{"id":29145,"date":"2016-01-25T01:00:07","date_gmt":"2016-01-25T06:00:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=29145"},"modified":"2016-01-15T08:12:27","modified_gmt":"2016-01-15T13:12:27","slug":"qotd-the-authoritarian-urge-left-and-right","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2016\/01\/25\/qotd-the-authoritarian-urge-left-and-right\/","title":{"rendered":"QotD: The authoritarian urge, left and right"},"content":{"rendered":"

The idea that Nazism is a more extreme form of conservatism has insinuated its way into popular culture. You hear it, not only when spotty students yell \u201cfascist\u201d at Tories, but when pundits talk of revolutionary anti-capitalist parties, such as the BNP and Golden Dawn, as \u201cfar Right\u201d.<\/p>\n

What is it based on, this connection? Little beyond a jejune<\/em> sense that Left-wing means compassionate and Right-wing means nasty and fascists are nasty. When written down like that, the notion sounds idiotic, but think of the groups around the world that the BBC, for example, calls \u201cRight-wing\u201d: the Taliban, who want communal ownership of goods; the Iranian revolutionaries, who abolished the monarchy, seized industries and destroyed the middle class; Vladimir Zhirinovsky, who pined for Stalinism. The \u201cNazis-were-far-Right\u201d shtick is a symptom of the wider notion that \u201cRight-wing\u201d is a synonym for \u201cbaddie\u201d.<\/p>\n

One of my constituents once complained to the Beeb about a report on the repression of Mexico’s indigenous peoples, in which the government was labelled Right-wing. The governing party, he pointed out, was a member of the Socialist International and, again, the give-away was in its name: Institutional Revolutionary Party. The BBC\u2019s response was priceless. Yes, it accepted that the party was socialist, \u201cbut what our correspondent was trying to get across was that it is authoritarian\u201d.<\/p>\n

In fact, authoritarianism was the common feature of socialists of both National and Leninist varieties, who rushed to stick each other in prison camps or before firing squads. Each faction loathed the other as heretical, but both scorned free-market individualists as beyond redemption. Their battle was all the fiercer, as Hayek pointed out in 1944, because it was a battle between brothers.<\/p>\n

Authoritarianism \u2013 or, to give it a less loaded name, the belief that state compulsion is justified in pursuit of a higher goal, such as scientific progress or greater equality \u2013 was traditionally a characteristic of the social democrats as much as of the revolutionaries.<\/p>\n

Daniel Hannan, “Leftists become incandescent when reminded of the socialist roots of Nazism”, Telegraph<\/em><\/a>, 2014-02-25.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The idea that Nazism is a more extreme form of conservatism has insinuated its way into popular culture. You hear it, not only when spotty students yell \u201cfascist\u201d at Tories, but when pundits talk of revolutionary anti-capitalist parties, such as the BNP and Golden Dawn, as \u201cfar Right\u201d. What is it based on, this connection? […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[7,53,41],"tags":[780,457,76],"class_list":["post-29145","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-history","category-politics","category-quotations","tag-communism","tag-fascism","tag-socialism"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-7A5","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29145","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=29145"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29145\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":29146,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29145\/revisions\/29146"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=29145"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=29145"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=29145"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}