I ceased to think of myself as a rightist years ago, but for some time after becoming a libertarian I continued to sympathize much more strongly with the right than the left. I still do sometimes, but that feeling is rapidly waning. Why? Well, part of it is Bush and the many follies and evils of his administration. But a big part of it is the fact that so many right-wingers seem to have taken on many of the same traits that make me dislike most of the left (a few people excepted) so much.
For example: the leftist tendency to wildly fling the words "fascist" and "Nazi" around at anyone they don't like, a practice which conservatives have embraced. I thought Islamo-fascist" was a fairly silly term. I got annoyed by the constant comparison of anyone conservatives want to bomb this week to Hitler. But this is the best one yet: Michael Medved has taken to calling Muslim terrorists "Islamo-Nazis." Yes, I thank God every day that my grandfather's generation stopped Hitler from imposing sharia law on all of Europe.
Honestly, do political terms mean anything anymore? Can I start calling Mayor Richard Daley an "anarcho-Falangist" the next time he does something I don't like? At this point, we might as well drop the pretense that "Nazi" is even a word anymore: after all, words have definitions. "Nazi" has become more like grunting in pain or yelling, "Eww!"; it communicates raw emotion but little else.
With exceptions, liberals and the left shouldn't be too smug about this particular bit of stupidity; it was their relentless overuse of the word that set the precedent for this sort of nonsense, after all. Sadly, one of the harder things I've learned over the past six years is that most conservatives cannot be expected to be any better. I suppose I shouldn't allow myself to be disappointed by anything the right does these days, but old habits die hard.
Hat-tip to the hard-working Whig-distributists at Hit and Run.
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