The ideal of (political) right

[Zorral]

What in bloody hell is there such a thing as a "healthy right wing?"  Right wing is by probably your own definition extremist.  It advocates to oppressing all others for the sake a few and their wealth and power.

This is strawmanning in reversal.  Good, frackin' grief.

[Kalbear]

My take: the only useful rightwing that the US has ever had was Teddy Roosevelt. If you want to go back to the idea where you have limited government AND massive rules against corporations AND medical care for all AND massive conservation of public spaces and environmental rules, that'd be great. 

But really, what the fuck does the 'right' stand for? Are you talking about economic right, which typically but not always involves deregulation, corporate growth, and low taxes? Are you talking social 'right', which seems to mean more religious integration into laws? Are you talking about the 1980s American right, which favored minority suppression, massive expansion of the military? Or today's US right, which involves anti-science, anti-immigration and massive judicial overreach?

At this point I'm not in favor of any thing that specifically is right vs. left. I'm in favor of parties. If a party wants to be anti-immigration, cool. Or anti-vaccine, or pro-business, or whatever - but that's what we need to evaluate on. 

My personal view is that I would vaguely consider some right-libertarian viewpoints around social conservatism, and that might be okay. But at this point there's basically nothing on the right that I can consider reasonable as a viewpoint. 

[OldGimletEye]

6 hours ago, Knight Of Winter said:

snip

It's hard for me to generally comment about other countries outside of the US (except for situations like Hungary with Orban), since I'm most knowledgeable about the US. But a start in the US would be cleaning house and getting rid of all the charlatans, cranks, and con men, like the Limbaughs, Hannities, Joneses, Moore's, etc.

[HoodedCrow]

Thanks! There is so much to politics that I don’t understand, and I try to keep informed, but the clarity here is very helpful.

As a newly minted American, I changed from independent to democrat. We got the citizenships to vote for Obama, although he was not as left wing as we were. We also didn’t want to endure legal alien status if something happened and it has. Does that make me a moderate?

I attended the democrat caucus to be responsible, but I wanted Democrats to choose as I don’t have it in my bones. I was one of those irritating undecideds. Bernie for me was preaching the gospel, however, in Canada it would be ho hum. I resented all the crap about Hillary. She murdered Vince Foster, had Pizzagate, used a private server that was never hacked, sat threw those Benghazi fake trials, forgave her husband, possibly has an open relationship, Cookiegate...remember that? My Left wing gay friend in the government had no problem with her and smiled.

Out precinct was split. We heard speeches, and I was flipping a coin and then just thought I wanted the first woman president that is barely tolerable to moderates, I’m in! Also, I like her! Does that make me conservative or pinko? 
 

Bernie did a lot of heavy lifting:)
 

I also think Americans would tolerate a German style of healthcare, but many wouldn’t like free healthcare, as there are issues with universal healthcare in quality, though I want everyone covered.

I always had a bad opinion of Trump. Now the right wing is trying a takeover, mob style. It’s surreal and scary.

Someone asked if the self described conservative nurse who said mask wearing was “an IQ test”  was in favor or not. She wants people to mask up!

The stuff on video of violent or freedumb right wing people horrifies me. I do not care about people’s color, except now that I want to support my brethren. I cared about this in the sixties and I thought it was done! How wrong. I thought Nixon was a villain. I thought Reagan was simple. I thought Carter, even Bush I were underrated. I liked Bill Clinton. I thought Bush 2 was a tool. I liked Obama enough to pay money, hire a lawyer, and learn some civics, so that I could legally vote.

I would be marching, if I hadn’t run away to my motherland. I did march for women and against the Iraq war.

 

[DMC]

1 hour ago, Kalbear said:

massive conservation of public spaces and environmental rules, that'd be great. 

It should be noted that while Roosevelt warrants credit for advancing conservationist policies, his motives were not environmental but rather the more efficient and less wasteful exploitation of natural resources for economic benefit.

As for answering the OP, at least in the US, I'm hard-pressed to come up with any satisfactory answer.  The combination of an inherent two-party system and the GOP as primarily ideological rather than as a coalition of groups means the right-wing will always be pushed to its extremes.  There was a time this was not the case, but it's hard to see ever getting back to that as long as the party generally just caters to white people and their fears/resentment.

[Knight Of Winter]

1 hour ago, Kalbear said:

But really, what the fuck does the 'right' stand for? Are you talking about economic right, which typically but not always involves deregulation, corporate growth, and low taxes? Are you talking social 'right', which seems to mean more religious integration into laws? Are you talking about the 1980s American right, which favored minority suppression, massive expansion of the military? Or today's US right, which involves anti-science, anti-immigration and massive judicial overreach?

 

I was talking about the first two (bolded). My knowledge of American politics is insufficient to comment on the last two. 

1 hour ago, Kalbear said:

My personal view is that I would vaguely consider some right-libertarian viewpoints around social conservatism, and that might be okay

Can you elaborate about viewpoints you mention?

 

[Knight Of Winter]

6 hours ago, sologdin said:

this summation fits well with my study of fascist and NSDAP writings, most of ayn rand, the unabomber manifesto, the ill-named anarchist cookbook, the minutemen manifesto, many red scare writings from the US, the protocols of the learned elders of zion, paxton and griffin respectively on fascism, isenberg's white trash, goad's manifesto on same, carlson on eugenics, lemkin & neumann on the NSDAP, friedman, hayek, von mises, the bell curve, AIDS conspiracism, huntington's clash, brzezinski's chessboard, fukuyama's end, nietzsche, heidegger, pessimism, cioran and nihilism, burke, de maistre, and a healthy dose of recent fox news talking heads' writings--all of this is laden with violent language and most employs eliminationist ideas. stripped of phenomenological variances, then, the underlying noumenal essence is likely in its revanchist, irredentist, revisionist, or other counter-movements against progressive developments--but unable to restore the past, it is a quasi-restoration of a fiction.

All fine and well, but not the subject of this thread. I was interested in discussing right-wing beside their violent and eliminationist ideas, and how right-wing ideas could me made into a respectable policy? Unless (and this is not a jab, rather a genuine question) your stance is that right is inherently violent and exclusionistic and nothing can be done about it?

6 hours ago, sologdin said:

is the croatian right these days just dressed up ustase?

For some part - yes. For most part, it's just an all-around cocktail of nationalism, clericalism/anti-secularism, anti-gay-rights, tribalism and corruption coupled with generally primitive chest-thumping mindset.

4 hours ago, Rippounet said:

A different way of putting it is that some decades ago what the "right" and "left" disagreed on was how much redistribution was ideal. Everyone agreed that it was necessary though.

Sound interesting. Can you elaborate on a time-frame and place-frame of that?

6 hours ago, Heartofice said:

Do you mean ‘right wing’ or just conservative? I think the answers you will get here will mostly describe the ‘far right’ 

Well, kind of both. I wasn't intending on trashing far-right (again), but rather considering how could not-far-right ideas be made into a productive piece of public political life.

5 hours ago, Jo498 said:

I think an economically somewhat illiberal according to today's standards with some national control of key industries, strictly controlled migration, high hurdles for naturalization, redistribution towards families, stressing "family values" in a believable way (i.e. not by a thrice divorced guy who is then found out to meet men at the railway restrooms) would have a chance for political power. They would combine the nonviolent aspects of the second group (strong familial and tribal bonds, caring for "the people", incl. controlling economical tensions etc.) while dropping the nastier elements (like totalitarianism, direct agression, certain elements of xenophobia would probably remain). I think one of the French rightwing parties had Family, Work, Fatherland as motto.

 

Thanks - this is exactly the type of discussion I was hoping for. Do you have any such examples, from past or present (other than Franch party in question)?

2 hours ago, JoannaL said:

I think we had the ideal right wing party until about 10 years ago. Its the CDU of Merkel. It was traditionalistic but science based, listened to the people without being populistic. It also tamed the more traditionalistic elements. There was a saying that there should never be a democratic party  on the right of the CDU and they fought to get and TAME the whole (democratic) right spectrum. About ten years ago they went  farer in the middle, and even if that made them in some aspects an even better party (e.g. more open to LGBTQ rights) they lost 10 percent to the right and another party could rise (AFD) which is unfortunate.

I had Germany's CDU in mind while writing the opening post, but alas - knew way too little about them to have a concrete opinion. Few pieces of information which I heard suggested that they had no problems with gay marriage and were among more open wealthy European countries with regards to immigration: both of which you wouldn't normally associate with right-wing politics.

 

[Kalbear]

8 minutes ago, DMC said:

It should be noted that while Roosevelt warrants credit for advancing conservationist policies, his motives were not environmental but rather the more efficient and less wasteful exploitation of natural resources for economic benefit.

that really isn't accurate. He created the entire national parks system entirely so that everyone could experience them at some point without them being ruined or overexploited, explicitly to ensure that they were not utilized for economic benefit. 

8 minutes ago, Knight Of Winter said:

I was talking about the first two (bolded). My knowledge of American politics is insufficient to comment on the last two. 

Even then, you've got a lot of very large gaps in things and some incredibly hypocritical policy choices. For instance, is the economic right associated with big deficit spending, or is it austere? Is it associated with lower taxes, or different taxes? Is it associated with progressive or regressive tax codes? Is it associated with federal control of banks or less regulation? I ask this because these are ALL positions that the economic right have advocated in the US in the last 15 years. As @DMC said, they have no actual policy and are entirely ideological. 

8 minutes ago, Knight Of Winter said:

Can you elaborate about viewpoints you mention?

Many right-libertarian viewpoints espouse things like completely legal drug use, no concept of marriage being a governmental policy, and significant scaleback of government programs like police and military, and major scaleback of federal intelligence agencies along with strict rules on privacy and personal property. Those are vaguely interesting and actually coherent policy statements based on a somewhat clear vision. Most of their shit doesn't work, but some of that would at least be interesting and is not entirely wedded to whatever.

Really, right now the rightwing is probably best characterized by one thing: oligarchy, or if you're less charitable kleptocracy. And that's at best. 

[OldGimletEye]

4 minutes ago, Kalbear said:

Many right-libertarian viewpoints espouse things like completely legal drug use, no concept of marriage being a governmental policy, and significant scaleback of government programs like police and military, and major scaleback of federal intelligence agencies along with strict rules on privacy and personal property. Those are vaguely interesting and actually coherent policy statements based on a somewhat clear vision. Most of their shit doesn't work, but some of that would at least be interesting and is not entirely wedded to whatever.

I have two other areas that I tend to share with the libertarian right. Their skepticism towards foreign intervention and their skepticism of intellectual property laws.

[Sir Thursday]

An argument I've seen posited in some quarters is that we're in a period of realignment: that current political divisions are in the process of being disrupted by a new axis of political alignment that is pro- vs anti- globalisation. This is something that makes some sense to me when you look at the UK's current predicament around Brexit and the tensions surrounding China's place in the world's economic order. Of course, there are some unsavoury reasons to oppose globalisation that are animated by prejudice/nativism, but I think there's space on the right side of the political spectrum for a movement that opposes globalisation without that. I've seen some conservative viewpoints that focus on the benefits of smallness in human society that I think are interesting (even if ultimately I don't agree with them).

The animating principles of such a group are founded mainly on traditionalism. Basically the idea goes likes this: globalisation encourages people to think big, whether that's in the way they do business, the way their governments are organised, or even the way they build their living spaces. In all of these cases, the traditionalist movement suggests that it is better for people to think small. This has a number of consequences:

• They feel that small communities are more harmonious and provide better quality of life.
• They believe (with some justification) that small scale farming tends to lead to superior results to globalised super-farms.
• They argue against the modern style of city construction with vast suburbs - instead, they recommend that when more space is required it is better to construct a small separate town that can function as a standalone entity. The aim is that people should have all they need to live and work in their local area.
• As a logical extension of that, they prefer small governmental structures that are matched to the scale of their towns. They tend to be suspicious of large government - how is a far off governing body able to make the correct decisions for each individual community?
• They believe that longstanding local traditions are virtuous and that such cultural institutions must be preserved and encouraged over the new. Consequently they tend to be disdainful of what they see as "globalist" culture. (One example of this is that they HATE the fixation on American politics that dominates a lot of discourse in the non-American Anglophone world. Why should we, they ask, care about what's going on on the other side of the world?).
• They feel that businesses should be scaled to this size of population where possible. The existence of many small businesses ensures healthy competition in a market economy. They're willing to tolerate a degree of government protectionism in the form of robust anti-trust enforcement to ensure that this state of affairs persists.
• They tend to favour homogeneity of populations within their small conurbations. To me this is the difficult part - if done wrong, it's very easy for this to lead to descend into some fairly awful bigotry (one of the hallmarks of this is a rabid anti-immigration stance that I think is very unhealthy). However, if approached in the right way, I think it allows individual populations to control their own destiny without some of the frictions/perceived negative outcomes that come from multi-culturalism.

Now, it would something of a paradox to see a national party advocating a platform like this - after all, the size of most modern nation states tends to be much bigger than the scales they think are ideal! But putting that aside I think it's a reasonable ideology for a right-of-centre party to hold. Although this is not a platform I would support myself, I think it embodies positive ideas that could lead to healthy public debate.

ST

[DMC]

12 minutes ago, Kalbear said:

that really isn't accurate. He created the entire national parks system entirely so that everyone could experience them at some point without them being ruined or overexploited, explicitly to ensure that they were not utilized for economic benefit. 

My point is the ethical basis of his brand of conservation was based on preserving natural resources in perpetuity for the benefit of humans.  This diverged from "preservationists" such as John Muir (the founder of the Sierra Club) that favored the preservation of nature from its own sake.  Also, while Roosevelt did sign the Antiquities Act, the National Parks Service was not established until 1916 under Wilson.  Finally, I have a hard time referring to a guy so famous as a prolific hunter as an environmentalist.

[Kalbear]

15 minutes ago, DMC said:

My point is the ethical basis of his brand of conservation was based on preserving natural resources in perpetuity for the benefit of humans.  This diverged from "preservationists" such as John Muir (the founder of the Sierra Club) that favored the preservation of nature from its own sake.  Also, while Roosevelt did sign the Antiquities Act, the National Parks Service was not established until 1916 under Wilson.  Finally, I have a hard time referring to a guy so famous as a prolific hunter as an environmentalist.

Your implication to me was that he was doing this to exploit natural resources - which today means things like oil and gas and minerals. And it wasn't about 'economic benefit', which is what you said. It was about every single person being able to appreciate these things. He was exactly against the exploitation of the land for economic gain. And while he was not as far as John Muir, he worked very specifically with John Muir, and a lot of the earliest parks were because of him.

The antiquities act was the start of the national parks service and enabled it. He created the first 5 national parks, along with some absurd amount of national forests and wildlife preserves.

As to an environmentalist being a hunter, I fundamentally disagree. While I'm not happy with hunters, many hunters - especially indigineous ones - are absolutely environmentalists on many levels, because they all recognize that if they don't preserve the world they won't have anything to hunt. 

[Kalbear]

Also, this book seems relevant to this discussion:

https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/623807/it-was-all-a-lie-by-stuart-stevens/?ref=PRHCC6F37F4FF&aid=8785&linkid=PRHCC6F37F4FF&pdivflag=1

 

[DMC]

1 minute ago, Kalbear said:

Your implication to me was that he was doing this to exploit natural resources - which today means things like oil and gas and minerals. And it wasn't about 'economic benefit', which is what you said. It was about every single person being able to appreciate these things. He was exactly against the exploitation of the land for economic gain. And while he was not as far as John Muir, he worked very specifically with John Muir, and a lot of the earliest parks were because of him.

He did work with Muir, but there was a split.  To elucidate the different philosophies, while Muir co-founded the Sierra Club, Roosevelt helped form the Boone and Crockett club along with (among others) Gifford Pinchot - who Muir mentored and later rivaled.  Just based on who that group's named after, obviously there was a primary interest in preventing overhunting and over-harvesting in order to maintain economic benefit.  Pinchot's conservation ideology was rooted in the effort "to make the forest produce the largest amount of whatever crop or service will be most useful, and keep on producing it for generation after generation of men and trees."  That sounds like an economic motive to me.

6 minutes ago, Kalbear said:

As to an environmentalist being a hunter, I fundamentally disagree. While I'm not happy with hunters, many hunters - especially indigineous ones - are absolutely environmentalists on many levels, because they all recognize that if they don't preserve the world they won't have anything to hunt. 

I suppose we just have different conceptions of what an environmentalist is.  Wanting to conserve animals so you can continue hunting them - either for sport or economic benefit - is not what an environmentalist is to me.

[Kalbear]

Just now, DMC said:

He did work with Muir, but there was a split.  To elucidate the different philosophies, while Muir co-founded the Sierra Club, Roosevelt helped form the Boone and Crockett club along with (among others) Gifford Pinchot - who Muir mentored and later rivaled.  Just based on who that group's named after, obviously there was a primary interest in preventing overhunting and over-harvesting in order to maintain economic benefit.  Pinchot's conservation ideology was rooted in the effort "to make the forest produce the largest amount of whatever crop or service will be most useful, and keep on producing it for generation after generation of men and trees."  That sounds like an economic motive to me.

That was part of it - and that's what the national forest service was about, all agreed. But the national parks was absolutely not about that. And Roosevelt worked with both. 

Roosevelt absolutely had some economic motive for some of his things - but the preservation of national parkland had very little about economic motive and more about his specific view that every human needed to be able to see these things and it was a fundamental thing that must be cherished. Here was Roosevelt:
"It is also vandalism wantonly to destroy or to permit the destruction of what is beautiful in nature, whether it be a cliff, a forest, or a species of mammal or bird. Here in the United States we turn our rivers and streams into sewers and dumping-grounds, we pollute the air, we destroy forests, and exterminate fishes, birds and mammals -- not to speak of vulgarizing charming landscapes with hideous advertisements. But at last it looks as if our people were awakening."

Not a whole lot of economic gain in here. 

"There can be nothing in the world more beautiful than the Yosemite, the groves of the giant sequoias and redwoods, the Canyon of the Colorado, the Canyon of the Yellowstone, the Three Tetons; and our people should see to it that they are preserved for their children and their children's children forever, with their majestic beauty all unmarred."

Just now, DMC said:

I suppose we just have different conceptions of what an environmentalist is.  Wanting to conserve animals so you can continue hunting them - either for sport or economic benefit - is not what an environmentalist is to me.

Economic benefit meaning things like 'being able to eat'? Or doing it as part of cultural heritage? Heck, how about simple economic survival, as in the tribes in the Northwest who are reliant heavily on the salmon run? In any case, there are a lot of hunters who very much disagree with you, as well as a whole lot of environmentalists who disagree with you. 

[ThinkerX]

I dwell in a highly conservative or 'right' region, and get to interact with many 'right' types in the course of my job.  I note contradictions: they despise government interference, yet cling like leeches to programs such as SS and Medicare. 

 

They promote 'free market solutions' to matters medical yet bitterly rail against literally extortionate costs at the local hospital and clinics. A large 'flake' component regards vaccines as an abomination and sees masks and social distancing as absurd.  

 

Many are at least willing to entertain the notion of artificial climate change.

 

They despise government handouts but regard the PFD (permanent fund dividend) as almost divinely ordained.  Quite a few of the better off ones donated their stimulus checks either to charity or people they deemed 'needy.'

[DMC]

Just now, Kalbear said:

But the national parks was absolutely not about that. And Roosevelt worked with both. 

I don't have any problem with his work on national parks.  That's not what I was referring to and like I said to begin with, he deserves credit for that.  My point is a philosophical one.  Roosevelt's form of conservation was rooted in Bentham's utilitarianism, which is about the "greater good" and not particularly interested in preservation for the health of the environment/planet.

4 minutes ago, Kalbear said:

Economic benefit meaning things like 'being able to eat'?

Of course not but Teddy Roosevelt didn't hunt because he couldn't eat, c'mon.  He hunted for sport.

[Rippounet]

1 hour ago, Knight Of Winter said:

Sound interesting. Can you elaborate on a time-frame and place-frame of that?

Post-WW2 most Western nations (the US, the UK, West Germany, France...) had some kind of "New Deal consensus," and that lasted until the 1980s or thereabouts when "the right" started morphing into the neo-liberal monster. 

[Kalbear]

1 minute ago, DMC said:

I don't have any problem with his work on national parks.  That's not what I was referring to and like I said to begin with, he deserves credit for that.  My point is a philosophical one.  Roosevelt's form of conservation was rooted in Bentham's utilitarianism, which is about the "greater good" and not particularly interested in preservation for the health of the environment/planet.

Roosevelt specifically talked about preservation for the health of the environment. 

"We have become great because of the lavish use of our resources. But the time has come to inquire seriously what will happen when our forests are gone, when the coal, the iron, the oil, and the gas are exhausted, when the soils have still further impoverished and washed into the streams, polluting the rivers, denuding the fields and obstructing navigation."

That was a pretty big concern! That aforementioned Boone and Crockett - one of the first things they did was stop Yellowstone from being mined, because Cleveland created it as a park but didn't give it any protections at all. 

Hell, the Sierra club calls him our first environmentalist POTUS.

1 minute ago, DMC said:

Of course not but Teddy Roosevelt didn't hunt because he couldn't eat, c'mon.  He hunted for sport.

Oh, are we talking about only Roosevelt? Even if you were talking sport hunting only as 'prolific hunters', as you referred to it, a lot of sport hunters consider themselves to be very big conservationists and donate close to a billion dollars every year for preservation of lands. Ultimately I don't personally care if their goals are hunting game that are either not endangered or are being earmarked for hunting as a way to raise money; I'll happily take that money to save the land. Sport hunters are a whole hell of a lot better than cattle ranchers, as an example. 

[DMC]

Just now, Kalbear said:

Roosevelt specifically talked about preservation for the health of the environment. 

I guess we just read that quote differently.  To me, that's what I've been saying - he wanted to preserve the environment to maintain the use of its resources (it's coal, iron, oil, gas) in perpetuity to continue employing them for human benefit as long as possible.

4 minutes ago, Kalbear said:

Oh, are we talking about only Roosevelt?

I was.  As well as the distinction between the philosophy he and the Boone & Crockett club espoused as opposed to Muir's, which is the type of conservation I identify with.

5 minutes ago, Kalbear said:

Sport hunters are a whole hell of a lot better than cattle ranchers, as an example. 

Roosevelt wanted to be a cattle rancher!