Mona:

Paul R.

Translation: Ooops! My bad!

Now Paul, not at all. People from your POV are never going to agree with people of mine on a great many issues, and it didn't make sense for libertarians to favor Democrats for quite some time. (Tho it did make sense not to vote, which I had taken to doing.)

That's hardly my argument. Rather, it's that the actually existing results of "libertarianism" are authoritarianism. And this contradiction was evident for quite some time. The coffee's over there on the counter.

This is, of course, the same reason that folks like me regarded the Russian Revolution at the earliest, and Stalin's purges at the latest as the "death of communism," a good 6 or 7 decades before the fall of the Soviet Union. Please note the symmetry here. When the theory produces its opposite in practice, it's time to junk the theory. There may be some useful insights to be salvaged as parts--which is why I like "Marxian" analysis, as opposed to "Marxist," it provides a useful perspective for getting at certain problems--but the vehicle itself is a goner. "Withering away of the state." Right.

What binds us right now is that the things the left (excluding Stalinists and allied types) has always had in common with 'tarians are the most pressing matters du jour -- civil liberties under attack and authoritarian power running amok and beyond control. Not to mention opposition to a neocon war cult.

Ah yes, the Stalinists. All 20 of them. This is one thing I'd hoped that you might learn from Altemeyer--there really never was any attitudinal affinity between American leftists and the Soviets. Authoritarians on the left are almost always high RWAs who've gotten lost somewhere along the line. And when they figure that out, they usually leave--like the neocon ex-Trots, Ronald Reagan and David Horowitz. We American leftists were always fundamentally at odds with the Soviets' authoritarian ways. It was the Swedes, with their saunas we were kin to. Not the Soviets and their Gulags.

But we can return to our regularly scheduled disagreements when the immediate crisis has been averted. In the meantime, do you realize that I put you on the frontpage of LGF, albeit Johnson omitted my link to your Altemeyer post?

Yipes! I had no idea! Cooties!

Hume's Ghost:

without reading all the comments ....

My apologies if anyone already made this point.

1. Ledeen is a fascist/fanatic. I'm convinced of this.

He's never been hidden about this. (He openly approved of fascist movements in his 1972 book, Universal Fascism: The Theory and Practice of the Fascist International, 1928-1936.) It's what distinguishes him from his crypto-fascist fellow-travellers. In his view, the fascist movements were just fine. The problem was with how they governed. As his career so aptly shows, they're still working on it.

I would add that I think that we are seeing a tide turn on this administration. But these people will be back. Ledeen did the same thing during Iran-contra and look how long it took for America to forget it and let it happen again.

The lesson, obviously is that is terrible mistake to go so lightly on the Iran/Contra conspirators.

We should have investigated everything down to the last jot and tittle, impeached the impeachable ones, and thrown everyone else in jail. Better yet, we should have burned the GOP down to the ground after Watergate, and never let Iran/Contra have a chance to happen in the first place.