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Conservatism is fascism - And it always has been

I’m a big fan of the New American magazine’s editor Will Grigg. Here’s an example of what I mean:

“In 1952, the individual who would become the Johnny Appleseed of American neo-Fascism, William F. Buckley, adumbrated that vision in an essay published by Commonweal. Owing to the threat posed by the Soviet Union, Buckley asserted, “we have to accept Big Government for the duration – for neither an offensive nor defensive war can be waged given our present government skills, except through the instrument of a totalitarian bureaucracy within our shores… [Thus we] will have to support large armies and air forces, atomic energy, central intelligence, war production boards, and the attendant of centralization of power in Washington….”

“Buckley never deigned to explain how home-grown totalitarianism would be preferable to the version exported by the Soviets, or how distant, impoverished Soviet Russia – even armed with atomic weapons it developed with the aid of its allies in the FDR regime – could pose a more credible threat to our freedoms than the government headquartered in Washington, D.C.

“But these questions were of no moment to Buckley; his objective was to cure conservatism of its suspicions about Big Government and its tendency to seek the preservation of freedom. One of the first things he did was to reject for publication in National Review an essay written by the well-respected John T. Flynn warning that the real enemy of our freedoms was in Washington, rather than Moscow or Peking.”

“He then proceeded to conduct a purge – using methods infinitely milder than those employed by the Soviets, but following very similar priorities – of conservative elements deemed unsuitable, including the John Birch Society, followers of Ayn Rand and other libertarians, and sundry unsavory and insignificant figures whose worldview was entirely defined by racial or religious prejudices.”

Indeed. In Justin Raimondo’s book, Reclaiming the American Right, he details the purges at length. Though I’ve never gotten ahold of it, I’m told that Pied Piper of the Establishment, by Grigg’s associate at the John Birch Society, John McManus, is also excellent.

More from Will Grigg’s blog:

“[T]he standard-issue harangue delivered five days a week, three hours a day, by Sean Hannity: The liberals are only interested in power, they’ll do anything to get it back, and so we have to be willing to do anything to keep it.

“One of the fundamental conceits of the totalitarian mind-set is that reality itself must yield to the demands of the Party’s ideology – and that mind-set is well-represented in the GOP-aligned Right. From there it’s but a few goose-steps to the conclusion that those who persist on interpreting reality without the supposed benefit of the official ideology really should be killed.

“And the Bu’ushists are already there.”

If “conservatism” described the sort of view Will Grigg has, I wouldn’t mind so much. I think that Raimondo and Grigg really have it half-wrong though. Anthony Gregory laid it all out for me once:

The only time in American history when the “Right” was good was when it was classical liberals - like Flynn - who were bound together in opposition to the conservative “grand consensus” of commies and Republican “progressives” that supported the New Deal.

The conservatives have always been the enemies of liberty, from Hamilton’s federalists through Clay and the mercantilist Whigs, and the Republicans who’ve ruled ever since: through the damned Bushes. The Democrats got right on board in 1913 with Woodrow “All my fault” Wilson and haven’t gotten off since.

The phony wars, hot and cold, untold hundreds of billions in welfare for millionaires, Jim Crow, the drug wars, centralization of power in DC - all have just about ruined a land I was brought up to believe would be great and free long after I’m dead.

Don’t count out those conservative Democrats. As Antony C. Sutton documented so well, the “great dictator” Franklin Delano Roosevelt worked for Wall Street all along. Must I remind you of LBJ?

Don’t forget the American Nazis who financed Hitler’s rise to power, worked with the Reich throughout World War II, and brought the Nazis here to found the CIA when it was over. These were the men, Rockefeller lawyers mostly, who launched the Cold War and and its proxies.

Liberals did, however, once believe in individualism, property rights, laissez-faire economics, a limited rule of law, etc., until stupid Hegel, Marx, and their misguided followers turned liberalism into a form of brutal conservative collectivism.

It is understandable that one would define conservatism, as Grigg does in his column, as a desire to “preserve traditional culture, institutions, and values from state-abetted subversion,” since, at least in my life - I’m still a few weeks on the good side of no longer trustworthy - the liberals, up until recently, have seemed to relish, beyond all reason, the use of state power to cram their stupid socialist agendas down everyone’s throats.

After all, they were the ones who held most of the power. It was easy for them to make the fascists (conservatives) seem a bit less threatening to liberty by comparison.

The deification of the state that Grigg finds so blasphemous, rather than being the result of a good ideology gone bad, is part and parcel of that collectivist ideology, conservatism.

The entire fallacy of the left-right, “pick your flavor of socialism” spectrum of political thought in America must be smashed and replaced with a philosophy of liberty.

A new realignment: Get to work.

© 2006 Stress.