Wednesday, September 03, 2008
Gives Me the Willies
Is anyone bothered by those "Service" and "Country First" signs at the Republican convention? Why am I thinking of Mussolini's words: "Everything for the State; nothing outside the State; nothing against the State"?
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5 comments:
Yup.
Conservatives speak the language of loyalty. They feel a part of "America" in the abstract, and want to honor the system and the abstraction and, indeed, what they think of as the reality itself.
Alas, that means that they tend not to be good about changing the nature of the system, or their leaders, when principles they otherwise approve of hit the dump heap of politicking.
Loyalty to group or leader has a cost: loyalty to principles.
In this way, libertarians like you and individualists like me, for all our differences, are pretty similar.
And this is our similarity to modern statist "liberals," as Jonathan Haidt explains . . . they have a narrowed moral focus, and loyalty to group or leader plays little part of it.
(Of course, they do seems altogether too partial to "cool" people, and that's the ancient honor standard revived, if in bastard form.)
Why are you thinking of it? Because you're intelligent, historically minded, and care about liberty.
Speaking of fascism, or of something like it, I believe this video was recorded last night: http://gnooze.com/archives/235
It's been given the title, "Protestors Tear Gassed! Raw footage - gnooze tear gassed in St. Paul!"
Pass it on if you think it's worth it.
I am with you on this.
Mussolini loved fascism and was the best teacher of it. Conservatives seem to love fascism while pretending it is freedom.
Because they both mean the exact same thing. The former just sounds less scary than the latter.
We need to point this out everyday.
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