10-03-2018, 01:18 PM
(10-03-2018, 08:11 AM)Bill the Piper Wrote:(10-02-2018, 11:09 AM)pbrower2a Wrote: We do not have a Hard Left with any relevance (Thank God!) but no center-right (which is too bad, because such would be a stabilizing influence). But with a new New Deal we will see the Establishment that is moderately-left start to have people drifting off to the center-Right. There will be something worthy of conservatism. Class privilege, contempt for learning, contempt for the poor, and a profits-only mentality do not merit preservation.
You mean something like the old-fashioned leftists who became neo-conservatives in the 1960s because they weren't happy with the countercultural trends?
David Horowitz is a prime example, although it was for a different reason (radical chic included 'Hate Whitey'm even if 'Whitey' was a sympathetic ally to begin with).
Extremists are surprisingly adept at going from one extreme cause to another. Many fascists were ex-communists, and many commies had been fascists. Although the Commies in Hungary, Romania, and Yugoslavia executed leading members of such thug organizations as the Arrow Cross, Iron Guard, and Ustase, they readily found rank-and-file members of such groups easy to brainwash into being enforcers for Commie regimes. Because the Commies had little local support in the sense of fanatical Commies already in place, they had to find others to do the dirty work -- people already brutal, people who had a vacuum where purpose and meaning were because they could no longer be fascists -- so who could be better?
Just replace the fascist symbols with hammers and sickles and images of lionized fascist leaders with Stalin or the local Red Quisling, and one had the ideal Red Thug.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.