The Honorable Right: Class Warfare in America

A U.S. bankruptcy has been averted and Republicans now stand there like aggressive lunatics who don’t know what a populist democracy is. Or perhaps they do.

The source of the quote is satisfying: American Republicans are outraged that a media commentator laid blame for the theatrics brought on by the fight over raising the U.S. debt limit on “right-wing radicals.”

The American Right Wing is Libertarian

The commentator was right on target. Whether the Grand Old Party (every political columnist in America has to use that term at least once in everything he writes so the people remain as comprehensively informed as possible) recognized it or not, they were still shocked that Republicans and their tea party movement hangers-on could be considered a bunch of whacked-out loonies. After all, while exaltation of those people is quintessentially American, they shouldn’t be tagged with the same labels Germans and Europeans apply to admirers of Hitler and any similar authoritarian groups. Because America’s right wing isn’t authoritarian. To the contrary, while Hungarian neo-fascists seek to bring the state and their party as closely together as possible, American libertarians can’t put enough distance between themselves and their government.

Still, it’s plausible to designate them as right-wing radicals if you consider the matter of class. (True, it doesn’t explain everything but it goes a long way toward that goal.) In the European as well as in the American case, neoconservative hysteria expresses itself in increasingly worsening class differences. In Hungary, the capitalistic chase over the last 20 years to catch up with the West has left an army of people behind who are now attracted to the warmth of the nationalistic-clerical-authoritarian-chauvinistic fires kindled by the Fidesz Party.

In view of high unemployment, the massive debt and the perception that the nation is increasingly losing ground to the Chinese, a feeling currently rampant in the United States, the fears of the (white) lower and middle classes are translating into resentment of the disadvantaged (and here’s where the two societies run parallel) whom they think are to blame for destroying the “real and independent” America, a land where those who don’t work also don’t need to eat. Europeans respond indignantly to tea party activists because they find the explicit rejection of government to be so alien. Even if the Free Democrats and the Christian Democrats who make up today’s coalition German government would prefer to see more free market and less government influence in their daily lives, it doesn’t change their basic belief in the Hegelian state as the highest embodiment of the moral ideal. Right-wing Americans are really true liberals who believe in what Ferdinand Lassale described as a laissez-faire state: a government that protects the citizen’s individual freedom and personal property and does not interfere in anything else. This proto-liberal concept is correct to the right wing because the state isn’t a promoter of what social democrats call “social equality” but merely serves to strictly maintain the status quo.

Conditions in the U.S. are What We Describe as Democracy

The German Free Democratic party, because of its disdain for social equality, comes pretty close to that definition even without input from howler monkey Guido Westerwelle. And as always, the various manifestations of it may differ. Policies made for the benefit of the ruling class and property owners are the correct policies. Even if, for the sake of the public good, class warfare isn’t practiced much in Europe — even in election campaigns — it still exists. It may be more civilized if the public good isn’t yet nationalized, but it isn’t any more honest. And as childish and increasingly “polarized” (Timothy Garton Ash) as an American caricature of populist democracy it may be, it nonetheless represents what we call democracy. In a nutshell, the bottom line is that it is the rule of the minority over the majority while pretending to be just the opposite.