focus on islam, but about the total collapse and relentless leftist elite denigration of cultural pride, confidence, devotion, and courage. The French cannot be for a France that is for the French, "The French State", and so it has been up for grabs for several generations and the contest for their terrain is between the Muslims who showed up demographically and American Progressivism which showed up ideologically. It is actually an alliance that makes sense, since the philosophical mortal enemy of every other party is a party that is about France-for-the-French, which they will band together even as bedfellows to crush by any means necessary and at all costs.
A similar thing plays out in the US. American GOP-Establishment Republicans - and especially the leadership with consistent applause from the WSJ - have never missed an opportunity in 20 years to keep trying over and over to give the left what it wants on immigration - despite facing intense opposition from and occasionally getting seriously punished by their own voters every time, the ultimate example of which being Trump's being able to - get this - at least promise to give Republican voters what they want - to win the primary and reset a good amount of the party dynamics, which he continues to do.
The GOPe has likewise recognized this possibility as an annoying characteristic of their frustratingly unenlightened voters and thus potentially undermining their ability to maintain control over the party's policy and direction for a long time. Their mistake is that they thought their control over the money and marketing and thus who would get a chance to run as a Republican was sufficiently strong to prevent anyone from breaking the cartel silence on the matter and making hay on the issue. But they were not prepared for Trump plus the social media revolution. The Europeans, however, are prepared to stop such possibilities.
Tony often does wear his cowboy hat. He seems to always do that at conferences. So you may get your wish.
Interesting because the first time I saw Tony in that hat was when we were both checking in at the Fort Worth hotel at which the 2019 Mont Pelerin meetings were held.