A brief email discourse:
The left is unified because the leftist ideology is very simple at its heart: egalitarianism, which itself is a result of the desire of individual humans to be immune to the judgment of life itself. They are afraid of being insufficient or inferior. This disease spreads like wildfire because it allows people to consider themselves noble for avoiding life as it is. And I sympathize with leftists: modern life is hell. However, it’s a result of the gradual liberalization of the West, culminating in the French Revolution.
My ultimate vision of conservatism is twofold. First, it is practical: it is based on consequences, cause->effect logic, and thus picking the actions we undertake by what their consequences have been in the past and therefore selecting the right cause->effect logic, not relying on effect->cause pairs which are logically invalid. If all A->B, it’s true that any A is B, but not that any B is A. Liberals want that B->A so that they can associate any result with their desire for it to be so. Second, conservatism is based on optimums, which also come from a study of history: if you know all the options, pick the best one. Thus we value sentiment, beauty, truth, honor/honesty, goodness and even religion.
It seems to me that both right and left are spectra. The left ranges from Anarchism through Communism, and the right, from fiscal conservatism through Fascism. There is no point denying that the difference between most political viewpoints within the right or left is a matter of degree, not of different ideologies. The left hates this, because it means they have to inherit Stalin, Lenin, Trotsky and many other psychotic killers. The right has had its missteps as well. For this reason, however, I tend to see anyone who identifies with any of the “feeling” of the right to be on that scale and likely to slide further rightward as they gain more experience. That is not a proxy for age, but refers to experience itself. The more one sees of humanity, the more conservatism makes sense.
I hope that explains where we’re coming from. I am friendly with generally all sides of the right, and I keep quiet about my disagreements with them, although if I spot tendencies in the right that are destructive, I speak out against them. This has won me some enemies from the underground right including some white nationalists who think my message is a cop-out. I have told people for years that pluralism/diversity are the enemy, not specific groups. Further, I refuse to demonize certain groups who could not possibly be responsible for the vast damage of liberalism on their own. Finally, I tend to advocate real-world solutions that are gradual and not “revolutionary,” and people really dislike that. They have a visual ideal of a right-winger, and are looking for emotionally-satisfying statements, like rabid calls to action or to strong emotional reactions including hatred. Most people, like most animals, are creatures of emotion and reaction.
Conservatism is practical realism mated with human sentiment. We choose sentiment because realism tells us we can have a range of working responses, so we pick the best. The best is a life based on a sense of purpose, delight, discovery and adventure, and for us to have that, we need to have social standards that emphasize beauty, goodness and truth.
This is anathema to liberals, who want a life based on human emotions/perceptions in the present tense only.
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What plagues some part of the right or the white movement is that they think they deserve to rule the world or their country. They don’t and nobody does. It’s only by by dedication, work, intelligence, and good will that one can earn some kind of ”right” to rule the land. We can never win by bitterness and tantrum. Not in the long term. People sense it when you have those feelings. They don’t want to follow you when you have those.
For far to long I have been bitter and depressed but I’m starting to realize that it lead nowhere so I’m now in the process of remedy that.
It maybe cliche but we have to change ourselves first if we’ll ever got the chance to change the (human) world.
> The left ranges from Anarchism through Communism, and the right, from fiscal conservatism through Fascism.
Unlike Anarchism, Communism, and Fascism, “fiscal conservatism” neither unilaterally accepts nor unilaterally rejects the use of the state as a means for enforcing social organization. I think it’s a bit of an inappropriate analog for Anarchism in your analogy.
If you are invested in making this analogy work, I see two options:
– Replace “fiscal conservatism” with a more extreme label such as Anarcho-Capitalism, Rothbardism, or Libertarianism.
– Replace Anarchism with a less extreme label such as “progressive”, and put the Anarchists and Libertarians somewhere else.