From Leftism: From de Sade and Marx to Hitler and Marcuse, Chpt 4 by Eric von Kuehnelt-Leddihn (the first edition of this book can be downloaded for free, in its entirety, in epub or pdf format here http://bit.ly/2abX9xP ):
"The right stands for liberty, a free, unprejudiced form of thinking, a readiness to preserve traditional values (provided they are true values), a balanced view of the nature of man, seeing in him neither beast nor angel, insisting also on the uniqueness of human beings who cannot be transformed into or treated as mere numbers or ciphers; but the left is the advocate of the opposite principles. It is the enemy of diversity and the fanatical promoter of identity. Uniformity is stressed in all leftist utopias, a paradise in which everybody should be the 'same,' where envy is dead, where the 'enemy' either no longer exists, lives outside the gates, or is utterly humiliated. Leftism loathes differences, deviation, stratifications. Any hierarchy it accepts is only 'functional.' The term 'one' is the keynote: There should be only one language, one race, one class, one ideology, one religion, one type of school, one law for everybody, one flag, one coat of arms and one centralized world state......
Left and right tendencies can be observed not only in the political domain but in many areas of human interest and endeavor. Let us take the structure of the state, for instance. The leftists believe in strong centralization. The rightists are 'federalists' (in the European sense), 'states’ righters' since they believe in local rights and privileges, they stand for the principle of subsidiarity. Decisions, in other words, should be made and carried out on the lowest level—by the person, the family, the village, the borough, the city, the county, the federated state, and only finally at the top, by the government in the nation’s capital......
Or let us look at education. The leftist is always a statist. He has all sorts of grievances and animosities against personal initiative and private enterprise. The notion of the state doing everything (until, finally, it replaces all private existence) is the Great Leftist Dream. Thus it is a leftist tendency to have city or state schools—or to have a ministry of education controlling all aspects of education....
Leftism does not like religion for a variety of causes. Its ideologies, its omnipotent, all-permeating state wants undivided allegiance. With religion at least one other allegiance (to God), if not also allegiance to a Church, is interposed. In dealing with organized religion, leftism knows of two widely divergent procedures. One is a form of separation of Church and State which eliminates religion from the marketplace and tries to atrophy it by not permitting it to exist anywhere outside the sacred precincts. The other is the transformation of the Church into a fully state-controlled establishment.....
The anti-religious bias of leftism rests, however, not solely on anti clericalism, anti-ecclesiasticism, and the antagonism against the existence of another body, another organization within the boundaries of the State: It gets its impetus not only from jealousy but, above all, from the rejection of the idea of a supernatural, a spiritual order. Leftism is basically materialistic....
The Provident State, Hilaire Belloc’s Servile State, is obviously a creation of the leftist mentality. We will not call it the Welfare State because every state exists for the welfare of its citizens; here a good name has been misused for a bad thing. In the final prophecy of Alexis de Tocqueville in Democracy in America the possibility, nay, the probability of the democratic state’s totalitarian evolution toward the Provident State has been foretold with great accuracy. Here again two wishes of the leftist find their fulfillment, the extension of government and the dependence of the person upon the state which controls his destiny from the cradle to the grave......
One could continue this list ad nauseam. Naturally, we must add that in the practical order of things there are exceptions to the rule because leftism is a disease that does not necessarily spread as a coherent, systematic ideology..... [But] if we then identify, in a rough way, the right with freedom, personality, and variety, and the left with slavery, collectivism, and uniformity, we are employing semantics that make sense.”
P.S. – “Liberalism” should be distinguished from “Leftism” although they both arose from the same so-called Enlightenment stew (except the authentic liberalism of the true Right, whose antecedents are much older and deeper). Anglo and American liberalism, at least initially, was sparred the bloody stain of the French Revolution. However, as Kuehnelt-Leddihn says “The American War of Independence had an undeniable influence on the French Revolution and the latter, in the course of the years, had a deplorable impact on America...In the same camp with socialism, fascism is that particularly vague leftism which in the United States is known perversely enough as liberalism.” Leftism has also, to a greater or lesser extent, infected “liberalism” in other countries -- including the UK – to the extent the "liberal" label is still used politically.
P.P.S – when in the above P.S. I referred to the “authentic liberalism of the true Right” I was referring to the concept of liberty and freedom with which the word “liberalism” was first associated. The first use of the actual term “liberal” (obviously from the root word for “liberty") was in 1812 in Spain -- it was used in reference to a political movement opposed to Napoleon's Jacobin project. But it meant something different than when it came to be a label for the radical wing of the Whigs; and from Prince Metternich's reactionary restructuring of Europe after the defeat of General Bonaparte. A sense of this meaning of “liberalism” can be seen in the old European Catholic Right. For example:
“Federalism in the European anti-centralistic sense has always been part and parcel of Catholic political ideologies.......The whole Catholic and conservative movement in Europe was always federalistic in outlook, condemning centralization and separatism alike..... Yet if there must be extremism, then a wild individualism takes precedence over its opposite form. As a result anarchism rather than communism or socialism is the classic form of 'radicalism' in the Catholic orbit.... It is for the anarchist, then, that even the European Catholic rightist had a weak spot in his heart.”~ Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn , in “Liberty or Equality” (1952) , Chpt. 5 http://bit.ly/1LjstYh
That is why in the 1930's, during the Spanish Civil War, anarchist parties allied with the very traditionalist Catholic Carlists.
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