So says Wally Conger in an interview with Sunny Maravillosa via Tom Ender at Endervidualism):
“Wally: It can be confusing, can’t it? [laughs] But I try to keep it simple. I’m a Hess-Konkin fundamentalist on left and right designations for the broad political landscape. Given Rothbard’s claim that our libertarian forebears were late 18th, early 19th century classical liberal “leftists”, and subscribing, as Hess and Konkin did, to the idea that politics follows a straight line, not a circle, I believe liberty lies in the leftward direction and culminates at the farthest left in statelessness, or anarchism. Likewise, as you travel rightward along the line, you move toward bureaucracy and concentrated power and wealth. That direction terminates in, well, tyranny, despotism, and repression. Adolph Hitler, Joseph Stalin, Winston Churchill, and FDR were all men of the right. Fidel Castro oversees a right regime. George W. Bush, of course, falls on the extreme right, as do Hillary Clinton, John McCain, and the reptilian Chuck Schumer. Whatever their rhetoric, they all believe in consolidating power into the fewest possible hands….”
Comment:
While I like Conger’s optimism, I am not sure that I follow this argument. There are too many ideas here not fully teased out. What is power, exactly? How is liberty affected by power – whichever version of power we are talking about?
As for politics being a straight line – I simply don’t buy it. Human interaction and ideological cross-pollination are so complex, many- layered and dynamic that any two-dimensional model is on its face suspect….