Newsweek: Requiem for the Right (William Buckley pushed Republicans to the Left)

[FrankRep]

Requiem for the Right
Sam Tanenhaus on the Death of Conservatism (http://www.newsweek.com/id/214253)

The biographer of Whittaker Chambers and William Buckley on a dying movement.


Newsweek
Aug 29, 2009


The editor of The New York Times Book Review and the paper's "Week in Review" section, Sam Tanenhaus is the biographer of Whittaker Chambers and is at work on the life of William F. Buckley Jr. In a new, short book, The Death of Conservatism, he argues that the right needs to find its footing for the good of the country. In an e-mail exchange with Jon Meacham, Tanenhaus reflected on the book's themes. Excerpts:

Meacham: So how bad is it, really? Your title doesn't quite declare conservatism dead.

Tanenhaus: Quite bad if you prize a mature, responsible conservatism that honors America's institutions, both governmental and societal. The first great 20th-century Republican president, Theo- dore Roosevelt, supported a strong central government that emphasized the shared values and ideals of the nation's millions of citizens. He denounced the harm done by "the trusts"—big corporations. He made it his mission to conserve vast tracts of wilderness and forest. The last successful one, Ronald Reagan, liked to remind people (especially the press) he was a lifelong New Dealer who voted four times for Franklin D. Roosevelt. The consensus forged by Buckley in the 1960s gained strength through two decisive acts: first, Buckley denounced right-wing extremists, such as the members of the John Birch Society, and made sure when he did it to secure the support of conservative Republicans like Reagan, Barry Goldwater, and Sen. John Tower. This pulled the movement toward the center. Second: Buckley saw that the civil disturbances of the late 1960s (in particular urban riots and increasingly militant anti-Vietnam protests) posed a challenge to social harmonies preferred by genuine conservatives and genuine liberals alike. When the Democrat Daniel Patrick Moynihan called on liberals to join with conservatives in upholding "the politics of stability," Buckley replied that he was ready to help. He placed the values of "civil society" (in Burke's term) above those of his own movement or the GOP.

Today we see very little evidence of this. In his classic The Future of American Politics (1952), the political journalist Samuel Lubell said that our two-party system in fact consists of periods of alternating one-party rule—there is a majority "sun" party and a minority "moon" party. "It is within the majority party that the issues of any particular period are fought out," Lubell wrote. Thus, in the 1980s, Republicans grasped (and Democrats did not) that new entrepreneurial energies had been unleashed, and also that the Cold War could be brought to a conclusion through strong foreign policy. This was the Republicans' "sun" period. The reverse is happening today. The Democrats now dominate our heliocentric system—first on the economic stimulus, which is already proving to be at least a limited success, and now on the issue of health-care reform. These are both entirely Democratic initiatives. The Republicans, so intent on thwarting Obama, have vacated the field, and left it up to the sun party to accept the full burden of legislating us into the future. If the Democrats succeed, Republicans will be tagged as the party that declined even to help repair a broken system and extend fundamental protections—logical extensions of Social Security and Medicare—to some 46 million people who now don't have them. This could marginalize the right for a generation, if not longer. Rush Limbaugh's stated hope that Obama will fail seems to have become GOP doctrine. This is the attitude not of conservatives, but of radicals, who deplore the very possibility of a virtuous government.

Is there an analogous historical moment? Conservatives argue that this is 1965 and that a renaissance is at hand.

I disagree. Today, conservatives seem in a position closer to the one they occupied during the New Deal. The epithets so many on the right now hurl at Obama—"socialist," "fascist"—precisely echo the accusations Herbert Hoover and "Old Right" made against FDR in 1936. And the spectacle of citizens appearing at town-hall meetings with guns recalls nothing so much as the vigilante Minutemen whom Buckley evicted from the conservative movement in the 1960s. A serious conservative like David Frum knows this, and has spoken up. It is remarkable how few others have. The moon party is being yanked ever farther onto its marginal orbit.

Would Chambers recognize the right as it stands today?

He might recognize it, but with dismay. Even in 1959, Chambers withdrew from National Review—where he had been writing occasional essays—because it seemed out of step, for instance, in its failure to see that the Soviet Union must be negotiated with, not simply threatened with nuclear extinction. Chambers opposed the arms race, favored civil liberties, distrusted the unregulated free market. His model was Benjamin Disraeli, the 19th-century English conservative who regarded unchecked capitalism, and the upheavals it wrought, as a potential threat to the social order. Above all, Chambers was a humanist intellectual, deeply learned in the literature of several languages. He urged Buckley (his young protégé) to read the radical novels of André Malraux. He admired Nabokov's Lolita.

Is there an inherent contradiction in the idea that conservatives need to put forward an agenda for the future?

I don't think they need to put forward such an agenda. The best policies are formed through cooperation between the two parties. Most voters aren't ideological. They choose leaders for reasons of trust and affinity. It's worth remembering that even at this supercharged moment, with so much fervor in the air, this country elected a relatively inexperienced African-American product of Hawaii, Kenya, Columbia, and Harvard, with some years spent as a social organizer on the South Side of Chicago. And a majority voted for him for they same reason they have voted for other presidents, because they liked and trusted him, and because he seemed attuned to them and their problems. Hannah Arendt identified the ability to listen—to place oneself inside the mind of others—as the essential requirement of democratic statesmanship. The function of conservatives is not to meet every liberal program or scheme with a denunciation or a destructive counterscheme, but rather to weigh its advantages and defects, supporting the first and challenging the second. A declaration of ideological warfare against liberalism is by its nature profoundly unconservative. It meets perceived radicalism with a counterradicalism of its own.

One criticism of your book will no doubt be that you are an egghead sellout from The New York Times and aren't a true conservative anyway.

Egghead? I wish. I'm a working journalist, plus biographer and self-taught historian. I claim no expertise as a political thinker, and even less in the realm of policy. As for my having sold out to the Times, anyone masochistic enough to review my writings over the years will see my point of view has changed very little. Nothing I say in my new book conflicts with anything I wrote in my biography of Chambers. I'm not registered with either party and never have been. I'm interested in politics as a theater of ideas and as a place where intellectuals now and again exert some visible influence. It is this confluence of ideas and action that I like to write about.

Who do you see as the plausible leaders of the right in the next decade? for that matter, will there be one "right," or possibly a Palin party and a Pawlenty party, to put it very roughly?

This is the crisis now facing the right and principal reason I wrote this book. The movement has exhausted itself and depleted its resources. Before the GOP finds a new leader, it will need a new vocabulary. Political ideas don't change much over time and political debates don't either. (Remember, TR, FDR, and Truman all favored national health care. So did Nixon.) But the tonal difference between a Joe McCarthy in 1950 and a Reagan in 1980 is enormous. And it is the intellectuals who must reinvent the conservative vocabulary, by thinking hard again. I once asked Bill Buckley what brought him to Goldwater and then Reagan. He said, "They came to me." Bill Buckley had the ideas and the language. These ascendant leaders needed to master both.


SOURCE:
http://www.newsweek.com/id/214253

[FrankRep]

William F. Buckley Jr.: the Establishment’s “House Conservative” (http://www.jbs.org/jbs-news-feed/457-william-f-buckley-jr-the-establishments-house-conservative)


Warren Mass | John Birch Society (http://www.jbs.org/)
14 March 2008


The New York Times noted in observing Buckley's passing: "Mr. Buckley's greatest achievement was making conservatism — not just electoral Republicanism, but conservatism as a system of ideas — respectable in liberal postwar America. He mobilized the young enthusiasts who helped nominate Mr. Goldwater in 1964 and saw his dreams fulfilled when Mr. Reagan and the Bushes captured the Oval Office." (Emphasis added.)

As one of the leading organs of the Eastern Liberal Establishment, the Times unquestionably played a key role in granting Buckley the keys to the kingdom of "respectability" (whatever that means in contemporary society) by which he might possess the power to admit (or deny) an entire political spectrum passage through the pearly gates guarded by alumni of Ivy League universities and members of the New York-based Council on Foreign Relations.

In so doing, however, it can be documented that rather than fit the traditional conservative square peg into the round hole of establishment "respectability," Buckley whittled away at traditional, "square" conservatism until it was divested of any resemblance of its former self. Buckley very competently performed the task assigned to him by his mentors (most notably his Trotskyite socialist Yale Professor Willmoore Kendall, a veteran of the OSS, which later became the CIA), of slicing from the conservative timber anyone who persisted in espousing traditional "Old Right" conservative values. These conservatives "excommunicated" (or simply repulsed) by Buckley included: Professor Medford Evans, who appeared on Buckley's National Review magazine's inaugural masthead; Henry Paolucci, a leader of the Conservative Party of New York State; economist Murray Rothbard, who was an early National Review contributor; Ralph de Toledano, an early National Review editor; and Daniel Oliver, a National Review executive editor.

But dwarfing all of these slights was Buckley's unprovoked and uncivil attack on the man who had done more than any other individual in the 1950s to marshal confused and leaderless conservatives around a singular standard — Robert Welch, the founder of The John Birch Society.

That this schism among conservatives was completely instigated by Buckley is indicated by Welch's high praise for Buckley's magazine at the 1958 founding meeting of The John Birch Society, when Welch told his associates: "I think that National Review especially, because it is aimed so professionally at the academic mind, should be in every college library in the United States…." And in the JBS membership Bulletin for May 1960, Welch encouraged members to write to Captain Edward Rickenbacker, then Chairman of Eastern Airlines, urging that both Human Events and National Review be placed on the airline's planes.

Despite Welch's longtime support of Buckley and his magazine, however, in early 1962 Buckley gathered his editorial staff to plan an attack on America's leading conservative, anti-communist leader. Starting with a six-page editorial entitled "The Question of Robert Welch," Buckley was unrelenting in his attack on The John Birch Society for the remainder of his life.

An excerpt from Buckley's forthcoming book, Flying High: Remembering Barry Goldwater, entitled, "Goldwater, the John Birch Society, and Me (http://www.commentarymagazine.com/viewarticle.cfm/Goldwater--the-John-Birch-Society--and-Me-11248)" was published in the March 2008 issue of Commentary magazine, which openly calls itself "the flagship of neoconservatism."

The article is a candid description of Buckley's meeting with members of Senator Barry Goldwater's pre-presidential exploratory campaign team in 1962, and of National Review staffer Russell Kirk's attempts to get Goldwater to renounce The John Birch Society. The very liberal New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller had urged Goldwater to do the same, and, for his efforts, was almost drowned out at the podium at the 1964 Republican Convention by a hearty chorus of boos coming from the galleries! To his credit, Senator Goldwater delivered his famous "extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice" speech, largely as a rebuke to Rockefeller.

Though the Times now credits Buckley for the conditions making Barry Goldwater's 1964 presidential nomination possible, it was Robert Welch and The John Birch Society that did the spadework that made that happen, and Senator Goldwater knew it. Buckley talked like a conservative, but his neocon philsophy was much closer to Rockefeller's than to Goldwater's.

Neoconservatism Explained

It is impossible to understand William F. Buckley without understanding what neoconservatism is. Those laboring with that handicap were apt to be taken in, as this writer once was, by Buckley's charm, wit, and ability to crush liberal opponents in debates. A case in point is an article headlined "Buckley's Catholic Legacy," in the National Catholic Register of March 9.

The Register is a newspaper I read faithfully, and, I rarely have reason to disagree with its generally conservative Catholic reporting. However, the author of this article, Father Raymond J. De Souza, stopped only a little short of proclaiming Buckley as the greatest American Catholic since Charles Carroll of Carrollton, the sole Catholic signer of the Declaration of Independence. It is entirely possible that Father De Souza, a Canadian, simply does not fully understand U.S. politics, and the difference between historic American conservatism and neoconservatism. (Very likely, 98 percent of Americans do not understand the difference!) Much is explained, however, as De Souza describes in a sidebar ("My Encounter With Mr. Buckley") how the late journalist, in appreciation for the priest-writer's favorable review of Buckley's autobiography, Nearer, My God, once treated him to lunch at Paone's, an Italian restaurant located near National Review’s Manhattan offices.

Having been subjected at such close range to the legendary Buckley charm, it is perhaps understandable that Father De Souza failed — as have so many others — to see through the late journalist's façade and realize that the man was an imposter as a conservative, and a poor representative of his professed faith, as well. Explaining the latter point first, during his career Buckley submitted to interviews with Playboy magazine, and allowed excerpts from his works to be published in both Playboy and Penthouse; he allowed National Review to publish several articles defending "gay rights," and as early as March 1966, several years before Roe v Wade, he wrote that "the Catholic Church should reconsider its position" on laws prohibiting abortion. In a footnote in Nearer, My God that Father De Souza must have overlooked in rendering his favorable review of the book, Buckley wrote, in a tone far too flippant for such a critical subject: "The demand to baptize abortion is very rare, the general position among Catholic dissenters being that those who abort, or collude in bringing about an abortion, are yes sinners, but so is your old man."

De Souza misses this point completely by describing Buckley as "staunchly pro-life," when, in reality, the man was as wishy-washy on the matter of life as is John McCain.

As far as Buckley's well-touted "conservatism" goes, De Souza accepts at face value what all those who have not fully investigated the man accept, and parrots the establishment's designation of Buckley as the "father of the modern conservative movement." His most egregious misstatement, perhaps, is his claim:



In founding his magazine, National Review, in 1955, he fashioned a new conservative movement, "excommunicating" the isolationists and nativists and extremists (he broke with Joe McCarthy) that had previously dominated American conservative thought.


The fact of the matter is that Buckley, far from being the father of anything resembling true conservatism (as best exemplified by Senator Robert Taft, who was denied the Republican nomination in 1952 by Buckley's philosophical brethren), was merely a very capable quarterback for a team of neoconservatives (neocons) who had graduated from the World War II-era OSS into the CIA, bringing their anti-Stalinist, but definitely Trotskyite (http://www.antiwar.com/justin/j061303.html), ideas with them. The repackaging of this anti-American philosophy as "neoconservatism" rivaled any campaign Madison Avenue ever concocted for a "new" detergent that would get your clothes whiter and brighter.

The original OSS/CIA neocons, including the aforementioned Willmoore Kendall, spotted young Bill Buckley when he was on the staff of the Yale Daily News, and tagged him as a likely rising star of their movement. (Buckley, of course, was also tapped to join the secretive Skull and Bones society while at Yale, as had both presidents Bush and Senator John Kerry.) At Kendall's urging, Buckley joined the CIA after graduating from Yale. Through Kendall, Buckley became acquainted with James Burnham, another OSS/CIA veteran who would become a prominent figure at National Review. So strong was the CIA connection that the brilliant economist and former contributor to Buckley's magazine, Murray Rothbard, said in 1981: "I'm convinced that the whole National Review is a CIA operation."

There is much more that must be considered to fully comprehend William F. Buckley, the star quarterback of the neoconservative movement. Those who are interested in learning "the rest of the story" are encouraged to read William F. Buckley, Jr., Pied Piper for the Establishment (http://www.amazon.com/William-F-Buckley-Jr-Establishment/dp/1881919064), by John F. McManus.


SOURCE:
http://www.jbs.org/jbs-news-feed/457-william-f-buckley-jr-the-establishments-house-conservative

[FrankRep]

'Bill Buckley: Pied Piper of the Establishment' (http://www.lewrockwell.com/orig/epstein5.html)


Review by Marcus Epstein | Lew Rockwell.com (http://www.lewrockwell.com/)
September 4, 2002


Fifty years ago, conservatism meant opposition to big government in all its manifestations and a belief in a non-interventionist foreign policy. Today, most people associate it with preserving the legacy of Harry Truman, Martin Luther King Jr., and Hubert Humphrey, while supporting American cultural, economic, and political hegemony across the globe. What conservativism means today is at odds for what it used to stand for. What is the reason? John Birch Society president, John F. McManus, puts the blame squarely on William F. Buckley in his excellent new book, William F. Buckley Jr., Pied Piper for the Establishment (http://www.amazon.com/William-F-Buckley-Jr-Establishment/dp/1881919064).

McManus tells the story of a talented and intelligent man born into privilege. His father, James Buckley, was an exemplar of the Old Right – a staunch opponent of Roosevelt’s New Deal and drive towards war. Buckley followed in his father’s footsteps and was outspoken in his politics, but somewhere he went astray.

McManus seems to blame his shift on his left-wing professor, Wilmoore Kendall, and his membership in the Skull and Bones club, but neither of these explanations seems to give a concrete answer. By McManus’ own account, Buckley, seemed to have just as much or more influence on Kendall than vice versa. All McManus manages to say about the Skull and Bones Society is that many powerful people have been members (what would you expect of a group that picks the most promising Yale students) and they allegedly have some weird initiation practices (none of which seem any weirder than what goes on at any college fraternity).

In 1952 Buckley wrote a very telling article for the Catholic Weekly, The Commonweal, where he stated,




…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…

And if they deem Soviet power a menace to our freedom (as I happen to), they 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 – Even with Truman at the reins of it all.



McManus sees this article as the root to Buckley’s ideology: fighting communism with internationalism and socialism.

Despite his break from much of the values of the Old Right, Buckley gained popularity among conservatives with the publication of two books, God and Men at Yale (http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/089526692X/lewrockwell/) in 1951 and McCarthy and his Enemies (http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0895264722/lewrockwell/) in 1954. McManus takes a close look at these books and sees them as hardly conservative. While he generally supports the message of God and Men at Yale, he finds it disconcerting that Buckley’s main concern about the atheism and socialism taught at Yale is that the Alumni don’t support that agenda, rather than it being immoral. This criticism is somewhat unfair. Buckley did not say that there were no other reasons to oppose those beliefs. The book was designed to be an appeal to Yale Alumni, and wished for them to assert power with their pocketbooks.

McManus notes that McCarthy and his Enemies is a rather reserved defense of the maligned Senator. He finds 63 criticisms of Tailgunner Joe in the book, and notes that now Buckley blames anything in the book that can be construed as pro-McCarthy on his late coauthor Brent Bozell.

He goes on to detail Buckley’s dealings in the CIA. He shows how the agency was intentionally filled with various Trotskyites and other anti-Stalinist leftists, and believes this may have influenced Buckley’s views. He then provides evidence to suggest that National Review was in fact funded by the CIA.

National Review was staffed almost exclusively by ex-communists, many of whom were Buckley’s CIA colleagues. He gives a critical look at many of the early contributors such as James Burnham, Frank Meyer, Willi Schlamm, Whitaker Chambers, and Max Eastman. McManus describes the paradox of the situation,



Those who dominated National Review at its inception… were ex-Communists, Trotskyites, socialists, and CIA stalwarts who deplored the excesses of Communism but who had no objection to steering America away from personal freedom and national independence. Yet this was the magazine that was supposed to provide pivotal opposition to America’s increasingly dominant Eastern Establishment, whose elitists had long been laboring to undermine our nation’s independence and erode the people’s freedom!


He explains how Buckley then became one of the biggest apologists for the establishment in all its manifestations. Whenever it seemed that the conservative grassroots were ready to turn on the Council on Foreign Relations, Henry Kissinger, the United Nations, The Trilateral Commission, Richard Nixon, or the Rockerfellers, Bill Buckley always managed to defend the hated institutions. In addition to quelling the masses, it allows the establishment to say "Even Bill Buckley believes…" to make any critic of them seem like extremists. The book also explains how Buckley invited the neocons into the conservative movement and helped propel them to its leadership. It also details several leftist positions that Buckley has taken in recent years such as support for legalized abortion, a Martin Luther King Holiday, and special privileges for homosexuals.

Looking at Buckley’s legacy, McManus writes,



Buckley is now in the twilight of his life. He has done most of the damage he could ever hope to do. Yet the counterfeit conservatism he has minted is now being circulated by others, including William Bennett, Rush Limbaugh, William Kristol, and George W. Bush. The stakes in the struggle haven’t changed, even though many of the participants have. Many years ago, in his Commonweal article, Buckley recommended "a totalitarian bureaucracy within our shores… and the attendant centralization of power in Washington" as the means to fight Communism during the Cold War. Today’s neoconservatives are calling for police state powers at home and a coalition of nations under the UN in order to win the war against terrorism. As the French say: "Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose."


While this book does an excellent job of exposing Bill Buckley for the fraud that he is, it fails to fully explain the Right’s transformation. McManus puts a great deal of emphasis on Buckley’s famous Commonweal article from 1952. But while libertarians such as Murray Rothbard and Frank Chodorov condemned (http://www.lewrockwell.com/rothbard/rothbard6.html) it as socialist and statist as soon as the article came out, by McManus’ own account, Robert Welch didn’t say a single critical word about Buckley until National Review turned its guns on the John Birch Society. Why is this? Perhaps it is because Welch overestimated the Soviet threat, and underestimated the importance of an isolationist foreign policy. While the John Birch Society and Robert Welch had reservations about America’s entry foreign wars, they usually gave (http://www.jbs.org/vietnam/no_win/index.htm) the same National Review line about how to finish the job.

At the same time, McManus fails to detail how far Buckley and National Review have strayed from their original views since the early 60s. Other than a few differences over conspiracy theories and strategy, the John Birch Society and National Review pretty much saw eye to eye forty years ago. Today they have absolutely nothing in common. Buckley’s membership in the Skull and Bones Club can’t totally account for the change. Perhaps the problem all goes down to foreign policy. Buckley saw the Soviet Union as a great threat that had to be countered by the United States military. To do this he was willing to align himself with liberal anticommunists, but not with conservative non-interventionists. By trying to please these liberal anticommunists, who had much more power and prestige than he, he eventually ended mimicking them.

Despite these few flaws, this book is still a great expose of the establishment’s favorite conservative and essential reading for any person interested in the history of the conservative movement.


SOURCE:
http://www.lewrockwell.com/orig/epstein5.html

[FrankRep]

Buckley denounced right-wing extremists, such as the members of the John Birch Society

Is this right-wing extremism?


Overview of America

Overview of America - Public Service - DVD (http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=6732659166933078950)

[Epic]

"This is the attitude not of conservatives, but of radicals, who deplore the very possibility of a virtuous government."

I'm a radical!!!

Seriously, the article is dumb, it was like, the modern day conservatives are extremists!!!! They don't even want to expand government any more!!!

Oh yeah, and since when was Herbert Hoover an "old right" politician???

He was a big-government guy through and through.

[RSLudlum]

[URL="http://www.newsweek.com/id/214253"]

[B]Would Chambers recognize the right as it stands today?

He might recognize it, but with dismay. Even in 1959, Chambers withdrew from National Review—where he had been writing occasional essays—because it seemed out of step, for instance, in its failure to see that the Soviet Union must be negotiated with, not simply threatened with nuclear extinction.



Isn't this the same reason Felix Morley (an "old righter") parted ways in the 50's with the mag he helped found, "Human Events", which is now a Neocon rag?

[FrankRep]

Seriously, the article is dumb, it was like, the modern day conservatives are extremists!!!! They don't even want to expand government any more!!!

I posted it to fire back at William F. Buckley Jr. and his NeoConservative friends. The biggest thing I wanted to point out is that Buckley pushed the Republican party to the left. He attacked the John Birch Society why calling them "right wing extremists" and expelled them from the Conservative movement.


Here's the grand finale:

William F. Buckley Jr. is a Council on Foreign Relations member.
(Now it all makes sense)


SOURCE:

William F. Buckley, Jr. Dead at 82
http://www.jbs.org/jbs-news-feed/483-william-f-buckley-jr-dead-at-82


In 2002, The John Birch Society published my unauthorized biography of the conservative leader, a 240-page critical survey entitled William F. Buckley, Jr.: Pied Piper for the Establishment. Having discovered that, as a young man, I had been misled by the man I originally trusted, I thought it worthwhile to put into print a history of many disagreements I came to have with liberaldom’s favorite conservative. Surprisingly, Buckley obtained a copy of the book and commented in an interview that he "treasured" it while claiming "it was mostly about how I was a member of the Council on Foreign Relations." Yes, that significant item is mentioned, but only as the apex of a lifetime of service to the neoconservative movement. For those of us who once admired Buckley, he became an enigmatic and troubling figure until the end.


YouTube - CFR Controls The Media (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8bddVIyngis)

[NYgs23]

It's not so much that Buckley pushed the right-wing to the left, it's that he helped push it away from it's isolationist WWII stance into Cold War interventionism. Murray Rothbard's Betrayal of the American Right goes into this in some detail.

Personally, I really think we should stop worrying so much about what's "right-wing" and what's "left-wing." We're supposed to be focused on freedom, not silly partisan politics. The so-called Left was the most pro-freedom "wing" in the 19th century, then it was the so-called Right, then the Left during the 60s, then the Right again, then the Left under Bush, then the Right under Obama. Do these terms have any meaning whatsoever? I don't think so. They're what Ayn Rand called "anti-concepts." They only confuse things.

[LibertyEagle]

You are defining right-wing and left-wing much differently than I do. At their most extreme, left-wing is total government control and right-wing is no government, whatsoever.

YouTube - The American Form of Government (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DioQooFIcgE)

[Conza88]

You are defining right-wing and left-wing much differently than I do. At their most extreme, left-wing is total government control and right-wing is no government, whatsoever.

YouTube - The American Form of Government (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DioQooFIcgE)

Wrong.

http://www.ronpaulforums.com/showpost.php?p=2142417&postcount=42

Never got a response. Want to try again? :confused:

[FrankRep]

Wrong.

http://www.ronpaulforums.com/showpost.php?p=2142417&postcount=42

Never got a response. Want to try again? :confused:

Are you saying this presentation below is wrong? The conversation you referenced seem very fragmented and abstract. What are you trying to say?

YouTube - The American Form of Government (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DioQooFIcgE)