Oh wow look its a man made of straw with a red herring in his pocket…
Thomas Aquinas : “'much more reason is there for heretics, as soon as they are convicted of heresy, to be not only excommunicated but even put to death.”
Naturally we’ll win, because the lefties will be too busy arguing over whether firearms are inherently sexist and whether the battalion is sufficiently representative of the transgendered/visible minority/differently-abled.
Precisely. It was my point recently about the LLs. While Rod Long debates over whether an article on Chomsky is “left libertarian enough”, people are actually writing articles challenging Chomsky. My take can be found in the comments of the blog post.
It’s these obsessions with anachronism, nit picking and semantics that makes the left in general (marxists, anti-capitalists, mutualists) stuck infinitely in first gear.
You mean like this one?
As someone who did experience this period, I think that you have to understand that a Reagan Republican was something completely different from what is now known as a conservative. Political life in the U.S. was really depressing in 1979. Inflation was skyrocketing, Iranians were holding a bunch of U.S. hostages, and the Soviet Union was building up their military. Meanwhile the U.S. military was still completely demoralized by the Vietnam war and high school dropout pay for soldiers. Johnson, Nixon, Ford, and Carter had all negotiated toothless peace treaties with the USSR, which the U.S. abided by and the USSR ignored. They were sending U.S. funds to the USSR, supposedly for food but the money ended up going into weapons programs. We did not know then, but we do know now, that the Soviets were planning to attack the U.S. and had constructed a huge underground city to protect their “elite” from a retaliatory nuclear attack.
Into this environment came Reagan, who had experienced coercion of card-carrying members of the U.S. Communist Party in his days leading the screen actors’ guild. He told us that we would have to endure a recession but that we wold see prosperity after it was over. He cut taxes and consistently stated that he would cut government spending. His Fed chairman, Paul Volker, hiked the Fed rates to the point where mortgage rates were 19%. Regan called the USSR the evil empire, cut off their funding, and held them accountable for negotiated treaties.
After a brief recession, the U.S. economy returned to prosperity and stayed there (with the exception of a brief plunge in the stock market in 1987). We now know that the financial pressure that he put on the USSR caused their downfall. Voting for the first time in the 1984 election, my choice was obvious.
I’m not saying that Regan did everything right, he started the “war on drugs”, had his share of scandals, and I now know that he ran up the federal deficit, but he laughed at the idea of national I.D. cards and never treated U.S. citizens (apart from illegal drug users) as criminals. Despite the very real Soviet threat and problems in the economy, he didn’t create a department of homeland security, spy on citizens, or nationalize companies. The flag burning, gays in the military issues did not present themselves until after the Regan presidency and the U.S. did not invade Afganistan, just sent them weapons to fight the Soviets. In other words, Reagan had his share of faults but he was still far superior to any other presidential candidate (RP excepted) in my lifetime.
Kevin Carson and Roderick Long are both good guys, in my opinion (unlike Marxists). Chomsky is not going to listen to challenges, anyway. His lazy dismissal of Rothbardian anarchism as “so full of hate that no one would want to live in it” is proof of that. Most of these articles are for the readers.
Which reminds me, I could have added to my point by saying the later-day Soviet Union was for the most part not Culturaly Marxist. Party members were expected to lead orderly lives and stay clear of the Jerry Springer material. Somehow along the way it had slipped from their mind that marriage was since Engels a “bourgeois institution”.
i was thinking about this subject a few days ago. i swear we are like twins or something. you made my day mate.
on the subject i have to say that it was simply knee-jerk reactionaryism. we did to russia what austria did to france.
I think it was rather the momentum. Which is also why the democratisation of 1991 - except for the Buchanite wing - did not change their goals.
im too confused. can u rephrase that?
on the side note: the OG conservatives were collectivist utalitarians. u can still here far-right europeans talking about the evil of greed and globalization. i mean look at the taliban.
It’s rather simple: the bastions of American imperialism needed SOME boogeyman to turn to after WWII.
that is true but not the whole picture. isolationists like taft still hated socialism with passion. conservatives hate communism but when was the last time the amish or the monks were put on a blacklist.
the essence of conservatives is double standart and defence of the status quo. there are no objective ends or ethical standarts. and since the ancien regime is always on the side of chauvinistic gendarms and public execution, conservatives around the world hold roughly the same values.
the archetypical right-wingers were the altar and throne pharisees. its the same strory two millenia later.
Hoppe, Rothbard and Mises certainly proposed such measures.
I diagree. From the book Regan’s War by Peter Schweizer:
“In retrospect, it is clear that Regan was largely correct about communism and his critics were wrong. Soviet communism was the threat that he claimed it was, and was vulnerable in the way he said it would be. He was on the correct side of the great battles of his forty-year struggle against communism. Moscow and its supporters did try to gain a level of control in Hollywood; the peace movement in the 1970’s and 1980’s was being influenced by the Soviet Union; and Moscow and Havana did have plans to subvert Central America. Archives in the former Soviet bloc settle these debates.”
the problem with BP’s statement is that while its true, it misses the point. the point is not whether the red threat was real or imagined, thats like saying “gays are not gonna take over the world” or "interracial marriage is under control. the issue is that conservatives didnt have any real reason to hate USSR. as for reds taking over the world, thats what all revolutionaries are supposed to do- spread the flames.
I`m saying it was momentum. USSR became the enemy and so it stayed the enemy. Nobody was continously examining if they stil qualify for an enemy. (Not like there are requirements anyway.) For the buerocrats too many jobs depended on it and for the public it had really turned into a peeing contest.* It really became like a football rivalry rather than an ideological conflict. (Ideology was more of an aesthetic, something like club colours. Symbolicaly important, but really beside the point.)
And somewhere along the way “communism is evil” morphed into “Russians are evil” so when communism fell the rivalry could go on without skipping a beat. Only the Buchanites proved to be sincere about their anti-communism so for them 1991 was an opportunity for rapprochement, but they were a voice in the wilderness.
American empire is often said to be continuation of the British Empire and well what do you know, British Empire too was - after 1815 - always looking to “contain” Russia, also often with ideological justification, so I am not really surprised. Maybe it`s old momentum from all the way back in London.
*In USSR as well as in US.
Barry Goldwater.
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That’s one of the reasons we have the Radical Islam Boogeyman now.
Ray-gun was a neo-fascist puppet.