This post is about when the right, as in the political right, becomes dangerous.
And at the end, I want to talk about when the left becomes dangerous, too.
First, I want to tell you some interesting history about the terms right and left, in the political sense.
The use of these terms politically began in the era of the French Revolution.
Before the French Revolution, France was in a lot of turmoil. Historically, the aristocracy in France had ruled with almost total power.
They levied high taxes on the poor in France who increasingly found these taxes unbearable.
Revolutions in England and the Americas had taken place already, limiting ruler’s power and increasing the rights of the common person.
“Declaration of Independence”, by John Turnbull, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.
People in France clamored for similar change.
Many debates over such issues took place in the National Assembly of France, which was somewhat like our House of Congress.
Those who favored the more traditional ways of France and supported the king and the aristocracy sat on the right and were referred to as the right.
The members of the assembly who advocated for major changes and a more equal society sat on the left of the king and were referred to as the left.
These terms became more common in Europe after the French revolution, keeping much of the same meaning.
Those on the left favored rights and equality for the common person, as well and change in traditional norms and social structure.
“Prise de la Bastille”, Jean Pierr Houel, Wikimedia Commons.
Those on the right favored tradition, hierarchy, and duty to family and country.
They also favored nationalism in terms of favoring the customs, national identity, and traditions of their land.
It’s important to note here that as basic political descriptors, the terms right and left are neutral and indicate a certain set of values like tradition or change.
We still use the terms left and right in the U.S. in many of the same ways with a few deviations.
Folks who lean to the right tend to emphasize tradition, hierarchy, and duty to family and country.
And those on the left tend to favor rights and equality for the common person, as well as change in traditional norms and social structure.
However, the left and right in the U.S. diverge a bit from traditional political categories of right and left.
For instance, the right in the U.S. favors capitalism, individual entrepreneurship, and limited government.
These tend to be progressive, traditionally left values in that they favor the common person.
However, when capitalism becomes dominated by ultra-wealthy elites, like Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos, seemingly progressive values like entrepreneurship devolve into an oligarchy or rule by the rich.
This is certainly not progressive and resembles something more like historical aristocracy, or traditionally conservative values.
The left in the United States is complex, too.
For instance, religion is often considered to be a right-leaning value.
However, there are a lot of deeply religious, left-leaning people in the United States, especially in the Christian tradition.
While Christians are often considered right-leaning, many Christians in the U.S. advocate for left-leaning values like greater social equality and social progress aimed at remedying problems like racism and prejudice.
And historically in the United States, we have championed freedom of religion and have rebelled against the right of a monarch to enforce a certain view of religion.
Both these aspects of religion in the U.S. reflect more progressive, liberal values.
Therefore, the United States historically has reflected both right and left tendencies.
And in fact, our unique combinations of these values, I believe, have made us strong as a country.
(By the way, some experts believe that the right and left ends of the political spectrum are more complex than I have painted them above. You can read about this here.)
Also, I am reading a book right now called For the Common Good by Herman Daly and John Cobb (Beacon Press, 1994).
They have a wonderful chart in the book (pg. 9) that illustrates both the common conception of the left/right political continuum (see 1.1. below), as well as a more complex version of it (1.2 below).
Now, the title of my post is “When the Right Becomes Dangerous”. At first, this title might seem like a silly exaggeration.
After all, what could be dangerous about values like tradition, duty, custom, and patriotism, which are values the right often holds?
Picture by Joshua Hoehne, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.
Certainly, at face value, all these conservative values are good.
However, these values can become dangerous when a country prioritizes them above everything else, especially people and their dignity.
When this happens, the right becomes dangerous.
That’s because it devolves into a corrupt and unethical form of conservatism called fascism.
Fascism tends to rebel against pretty much all progressive or liberal (left) values.
For instance, instead of valuing progressive ideals, it elevates tradition, usually extolling the folk stories and early heroes of a country’s history.
Fascist leaders usually aim at reviving their country’s greatness by extolling nationalism, in which they prioritize the country, its history, and its needs over any other country in the world.
“Facismo Argentino Buenos Aires”, Franz Lindbergh, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.
And instead of valuing equality, it values hierarchy and holds that some people are naturally better than other people.
In extreme forms, fascist-like tendencies lead to slavery, absolute monarchy, or authoritarian government regimes.
For instance, traditionally, fascists tend to extol powerful men who reflect the original ethnicity of a country.
Such men, in fascist thinking, recall a bygone era of heroic valor, and they rule their country with an iron fist.
Examples of this are Benito Mussolini in Italy, Tojo Hideki in Japan, and Hitler in Germany during World War II.
As you can imagine, fascist leaders are often obsessed with their own power and tend to be very militaristic, waging wars against other countries, to consolidate their power. (Mussolini, Hitler, and Hideki all illustrate this.)
In addition, because fascist leaders focus on national pride and reviving past eras of their country’s greatness, fascists tend to reject minority groups as polluting the pure blood of the country and contributing to its demise.
Thus, fascist countries often persecute minorities in various ways such as mass deportation, imprisonment, or (in extreme cases) genocide.
You were probably already aware that Hitler and Benito Mussolini were fascist leaders in World War II.
And if you research a bit about fascism and fascist leaders at the links included above, you will find that the fascist leaders discussed in these articles all displayed the character traits I mentioned.
That is, they promoted extreme nationalism, authoritarian rule, and the persecution of minority people.
The Nazis are one of the clearest examples of fascism from history we have.
Some people in the U.S. mistakenly refer to the radical left as Nazis.
However, the radical left is not fascist because it’s not a right-leaning party, which is what fascism always is.
Rather, the radical left has revolutionary communist leanings because it is leftist.
In fact, if you look at the self-stated values of the radical left, you will see that those values are the opposite of fascist values, which are an example of corrupt, unethical conservatism.
Now, conservatism is not dangerous per se.
In fact, conservatism is a necessary force for balance in society.
Values like family, tradition, religion, and duty—when expressed ethically–play an important role in the health of any country or nation.
English family outside house in 1930s including ginger cat, picture courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.
However, conservatism is dangerous and unethical when it devolves into fascism.
That’s because fascism, with its hyper-emphasis on nationalism, strong man leaders, and ethnic purity inevitably leads to various problems like racism, militarism, censorship, and violence.
Fascist leaders inevitably seek to aggrandize themselves at the expense of other nations and even their own people.
Remember: It’s okay to be conservative. It’s not okay to support fascism.
And it’s important to note that fascism is bad for everyone, including you and your family, even if you are conservative.
That’s because fascist leaders don’t care about you, your rights, your family, or your livelihood.
So, even if they seem like they are on your side initially, they will easily turn against you if it suits their purpose.
For example, historically, fascist leaders (like Mussolini and Hitler) got elected on the promise of returning their country to its former glory.
But after getting elected, they soon turned their attention to persecuting minorities.
And fascist leaders and imprisoned anyone, even their former supporters, who criticized their actions.
These leaders also launched massive, deadly, unnecessary, an expensive wars against other countries, killing thousands of people in their own countries simply to consolidate their power.
We imagine this kind of thing couldn’t happen again. But I would suggest to you that the President is already trying to do these things.
He demonstrates these kinds of actions in his mass deportations; censorship of racial discussions like DEI; his constant attempts to acquire other countries like Greenland; his tariff wars; and his deepening friendship with clearly fascist leaders like Vladmir Putin.
Please also consider that when Donald Trump lost the election to Joe Biden in 2020, he encouraged a violent insurrection in our state capitol that led to the death of several police officers trying to protect our government.
In addition, the President repeatedly pressured Vice President Pence, a committed Christian and faithful supporter of Trump, to refuse to certify the election.
When Pence refused to do this and said Biden had won the election, the President subtly encouraged rioters to seek out and hang Pence, which they tried to do.
When told his Vice President was in trouble, Trump said, “So what?”
(By the way, Pence is one of the few Republicans today who will criticize President Trump.)
The frightening thing about fascism is that it is like a wolf in sheep’s clothing.
It comes dressed as good things patriotism, tradition, and pride. But in the end, homo homini lupus: Man becomes wolf to man.
Picture courtesy of Wikimedia Commons
I think a lot of people on the right overlook the dangers of fascism because they are concerned about the dangers of the left.
And certainly the left can become dangerous, too.
On the one hand, just like we need the healthy right, we need the healthy left in politics.
The left values progress, and it champions equality. As such, it serves as a corrective for the right to make sure it doesn’t become too extreme.
On the other hand, when the left becomes extreme, it revolts against all conservative values and aims for radical change to bring about equality in society.
And it usually tries to do this through a lot of violence. (The French Reign of Terror is an example of this.)
When the left becomes unhealthy it often aims at destroying social traditions such as religion, family, and conservative ideals such as the love of historical patriotic values and heroes.
Soviet communism is an example of this.
For example, Joseph Stalin was a communist leader of Russia who implemented violent communistic rule.
He tried to stamp out religion, and he regularly condemned critics and rebels to Siberian concentration camps.
The flag of the USSR, picture courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.
When the right or the left devolve into their dangerous and unethical forms, they do so pursuing different goals.
However, they both end in violence, authoritarianism, censorship, and the crushing of human dignity.
Nevertheless, I have chosen to focus this post on when the right becomes dangerous for several reasons.
First, our current administration is right and clearly shows signs of fascist behavior. In addition, the right currently controls all three branches of government.
Second, we are a relatively young country with a strong history of patriotism and many strong, conservative values like God, family, and country.
These values have, in fact, historically made us strong.
But because we are a historically conservative country, when our politics become unhealthy, they lean more towards the dangers of the right than the left.
For example, right now the majority of people in the Republican Party identify as MAGA. (About 48% of folks in the U.S. are Republican.)
By contrast, at one point in the U.S., people were extremely concerned that the radical left in the form of communism was taking over the country.
However, at its peak in 1942, the communist party in the U.S. only had 85,000 members. Today, the communist party in the U.S. has declined significantly with some estimates that it now has fewer than 15,000 people in the party.
My point in sharing these statistics is to point out that historically the U.S. tends to lean right. And right now, we lean right in that all three branches of government are controlled by the right.
Therefore, currently, fascism is more of a threat to us than, for example, violent communist revolution.
This post is getting very long, but I wanted to end with three quick observations that pertain to both the right and the left.
First: Ethics must always rule politics. It is never appropriate to abandon ethics to serve a political agenda. The ends never justify the means.
When we believe the ends justifies the means, whether we are on the right or left, our politics become dangerous.
Second: Neither the right nor the left in their healthy forms are the problem. In fact, both the right and the left have played an important role in our country’s success.
The problem is unethical forms of both the right and the left which prioritize their individual goals above human beings.
We should be concerned about unethical forms of the right and left, no matter our political leanings.
Right now, the right has the most control in our government, and it is demonstrating very unhealthy forms of conservatism, namely fascism.
We can address this problem through talking about these things together, calling our representatives, and voting unethical politicians out of office.
Third: Politics has only one purpose: To serve people and help them have a good life.
This means that politics needs to protect individual dignity, the rights of all people, people’s religious conviction (or lack of it), free speech, their livelihood, and the planet which is the only home people have or will have in the future.
It takes all of us, right and left, to achieve these goals in dialogue together.
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