When is “far right” actually moderate?
When it’s defined by the far Left.
Such appears the case with Spain’s Vox party, which was vaulted to prominence in December 2’s Andalucían election. As the Guardian writes, “The 12 seats it picked up in Andalucía’s 109-seat parliament exceeded all expectations and could see the socialist PSOE party lose control of the heartland it has governed since 1982.”
“In the last Andalucían election three years ago, the PP [the ostensibly “conservative” People’s party] took 61% of the vote in the barrio, with Vox limping far behind on 3.2%. On Sunday, the PP’s share of the vote in Los Remedios was down to 37.3%; Vox’s was up to 24.7%,” the Guardian also informs.
Yet again proving that its primary function isn’t guardian of truth but of leftism, the paper also writes that, “more importantly,” Vox “ended four decades of Spanish exceptionalism and showed that the country’s fabled immunity to far-right politics had finally given out.”
So addiction to socialism equals exceptionalism? Well, perhaps we can’t expect objective journalism from people who fancy the objective (Truth) mythical.
Yet the Guardian well reflects most leftist media in that it mentions the 36-year socialist PSOE-party reign and never even intimates that such dominance could reflect mainstreamed radicalism (no, not an oxymoron).
So what earns Vox the “far right” label? Here’s the Guardian’s case: The party supports the “repeal of Spain’s gender-violence legislation, the ‘abolition of subsidised radical feminist organisations’, an end to public funding of ‘non-health-based surgery’ (gender changes, abortion), and a law to protect bullfighting.” Far more significantly with 53,500 migrants having inundated Spain’s southern shores this year alone, Vox also warns “about the threat immigrants pose to European identity,” the paper complains.
But who’s the radical? A study this year found that a majority of millennial women do not identify as feminists; in fact, only 18 percent of Americans do, and the numbers shouldn’t be much different in machismo-infused Spanish culture. This is no surprise; even the leftist-disgorged term “feminism” is ridiculous. Perspective: If I called myself a “masculinist,” wouldn’t that raise eyebrows?
As for the “‘gender’-violence legislation,” Spain has “106 inquisitorial tribunals exclusively made to judge men, with no constitutional guarantee,” according to this source, and men are considered guilty until proven innocent. The legislation should be scrapped.
But should European culture? Leftists would defend any primitive tribe or non-Western people being overrun by outsiders and call the process cultural and demographic genocide. Yet when this happens to Europeans, they brand it “diversity” and say “Our strength lies therein, you bigot!”
In fact, the Guardian quotes an academic who claims Vox’s rise is partially attributable to xenophobia. Our real problem, however, is xenophilia and an attitude stating that European peoples — and only European peoples — have no right to defend their cultures. Talk about radicalism.
The Guardian does point out that many Spaniards supported Vox because of the PP’s corruption; as with Brexit and Donald Trump’s election, it reflects anti-establishment anger.
As for establishment bias, Europe’s political spectrum is well “left” of ours, and it’s hard finding a true “rightist” party; that is, one robustly traditionalist socially and libertarian economically. Instead, merely having the common sense to oppose nation-rending Third World migration earns one the “far-right European” label.
The establishment, including its media, thus labels opponents for three obvious reasons:
• It serves to demonize these more moderate voices of the people.
• It scares some voters into supporting the Left even more intensely to combat the “rightist threat.” This pulls society toward ever-more-intense leftist radicalism.
• Many leftists actually believe it.
As to the last point, it’s normal for people to view the status quo — especially when they’re an enthusiastic part of it — as moderation and deviation from it as radicalism. Yet this isn’t a rational worldview. A dwarf will appear a giant in a land of Lilliputians. A man insisting 2+2=4 will be considered a radical in a place where everyone believes it’s 5. Being labeled “radical” doesn’t mean you’re surely wrong, just surely unfashionable.
Yet there’s a deeper problem here, involving the concepts of “right” and “left” themselves. Know that the terms, as they relate to politics, originated with the French Revolution. Back then, a rightist was a monarchist and a leftist a republican (small r), referring to someone aiming to create a republic. Since then, what has happened with the terms’ definitions?
As I explained last year:
Noting that “right” and “left” correspond with “conservative” and “liberal,” also consider that while 1950s American conservatives were staunchly anti-communist, a conservative in the Soviet Union was a communist. And today, European “conservatives” are far more “liberal” than ours.
The explanation is that the only consistent definitions of “conservative” and “liberal” are, respectively, a “desire to maintain the status quo” and a “desire to change it”; thus, as the status quo varies from time to time and place to place, so do the actual beliefs represented by the two political terms.
Thus, more than ideologies, liberalism and conservatism are processes — respectively, that of continually trying to effect change and that of continually, as late author Bill Buckley put it, standing “athwart history, yelling ‘Stop.’”
Or as philosopher G.K. Chesterton wrote of the processes, “The whole modern world has divided itself into Conservatives and Progressives. The business of Progressives is to go on making mistakes. The business of Conservatives is to prevent mistakes from being corrected.”
Why have we thus divided ourselves? Well, the sane view — the West’s erstwhile prevalent view — is recognizing that there simply is Truth and everything else.
And everything else is a lie.
This correct division some would characterize as “orthodox” vs. “heterodox” or, perish the thought and to use verboten terminology, orthodox vs. heretical.
But then the West ceased believing in Truth (absolute by definition) and began fancying everything relative. When this happens, ultimately, things often become relative to oneself. So it’s no surprise that leftist media could very sincerely view those somewhat less mistaken than themselves as “far right.”
Forgotten is that a “radical” is sometimes just someone who’s right 50 years to soon — or 50 years too late — and that man’s extremism is, sometimes, God’s moderation.
Photo: AP Images
