Then there is the following response, typical in my experience of one sort of blogosphere reaction whenever either “liberals” or “the left” are criticized. I interject my comments:
Randy
I’m eager to move on from the recent flood of posts beating up liberals for not apologizing sufficiently for the reds amongst them.
People are reporting their experiences with often self-righteous persons who turned out to be wrong. I see no “beating up” behavior. To the contrary several noted similar reactions by conservatives. Nobody claimed that liberals were themselves communists. Only that they continued to express sympathy for tyrannical regimes. This is called “anti-anticommunism” which is not itself to be a communist. But I guess I don’t blame this reader for his eagerness to “move on.” As the ironically named “Move-On.Org” has demonstrated, we must always “move on” immediately from Democrat peccadilloes, to dwell endlessly on those of Republicans or the Right. Indeed, many have not “moved on” from McCarthy or Nixon. “Moving on” is apparently done on a one way street.
Can we talk about the conservatives who, dollar-signs in their eyes, can’t say enough nice things about Red China *today*?”
I have been to the PRC and I am well aware of the serious abuses of dissidents there and the lack of political freedoms which is to be condemned and resisted. I tried unsuccessfully to get my official tour guide admitted to the US, but though the PRC gave him a visa after he quit his state job, he was turned away by US immigration officials in Beijing after I had arranged his admission and scholarship to a local college. And we all watched Tiananmen Square first with hope and then with horror.
Nevertheless, there is no question that China’s movement towards a market economy has greatly benefited large numbers of the public, though not everyone of course. In fact, from large cities to small, one is simply in awe of the increased prosperity all around you. You are only allowed to tour some cities on formal tours such as I was on, but this includes a lot of different size cities and towns. And in the 1990s tour guides were amazingly candid about the bad as well as the good. Much more progress needs to be made but progress has undoubtedly been made. Just listen to the people talk there, quite freely, of the horrors of Mao’s Cultural Revolution. It seems at every historical site, the story is the same: this temple was used as a stable during the Cultural Revolution, or this has been “restored” (read: completely rebuilt) from having been trashed during the Cultural Revolution. I could go on and on. None of this is to apologize in any way for the current Communist party rule in China. It is simply to note that when even a brutal regime such as the PRC liberalizes economically in the direction of the market to some degree, even without political reform, the lives of its people improve markedly. An important lesson to learn.
Or the ones who were happy to sweep under the rug any inconvenient truths about death squads in Latin America &c. when the death squads were on the right? (And there are plenty of autocratic, oppressive, vicious governments in the world *today* that have no shortage of defenders on the U.S. right wing.)
This is the typical association of tyrannical regimes with “the Right” because the regimes are not communist. Remember when the Soviet communists were called the “conservatives” when they resisted Gorbachev’s reforms? Even if this categorizing makes sense in the foreign context, these “rightist” regimes have no connection with, nor bear any relationship to, the American “right.” More relevantly to this thread, you do not ever hear American conservatives or libertarians extolling the virtues of so-called “right-wing” dictatorships as some sort of misbegotten but well-motivated model, the way liberals and the left continue to express sympathy with left-wing dictatorships such as that in Cuba. (I view Chile as a different and more difficult case. There you did and still do see some Americans on “the Right” expressing sympathy for the Pinochet regime–as do many Chileans–but the facts of its rule and how it came to power are deeply contested and I do not intend to explore them here.)
How about the conservatives who keep trying to trot out the “American Civil War wasn’t about slavery, but about federalism, and the Confederates were really fighting for freedom” story?
The debate about what the Civil War was “really about” are longstanding and fascinating, but hardly map the liberal-conservative divide. And even the Southern-sympathic view of the so-called “war of Northern aggression” concedes the terrible injustice of slavery, while condemning the North for its racism and accusing it of being motivated more by nationalism and economics than a concern for slaves. Indeed, you hear this sentiment quite frequently from those on the left who want to condemn America rather than give the US any credit for ending slavery. Sound familiar?
It’s disingenuous to spend multiple posts talking about the motes in the eyes of liberal professors, when conservative policymakers and pundits can hardly look at each other for the clashing of the two-by-fours.
Disingenuous? Liberal professors? Clashing of two-by-fours? Characterizing past and, in some cases, continued sympathy for regimes that killed or immiserated millions as a mere “mote” in the eye exemplifies the very phenomenon I and others were reporting. Thanks.
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