(12-15-2024, 10:14 AM)TDOSS Wrote:

(12-14-2024, 11:35 PM)Lucky2Last Wrote: I'll give him one more shot. If he doesn't address my points, I'll move on. I have better things to do than feed trolls.

I'll start with the premise that left/right is not an accurate paradigm to adequately measure anything but preservation of tradition, and it's widely misused by political novices and rhetoricians. It's an arbitrary measure based on the political leanings of the French during their revolution. In its purest sense, the right has come to be associated with tradition and the left change. However, the left-right paradigm loses almost all of its value when you start trying to clump multiple ideals into a simple, horizontal axis. It's just absurd to do such a thing. We don't measure anything else this way. To suggest that the American right favors tyranny is about an absurd an idea as one could have.

The left-right paradigm is only useful when it's defined in a clear way, and in the context of the traditions a group is trying to preserve. In this regard ONLY, I agree the NAZIs were right wing. That doesn't make them comparable to the American right, because they are attempting to hold onto different values. For every similarity between the American right and the German right you list, I can find differences. It's a fool's errand to try to link entire groups to other groups because it lacks nuance and understanding. 

TDS, you and your ilk are so inconsistent in your values. If I tried to say how American blacks are just like American whites (of which there are far more similarities than dissimilarities), you would yammer on about the importance of identity and multiculturalism. Yet, when it's convenient, you disparage entire clusters of people if you think it gives you a political advantage. It's gross. And if you really believed what you preached, you would be so quick to swallow that bukkake.

I don't know why you believe my characterization of pre-WWII Germany is inaccurate (since your replay was read a book), but it's pretty spot on, if not oversimplified. I have been one of the most conciliatory posters on this board when it comes to acknowledging the similarities between Germany and the US, especially as it pertains to cultural resistance to leftist ideas. I think the conditions do favor an authoritarian offering to abuse the powers of the state on behalf of the people. That's what Hitler did. That said, you either aren't honest enough or bright enough to see what's causing this, which is too much change being ushered in by the radicals on the left.

Actually, I agree that the radicals on the left have been ushering in too much change at one time, which has pushed those right of center further right, to the point that they begin to resemble the old Nazi/fascist right.

I also agree that the left/right paradigm is an inadequate measure. However, I'm not a big identity Democrat or someone focused in the extreme on multiculturalism. You're oversimplifying, too.

There's a huge difference between being attached to traditional hierarchy and forging toward equality without forcing an end to hierarchy by merit. But money isn't merit, and neither is traditional hierarchy. Time only goes in one direction, and it favors eventual progressive social values and more egalitarian distribution of wealth, even though there may be small reactionary turns.

You argue that it is important to place historical events in a contextual perspective and compare them to alternatives from that time. Saying that Nazism developed as a reaction to the threat of communism is partially correct, but it does not explain why the Nazis themselves adopted ideas that were deeply authoritarian and anti-individualistic. It is also misleading to call these "leftist ideas" simply because the state played a central role.

Let us not forget that it was conservatives who brought Hitler to power and supported him in becoming Chancellor. Socialists, on the other hand, were his main opponents, and once he consolidated power, he imprisoned them. Many prominent socialist figures were executed, and even "ordinary" socialists without political influence were arrested. My grandfather was one of them.

This is also a pretty good post, but I marked it's major error in bold. 

In physics, time only moves forward.  But in politics, time can move any direction for any amount of time.  It won't ever move precisely backwards, as if decades and centuries past could be recreated and relived in hi-fi, but it can angle strongly towards that direction.

The main enduring appeal of Marx is also one of his main errors: he thought he could predict the future. He thought Germany would broadly become a capitalist and bourgeois democracy as the UK and France had, and he thought the UK and France would inevitably be the first to become dictatorships of the proletariat, with every other nation in the world inevitably following that pattern.

There's more we could say about this, but it's enough to point out that Democrats, and you, embrace this today.  That way, every time you lose, you haven't really lost for good, it's just your eventual victory has been delayed.  It's quasi religious pap for people who have rejected or been disappointed by traditional religion.

And it's dangerous! The good stuff we have today, the wide distribution of wealth and power, the permissive social values, we have to fight to keep that, if we want to keep it. It does not inevitably grow. In fact, if anything in political economy is inevitable, it is that the powerful and wealthy today will attempt to make their power and wealth permanent, they will pull up the ladder behind them. We have to resist that.

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