Right Wing Radicalism

Copyright 2006 Bart Stewart

Now as always we hear the term socialism being screamed, it being the great scare word of the right wingers. We must endure anything the far right would foist upon us, or else we shall end up in the dreaded hell of socialism. Oddly enough, Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain was a genuine socialist, certainly by American standards. Yet he was deemed okay by the Bush Republicans.

Socialism? What about the opposite extreme of the political spectrum? What about right wing radicalism? The prospect of that doesn't bother Republicans at all. The great unspoken goal of contemporary conservatives is nothing less than a return to the Laissez Faire system of the 19th century. (With a space age military, of course.)

The right wing has never embraced the reforms which reined in the plutocracy of the 19th century. Indeed, reforming the Laissez Faire system is what marked the start of the liberal movement as we know it. It is important to remember, the right wing did not accept those reforms when they were made, and their philosophy has never accepted them.

In one of history's grandest tragedies, the cult of communism was born around the same time that legitimate reformers were building the modern liberal ideology. This was during the 19th century Industrial Revolution. The communists and the liberal reform movements worked together up until the atrocities of Stalin were revealed in the late 1930s. After that, communism was finished as a major movement in the United States, although a small hard core of communists remained on the political fringe. To this day, the American right wingers holler "communist" whenever a liberal idea is put forth, no matter how valid it may be. It is a hold-over of the Cold War that you see constantly in political discussions in this country, and it is an increasingly worn-out antique.

The right wingers will never come clean about their own history, though. The abuses of Laissez Faire are endless, and nightmarish. And of course they served to generate all those communist revolutionaries in the first place. Here are a few of them, lest we forget:

Absurdly low wages.

No overtime pay.

No minimum wage.

Horrendous sweat shops.

Robber Baron corporate crime.

Child labor.

Severely limited rights for women.

Institutionalized racism.

Wide open military adventuring.

Colonialism.

No environmental protections.

No social safety net.

No justice for the poor.

In short, it was Plutocracy. That is, the unquestioned rule of the richest of the rich, and their associated hangers-on.

It could be argued that Laissez Faire was a hold-over from feudalism -- that grim, ancient way of life of wealthy barons at the top and penniless peasants at the bottom. Those are the "good old days" that right wingers want to restore. Everything they are enthusiastic about fits this pattern. Laissez Faire is what a contemporary right winger calls "Freedom."

You sometimes hear modern day right wingers derided as "fascists." That is not entirely accurate, in most cases. Their goal is more the resurrecting of the American Laissez Faire system of the 1880s than true fascism. Although certainly many of them are as heartless and fanatical as any European fascist who ever goose-stepped. And then there is an interesting quote from true fascist Benito Mussolini, “Modern fascism should be properly called corporatism, since it is the merger of state, military and corporate power."

To say that we have to choose between some Marxist craziness and the "good old days" described above is simply false. It is a false choice, which we must loudly reject. Centrist Americans will continue working to develop the middle ground between the extremes. It would be nice if they could be lent a hand, too, even though their philosophy is not as well suited for assembling full-throated, roaring mobs.

That terrain between the ideological extremes is where the future of civilization will be, if there is to be one at all.