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Entry: Sell Your Souls to Save Your Skins Link: http://www.takimag.com/site/article/sell_your_souls_to_save_your_skins#11748 Post contents: <i>They fear Hillary Clinton as if she were incarnate evil—when in fact, her policies would prove indistinguishable from Giuliani’s, since they both sit on the same point of the center-left.</i> The Left/Right paradigm has long fallen into obsolescence, if it ever made much sense. To keep using it obscures reality and promotes the illusion that because two camps are plotted on the line “closer” to another, they might have something in common, and thus might be able to coalesce. I too applauded <i>Commentary</i> in the 70s and 80s. We Tories and we Jeffersonians have learned since that Whigs (Burke’s “New Whigs”) are quite different creatures, a position that is not “close” to us at all. (I pray we have learned also that nationalists, racialists, and Fascists are not “close” to us either.) So let’s throw away the Left/Right metaphor. Instead of a line running from left to right, politics is more like a Chinese Checkers board, at best. The September Hero and Nurse Ratched are only “indistinguishable” superficially. Giuliani is a Hamiltonian-Whig, Hillary a Social Democrat. Both positions are indeed statist welfare, but their clients differ, the one megacorporations and megabanks, the other statist school teachers, Sixties leftovers, the Lumpenproletariat, and any individual who gets a paycheck from Leviathan. The deep structures of these two positions and their long term goals differ quite sharply. Not to know Giuliani’s deep structure results in bafflement with respect to his seeming shift from law and order to something else. In fact there’s no shift at all; his positions follows logically from his Whig-Hobbes principles. Otherwise, a good, fair article that acknowledges the good, the bad, and the shades of grey. Sent at: 2008 10 11