For a while I was mystified by this obviously flawed perception - I mean, okay there are a lot of dummies out there, but for the most part, conservative people that I know personally aren't dummies, in fact many are quite smart. So how do you explain a smart person being unable to tell the difference between two very different things? I mean socialism and communism are about as similar as sliced bread and a car battery. How can a smart person not see that?
I struggled with this for some time until about a year ago (or two?) I was engaged in a discussion on io9 or Quora with an American Republican who kept using the term "leftists" when describing people, and the 'leftist media' etc. I objected to the latter, but the former got me thinking. Clearly, there are few if any "leftists" in America. I mean the US Communist Party is and has been poison since the McCarthy era, and I wasn't aware of any actual official socialist parties in the US. So I asked him to please list some "leftist" organizations currently active in America. His answer threw me for a loop - he listed no fewer than 50 of them.
Well, the list contained the names of 50+ organizations. But they were all civil rights organizations like the NAACP, Kansas Commission on Civil Rights, National Voting Rights Institute, and many others. Egad!! Those are what he thought were "leftist" organizations? Then I had a eureka moment: It's all about perspective.
Have a look at this image:
On the left, we have the political left; on the right, the political right. Anyone who attended a single class of political science (or has ever strayed from the sports or funnies in a newspaper) will tell you that on the extreme left is communism (some would insist that we say 'ideal communism' but that's only a theoretical thing), and on the extreme right is fascism or nazism.
In a normal (or perhaps theoretical) world, we could map out where the American and Canadian political parties lay on this grid:
For the most part, they all tend toward the center, some being more left, others being more right, some more authoritarian, some less. I hope nobody is insulted by this map; I think it's fair from the perspective of the reasonable person, whatever their political leanings may be. Now to be honest, I really don't understand the Greens, so I just put them there for no reason. They actually don't interest me that much. Sorry.
So back to perspective. First, I have to say that I don't think there are many moderate conservatives or republicans anymore. Most of them have gone to the far right. This is a generalization of course- and while someone like Mitt Romney may actually be a moderate Republican, he has been soundly rejected by his party (and not just once), and does not represent mainstream Republican thinking today. Most Republicans are ideologically far to the right of Mr. Romney. So this movement to the right in and of itself affects the perspective of most Republicans - their position on the grid affects how they see others. I am focusing on the US Republicans here, but exactly the same can be said about Canadian Conservatives- at least the former Harper administration. The graph below illustrates what I mean:
For me, this explains a lot of things. How can a sane and intelligent person see different things, and think they're the same? By looking at them from a great distance. From the far right, commies, socialists and dems look the same - so do those Canadian libs. They're all a bunch of "leftists"...
It's like looking at the Rocky Mountains from downtown Calgary. There are a whole lot of mountains over there, and they all look pretty much the same. Some a bit taller, some less so. Most are gray-green, lots have white at the top. And they're all way over there. They're all a bunch of "mountains"...
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