CC, who the hell is “calling you out”??
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.
