Hey, Czar, the problem is that “right-wing” is a really bad descriptor. It’s basically a pejorative, as you note, at this point for “bad people.” But even if we take it a bit more analytically, comparing the European right to the American right is almost apples and oranges. There are some points of agreement—like (at the moment) skepticism about mass immigration—among parts of both rights, but overall, there’s a lot of daylight.

The main point of divergence is that the American right is to some degree permanently anchored in eighteenth-century Anglo-Scottish Enlightenment liberalism, since that’s what “conservatives” eventually have to try and conserve, given it’s the foundational legal-political philosophy of the country. That said, there have been been plenty of big-government types theoretically on the right—Richard Nixon comes to mind—but again, it depends what you mean by “right.” On a continuum from socialist to libertarian, Nixon is leftward. In a scheme where it’s “socialist vs. non-socialist,” he’s on the “right.”

Breivik is on the European right in that he’s not a socialist. The mainstream Christian Democratic right in Europe are basically managerial statists with a more traditionalist cultural bent. The radical right tends to be fascist (which of course is way “left” on the socialist-to-libertarian continuum).

Breivik is a revolutionary, which is as unconservative as you can get. He grounds his views in a fantasy ideology rooted in an imaginary utopian past, rather than an imaginary utopian future like communists, so that reactionary reflex gets him put on “the right” over there, correctly or incorrectly depending on your model.

So as usual, the label is a function of a whole stack of underlying assumptions, and in this case it muddles rather than clarifies the political spectrum.

It’s a bit complex, and Confucius is just dashing this off before he runs, so please excuse whatever muddling of his own he’s doing.

Confucius, Œc. Vol.

Don’t ask impertinent questions like that jackass Adept Lu.