Beware The Corporatists

We were always on the left. In 1776, we were the very definition of the left. We were a mixture of Thomas Paine and Johnny Cash, embarrassing tyrants and sycophants with the immutable logic and dignity of our arguments. And now, we have spent so many decades protecting our left flank from a long-since vanquished demon called Bolshevism that we are blind to the demons gnawing at our right wing.

Beware of Chavez, we are told. Only an enemy would smoke a Cuban, we are told. The French are pussies, we tell ourselves. The Saudis are our friends, we are told by the very same mouths. State ownership of vital resources is totalitarianism, they say. Corporate ownership of the very same thing is liberty, they say with no embarrassment.

When a state that would confiscate private wealth to provide health care to poor women is judged to be more "anti-American" than a state that would confiscate private wealth to provide assurance that a woman will not be allowed to leave her house unless accompanied by her husband or a male relative, we know that our foreign policy is indeed very foreign to what we pretend are American "ideals".

Hitler wasn't a fascist; he was a National Socialist. And if you study his platform, sans the killing of the Jews, all Western states, including the United States, are to some degree National Socialist societies. Mussolini was the closest any person has come to fascism, and although he was a military and strategic midget, his intellect was not appreciably weaker than Lenin's; he synthesized the antithesis to Communism.

Mussolini's definition of fascism, rightly called corporatism, was the marriage of state, military, and business. What intellectually honest person could deny that all of these interests are served by war? And what emotionally honest person could call this coincidence? We have created a system that ensures war profiteering, and we feign disbelief when the inevitable becomes evitable.

I have studied quite a bit of history, and any person who understands history understands that studying history is a process of embracing ignorance; the more you learn, the more aware you are of how much else you don't know.

That being said, there are a few conclusions I have dared to reach about power. The most immutable rule is that men don't give up power; they seize power, and then eschew all the romantic rhetoric than carried them to power in the first place.

There are exceptions to the rule, however. Here are the three titans that dared not just to seize power, but to give it up: George Washington, Che Guevarra, and Mikhael Gorbachev. Regardless of how one feels about the politics of these men, they were moral giants. And they were all Leftists.

The Cold War is over; we no longer need to obsess over our left flank. Our job now is to be honest with ourselves; in the interest of "proving Communism wrong", we have flirted far too much with fascism.