Some Republicans That I Admire

What the People of the Napkinville don’t like is disagreement, especially disagreeable disagreement like, say, everything Rep. Boehner says or MoveOn’s ad against Petreaus.

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p>However, the Iraqi invasion, costing billions of dollars, displacing millions of Iraqis, inflicting terrible head injuries and psychological stress, as well as killing people is a very real thing. The Republican Party has not, er, exactly distinguished itself in its fealty to truth on the whole thing, or bipartisanship. Possibly, too, your party is being punished precisely for its politicizing this whole thing.  Until the Administration and its ever loyal supporters in the Congress face realty on Iraq, the conflict-adverse will have lots of conflict about which to feel adverse.

[new]  I think, by and large, that the high number of moderates….  (0.00 / 0)

…are so appalled by the actions and rhetoric of the numerically tiny extremes on both sides, which are portrayed as the ‘base’ and true distillation of politics by MSM types who are really just looking for a cheap and controversial quote, that they do not write a platform and form a party because they are horrified by the people involved in the activity.

Agreed about trans-political politicians – RINOs and DINOs.

Yr. Obedient Servant, Peter Porcupine, Republican

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p>What you believe and how you go about implementing and/or achieving what you believe are orthogonal: that is, statistically unrelated.   Reckless is not an ideology (not matter how much Cheney and Bush try to act as if it were so…)and liberal is not a verb.

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p>It suits one side of the ideological divide to conflate ideology and the momentum, (if only to confuse the issues. And, btw, guess which side…?) and so define themselves as inherently better.  But this is BMG, reality based and all…

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On how the National Socialist German Workers Party does not have it’s routes in socialism?

… the socialist ties of the Nazis in his book.

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p>Neiwert takes it apart here:

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Indeed, it was probably as dangerous to be a socialist in Nazi Germany as it was to be a Jew. Certainly, the liquidation of the Left in Germany served as an important predecessor to the Holocaust.

The idea that a far right party could be socialist is just dizzingly weird. I think the burden of proof is on JK.

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p>Anything Jonah Goldberg writes does not count as proof.

Your and Neiwert’s position only discusses what the Nazi’s had turned into and fails to acknowledge where it began.  Which is what I had posted.

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p>The evil that came to become the Nazis can’t be put on political spectrum.  I had this discussion with many on this site before that tried to say that Nazis were conservatives.  They were not.  Nor were they on the political left either.  They did how ever have their start in socialist worker party.

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p>Nazis were authoritarians, which can have both left and right economic beliefs.  Nazis did believe in many socialist economic policies, such as capping profits on private corporations, nationalizing certain means of product,  increasing social benefits, etc.  The exception is that they wanted these things for only Germans to benefit.

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p>All of this just adds to my original point, the left/right political spectrum is an oversimplification of complex ideas and is misleading and inaccurate.

Because fascism is more in the way of a pathology than an ideology — a pathology centered around the crude acquisition of power — it would adopt and discard ideologies and ideas with great alacrity, depending on its needs in forming alliances and gaining access to the levers of state power. As Franz Neumann put it:

   

National Socialism ideology is constantly shifting. It has certain magical beliefs — leadership adoration, the supremacy of the master race — but it is not laid down in a series of categorical and dogmatic pronouncements.

Thus, to genuinely understand historical fascism, it’s far more important to look at their actions as well as their words.

… has much more to do with nationalism that socialism.

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p>Another Orcinus Post.

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Griffin’s treatment of Nazi Germany follows the same narrative arc as his discussion of Fascist Italy. Nazism has it roots in a tradition of völkish nationalism, which lacked the “ideological, structural, or tactical cohesion of a political grouping such as the Italian futurists.” Rather, these nationalist ideas “were a diverse current with many nuclei of assorted organizations and publications.” They tended to be centered on myth making about Germany’s past and future with the Volk at the center a “nebulous abstraction.” Sternhell illustrates the romantic and unpolitical nature of this culture in the Bayreuth Circle around Richard Wagner, and the Georgekreis, the “exclusively male” cluster of young “seer poets” that developed around the poet Stefan George. While the Bayreuth grouping was quite anti-Semitic, both groups were “esoteric” and passive. They were a “publicistic” group, along with anti-Semites such as Houston Chamberlain, and their writings had little impact on wider German society. Even völkish groups that had an associational purpose (such as the ‘Cartel of Productive Estates’) had little impact on the politics of the Second Reich. The Pan-Germanism inspired by the Boer War and World War One did not translate into revolutionary nationalism even as the Second Reich entered the third year of the latter conflict.

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p>More from the previously cited Neiwert post.

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The problem with doing so is twofold: not only were fascists prodigious liars and deceivers, they also were highly mutative and opportunistic. Because fascism is more in the way of a pathology than an ideology — a pathology centered around the crude acquisition of power — it would adopt and discard ideologies and ideas with great alacrity, depending on its needs in forming alliances and gaining access to the levers of state power. As Franz Neumann put it:

National Socialism ideology is constantly shifting. It has certain magical beliefs — leadership adoration, the supremacy of the master race — but it is not laid down in a series of categorical and dogmatic pronouncements.

Thus, to genuinely understand historical fascism, it’s far more important to look at their actions as well as their words.

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As for the “hatred of capitalism” that they actually practiced [quoting Paxton]:

   

It turned out in practice that fascists’ anticapitalism was highly selective. Even at their most radical, the socialism that the fascists wanted was a “national socialism”: one that denied only foreign or enemy property rights (including that of internal enemies). They cherished national producers. Above all, it was by offering an effective remedy against socialist revolution that fascism turned out in practice to find a space. If Mussolini retained some lingering hopes in 1919 of founding an alternative socialism rather than an antisocialism, he was soon disabused of those notions by observing what worked and what didn’t work in Italian politics. His dismal electoral results with a Left-nationalist program in Milan in November 1919 surely hammered that lesson home.

   The pragmatic choices of Mussolini and Hitler were driven by their urge for success and power. Not all fascist leaders had such ambitions. Some of them preferred to keep their movements “pure,” even at the cost of remaining marginal.

All parts of the Left in Germany can be traced to the SPD. Parties have split off from it temporarily (like the Independent Social Democrats) or permanently (like the communists). The German Workers’ Party, its predecessor, was hostile to the SPD.

… much of German nationalism can be traced back to the mid 1800’s.  Young Germans longed for a united Germany rather than the scattered kingdoms, duchies, and counties they had.  There used to be a popular drinking song that spoke of “What is the Fatherland?”.  Each chorus would supply a potential answer.  The one that ‘wins’ in the end is the lands that share the ‘Father-tongue”.  In fact, the reason you see a lot of paintings from the era showing women in empire-cut dresses is because the empire-cut itself was a political fashion statement.  It was a throw-back to the fashion during the Holy Roman Empire,… the last time Germany was united.

I don’t want to hijack Laurel’s post.

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p>So I started a new one on this subject.

But if you can trace the NSDAP to Marx by telling us when they split from the social democrats, I’m all ears.

…Meaning there’s nothing upon which to elaborate…

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*[new]  Please elaborate  (0.00 / 0)

On how the National Socialist German Workers Party does not have it’s routes (sic) in socialism?

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p>The Nazis were socialists in the same way that the USS_R_ was a Republic… which is to say, in name only…   It’s a time honored tactic of dictators the world over to usurp the word and gut the meaning: which realization ought to leave you with a leaden, sinking feeling in your gut…   Not even the Nazis (or, indeed, the Soviets) thought they were fooling anybody. But they never met you, I guess…

you mean? 😉

“Patriot Acto”
“Moral Majority”
“compassionate conservative”
“Blue Skies Act”
“No Child Left Behind”
“Healthy Forest Initiative”

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p>I’m beginning to think that fella Orwell was onto somethin…