Hey, Czar, the problem is that \u201cright-wing\u201d is a really bad descriptor. It\u2019s basically a pejorative, as you note, at this point for \u201cbad people.\u201d 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\u2014like (at the moment) skepticism about mass immigration\u2014among parts of both rights, but overall, there\u2019s a lot of daylight.<\/p>\n
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\u2019s what \u201cconservatives\u201d eventually have to try and conserve, given it\u2019s the foundational legal-political philosophy of the country. That said, there have been been plenty of big-government types theoretically on the right\u2014Richard Nixon comes to mind\u2014but again, it depends what you mean by \u201cright.\u201d On a continuum from socialist to libertarian, Nixon is leftward. In a scheme where it\u2019s \u201csocialist vs. non-socialist,\u201d he\u2019s on the \u201cright.\u201d<\/p>\n
Breivik is on the European right in that he\u2019s 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 \u201cleft\u201d on the socialist-to-libertarian continuum).<\/p>\n
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 \u201cthe right\u201d over there, correctly or incorrectly depending on your model.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s a bit complex, and Confucius is just dashing this off before he runs, so please excuse whatever muddling of his own he\u2019s doing.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"