About the only non-rightwinger involved in terrorism was a Muslim convert Carlos "Corey" Bledsoe, now Abdulhakid Mujahid Mohammed, who allegedly shot and killed Army Pvt. William Long and wounded another soldier outside a Little Rock, Ark., mall.
Some of us, myself included, have argued that most of this blood also lies on the hands and tongues of men and women like Bill O'Reilly, Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Glenn Beck, and Michele Malkin. They are the moral monsters who create and constantly reinforce a emotional and intellectual climate where others create bloodshed and terror. But there is a problem here even deeper than murder.
Our identity as a nation is not innate, a fact of nature and biology. Instead our identity as Americans is a cultural construct. Like all cultural constructs, it must continually be recreated through the activities of people who regard themselves as Americans.
More than other nations, our national identity is rooted in ideas incorporated into our Declaration of Independence and Constitution. Unlike most European nations we are not primarily an ethnic group or former tribe. We do not share a history extending back into the distant past. We are a people who came together to make a vision of a free society real. This vision has never been fully realized, and the Dixie explicitly repudiated it before the Civil War, but its promise has remained our strongest source of national unity and hope for the future. As a country, our most important reforms and achievements have been in its name, our greatest failings when we failed to live up to it.
Like termites, the right wing media has been gradually eating away at this moral and intellectual heritage for decades. They have been teaching that other identities are more important than being an American: "Christian," conservative, white, and so on. In doing so they have constantly taught that Americans who do not meet their tribalistic standards are inferior.
No greater treason is possible than that of undermining the bonds of peace and respect that hold a society together, substituting hatred, distrust, fear, and violence in its place.
The traitors of the right hide their treason against our nation by constantly talking about patriotism - the same way the communists talked about worker self rule while destroying it or Republican politicians praise "bipartisanship" while violating it at every opportunity. By reversing the meaning of words and destroying dialogue they make public debate impossible, and reduce it to yelling and shoving.
I fear we have seen only a taste of their bestiality. Much more will come.
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This has gone on long enough.
You are refusing to read me carefully, and so I believe I am wasting my time discussing these matters.
I did NOT say there was no "true left" in this country - I earlier said I am a man of the left. I might contradict myself at times, but not that much.
I said there is no left IN THE EUROPEAN SENSE, that is, one with a collectivist past insofar as it was originally Marxist and strongly anti-capitalist. Much as you are in denial about it, almost all American political debate except that rooted in the South and its political culture is liberal in one form or another and is 'socialist' only by ignoring the meaning of the word historically. Until you offer a DETAILED and not simply rhetorical rebuttal (without using the word 'collectivist'), I ask you to refrain from continuing this conversation.
For similar reasons your discussion of there being "no true Right' is mistaken. We have a true right, it is predominately Southern in origin and explicitly repudiated the liberal principles of the American revolution. There are other forms of American right wing thought, including the individualist right of Ayn Rand and her followers. The Southern right is illiberal. Randian rightists are liberal.
It seems to me almost everything you say regarding people you disagree with ultimately refers to them as "collectivist." And then you suggest their thought ends in mass murder. This is ad hominem argument taken to a breathtaking degree.
Your use of "classical liberal' is also idiosyncratic, confusing to me, and I would suspect incomprehensible to most readers of this blog. Ditto you use of Hayek. I know his thought well, most readers here do not. If you are going to refer to Hayek, explain so everyone will know what you mean.
I will no longer discuss these matters with you until you use terms in a generally accepted form, or carefully define what you mean, and also pay attention to what I say.
Humans have a deep need to believe in something outside of them affecting (controlling) the world. This in part comes from the fact that humans are social mammals, and social mammals all have leaders. With our more powerful imaginations, we imagine that there are things which control the world, thus making us less responsible for what happens. We are a naturally paranoid species.
This first came about in the belief in natural spirits. Sickness was demon possession. This later was transfered to the gods, who were oftentimes in opposition to each other, so it was hard to determine what side to choose (a problem Socrates points out in "Euthyphro"). Still, they were out there, and you had to choose, or face the consequences. Sometimes you faced the consequences precisely because you chose (consider Euripides' "Hippolytus"). This problem was solved with monotheism. There was one good God running everything, and one bad one trying to mess up his work. When people started becoming atheists, they didn't shed this deep-seated need for something out there to appear to control them. Thus, early atheists embraced statism, and turned the state into God. Postmodern atheists, who no longer have faith in the state as God have embraced the Panopticon (as Michel Foucault predicted they would in his work by the same title). Belief in the panopticon makes one paranoid and distrustful of practically every human achievement, believing such achievements were and are part of an oppressive power structure designed (by whom?) to keep people down -- particularly women and minorities (for what reason? -- Who knows?). This is what happens when you have nothing to believe in, find the world utterly meaningless, and embrace nihilism.
Of course all of these religious forms accept that there must be someone out there controlling things. We need to move beyond this belief and shed our paranoia. The world is not a simple system controlled from the top-down; it is rather a set of nested, bottom-up, self-organized complex cybernetic systems. We try to impose the first on the second in our forms of government, and even try to make God out to be a control freak. To do so will be to find ourselves more in tune with nature as a whole, freer by recognizing the emergent naturalness of freedom, and thus happier.
I'm saddened by this. But of course you can't make someone teach you if they aren't interested in doing so.
I must thank you for pointing me to Kropotkin, though. I have found him absolutely hillarious, notwithstanding the occasional insight regarding how the Left thinks.
I can not believe anyone calling themselves a citizen of the US would write such nonsense. If what I read in these blogs are indicitive of any segement of the US population I am astonished such minds exist. Talk about living in ones own world. Total nonsense at the highest form.
I just was tipped off at elgatogrey's comments. I will be brief since s/he decided to share an opinion with no reason other than passion to back it up.
Over the past few months we have seen right wingers contest democratic elections, threaten armed revolution, hope for the failure of America under Obama, and so on. And on.
Maybe that does not constitute threats of war against our country and its constitution, and an implacable deep seated hostility to citizens who see the world differently than Beck, Limbaugh, and other like minded ones do, But then I'd like to know what does.
I am as always interested in your reasons, not the intensity of your beliefs.
Gus
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