Sorry about that typo. It was supposed to be “preserve society’s culture”. By culture, I was referring to, basically, traditions, hierarchies, family values (like punishing someone for prostitution, etc.). They don’t understand that by using force to uphold family values, they are acting as if family values are not valuable.
Huh. It seems Nitroadict’s original interpretation of ‘preserve society’ was right after all.
"In addition to our re-evaluation of the origins and nature of the Cold War, we engaged in a thorough reassessment of the whole “left-right” ideological spectrum in historical perspective. For it was clear to us that the European Throne-and-Altar Conservatism that had captured the right wing was statism in a virulent and despotic form; and yet only an imbecile could possibly call these people “leftists.” But this meant that our old simple paradigm of the “left Communist/total government . . . right/no government” continuum, with liberals on the left of center and conservatives on the right of center, had been totally incorrect. We had therefore been misled in our basic view of the spectrum and in our whole conception of ourselves as natural “extreme rightists.” There must have been a fatal flaw in the analysis. Plunging back into history, we concentrated on the reality that in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, laissez-faire liberals, radicals, and revolutionaries constituted the “extreme left” while our ancient foes, the conservatives, the Throne-and-Altar worshippers, constituted the right-wing Enemy. Leonard Liggio then came up with the following profound analysis of the historical process, which I adopted.
First, and dominant in history, was the Old Order, the ancien régime, the regime of caste and frozen status, of exploitation by a war-making, feudal or despotic ruling class, using the church and the priesthood to dupe the masses into accepting its rule. This was pure statism; and this was the “right wing.” Then, in seventeenthand eighteenth-century Western Europe, a liberal and radical opposition movement arose, our old heroes, who championed a popular revolutionary movement on behalf of rationalism, individual liberty, minimal government, free markets and free trade, international peace, and separation of Church and State—and in opposition to Throne and Altar, to monarchy, the ruling class, theocracy, and war. These—“our people”—were the Left, and the purer their libertarian vision the more “extreme” a Left they were. So far, so good, and our analysis was not yet so different from before; but what of socialism, that movement born in the nineteenth century which we had always reviled as the “extreme left”?
Where did that fit in? Liggio analyzed socialism as a confused middle- of-the road movement, influenced historically by both the libertarian and individualist Left and by the conservative-statist Right. From the individualist Left the socialists took the goals of freedom: the withering away of the State, the replacement of the governing of men by the administration of things (a concept coined by the early nineteenth-century French laissez-faire libertarians Charles Comte and Charles Dunoyer), opposition to the ruling class and the search for its overthrow, the desire to establish
international peace, an advanced industrial economy and a high standard of living for the mass of the people. From the conservative Right the socialists adopted the means to attempt to achieve these goals: collectivism, state planning, community control of the individual. But this put socialism in the middle of the ideological spectrum. It also meant that socialism was an unstable, self-contradictory doctrine bound to fly apart rapidly in the inner contradiction between its means and its ends. And in this belief we were bolstered by the old demonstration of my mentor Ludwig von Mises that socialist central planning simply cannot operate an advanced industrial economy.
The Socialist movement had, historically, also suffered ideologically and organizationally from a similar inner contradiction:
with Social Democrats, from Engels to Kautsky to Sidney Hook, shifting inexorably rightward into accepting and strengthening the State apparatus and becoming “left” apologists for the Corporate State, while other socialists, such as Bakunin and Kropotkin, shifted leftward toward the individualist, libertarian pole. It was clear, too, that the Communist Party in America had taken, in domestic affairs, the same “rightward” path—hence the similarity which the “extreme” red-baiters had long discerned between Communists and liberals. In fact, the shift of so many ex-Communists from left to the conservative Right now seemed to be not very much of a shift at all; for they had been pro-Big Government in the 1930s and “Twentieth Century American” patriots in the 1940s, and now they were still patriots and statists." - Betrayal of the American Right by Murray N. Rothbard