One thing though – probably best discussed in person over a six-er of Bass – we’re still not completely connecting on this political continuum thing, based on your comment above. I think we need a whiteboard – I’m a visual kinda guy and it’s much easier for me to just draw pictures. That’s why I cobbled that triangle diagram together in the post on political ideologies.

cheers,

g

I will graciously offer my apology. Obviously I misread the tone of your post on no. 76. And by the way, my use of “your grandmother” was purely a rhetorical generic grandmother, and was not your grandmother.

I think that with your last comment post I finally see what you have been so distressed about. Ironically, in a different forum better suited to nuance of expression, I think you would realize that we actually agree on virtually everything.

In fact, your statement that “the midpoint – any point – between international socialism (communism) and national socialism (fascism/nazism) is … socialism. ” happens to be exactly what I have been trying to say. But is not that statement itself an expression of the limitations of a linear political model? You yourself are saying that conventional American political parties do not exist on a continuum between “left” and “right”. I wholly agree.

But in fact, “left” and “right” do in fact correlate to “Democrat” and “Republican” in common political discourse, and even many educated people assume that conventional American politics exist on a continuum between Socialism and Fascism. Therefore, extra effort must be expended in breaking the connection.

One must start somewhere, and forcing people to re-think what they think they know about the popular concept of the political spectrum is the best place. Because as you said, the rules were designed by the left, and sometimes you have to break them down before you can start.

I have no attachment to a circle, and in fact, I have already made note of your triagular model for future use.

I did not check back directly to your blog. I should have. I thought that you would email if you wanted to discuss it further.

Once again. My apologies. I’m on your side.

You posted “at least we agree on all the important parts.” I tend to agree, but didn’t think it was necessary to broadcast that fact, because…

You posted at my site. I invited you to return and discuss the issue, noting that we probably only disagree on methods. Haven’t seen you respond.

My grandma’s dead.

Not sure what your problem is, but since you insist on belaboring this point two days on with an accusatory tone, I’ll just cross-post my response to your comment below. It’s equally applicable to your post above.

In short, the metaphor you insist on perpetuating is flawed, inaccurate, non-intuitive, irrational and unsupportable. I’m not sure how else to demonstrate that any better than I already have: nowhere on the political spectrum between communism and fascism are you ever going to find classical liberalism or constitutional republicanism. I don’t care if you twist the spectrum into a fecking Möbius strip – you won’t find classical liberalism on any line connecting communism and fascism. Not in the real world.

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Based solely on what you’ve written here and at my site, I submit that you simply lack vision. You fall back on what your students “know” and how they’ve been conditioned, rather than stimulating their imagination with the verifiable facts that challenge their conditioning. That’s your choice. I’m not in your position and I’m sure you have bigger fish to fry in terms of pushing at least some nuggets of knowledge into youngsters’ heads. But please don’t try to suggest that this approach will ever fix their misconceptions. It can’t, since it perpetuates a lie.

I was educated by the same corrupted public education system as you and everyone else, and came away from PoliSci 101 thinking that “fascism is the opposite of communism”, just like everyone else. The memory of my PoliSci instructor standing at the front of the class and explaining this lie is seared… seared into my memory (actually, all kidding aside, it’s one of the very few events in my education that I remember so clearly… which is interesting in its own right – I think it’s because it made no sense at the time and try as I did to get him to elaborate, he couldn’t). I never consciously stopped to notice that nowhere in between these two “extremes” are you ever going to find constitutional republicanism. The flaw always bothered me subconsciously, but I never cared enough or understood the underlying ‘-isms’ enough to pursue it. Until fairly recently.

This obfuscation is purely by design in the left’s indoctrination curriculum – the one you’re willingly perpetuating. The goal is to focus on the false choice between the “extremes” of communism and fascism, and get the student to believe that our form of government is a democracy that sits between them. It’s like when MSNBC stages a “debate” between Tucker “Bow-tied Wimp” Carlson and Paul “Professional Asshole” Begala – the viewer is encouraged to believe that both sides have a point and the truth is somewhere in between. Anyway, the fact is that nothing could be further from the truth: the midpoint – any point – between international socialism (communism) and national socialism (fascism/nazism) is … socialism. And the socialists know it. Your students would know it too if you took the time to explain it to them.

My position is that anything which obfuscates reality will only perpetuate the ignorance we can and must overcome. So I believe it’s wrong to promote the political-spectrum-as-a-circle canard. This only cedes the choice of ground to the left – and they always grab the high ground first. I believe it’s wrong to pander to “conventional wisdom” (read: ignorance) by accepting this false choice and “arguing” against it instead of dismissing it as the red herring fallacy that it is.

I’m tired of playing by rules designed by the left, for the left’s benefit, changed at the whim of the left. That sort of compromise is what has led to the slow decline of our Republic. You do that Republic no favors by continuing to engage in it.

I’m not actually philosophically attached to this “circle analogy” at all, but let me give you some perspective here. These questions are fine as academic exercises, but at this point the discussion has become rather esoteric. So here is a better question… How do you get non-academics to appreciate this argument?

I’ve been teaching high school history and government for many years, and I can tell you that the standard linear political continuum is absolutely useless in getting young people to understand what has gone on in the past, and what dangers we are facing in the world today.

When I get them in high school, even good, smart kids know next to nothing of Stalin or Mao (beyond just the names). However, they know a great deal about Hitler, and they have absorbed the pop-culture version of history that frames the Nazis as “right-wing”, and the right-side endpoint of a continuum that includes everything from fascists to small-government Republicans and your grandma who is a social conservative.

Therefore, what they have been conditioned to believe by Leftist propaganda is that, the farther you let them take you Left, the safer they are from tyranny. They have no idea that monsters await on the left-end of the spectrum as well. I’m reminded at this point of the line in Animal Farm, in which any time the other animals show doubt, the pigs warn that a failure to follow them will inevitably lead to the return of Farmer Jones. “You don’t want JONES to come back? Do you?” is the refrain.

The “circle”, such as it is, becomes a point of discussion so that I can get them to realize that Left-wing ideologies are tyrannical as well. To continue the Animal Farm analogy, we see in the end that the pigs are walking, talking, and living just like the deposed farmer.

If it makes you feel better, I can tell you that I have never once drawn a circle to illustrate this, I use it as a point of rhetorical discussion.

You are pursuing this as an academic debate. That is fine for us, but if we are going to have any hope for the big picture, we have to have useful ways to convince regular Americans what is at stake. That includes public school kids, who by the way, grow up to be voters (the tendency to write these kids off as lost causes because of all of our public schools’ problems is actually one of the dissentions I have with Republicans, but that is a side issue).

On that note, it is not defeatism, as you accuse me of above, to come up with new ways to conceptualize things, and new words once the meanings of old ones have been corrupted. We do it all the time. For example, the introduction of the term “statism” has been enormously useful as a way to break the old left/right vocabulary, and correctly group all philosophies that seek centralized power into one.

I don’t have any more time for this. But I want to ask you this question. Do you really want to keep calling out your allies so that you can argue terminology, or do you want to arm the rising generation to fight this stuff?

Your call.

you forget that these persons have already a nationality, and saying they are UNjews is only putting a religious mark ; since when does a religion define a population ?

sorry, but not in our democraties anymore, some people died for freedom of religion rights as for human rights

Rather it inspires a vision of the extremes bunched together at one point and the (equivalent of) classical liberals at another, no? Two points determine a line, not a circle.

And, as your comments seem to suggest, I would submit that these extremes have “touched” ever since, in all countries, because they are just slight variations on the same underlying malady. This of course depicts the ostensible “difference” between international socialism (communism) and national socialism (fascism, nazism) almost perfectly.

Liberal Jews are a disgrace and a humiliation