Why I'm a right wing extremist
By Charles A. Morse
web
posted February 19, 2001
The term "right-wing" makes me uncomfortable for good reason. As a Jew, naturally, I'm not sympathetic to Nazism given Hitler's Holocaust against the Jews. Members of my grandparents family were liquidated by the Nazi's. Nazism and Fascism are referred to as "right-wing," yet, in this country, the label is applied to libertarians, conservatives, and even, in certain circumstances, to liberals. How could the majority of Americans who generally advocate limited government, self rule, liberty, sovereignty, private property, religion, a moral code etc...be lumped in with Fascists who advocate the exact opposite? After all, last I checked, Hitler wasn't exactly known for his respect of private property ownership. My relatives could've attested to that had they survived. Neither was Mussolini famous as an advocate of limited government. How could it be then, that libertarian/conservatives such as myself are spoken of in the same breath as those who advocate the exact opposite of everything we believe in?
The answer can be found in the way the left deals with opposition. Anyone who opposes a left-wing agenda, however it is defined at a given time, risks being placed into the "right wing" bin. To the left, the term right-wing applies to anyone who is not left-wing. This has even included devout Marxists who may have deviated from the party line. Marx himself invented the term "capitalism" as a derisive reference to the emerging free market of the nineteenth century. His attempt at defamation was turned into a badge of honor. The term capitalist today is synonymous with freedom. The same should apply, in the US, to the term right-wing.
The American Revolution was a war against a right-wing British monarch who was imposing absolute tyranny over his colonies. The colonists rejected his European conception of hereditary aristocracy, the divine right of kings, a state church, and a mercantilist economic system where charters are granted to monopolies. Jeffersonian libertarianism called for an aristocracy of ability, a government serving citizens under a Constitution, freedom of religious expression, and free enterprise. American's were never right-wing by the classic definition of the term.
The European right and left were two types of tyranny. The right used the church as a tool of authority while the left used atheism in the same manner. The right gravitated toward a hereditary aristocracy while the left looked to a "dictatorship of the proletariat" under a "hero of the people" such as Stalin. The right viewed property as a servant of the state while the left sought outright control over property for "the common good." The right was hyper nationalist while the left practiced world conquest through "struggle" and subversion. The right sought earthly utopia through racial and ethnic purity while the left sought the same through the elimination of economic class and those who refused to conform to political correctness.
Both systems, to the degree they were enthroned, led to holocausts, forced starvations, and, in the case of the left, the murder of hundreds of millions of people worldwide. European right-wing conceptions never took root in the US to any significant degree. Nazi's, Klansmen, Aryan Nation, and Christian Identity, for examples, are on the fringe of American life. Concepts of theocracy and ethnic purity generally don't resonate. American ideas of progress have been to move away from such primitive socialistic conceptions. Of course, the left has gone to great lengths to exaggerate the influence of the European right here while falsely tarring the American right, which is most of us, with the European right-wing brush.
European left-wing conceptions, on the other hand, have taken deep root in the US, primarily among the leisure class. The left has developed a homegrown movement connected philosophically and in some cases literally with its European counterpart. They have obtained enormous influence in areas such as the academe, the media, foundations, business, entertainment, and government itself. The deeply entrenched left today represents the vanguard of a European style authoritarian movement. They seek to erode religion, the family, private property, and privacy in general, replacing these with the authority of the state in an attempt to undo the spirit of the American Revolution.
The American right, as opposed to the European right, opposes authoritarianism
in favor of small government, liberty, and the free market. I'm proud
to be right-wing if this means an insistence that the government operate
strictly under the Constitution. I'm proud to be right-wing if this means
espousing moral values, individual responsibility, the family, God, and
basic patriotism. Given the dominance of the left today, these positions
are now considered to be extreme. That would make me a right-wing extremist.
Chuck Morse is the author of "Thunder out of Boston."