The 2012 National Review Cruise

The difference is that the intellectual leaders of the liberal movement don't hold cruises where they can talk about how evil conservatives are.

They just sit around and swap poos while talking about how great Hitler was.

Oh yeah, it's the hard right alright.

Never mind, just go on with how liberals never say a bad thing about anyone and all consevatives do is plot how to kill children and kick puppies.

Yes. The part where cruisers ask him for investment advice is a real spit-take.

FUCK YEAH, BROKEN FORUM.

I think it's cheating if someone actually was a communist and switches teams.

What I meant was that, say, a DNVP-voter in Germany or a right-wing French aristocrat or military officer - or even a member of the crustier Tory squirearchy - could have already been far enough right to feel strong dislike and contempt for the mainstream democratic parties of the left and centre - that they were enemies of the nation - without necessarily approving of fascists either. (Some, of course, approved of fascists a lot more than they approved of the left.)

The fascists shared that whole "socialists and wooly liberals and democratic parliamentarism are destroying the nation" belief while adding on their revolutionary/counterrevolutionary political content. I guess explaining that fascism isn't left wing in terms of something as historically involved as "the historical viewpoints of the hard right in these countries" is sort of a pointless exercise.

Like virtually everything Jonah Goldberg has ever written, his take on it represents the lowest common denominator leftovers of preexisting ideas that have been filtered through the random trivia lottery that is Free Republic and the blogosphere around it.There are two main currents that I think come together for this.

One of the intellectual fountainheads of Buckley's original conservative movement was Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn, who wrote Leftism and Leftism Revisited among many other things. It would not be an exaggeration to consider his ideas a foundational pillar of Olde Nationale Revyew. LR, for example, provides a deeply provocative and erudite argument for why you can see broader trends across monstrous authoritarian groups in history. Unfortunately, it is also a polemic written by self-identified monarchist who is quite mad, and thus engages in fairly transparent maneuvers to reorient this as leftism at a fundamental level. But the reason it's not a complete waste of time is because it's informed by the second thing, which I'm sure you're aware of.

There is a longstanding academic debate about the voting patterns and relevant political dialogue around it, focusing on why people voted for what. It's been simplified in a variety of popular works, but the essence of it focuses on the apparent correlation between brown and red voting in Germany, which is one element of many that problematizes the traditional popular conception of left and right. And not even in the usual "oh but Americans fucked it all up by rebranding liberalism" thing but also within the Euro-Russian 20th century blob that's supposed to be somewhat consistent.

So, here's the thing: you have these interesting theories in terms of academic deconstruction of political movements which become pure nonsense when turned into smears by association. This leads to factionalization as honest historians and intellectuals gravitate to different poles in terms of providing the context that makes competition between fascism and communism more than just a power struggle between cults of personality. If you're an idiot marketing arguments to the kind of people who like sounding historically sourced but aren't bothered by coherence, this is tremendously appealing.

Thus is born a Jonah Goldberg book and a high five for morons on Dipshit Cruise 2012. Because these people only read books that strive to be deceptive, it is in fact a celebration of that culture of deception when you say these things out loud. It feels good, it feels A is A in that Ayn Rand way that still titillates many conservatives in the wee hours of the night even if they've been forced to sell her out to placate the religious people.

Sorry I should have been clearer. I was making a penis joke.

There is a longstanding academic debate about the voting patterns and relevant political dialogue around it, focusing on why people voted for what. It's been simplified in a variety of popular works, but the essence of it focuses on the apparent correlation between brown and red voting in Germany, which is one element of many that problematizes the traditional popular conception of left and right.[/quote]

The thing is - not addressing this to you as such - what's "red" about red-brown overlap? Voters? Appeal to voters? Political content of a leader- and leadership-centric party? Or the ideas of the leadership or leader? What about the shift from an electoral party to the later quasi-custodial role it played after '33-34? Not, obviously that pre-'33-'34 isn't important, but rightly or wrongly "the Nazis" I've generally been interested in have been the Nazis of the Third Reich.

Of course there are still cliches about a supposedly heavily petit-bourgois constituency to explode, the regional correlations, and so on. But never having dismissed the NSDAP as a narrow political phenomenon, I've also never been all that arrested by detailed debunkings of that canard or explanations of the red-brown thing. The participation of ex-SPD and Zentrum supporters with the "mature" regime arrangements after the Röhm purge appeals to me more as a "counterintuitive people and Nazism" topic.

That may be the fastest I've ever seen Brett scurry out of a thread. I guess getting banned from half the politics subfora *was* a learning experience.

I really didn't want to feed the quagmire but I'm high and feeling saucy. There's a gaping difference between the whole "fat greedy white Republican evil" brand of diatribe -- which runs on a rhetorical premise of "evil" that for liberals evokes mostly upper-class privilege and nationalist tendencies -- and "your party is a brooding dictatorial genocide waiting to happen while its leaders secretly plot to overthrow the free world as we know it and replace the government with homosexuals". (I read recently that homosexuals were estimated to be between 1.5% and 6% of Britain's population; if the rest of the world is anything like that, I just don't see the numbers for running the free world, although a flag with a rainbow on it would be quite cheerful.)

But I'm just a small-S socialist who doesn't think much better of either side, so what do I know.

Gnu, meet Brett.

His reputation preceded him in my lurking, which is why I first resisted taking the bait ... wits, unarmed, blah blah. Oh well, there's always tomorrow.