Ron Paul's popularity: The "right" is just as disenchanted as is the "left"

Two or three years ago, could anyone have predicted that today many conservatives on conservative websites would routinely hammer Bush and Giuliani? Who would have thought that a large percentage of conservatives would support an anti-Iraq War politician like Ron Paul? Similarly, could anyone have predicted the widespread backlash here on DU against the corporate Democrats like Hillary Clinton?

I think the "political divide" within the nation is closing significantly, as both "sides" grow increasingly disillusioned with how the corporate-government complex has screwed everyone over.

These days, I think that political ideologies aren't located on a straight-line continuum, with socialism on the left and fascism on the right. The ideology continuum is now a circle, with far right and far left beginning to overlap.

Or seen another way, the divisions now are sharpest between corporatists and individualists. The left has always opposed corporatism as the death knell of the human spirit, planetary ecosystems, or both. The right has been deluded into thinking that corporatists like Reagan, Bush 1 and Bush 2 are on their side -- until this latest crop of fascist rat bastards finally got their attention.

Clinton was the equal of any of them as a corporatist, but the right hated him for other reasons which still aren't completely clear to me. Blowjobs in the oval office are for the prissy moralists on the fundie right to obsess about; I doubt Richard Mellon Scaife gives much of a damn about distractions like that.

Anyway, it's been increasingly apparent for maybe the past year that the very people you'd expect to be whole-hearted supporters of fascism are furious about many of the same things we are. It's not that they're not fascists themselves; they just want a certain brand of fascism that's not derived from suffocating state power but from the barrel of a Kalashnikov held by a racist, misogynist, homophobic "patriot" affiliated with some unregulated militia somewhere in the lousiest part of a fly-over state.

Strange bedfellows, indeed.


wp

I would hope that members of the other side would be more interested in stemming illegal immigration through less extreme means, though.

The whole "right" and "left" thing is this stupid dialectic control mechanism. I mean, if we really believe we are correct in our beliefs, why do we use the word "left" to describe ourselves, when the word "left" generally only refers to a part of a whole, such as "left side" "left hand" or "left wing" (of a bird?) Why do we accept the fact that there needs to be these people on the other side of the isle who we disagree with, why don't we aim to get rid of their beleifs entirely???

The reason why is because its a control mechanism, and having any side emerge victorious would prevent us from constantly fighting our neighbors. The dialectic, the conflict, needs to be preserved, even while corporatists from both sides of "the isle" take money from the same forces in DC.

The fact is there is no popular political support for the attack on the constitution Bush launched with the patriot act, or the mass surveillance of the people. Neither right nor left. Yet WHO voted against the war? The Patriot Act? Kucinich and Paul. While our mainstream candidates voted for both.

So yes, I think there is a sense of a new movement, motivated fundamentally by a desire to rollback the radical changes to the country that have been set underway, and people are seeing through the dialectic.