Commies and Fascists, Sitting In a Tree

Why do conservatives consider communism and fascism to be close cousins and the opposite of conservatism?

More Like Siblings

Quora has a page with some wonderful answers that describe common characteristics of Communism and Fascism and that contrast them with Conservatism. However, common characteristics merely makes for similarity. “Close cousins” implies common heritage and genetic commonality that cause the commonalities. The metaphor bears truth.

Just as Vladimir Lenin and built Mao Zedong built their bloody Communist regimes upon a foundation of Marxism, so did Giovanni Gentile built his philosophy of Fascism upon Marxism. (Is Fascism Right or Left?) Thus, Communism and Fascism derive from a common philosophy. They are more like half-sibling rivals than like cousins. (Progressivism shares those roots, and Communist governments had a hand in establishing it in American politics.)

Children of Marxism

The children of Marxism are rooted in the idea that the collective (that is, in practice, the State) is a higher organism than man. They require acceptance of a Utopian notion of citizens submitting their interests to the common good.

That is a fine idea, as long as the system is filled with hypothetical, ideal humans. However, in practice, it has two fatal flaws. First, humans are a competitive, self-interested species. Someone will always claw his or her way to the top, and bolder citizens will fight for freedom.

Second, the State will always have to use indoctrination, intimidation, and force to cause everybody to submit to the collective’s will or to preserve the top dog’s rule, crushing freedom and removing incentive to excel. Thus, Marxism’s children, Communism and Fascism, always lead to totalitarianism.

Conservatism

American Conservatism is rooted in the idea that the individual is the ultimate earthly organism. That is why the Founders established a government with the People at the top, a Constitution expressing their will, and Government at the bottom. Whereas the People subjected under Marxism exist to serve the government, in Conservatism, the government exists to serve the people. That is why Marxist governments claim for themselves all capital, or at least control of capital, whereas Capitalist governments remove as little capital as possible from the People.

Conservatism also recognizes what happens when you introduce flawed, self-interested humans into any system. Freedom and retaining the fruit of one’s labors give people incentive to excel, raising metrics for the whole society. Moreover, Conservatism recognizes the need for balancing powers within politics and government, a major tenet of the US Constitution, so that competing interests keep each other in check. This contrasts against rule one-party rule and dictatorship that always develop in Marxist governments.

Another contrast is that Marxist “Social Justice” dictates equality of outcome that places heavier burdens on disfavored classes, such as forced redistribution of wealth to less successful classes, whereas Conservatism emphasizes equality of rights, individual responsibility for outcome, and voluntary charity. Thus, Conservatism champions personal charity and individual justice whereas Social Justice depersonalizes charity and undermines equal justice.

I have specified American Conservatism because the word Conservatism is defined by its context. It generally indicates a philosophy of preserving the current system. American Conservatives who want to restore lost values are insultingly called "paleo conservatives," when in fact, many of them would have been considered moderate-to-liberal just a generation ago.

American Conservatism is known in the rest of the world as liberalism because it champions conditions that allow liberty, unlike monarchy and Marxism. More importantly, American Conservatism could be better described as Americanism because it promotes the foundational values of American society and government, in resistance to Marxist values that now dominate the Left.

However, we stick with the label Conservatism because we can’t stomach the screams of “How dare you call me un-American” from un-American Leftists.

Is "moderate Islam" an oxymoron?

I received an email, with the above title, that makes the case that all Muslims are extremists. I have to disagree. The key to understanding my position lies in a look at Judaism and Christianity.

Judaism has what Christians call "apostates," those who have left the faith; and it has "heretics," those who were raised outside the faith and either through error or through hostility, undermine the faith. At the extreme, some of these people remain religious and follow cults such as Kabbala or (from their perspective) our Yeshua. In the middle, the vast majority follow some semi-agnostic variety of Judaism that is Jewish primarily by culture. The real Jews are the Orthodox Jews, whose males often wear some element of a uniform such as yarmulkes or beards to identify themselves.

Christians are the same way. There are plenty of heretical sects such as Mormons, The Watchtower (Jehovah's [false] Witnesses, and Unitarians. In the middle are the mainline denominations that use a Christian vocabulary but have lost the Christian faith. For example, in the United Methodist Church, a poll many years ago revealed that half the pastors denied the virgin birth and the resurrection. With so many holes cut in their Bibles, it's no surprise that most "mainstream" Christian churches cooperate in the ecumenical movement, whose aim is to join with all theologies, even including New Age religions, animist, aboriginal religions, and "moderate" Islam -- essentially, a precursor to the One World Religion of Antichrist. I would put  the apostate Westboro Baptist Church in that category. I think you might be willing to put the Liberation Theology branch of Catholicism in that category, too.

The main thing that ties together all those "heretical" and "apostate" varieties of Jewish and Christian beliefs is their treacherous lip service to The Bible. They either believe God isn't god, or God doesn't care enough to communicate truthfully with man and then preserve that communication. Functionally, they are agnostics who prefer to err on the faith side instead of erring on the side of atheism. They contrast with evangelical or fundamentalist believers, and they make up the majority of Christians. (The sense with which I mean "evangelical or fundamentalist" includes those who have a strict faith in Catholicism.)

Islam has a similar distribution of faith. I don't know whether the majority of Muslims are functional agnostics the way most Christians are, although I've met a lot who are. I've met a few who might compare to mainstream Christians that border the Evangelicals. They retain the culture and worship; but in practice, they don't treat the Koran as a reliable revelation of their god.

I've described a perspective that views a moderate in anything as falling short of "true believer." For example, if you disagree with the Constitution and the reasoning behind it, you are fooling yourself if you claim to believe in Americanism and be a patriot. Similarly, "moderate Islam" is an oxymoron, just like "mainstream Christian" or "non-Orthodox Jew" are oxymorons. If the words apply to one, they have to apply to the others.

The difference is that, in Islam's case, moderation is a very, very good thing.

What's So Bad about Being a Liberal?

First, not all that presents itself as conservative is actually conservative.

The Republican Party poorly represents conservatism. In fact, the GOP vacillates between moderately conservative on some issues and liberal economics and internationalism. I would guess that a third of the GOP is actually liberal, a third sticks a wet finger in the air, and a minority is actually conservative. For example, George W. Bush got tax cuts passed early in his administration, but cooperated with Democrat-led bail-outs of banks and GM.

So, let's not use Republicans to define the opposite of liberalism.

Second, being liberal is a good thing; and progress is good when the goal is good and the means are just. Being a liberal or a progressive, however, has a very peculiar meaning that does not necessarily connect to the root words, liberal and progress.

In my definitions (not necessarily standard, but offered for the sake of communication), conservatism seeks to preserve traditional values of liberty, self-reliance, and justice that does not respect persons.

Liberalism, or as the codeword is used today, progressivism, on the other hand, redefines a neutral term. Progress is good, right? Doesn't everybody love progress?

When you say change (as in hope and change) or progress, you have to pick a direction. You have to pick an origination and a destination. Depending on your definition of progress, it may or may not mean something good. The compass has only one North, but it has 359 degree-markers that point away from North.

Suppose your objective were to see far with an unobstructed view, so you climb the highest mountain. Progress would be pretty stupid if it meant trekking off that cliff to the West, wouldn't it? What else could you do? You could build a tower where you are, on your existing foundation. But would you leave the spot just because change is good?

The progressive compass points hard left, to 270 degrees, toward freedom for immorality and toward repression of traditional morality, toward collectivist statism, and toward "social justice" that bases rights on class, skin color, and sexual orientation.

American conservatives see progressive, liberal, socialist, and Marxist, as variations of a single philosophy. That philosophy derives from secular, materialist existentialism, in which interpretation is reality, objective truth is a myth, and the ultimate organism is the state.

Whereas Americanism states that authority flows from God through the People to the government, the progressive spectrum worships the Collective as the ultimate organism, whose people live at its pleasure. Americanism secures rights to the people and assigns responsibilities to the government, but progressivism gives the government rights and the people privileges. Conservative liberalism means personal tolerance and personal giving (to which the restaurant help will attest after any political convention), but Progressive liberalism forces promotion of the tolerable and gives at the expense of others.

If you believe black is white and right is wrong, then, I suppose, being a liberal is great.

Obama: You Didn't Build That

People think that Me-me-me-my-my-my-I-I-I-bama's speech makes sense only because his speechwriters sugarcoat false reasoning. His error stems from the hidden socialist dogma that the business is not responsible for the roads, utilities, regulators, delivered in tones of fake outrage. Rather, he implies, the contributions of employees, utility workers, bureaucrats, etc, add significant value to the business. This assumption deceives for two reasons.

First, the business pays, through taxes to the government, wages to employees, interest and fees to lenders, and dividends to stockholders, for all those things Ibama says contributed to building the business. A new business may pay afterwards instead of before, but it still pays. It says that if you pay somebody to do make something you thought of, they get all the credit, as though you had nothing to do with it.

This couldn't be more wrong. If you buy a painting, you own it. If you buy a pizza, you have the right to eat it. Likewise, if you pay for all those ancillary contributions, then you get the credit for building the business.

Second, all those external factors would exist whether you build the business or don't. The contribution is mutual because, without the business, unused roads and utilities would be failures due to lack of use and would be failures due to lack of sponsorship. The electric company, the construction companies, employees, and bureaucrats profit from the presence of the business.

By Ibama's reasoning, when you build that business, you get to take credit for all those other things, too. But Ibama is a committed Marxist, so he loses his sense of reality amid all the big words and false intellectualism. "You didn't build that" is sophistic: It sounds brilliant, but when you slow down and think, you hear the foolishness.

Liberals Misunderstand America's Melting Pot

The melting pot is just an implement. It brings to mind a stew, since it has been contrasted with a salad bowl. However, I think the correct image comes from metallurgy, where various ingredients should blend to form an alloy such as steel.

Staying with the stew pot (I think more people can relate to cooking than to metallurgy), we have three cooks brewing a terrible mess. 

One cook, the conservative, wants to maintain the stew's distinctive balance of flavors, the recipe that made the stew a distinctively American stew.

The second cook, the newcomer, comes in numbers that upsets the balance of flavors and, in fact, refuses to abandon the flavor that he left behind. He sees only the rich nutrient content of the American stew and fails to value the recipe that made it great. That is, he brings the values that caused the conditions from which he fled and clashes with values that made America great. While conservative cooks welcome newcomers, an excess of newcomers can turn the stew into a completely different dish.

The third cook, the liberal, rejects the Judeo-Christian broth on which the soup was based. He waters down and neutralizes the distinct American flavor. He tries every other continent's distinctive dish; after all "change is good." Doing so, he leaves a hole into which the newcomers add the flavors of their impoverished, oppressed, corrupt, fan-ruled countries of origin.

We don't have a situation where we neutrally teach children about other cultures' recipes. Liberals rule the State Church (the education system). They use their power to belittle and suppress the conservative flavor. In its place, they teach the recipes of materialistic humanism and even the recipes of the newcomers. Thus, we see generations of agnostics, pictures of schoolchildren bowing in Muslim prayer, and children becoming "gay" before it is even developmentally appropriate for them to know about sex.

By suppressing the conservative values that redirected rights from the state toward the individual and by encouraging those whose native cultures produce totalitarianism, liberalism -- both political and religious -- threatens to destroy American and that for which she stands -- or used to stand.

The analogy holds up for the metallurgical melting pot, too. With the right ingredients, the product can resist oxidation, spring back into shape, or separate a nucleus from its cell's membrane. With careless formulation, it can be easily dulled, can oxidize overnight, or can even be toxic -- but that's assuming you're willing to separate it from all the unmelted dross. And liberals aren't willing.