The Wright Perspective: Who is on the Right?

My column for this week at Everyjoe:

http://www.everyjoe.com/2014/05/14/politics/what-is-a-conservative-who-is-on-the-right/

What is a Conservative? Who is on the Right? I am, if these words are used honestly. They are almost never used honestly.

Conservatives are placed to the Right on the traditional Left-to-Right political spectrum. That spectrum groups Whigs and Republicans as well as their enemies the Monarchists and Imperialists on the Right, Conservatives as well as Anarcho-Capitalists, and, worst of all, members of the National Socialists Worker’s Party (Nazis). The traditional spectrum is based on the assumption that enlightenment, change, revolution and progress are the exclusive property of Socialism, and that any opposition to Socialism is rooted in benighted ignorance, folly, reaction, conformity, cowardice and regress.

If we call ourselves “Right,” the unwary are likely to get a confused mental image of a follower of Torquemada, Simon LeGree, Adolf Hitler, George Bush and Gordon Gekko, perhaps with Cotton Mather thrown in. But none of these men have anything in common, except that they represent ideas Progressives hate.