Vox Popoli has it exactly right:
The primary difference between the Left and the Right is that the Left instinctively defends its extremists and the Right instinctively runs from them and leaves them out to dry. The latter is an appeasement strategy, and it works about as well as the infamous failures of appeasement we all know from history.
All appeasement does is signal to the SJW what buttons he needs to push in order to force an opponent to retreat. When you dutifully point out that “you don’t agree with everything X says” or “don’t include the sexists, the woman haters and those who argue in bad faith”, what you are accomplishing is not the inoculation of your argument from their extremist taint, you are telling the SJW exactly how he can rhetorically defeat you by painting you as the very sort of extremist you disavow. And remember, rhetorical victory is the entirety of their objective!
Embrace the extremists. Defend them. Refuse to permit them to be cut off and isolated. Allow them to play their role as the intellectual shock troops they are. That is how you win. Because if they’re not taking the incoming fire, you are. And the shock troops are much better equipped psychologically to take it and survive than the average self-styled moderate.
I am an extremist. Embrace me!
Filed under: Conservatism vs Liberalism |
Throne and Altar 
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You? Extreme? I don’t buy it. Gonna need to see some extremist bona fides before I write you off as just another moderate monarchist.
i’m actually extreme and unembraced. it is more fruitful now that i’ve accepted that and keep plugging anyway.
Yep, when right elites and left elites both insist on being to the left of their non-elite supporters, the result is that society moves <——-
What is an extremist? A racist? An anti-Semite? An abortion-clinic bomber? I confess to being the first two, and lukewarm and perfunctory in my condemnation of the last.
Neocon litmus test:
1. True or False: It was morally mandatory for Germans during the Hitler regime to sabotage train tracks leading to death camps, and it is morally impermissible for contemporary Americans to bomb abortion clinics.
I don’t know it seems to me the Right is willing to defend its extremists when it comes to Israel or torture. The Right will also defend capitalism to the bitter end (contrast the Right’s circling of the wagons around Romney’s 47% remark versus their abandonment of Todd Aiken).
Suppose, Bonald, you were made ruler of America and established an authoritarian Catholic state. I am pretty certain that people like Vox Day would join forces with left-liberals against such an order all in name of freedom and liberty. The way I see it, liberals be they right or left variety will always join forces against the non-liberal other whether the other is Catholicism or Marxism.
While rightist is certainly a broader category than conservative, I don’t think it’s perpendicular, otherwise their would be left-conservatives in addition to right-liberals. Also, while conservatism and communism are both non-liberal, in the practical sense, communism is in a way, the final theoretical conclusion of liberalism. Their main dividing factor seems to be that Communists seek an end, while liberals simply move toward that end without consciously seeking it.
Communism:
|<——–
Liberalism:
——–
Conservatism:
——–>|
Last post posted incorrectly.
Liberalism:
——–
Liberalism:
——–
Liberalism is supposed to have a left pointing arrow on the left side.
And neoconservatism was supposed to show the same as liberalism, but with the arrow pointed the other way.
Not sure why that wouldn’t post.
Each of Communism and Libertarianism is the final theoretical conclusion of liberalism. They have a minor disagreement about what particular, worldly arrangements are practically likely to maximize human freedom. Furthermore, they have grave difficulty grokking the idea that there can be anything other than arguments about what particular, worldly arrangements are practically likely to maximize human freedom. Political theory is just about that question for them. Just observe the left-libertarians and the right-libertarians fighting it out for which one of them is the authentic voice of hyper-liberalism.
Here is another litmus test. If David Graeber and David Friedman seem radially dissimilar to you, then you are not on the right. If David Graeber and David Friedman seem pretty similar to you, then you are possibly on the right. Conservatives fail this test badly.
I think the point can be made that liberalism approaches that end, it seems that liberals never actually reach it, they always retain pseudoconservatives to serve as their “oppressors”. Communism on the other hand, effectively removes any semblance of conservatism from public discourse, it wins, in other words. That may actually be why Communism collapsed, it requires an oppressor, but it destroyed the “oppressor”.
I don’t know that you can really go that route regarding liberalism and leftism. The problem is that humans need collectives to be functional, productive and race-sustaining (here meaning the whole of the human race). So since we have to have some degree of collectivism, or communitarianism, or communalism, you have to start with conceding that left-liberals and even communists are on to something when they bring up the importance of the collective. But, as Zippy Catholic has pointed out, they’re sociopathic about it.
But sociopathic about the need for collective action as a staple of healthy, normal living doesn’t mean *wrong*.
A relatively healthy, well-ordered, correctly formed Christian patriarchy (i.e., a historical one) has lots of collective coercion, and relatively little of what most would consider “individualism”.
Of course, it would also have a lot more sex segregation than many in the regular and especially dissident right would put up with, for all their talk about wanting man-only spaces.
I hardly think they can rightly be said to be on to something when it’s merely a piece of conservative wisdom that they haven’t rejected.
In any case, I wasn’t really addressing individualism versus collectivism, but the extent of their revolutionary effects. By liberals, I was including both right-liberals and left-liberals.