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re: Willful blindness
TB — (archived)

You and the idiots you source call it "authoritarian 'conservatism'" precisely for the political effect, deliberately and with malice, knowing full well that it splashes quarts of tar on the term "conservative." In the meantime, they neutralize the word "leftist" until it becomes meaningless. To try and pretend they are not being political with this thesis is a massive insult to my intelligence.

The simpler and more precise term of "authoritarianism" doesn't work for these writers, because it allows the reader to draw their own conclusions about which philosophies have done the most damage in the past century.

So Marxism magically becomes defined as "right wing," and now we live in the Mobius world of the Left that has only one side, and one extreme, and it's always the other guys. The Soviets were right-wing, the Maoists, Pol Pot, and all the rest. Once you finish the tally, the word "Left" in these papers seems to define itself only by the featureless hole that is left in the entire range of the political spectrum.

Back in the real world, American leftists have been apologists to one degree or another for communist regimes for fifty years. Even today many think Marxist Hugo Chavez is the greatest thing to happen since the Sandinistas. How is this particular version of the "left" defined?

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