Today I have read two of the greatest posts I've seen in a while. What makes them so great? They agree with me, of course! I've said a billion times that the tea-party would be embraced by the hippies, and I've tacitly alluded to my hippie-ish nature by posting a song by the Youngbloods, titling a posts after Bob Dylan songs, and professing my love for the Grateful Dead, as well as that fine young lass, Mary Jane. I have lamented that the counter-culture warriors who once bucked the establishment and played government watchdog have no become partisan shills and cheerleaders for The Man. I was having a fun little political debate with my "left-of-center" roommate who said he's a "moderate", and I noted that moderate doesn't really mean anything. I'm pro-choice, pro-gay marriage, pro-marijuana legalization, and I'm also pro-guns, pro-capitalism, and very right of center on social security. Sounds like I'm a libertarian, sure, but it just goes to show that I don't fit in on the left-right divide. That's why, courtesy of Zombie, I can present you with the new political spectrum graph!
Zombie's article is truly epic, as he explains the graph, and explains why hippies are right next to The Tea Party on the list. Also, I loved his bit on Hobos vs. Bums, making me even more excited for Hobo With a Shotgun.
I include “hobos” and “bums” on the chart because the distinction between these two classic types illuminates the nature of the spectrum. In case you’re thinking that hobos and bums are just different words for the same thing, note: A hobo is an itinerant laborer who chooses homelessness because of the freedom it affords him, but who is proud of his self-sufficiency and will take temporary jobs to support himself wherever possible. A bum on the other hand is someone who is poor because he simply refuses to work or support himself, and instead is unashamed to survive on handouts and other people’s generosity. Because hobos celebrate individualism, freedom, independence and their own self-worth, they occupy the “sweet spot” at the bottom left corner of the spectrum, along with hippies and Tea Partiers. But since bums are essentially parasites on society and who survive on either formally or informally doled-out welfare, and often blame others for their predicament, they rightfully belong near the other end of the spectrum.
Get a job, sir. The bums will always lose. Do you hear me, Lebowski?
Zombie also explains the vertical axis and the dichotomy splits those who believe human nature can be changed and those who believe it is innate. It all goes back to what Malcolm Reynolds said in "Serenity" when talking about the evil, big intrusive government that is the Alliance.
I know this - they will try again. Maybe on another world, maybe on this very ground swept clean. A year from now, ten? They'll swing back to the belief that they can make people... better. And I do not hold to that. So no more runnin'. I aim to misbehave.
That, my friends, should be the Tea-Party's official t-shirt. Ok, it's a little long, but c'mon that's good stuff! I at least wanna see "I aim to misbehave" on signs at your rallies [Viking Admission: If they start bringing those signs to rallies, I want royalties!].
Zombie hits exactly upon my feelings here:
So, the hippies of 1968 didn’t particularly like either major political party, but they showed a particular anger toward the Democrats for screwing everything up — while giving the Republicans a shrug. Which, amazingly, is exactly the way the Tea Party feels today: Anger towards Democrats, and a grudging acceptance of Republicans as the lesser of two evils.
Everybody who reads this knows I that the only mainstream American political party I dislike more than Republicans are Democrats. Like the creators of South Park have said, "I hate conservatives, but I really fucking hate liberals." I also found it funny when people would say things like, "if you go to far right you get Nazis and if you go too far left you get commies." It depends on what "left" and "right" you're talking about. They're both collectivist economically and believe in huge government control. So in essence, they're on the same side of the spectrum for Zombie's horizontal axis, but taking in mind the vertical axis, Zombie explains the difference:
On the right half of the chart are all the different varieties of political collectivism, or people who seek to impose or benefit from collectivist government. Those collectivists who think that human nature is malleable and a “cultural construct” are at the upper right; those collectivists who think that “people are the way they are” can be found at the lower right. What unifies the collectivist Nazis, Fascists and Islamists is not just their belief that humans have built-in attributes, but that their specific social, ethnic or religious group possesses built-in attributes superior to everyone else’s.
Zombie notes that he hasn't included all political ideologies on the chart, and that if you take issue with his placement of a particular ideology you can debate him on it and change his mind. He also rejects the left/right dichotomy:
People who adhere to the outdated and overly simplistic left/right divide may have trouble grokking this new way of looking at society. Newsweek, for example, recently claimed that the Tea Party has an “anarchist streak.” I find this interesting, because the Newsweek writer understood that both Tea Partiers and anarchists are on the same end of the “Government Control” axis, but couldn’t grasp that, viewed from a different orientation, Tea Partiers are at the opposite end of the “Human Nature” axis from anarchists, who want to construct an (impossible) law-free utopia based on the assumption that people can change and control themselves in the absence of any authority whatsoever.
This brings up a good point: Scroll back up to the chart and think of it in terms of “halves.” Leftists want to highlight the fact the both Tea Partiers and Nazis are in the same “half” of the chart — the bottom half, as it is currently oriented (although of course the way I rotated the chart was completely random — there is no inherent meaning in the up-down-left-right placement, and I just as easily could have designed it to be 90 degrees or 180 degrees a different way). Of course, as mentioned above, the crucial difference is that Nazis and other totalitarians want to use government to enforce their idea of the natural order of things, whereas Tea Partiers have the exact opposite urge — to have no government enforcement at all, and to let the natural order of things play itself out — naturally.
On the other hand, The Tea Partiers (and I) want you to notice that all the “bad” ideologies, including Nazism and communism, also share space on the same half of the chart, in this case the “more government control” half.
So, the chart is viewpoint-neutral; each person can express their pre-existing political bias by pointing out how this-or-that political enemy is at least in the same half as some identifiably bad ideology. It just all depends on what angle from which you choose to view the spectrum.
The last thing I want to note from Zombie's piece is something I was genuinely ignorant of before reading. Jack Kerouac, beat writer and father of hippies, was a conservative who supported Bill Buckley of National Review fame. That shouldn't surprise me, considering that I have always thought it makes sense that hippies should be libertarian-ish, but it genuinely surprised me. Zombie explains how the commies and anti-capitalists co-opted the hippie movement. Their revisionist history has taught the younger folks like me that hippies were always hard leftists, but it was not so! And Zombie, like my father and Roger L. Simon, was once a hippie and a leftist has woken up and is now libertarian-ish.
Hat tip to Jeff G. at Protein Wisdom on the Zombie article, I don't know how I missed it as I usually read what Zombie puts out. Jeff has also posted his commentary, and his post title is also a Bob Dylan lyrical reference. Here's what he has to say, and if I may say so myself, he sounds a lot like me (that's a compliment, Jeff!)
For awhile now I’ve been pointing out to anyone who’d listen that the 60s counterculture (at least, its rank and file) agitated for the same kinds of libertarian values that we now see coming from Tea Party / legal conservative types. Meanwhile, today’s progressives — the direct descendants of the New Left — pretend toward a counterculture hipness that simply doesn’t jibe with their calls to regulate salt intake, or legislate toilets, or micromanage every aspect of the life of “the people”...
It’s time for the erstwhile hippies to take stock: are you for the freedom and individualism and anti-authoritarianism you once claimed to embody? Are you for smaller government, individual autonomy, self-sufficiency, and the organic organization of the marketplace? Or have you become The Man?
The times they are a-changin'.
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