Is The Political Spectrum Linear or Circular?

Repost from the old site.

If you want to take the time, can someone please tell me where this guy is coming from? A lot of it looks like good Left progressive stuff, but then there seems to be this kind of Far Right Ron Paul populism too. I don’t get it. What is it? Some kind of marriage between Far Right and Far Left? I’m seeing more and more of this crap nowadays on progressive and Left sites and I must say, I don’t really like it.

While we are at it, where the Hell is Jeff Rense coming from anyway? Same place as this guy? He can write about Bigfoot and UFO’s all he wants, and there are usually lots of good articles on the site, but his politics seriously creeps me out. For one thing, he’s leaking anti-Semitism out of his pores.

My Mom has been telling my whole life, “Well, you know. It’s like a circle. When you go so far to the Left and so far to the Right, you don’t have two polar opposite ends of a huge ruler. The ruler starts bending and becomes circular. It’s a circle. Far Right and Far Left meet, and you just have a nut, a fanatic.” I always figured that was just Left-trashing, but now I’m starting to wonder.

There were some people marching against the war in Oakhurst the other day and my brother went to talk to them. Some of them handed some really weird brochures full of all this conspiratorial shit. I went to the site and it was the same thing. Anti-CIA, anti-militarism, anti-Bush, anti-Iraq War, ok, that’s good.

Then it starts taking off into all this weird conspiracy theory about the Federal Reserve, the Rothschilds, the New World Order, Ron Paul, black helicopters, chemtrails, bla bla bla. Kind of like this guy.

Hard economic times really brings this stuff out bigtime.

Is this what the new radical US populism is going to look like? Some Far Right – Far Left mix? I don’t mind the Far Left part, but whenever anyone starts talking about “marrying Left and Right”, I get the creeps. I hate to say it, but that tends to end up in some weird kind of fascism of one species or other. One of the favorite fascist lines was about “getting rid of Left and Right”.

Yuck.

Color me perturbed.

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9 thoughts on “Is The Political Spectrum Linear or Circular?”

  1. Rob, what’s wrong with taking the good out of the left and the right and mixing it up? Perhaps the far left and far right are realizing that their real enemies are not each other, but the corrupt, plutocratic ruling class?

  2. Rense’s site gives me a headache. What a mess. I’ve heard of him before somewhere. Bet that’s a wig and false mustache.

    1. Yes, I used to listen to Rense. He is just the kind of New Age simpleton I hate. Some accuise him of being a Nazi, and might be, but mainly I think he believes whatever someone told him last. As for his site, it looks like it was designed by a 14 yr. old in 1995.

  3. That therearenosunglasses site looks quite interesting actually. Seems to be for Russia watchers. I just skimmed it, but it didn’t strike me as particularly left or right, just info oriented. It seems to me sometimes that elements of the pseudo-Marxist left now feel any discussion of facts about anything to be getting into right-wing conspiracy theory territory. A standout example recently was Louis Proyect arguing with Andy Newman of the uk site Socialist Unity (probably of very little interest to non-uk folks) about the death toll under Stalin: Louis ( the unrepentant Marxist trying to revitalise some sort of international communist current) seemed to be only vaguely familiar with the name J. Arch Getty, and to be oblivious that he and his associates had produced the state of the art figures on the matter; in fact when Andy put this to him, he tetchily called Getty a Stalinist. LOL. For all that, my opinion of Louis has risen a bit – he’s better than a lot of them, and much less of a jewish partisan than I suspected. Too touchy though.

    1. Louis isn’t real big on facts. Most of his post on the passage of SB 1070 concerned his affection for Turkish food:

      http://louisproyect.wordpress.com/2010/05/04/turkish-food-arizona-nativism

      Notice his disinterest in answering the following practical question in the comments:

      9. I’d like some advice on how to discuss this issue with my white working class relatives and friends who are struggling now. They’re very threatened by the idea of legalizing undocumented workers. Some of them have worked in trades like construction and seen their wages fall or jobs disappear. What is the best way to convince them that legalizing undocumented workers is in their class interest?

      Proyect’s lack of concern for the “privileged sector” of construction workers doesn’t give me much reason to take him seriously.

      1. Yes, ‘privileged’ construction workers. LOL. That’s pretty typical of ‘the left’. Of course Louis had a secure and well paid computer tech job for decades. I noticed that the ‘study’ he linked to pointed out that decline in wages was more due to the decline in unionisation than immigration; missing of course is the obvious that it’s much harder to unionise effectively if there are 10 guys queueing to do every job at half the wage.
        As I’ve said before, these pseudo-Marxists are NOT ‘left’ in any effective sense. ‘Left’ starts with defending the workers against the bosses. The lefties elevate abstract idealism into an over-riding principle that comes before the workers’ interests. Either they prefer not to see, or the justify it by calling the workers ‘privileged labour aristocracy’.
        But calling them Utopians might just be too generous; Troskyists especially have a long track record of pretending to oppose the ruling class’s projects, while reinforcing the propaganda that’s used to justify them. Don’t trust them an inch. Of course, it’s worth noting that most of their ‘leaders’ belong to the same religious sect.

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