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what's "right"? (a) posted: Tue 2011-08-02 04:55:36 tags: TWFTR
Lately I've had this phrase kicking around my head, "The Wrong From The Right", as a working title for my thoughts on the advance of right-wing agendas in my lifetime.

I really want to dive in by defining my terms, but before I even get there, let me note that a) political terminology is slippery, because almost every term in political discourse is nuanced both by historical context and by doctrinal orientation; and b) some of it is so widely misunderstood, or misused for propaganda purposes, that we have people claiming (without a hint of irony) things like "HITLER was a liberal, too!" (If you think Hitler WAS a liberal, you're in the wrong place. Come back and visit when you're less stupid; you'll know when that happens because you'll understand the polar differences between "genocidal totalitarian warlord" and "liberal".)

So now we can talk about what "right wing" means, right? Wrong! First let's step back just another couple moments and ask, "what is a conservative"? Conservatism has two contexts, fiscal and social. A number of fiscal policy positions are commonly associated with fiscal conservatism, but the defining feature of real fiscal conservatism is the avoidance of debt. What did the Founding Fathers think of national debt? Well, the War of Indpendence was fought with international loans that amounted to about a trillion inflation-adjusted dollars. When the dust settled, some founders, Thomas Jefferson among them, didn't want to honor that debt. Alexander Hamilton struck a compromise to pay it off by levying taxes, in exchange for letting Jefferson move the capitol to Washington DC. The federal government borrowed again to finance the 1803 Louisiana Purchase.

Hand-in-hand with debt avoidance is deficit avoidance - the idea that the government shouldn't outspend its treasury. There are two ways to manage this - don't spend more than the treasury has already "banked", which raises the question of how much surplus to "bank" to cover potential incidentals like, oh say, The War of 1812; and/or adjust taxes to make up shortfalls, which arguably encourages runaway shortfalls and attendant tax inflation.

Contrast fiscal conservatism with social conservatism, which seeks to preserve social customs, norms and institutions from change. In the 1950s and '60s, it was not ideologically inconsistent for conservatives to support racial segregation. Contrary to common rhetoric, the current right-wing push to outlaw abortion is NOT technically "conservative"; a proper conservative in the current era of abortion politics would have to be one who seeks to uphold the 1973 Roe vs. Wade decision that enshrines the right to abortion under the basic doctrine of right to privacy, specifically the medical privacy of doctor-patient confidentiality.

The word for those seeking to revert to social customs of a previous era is "reactionary". In the face of social change, today's conservative seeking to preserve a cherished social institution become tomorrow's reactionary, seeking to revive it.

The antithesis of social conservatism is social liberalism, from the same Latin root liberalis, carrying a dual connotation of something "freely" given, that is, given in generosity, and something "noble", first applied to the "liberal" arts, that is, studies befitting or pertaining to a "free" man - grammar, logic, rhetoric, math, music and astronomy - as opposed to the "servile" or "mechanical" arts - farming, animal husbandry, and trade skills like smithing, carpentry, tanning and masonry.

"Progressive" has a much muddier etymology - in the 1920s and '30s, the Progressive movement was very much characterized by "ivory tower elitism" in government - not exactly left-wing, and with its pet white-supremacist leanings ("Fairer, Fitter Families", eugenics, Jim Crow and forced sterilization), served as the eventual model for the Third Reich's narrative of "Aryan" racial supremacy... decidedly right-wing. More recently, as the right-wing media have steadily loaded the term "liberal" with a complex of negative connotations, some left-leaning politicians have sought to shrug off that association by dusting off the "Progressive" banner, presumably minus the overt racism.