Start of the new cycle

[pbrower2a]

(10-04-2018, 07:05 AM)Bill the Piper Wrote:

(10-03-2018, 01:18 PM)pbrower2a Wrote: 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.

Neoconservatives were by no means extremists. If you want an extremist of the capitalist "yellow sector", try libertarians and Randians. If you want a conservative ("black sector") extremist, try Dominion theologists or European counterparts like Marcel Lefebvre. Neoconservatives weren't like either of these two.

But 1T is not a time for neo-cons. It's more likely cautious politicians, focused on domestic issues, will be elected throughout the West. Neo-conservatives will be remembered as one out of many types of misguided boomer idealists. I wonder however, what the new idealists will think about them?

Dominionist theologians are totalitarian, so I can dispense with them quickly as you can. I have had plenty of debates with fanatical supporters of Rand, and they seem just as fanatical as Marxist-Leninists.  The transformation of a liberal, socialistic society or even a welfare state to the Randist ideal could result in mass death that fanatical Randists would think a necessary 'cleansing' of society of human dreck. The Rand ideal has little to offer the common man except the duty to suffer (if given the alleged privilege necessary for survival, and if they never get that privilege they can simply die of starvation) for the economic elites. I can easily imagine Randian society becoming as hierarchical and inequitable as feudalism at its worst. The neo-conservatives seem to believe that the poor will always be among us, and they might be useful as (sorry about the Marxist term) "the reserve army of the unemployed". The Randist may be the antithesis of a Strasserite (the sort of Nazi like the brothers Otto and Gregor Strasser who wanted a socialist if antisemitic revolution -- to them the Jews were the worst capitalists and the ones most in need of liquidation), but just because someone is the antithesis of one part of the perimeter of the pentagon, that might ignore the fanaticism of both.

Ayn Rand is an extremist, and  it is a good thing that nobody has built a political order upon her principles.