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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See, THIS is why I hate putting labels on people. I don't understand the need to make people fit into neat little groups as though we're classifying insect Family, Genus and Species. People are more complicated than that, don't you think?
Or am I missing out on some life-changing revelation that occurs when you accurately "bag" somebody?
Well, not all interest groups are collectivist, if we are including African-Americans, Hispanics, and other ethnic groups as interest groups. Someone who is trying to lobby Congress to protect the spotted owl is a member of an interest group, but it not necessarily collectivist. Anyone engaging in racial politics -- on either side of the aisle, whether "for" a group or against it -- is collectivist in their thinking.
Now, of course you didn't say that support for universal health care was Leftist -- but most people in this country would of course recognize it as being so. Efforts as nationalization, having things over to the government, etc., are typically understood in this country to be Leftist/progressive ideas. I don't think that any intelligent idea is necessarily seen as being Leftist -- but, then, on the flip side, I don't think single payer health care is a good idea in the least. Which is certainly no defense of the current system our government created.
You mention there being no true Left in this country -- but there's no true Right here, either, the title of your posting notwithstanding. Which is one of the reasons why I have tried to clarify these terms, using them precisely, in the European sense, precisely because they are so muddled up in this country. I have also noted that the Left-liberals in this country are in fact a mixture, as are the Right-conservatives. Both give lip service to different elements of classical liberalism, even if neither side in fact follows through on those ideals. On both sides, it seems classical liberal ideals have been almost fully jettisoned for an essentially postmodern world view. I mean, you have neoconservatives with roots in Marxism (using Marxist terms like "the end of history") promoting what is essentially a postmodernist conservatism. The result is a "democracy for the same of democracy" push around the world, by any means necessary. Do they do it for idealistic reasons? No. They do it because in their minds democracy and capitalism have clearly won, and now it's time to get everyone else on board. It's both unprincipled and amoral, at best. I'm sure you see the same thing with postmodernism's influence on the Left as well. After all, that's where it started.
Of course, it is important to clearly define one's definitions, which is what I am trying to do here. I think a simple dyad of Left-Right is practically useless. Too many get thrown in to one or the other who have no business being there. Like me. And, I still contend, like you -- we are closer to each other ideologically than either one of us is to either the Left or the Right, no matter our differences on health coverage. We need more, not fewer, labels to clarify our thinking on these things. The American centrist muddlement of these terms does not help. And a rejection of definitions entirely is a rejection of thought itself.
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.
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