"We're all left-wingers now"

Many thanks to Brad Spangler, who offers a news flash for libertarians this weekend. “We’re all left-wingers now,” he writes, “whether you’re personally down with that or not.”

Brad points to an article by Glenn Greenwald at Salon that credits neoconservatives for re-shaping the Left-Right political spectrum. Greenwald says that today’s empire-building neocons have turned the conservative right-wing into “an authoritarian movement animated by the Orwellian slogan that ‘security leads to freedom’ which embraces and seeks ever-expanding government power based on the claimed need to protect people from all the scary, lurking dangers in the world — dangers which are constantly stoked and inflamed in order to maximize the craving for ‘security,’ derived by vesting more and more power in the hands of our strong, protective Leaders.” He adds: “The central tenets of the right-wing movement in this country — which has seized and now defines the term ‘conservative’ — are easy to see. They’re right there in plain sight — they want to expand government power in pursuit of mindless, bloodthirsty warmongering and empire-building abroad, and the accompanying liberty-infringement at home. ...

“At least for now, until this movement is banished to the dustbin, [the terms ‘left’ and ‘right’] have come to designate whether one is loyal to, or whether one opposes, this government-power worshipping, profoundly un-American right-wing cultism that has been the dominant political faction in America for many years.”

Of course, Greenwald is only recognizing now what we Libertarian Leftists have known for decades — that the real Right has always been authoritarian and has, as Karl Hess wrote many years ago, “traditionally reflected the concentration of power in the fewest practical hands”; the real Left reflects the opposite tendency.

Keep Left!