Drlee wrote:As a paleo-conservative (for lack of a better descriptor) I would like it to be sorta true.
Paleo-conservatives are people like Patrick J. Buchannan--who is anti-abortion. Let's be clear. Elective abortion was not promoted by conservatives. It was promoted as "Eugenic Abortion" by progressives as part of the Eugenics movement--that ultimately led to some of the extremes of Nazi Germany.
Drlee wrote:Look a the so-called neocons. They do not support individual freedom. They would, for example, rescind a woman's right to choose to have an abortion. (They make a weak argument about defending the "child") but this is mostly the imposition of religious principles. They would prohibit a person's right to marry whomever he/she chooses. Just two examples. How can these be seen to be socially libertarian principles? They are not.
The neoconservatives are a group of former Trotskyists led nominally by Norman Podhoretz--that is, mostly Jews. They are not evangelical Christians by a long shot. However, thinkers like Leo Strauss believed that a crisis in the West was spawned in part by the idea that the West had lost its ideological moorings, which he identified as classical Greek republicanism and Judeo-Christian heritage. In effect, by adopting atheism and progressivism, the West lost its way and led to actors like Hitler and Stalin. Neoconservatives are opposed to the pacifism of the New Left as represented by people like George McGovern.
Drlee wrote:Our current so-called conservative government wants to enforce existing federal marijuana laws in the face of states legalizing the drug.
Use of the federal supremacy clause was abused to effect social change. For example, the Warren Court effectively banned segregation in the South using federal supremacy. Federal marijuana laws follow in the vein as well. States rights was largely pushed by the Democratic party to maintain Jim Crow. It is an anti-federalist position and championed by today's Democratic party in order to exploit Central American laborers illegally in the United States.
Drlee wrote:We have an aggressive foreign policy. Right out of Moussilini's{sic} play book.
So you see, there are real similarities between (at least) the neocon movement in the US and the actual goals and practices of fascist Italy.
Mussolini was not trying to overthrow tyrannical governments and replace them with liberal democracies. That is the goal of neoconservatives, who have their own splintered factions opposed to this idea, such as Jean Kirkpatrick who made a distinction between authoritarianism and totalitarianism--supporting the former when necessary to combat the latter.
The Immortal Goon wrote:The Von Mises institute today continues the interpretation:
Right. This is why people like Kirkpatrick were fine with deposing Allende for Pinochet, for example.
Blook wrote:The idea of the Right is more liberty and individual freedoms, each person having sovereignty with less government involvement and a freer market. However people seem to associate this with Fascism, which is an ideology which involves people renouncing/giving up their individuality and essentially giving their whole life to the state.
In the post-war era, Fascism became the bogey man of the far left. So anyone they don't like tends to be labelled as fascist, even if they bear little or no relation to fascism. Many self-styled intellectuals similarly assume anyone who disagrees with them is stupid--their ultimate evil. In the United States, the totalitarian tendency to censorship is happening on the political left today. It has some practical roots too, in that the mass surveillance state can capture the bulk of content, but it cannot detect subtleties or nuances like sarcasm, sardonic wit, parody, or satire. So the censors use a mass of "complainers" to stoke up "controversy" and then they react to that, because computers can't do it effectively.
"We have put together the most extensive and inclusive voter fraud organization in the history of American politics."
-- Joe Biden