That's right. Anarchism was historically considered a Left Wing movement, because it sought to overthrow the aristocracy, the clergy, and the landowners/industrialists. Nobody of sound mind considered Mikhail Bakunin a reactionary or a conservative because he was anti-government, because he and other radicals saw the government of their times as tools of the hated upper classes. Come to think of it, didn't Marx and Engels write that the state would "wither away" once independent worker's communes were established? Does this make them "conservatives"?
I heartily agree with your posts 49 and 50 (and I would have pinged you to my own posts if I could have remembered your name from last time we conversed). American conservatives simply refuse to wrap their heads around the fact that the American right is different from the right in Europe because the traditional social structures America and Europe are different.
The Birchite "totalitarian to anarchist" spectrum is incorrect and dishonest and does our side no credit. The original Right (in France) was certainly not individualistic or classical liberal (in fact, American right wing hero Frederic Bastiat sat on the Left side of the Assembly while he was a member). The terms "right" and "left" were confined to France until the early twentieth century, so the French Right is the Original Right. I'd be very careful about re-defining what "right wing" means apart from that authority.
It was French rightist Maurice Barres who said "the individual is nothing; society is everything." Furthermore it was the original French Right that advocated a sort of Spartan society of "warriors and monks." I've attempted to locate this last quote but have been unsuccessful.
Anyway, thanks again ek, for keeping us honest.
You see the same kind of intellectual dishonesty (unless it's just plain ignorance) at work with Goldberg's classification of Mussolini, Hitler, and Franco as "left wing," on the grounds that American rightwingers are libertarian while fascists were authoritarian.
Obviously, the American right doesn't share much in common strategy-wise with the European right (especially fascists). What they do have in common, and what classifies them both as right-wing, is that they both follow the dictionary definition of conservative vs. liberal: upholding the traditional social structure and hierarchy versus subverting it. Webster's Dictionary definitions of conservative/liberal and right/left-wing don't say anything about the size of government. I think I'll stick to these and leave the "Stalin was actually right wing" or "Hitler was a leftist" to the intellectually dishonest or misinformed on either side of the aisle.
I try not to use "Left: and "Right" all that much because these disagreements always crop up and they are tiresome.
It seems to me that the spectrum is really Collectivist vs Individualist. Mussolini identified himself as a Collectivist. He focused on the group, on society, on the state.
Lenin, Trotsky, Hitler, and Obama have all focused on the group, on society, on the state.
Our Founding Fathers declared some individual rights to be inalienable and they wrote a Constitution designed to protect individuals from the over-reaching power of Government.
America was not intended to be a Collectivist society, but it has become one.
It was a split between traditionalists and rationalists.
America did not have traditionalists. The split that developed was between two schools of rationalists - doctrinaire liberals and practical liberals.
In Europe the traditionalists of Britain were eliminated by the Civil War and the Glorious Revolution. That was 1688. In France it was the Revolution in 1789. In Spain and Italy it was the Napoleonic Wars. In Germany it was the revolutions of 1848.
The Reformation, the source of radical individualism, had originally set all Leftism in motion.
In any case, the civic institutions that conservatives wanted to preserve had all been destroyed or repurposed by 1850.
That created a social void, one which socialism, communism, syndicalism, anarchism and fascism tried to fill - by manufacturing ideologies that would create the kind of social cohesion that had been fragmenting for centuries.
Fascism differed from Communism only in this: it wanted to use any remaining stones of the social edifice - religious faith, nationalist fervor, noble heredity - as tools to build a society that would allow its ideologues to gather complete power to itself without any accountability.
Communism may have technically abolished private property - but all that meant in practice was that enemies of the regime were expropriated and friends of the regime were assigned the spoils. Communism may have been officially atheist, but Stalin's relationship with the Orthodox Church, Mao's relationship with the churches, etc. was toleration of believers who would accept total subservience to the state.
Fascism was, despite revisionist claims, just as anticlerical as Communism. The Concordats between the Church and the Nazi and Fascist regimes were agreements by the Church to accept official abuse, humiliation, and outright theft in exchange for preserving the liberty of the Church to preach the Word. That promise was not kept.
Fascism is not conservative - not because it rejects atomistic individualism - but because it is the worship of earthly power rather than worship of the living God.