Ran Prieur Loves Your Freedom

This is my second post coming from Ran Prieur responding to my request to look at my blog. 

To the post They Hate Your Freedom Ran writes:

you're totally right about americans and freedom. i figured out a while back that in that famous grid, with economic freedom and social freedom, they have economic freedom backwards. real economic freedom is freedom *from* money, but the way libertarians have trained us to think, economic freedom is freedom *of* money to exploit humans however it has to, to turn itself into more money.

I think this helps make sense of the supposed authoritarian turn on the right. They always were authoritarian on both dimensions. ("But wait... The West Wing showed me that their are always reasonable Republicans that we can work with, and those dumb hippies keep trying to ruin it!" Sounds too stupid for anyone to believe? Obama squandered both of his terms on this article of faith... that or he failed on purpose). 

 Ian Welsh has a really good piece that sheds more light on this:

[with] conservatives ... the general orientation is towards authoritarian identity. The left emphasizes horizontal ties, conservatives emphasize primitive identity (religion and culture) mediated through vertical ties. Ruler, nobles, rich, church. 

At some point, I think Welsh is building his own nomenclature based on how things turned out -- meaning I think there were liberals (prior to, say, the Atari Democrats) that were operating in good faith and are swept up and reordered as "left" by what Welsh is doing here, but in broad strokes, he's spot on with:

Liberals are the great apostles of capitalism, not conservatives, though they like the way capitalism stratifies society. Left wingers are the opposition to capitalism. The most extreme versions want an end to it entirely, the moderate versions want it under firm control, made to contribute to mass prosperity, not turned to produce billionaires.

And, again, this is because what the left wants everyone prosperous, not a highly stratifed [sic] society, where a stratified society is a goal both liberals and conservatives share. 

Thus, 

Right-wingers [1]: freedom of money.

Liberals: attempted freedom through money. But, opps! Over and over.

Left-wingers: freedom from money. 

=

[1] Right wing, nothing conservative about it. You can't conserve disruption. (part II of the piece). Although the end game does appear that we will have a kind of feudalism, so I guess it will end up a stratified society society to be conservative about, after all.