[MD] Freewill

[david buchanan]

dmb said:
... conservatives don't just think their policies are better. They think liberals are just plain evil.



MRB replied:
If that's true, they must be following the suit of "the liberals," who for several decades have helpfully told me I and my confreres hate the poor and are Nazis since we're classical liberals. I've been hearing it from "the left" since my Freshman year in college - 1983 - so maybe "the right" is finally catching up.

dmb says:

Yes, my impression is that those anti-liberal book titles reflect something like revenge on the "cool" kids who made fun of them back in high school and college. The right's complaints about the so-called "Hollywood Elite" and the so-called "Academic Left" has a tenor and tone that pretty clearly announces their own deep-seated feelings of inferiority. Ever seen the morning crew on Fox News when they're trying act like rock and roller hipster types? If that doesn't make you cringe you better have your dork-radar checked. (I'm not saying you are guilty of this, Mike. It's just a generalization about conservatives in the media.) My freshman year, by the way, was in 1980. 


MRB said:
These equal "the conservatives"? How about Krauthammer and George Will and the late W.F. Buckley (whom I don't like)? How about avoiding false dichotomies and looking at Mises and Hayek and Sowell? Even Rand had equal ire for both sides, with probably more dislike for "the conservatives" post-Goldwater. She abominated Reagan.


dmb says:
I'm going to guess that you already know something about Hillsdale College, my Alma Mater, and I wouldn't be surprised if you are a fan of the place. It houses the Ludwig Von Mises Library and it was something like an Ayn Rand cult when I was there. Malcolm Forbes gave the commencement address the year I graduated. Hayek and Buckley were considered great men by these folks. I studied intellectual history there and so I learned about conservatism from very sympathetic academic conservatives. And my senior thesis was about Hitler's fascism.
On the other hand, before college I grew up amidst the religious right and after college I produced a right-wing talk radio show. (Alan Berg hosted a liberal talk show at that station before I arrived, but some right-wing militia guys went to his house and shot him to death.) I realize that conservatism has a genuinely intellectual dimension but it also has a rabidly anti-intellectual dimension that obscures and overwhelms the relatively respectable forms. (George Will, by the way, is one of the least accurate political pundits of all time. His predictions almost never pan out.)

MRB said:
One could readily name Michael Moore's various wacky untruths, and the seething hate on many thousands of protest signs carried by "the left."  Remember "Bushitler"? Many calls to assassinate Bush in protests by "the leftists." Oddly, the media seemed far less concerned about those than about the far fewer in number calls for Obama's assassination among idiots on the right.

dmb says:
Many calls for assassination? I've never heard that and I'm very skeptical. Do you have any info that would support this contention? There is quite a lot of info on right-wing extremism in this country and the folks who monitor its growth and movements are warning us that their potential for violence is very high at the moment. The bombastic book titles I cited perpetuate and amplify the belief that liberalism is a dangerous form of evil. When this is mixed with the anti-government paranoia of the militia movement, something is bound to explode. That Norwegian crusader who gunned down all those kids because they were liberals, is an example of what could happen here at any moment.

The University from which I am just about to graduate is situated right between the arena where the Democrats held their convention and the stadium where Obama gave his acceptance speech. During that period of time, my campus was considered to be the most dangerous place on earth in terms of political violence. At least two attempts on Obama's life were thwarted that week here in Denver.

Also, I would invoke the "yea, but is it true?" defense of the Bush bashing. If Pirsig is correct about the connection between European fascism and American conservatism - and I certainly think he is correct - then the American right is fascism with the volume turned down, a lesser storm in which the winds still blow in the same general fascist direction. It seems pretty clear to me that GWB's administration was about as close as we've come to real fascism in this country. I do NOT mean that Bush was a German-speaking, goose-stepping genocidal maniac with a lust for Poland, of course. If and when fascism ever emerges in the USA, it will be very, very, very American. It'll wear a cowboy hat and swagger down the street like a gunslinger. It'll be smeared in apple pie and cloaked in the old stars and stripes because fascism is, among other things, nationalism on steroids. You can see this hyper-nationalism in the fascism of Italy, Germany, Spain and anywhere else it has ever developed. We saw this when the former Yugoslavia was breaking apart into its ethnic components back in the '90s. 
I don't doubt it, by the way, but I never saw a protest sign that said "Bushitler". I do recall seeing signs that said "Bushitter", which I take to be a play on the term "bullshitter". In any case, it's not exactly crazy to be concerned about the outbreak of fascism. A good portion of the Republican base could rightly be described as right-wing reactionaries, if not outright fascists. 


MRB said about the book title, "New Deal or Raw Deal: How FDR's Economic Legacy Has Damaged America.":

  That's an understatement.


dmb says:
I hate to break the bad news, Mike, but that is exactly how Pirsig describes the reactionary right in America, as completely hostile to FDR's New Deal. In 1991, when Lila was published, Pirsig described the state of American politics as a Neo-Victorian slide backwards against the intellectual level and toward the social level of values. You'll find this in chapter 22, among other places in Lila. 


MRB said:
On a more serious level, this is is all about our evolutionary-psychological propensity to put thing in terms of simplistic dichotomies, and to look at human relations in simplified tribal terms. We need a good dose of Korzybski here.



dmb says:
Simplistic dichotomies and tribal terms? Well, that's the essence of fascism. In the fascist mind, the "Other" is a threat that has to be destroyed. You see this hate and fear toward "Otherness" in the conservative book titles. You know, because they all Obama isn't really an American or a Christian or a capitalist. The book titles have him in league in socialist tyranny and Islamic terrorism, not to mention the Black Panthers and other political radicals of the 1960s, which were active when you, me and Obama were little kids in grade school. (Ah yes, I remember 1968. During "the summer of love" I eating LSD, protesting racism and the war, and getting naked with hippie chicks. Just kidding, in the summer of '68 I was looking forward to my first day of kindergarten. It doesn't make any sense but that's how they roll anyway. The tea party, for example, supposedly opposes Obama because of the tax rate but the fact is that taxes have not been as low as they are right now since before we were born and his recent stimulus package included the largest middle-class tax cut in American history. It's pretty clear that their opposition is not based on any actual facts about his policies.

On the other hand, one can't very well talk about large scale political movements without making some generalizations. If fascism has appeared in a dozen different places and they all share a set of common characteristics, then the generalizations we make are pretty good tools with real explanatory power.