[lbo-talk] Chris Hedges comes out as socialist

[Matthias Wasser]

>
> Not sure how high it would be. Socialists are more likely to become
> liberals or neocons that outright libertarians. Or that's my guess.
> There are very few people on the left who really understand how the
> right thinks at all, or even takes the right seriously as thinkers.
>
More likely to become liberals or neocons than outright libertarians:
yes, that sounds right. And I do think most leftists know how those
people think, because most started out as liberals and behave like
liberals and have mostly liberal friends and can pass themselves off
as liberals if need be (unless I'm wrong in any of these), and because
neoconservativism is just what leftists would advocate in a world
where the US was a progressive force.

And if all of that doesn't apply to libertarians I think there are
some obvious sympathetic bonds there that end up attracting similar
personality types, at least - secularism, a belief that individual
freedom and dignity is the goal of a social order, concern with
abstract economic questions (often leading to contempt for mainstream
economics), et cetera. You could probably look at various demographic
slices and find that libertarians and socialists tend to covary: among
people who have ever played Dungeons & Dragons, probably higher than
average, among people who have ever invented their own language,
probably almost everybody.

On the other hand, some things will probably be forever foreign to me.
I can map and even find internally consistent almost any ideology,
with the right exposition, but even after that the notion that we
ought obey God, or that the sexes have distinct roles in society, or
that one race is superior to another strikes me as inherently absurd -
and this despite the fact that all sorts of racist, sexist, &c.
hobgoblins prance about in my subconscious all the time.