Agreement on the Left

Keith Preston writes:

“I very much appreciated your review of the Mitchell book [LRC, January 11]. I too regard the Left/Right model of the political spectrum as archaic. As a classical anarchist in the Bakuninist tradition, my own political background has given me some important insights into what is going on politically in our country and in the West today.

“Historically, the fiercest enemies of anarchists have been the Marxists, since the time of the First International. The creeping totalitarianism we see evolving today is an outgrowth of Marxism, not necessarily in the orthodox socialist sense, but in the re-application of Marxist theory to cultural matters, where the ‘official victims’ of Western civilization replace the proletariat as the focus of a dualistic struggle for political power. The emerging ideology of the Western, particularly American, ruling classes can, I believe, be described as follows:

“1) Militarism, Imperialism and Empire in the guise of ‘human rights’, ‘democracy’, modernity, universalism, feminism and other leftist shibboleths.

“2) Corporate Mercantilism (or ‘state-capitalism’) under the guise of ‘free trade’.

“3) In domestic policy, what I call ‘totalitarian humanism’ whereby an all-encompassing and unaccountable bureaucracy peers into every corner of society to make sure no one anywhere, anyplace, anytime ever practices ‘racism, sexism, homophobia’, smoking, ‘sex abuse’ or other such leftist sins.

“4) In the realm of law, a police state ostensibly designed to protect everyone from terrorism, crime, drugs, guns, gangs or some other bogeyman of the month.“Though you are a paleolibertarian and I am a Bakuninist anarchist, I suspect you and I would agree that the state and the concentrated power it represents is among the gravest threats to human life, liberty, culture and civilization. The kind of state that proponents of this new ideology envision is one where the purpose of local government is to enforce leftist orthodoxy against competing institutions (like families, religions, businesses, unions, clubs, other associations), the purpose of national government is to enforce leftism against local communities, and the purpose of foreign policy is to enforce leftism against ‘backward’ or ‘reactionary’ traditional societies. If you think I’m exaggerating, check this out. I call this point of view ‘Liberal-Nazism’.

“Rather than the traditional divide of Left and Right, I would regard the core aspect of contemporary political struggles to be the battle between those who support the paradigm described above (whose ranks include most liberals and leftists obviously, but also many so-called ‘conservatives’, ‘libertarians’ and others as well — as your nemesis Cathy Young illustrates) and those who reject this paradigm, whose ranks amount to a divergent collection of dissidents from a variety of ideologies.

“I also appreciated your inclusion of a link to Kirkpatrick Sale’s piece on secessionism from The American Conservative. I think the best bet for our political salvation would probably be an alliance of local and regional secession movements, with each of these maintaining various cultural, ideological, religious, ethnic or economic sub-tendencies within themselves. For instance, there can be fundamentalist Christian enclaves in South Carolina and homosexual enclaves in San Francisco, ‘militiaman’ enclaves in Texas and Nation of Islam enclaves in the large cities.

“It’s been amusing to observe the irrational hostility I’ve gotten from Leftists by arguing for this idea. Recently, I was booted from a ‘libertarian’ discussion list owned by a transsexual prostitute for ‘advocating common action with racists and reactionaries’ — which, of course, amounts to Satan worship in the theology of Leftism. I recently formed a discussion list of my own to advance this perspective:

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/attackthesystem/

“Feel free to join and invite others to do so if you wish. Either way, keep writing.”

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3:13 pm on January 15, 2007