Whilst cruising Brian Linse’s Directory of ‘left wing’ blogs, I was trying to make sense of who was listed and why.
There are the blogs of the fuzzy and cuddly ‘soft left’ such as Brian’s own Ain’t no bad dude, ranging all the way to Chomsky adoring pro-totalitarians like Blowback: two blogs seemingly as far apart as robustly anti-left Cold Fury and the joyfully idiotarian WarBloggerWatch. But there are also hard to classify blogs like AirstripOne. When ‘Emmanuel Goldstein’ of AirstripOne writes things like…
That being said, Britain has no business opening up its markets just because it will help Third World countries. The argument for free trade must come from British interests.
…it should be clear that Emmanuel’s views owe more to Burke than Marx. This is pure old paleo-conservative Tory values: free trade may be allowed as an expedient if it is conducive to ‘national’ ends but it is certainly not carried out by right between free individuals. So does AirStripOne belong in a ‘leftist’ directory?
Yes actually. And so do links to Pat Buchannan or Ross Perot, because Brian’s ‘leftist’ directory is not really a ‘leftists’ directory at all, but rather a ‘Civil Interventionists Directory’ (i.e. the opposite of a ‘Civil Libertarians Directory’) because that is the only common thread between this disparate listing. What all these folks share is the belief that it is okay for a violence backed state to forcibly intermediate itself into private people’s lives, not just in emergencies but within the context of normal civil society, in order to change how they may choose to live.
That is right. The likes of Buchannan or Ted Health are just as statist as any on the so called left, they just want to do (some) different things with the power of the state (plus quite a few of exactly the same things): but then when you compare people like Brian Linse and Noam Chomsky they also want to do very different things, so it is a fair comparision. In fact ‘left wing’ Linse probably has more in common with ‘right wing’ Buchannan that he does with that piece of crap Chomsky.
That is what make left and right different for each other but kinda the same to libertarians: Statist who want different stuff. But it is more than just that: they are different ‘tribes’. The left hate Buchannan but it is because of his language and vibe really. He is not ‘one of us’ culturally for the left but in reality they are not so different. The right hate Clinton but then keep a lot of his policies after he is gone. They are all collectivists who believe in imposed top-down power justified by the bogus empowerment that democracy make people feel they have, rather than real individual empowerment.