This issue is of much more than academic interest. Powerful right wing forces in our country have acted as perpetual barriers to progressive social change since the first days of our nationhood – starting with their insistence that slavery be written into our Constitution.

Those right wing forces have been behind the “war against socialism” in the United States since the beginning of the industrial era of the late 19th century. With the rise of totalitarian Communism, especially as manifested under the dictatorship of Joseph Stalin beginning in 1924, they received a powerful boon to their cause. Henceforth, by equating totalitarian Communism with “left wing”, they sought to demonize any government that contained a hint of socialism or left wing leaning, or was in any way seen as being contrary to their interests. For 46 years of the Cold War that demonization provided the excuse for our CIA and military to intervene in dozens of sovereign nations anywhere and everywhere in the world, to overthrow the legally elected governments of those nations or to prevent them from being elected in the first place. This gave rise to repressive right wing governments all over the world and resulted in untold misery widely distributed throughout the world. Richard J. Walton, in his book, “Henry Wallace, Harry Truman and the Cold War”, describes the situation:


Similarly, the excuse of totalitarian Communism was used to demonize the domestic opponents of the right wing elites. That is what McCarthyism was all about. Eventually, they even succeeded in demonizing the word “liberal”, to the extent that few politicians today have the courage to identify themselves with that word.

Today, 18 years after the end of the Cold War, that tactic is still being used. Want to provide universal health insurance to the American people? SOCIALISM! Want to raise income taxes on millionaires by 3% or re-establish the estate tax on millionaires? SOCIALISM!!


The meaning of Right Wing

One of the best definitions of “right wing politics” that I’ve seen is “Positions that focus on adherence and obedience to traditional values and authorities and creating or promoting a form of social hierarchy”.

Let’s analyze that definition. It consists of two parts. One part is the goal and the other part is the strategy for attaining the goal. The goal of the right wing elites is the social hierarchy – with them at the top of that hierarchy. President Franklin Roosevelt had a few words to say about them. He called them “Economic Royalists”. This is what he said of them at his 1936 Democratic Convention speech:


The second part of the definition of right wing is “Adherence and obedience to traditional values and authorities”. The most important words in that phrase are “obedience” and “authorities”. Those words virtually define authoritarian followers. Bob Altemeyer, perhaps the world’s foremost authority on authoritarianism, wrote in his book, the Authoritarians, that the three core characteristics of authoritarian followers are: 1) High degree of submission to authority; 2) Willingness to attack other people in the name of the authority; and, 3) Highly conventional attitudes.

Altemeyer defines two types of authoritarians – leaders and followers. The leaders are the right wing elites whose goal is to promote a social, political, and economic hierarchy, with them at the top – the ones that FDR referred to as “Economic Royalists”. But the leaders can’t do this alone. How could they? They are vastly outnumbered. So they need many millions of right wing followers.

But other than themselves, who would be interested in promoting or fighting for a social hierarchy with the right wing multi-millionaires and billionaires at the top? That’s where the personality of the right wing authoritarian follower comes in. By positioning themselves as the highest of authorities, the right wing authoritarian leaders convince the right wing authoritarian followers that the highest social good is obedience …. to themselves. And then they throw in “traditional values” in order to help their followers feel good about themselves. “Traditional values” is of course a vague enough term that it could be taken to mean just about anything. The authoritarian leaders essentially define it to mean the same thing as maintaining the status quo – with their place at the top.


What about left wing authoritarian followers?

Altemeyer explains that a major source of the authoritarian propensity for conformity is their inability (or refusal) to think for themselves. That personality characteristic provides fertile ground for nationalistic leaders who wish to drive their country into war – or anything else. If a person lacks the ability or inclination to think independently, then what other choice does he have but to accept what he’s told by authority figures?

Altemeyer describes an experiment in his book that sheds light on how authoritarians helped to perpetuate the Cold War, greatly facilitated by their aversion to independent thought. The experiment involved asking citizens of both the United States and the Soviet Union their thoughts about the Cold War, their own country, and the other country:


That experiment raises the question of so-called left wing authoritarians. Altemeyer’s discussion of that issue is a little confusing. First he emphasizes the difference between the psychological and the political. Since the primary characteristic of an authoritarian follower is submission to established authority, that would make American authoritarians almost all right wing authoritarians. But what about the authoritarians of the USSR in Altemeyer’s experiment, who were just as submissive to the Soviet authorities during the Cold War as the American authoritarians were to their country’s authorities? Altemeyer deals with that issue by saying that the Soviet authoritarian followers were right wing authoritarians in the psychological sense but left wing in the political sense. He therefore says that he will refer to all followers of traditional authority, whether Communist or anything else, as right wing authoritarian followers, since they are all right wing in the psychological sense, regardless of their political views. In other words, it is the right wing psychological trait that connects all of these authoritarian followers, regardless of their political views. Altemeyer then confuses the issue a little by noting the existence of left wing authoritarians, saying that “I’m sure one can find left wing authoritarians here and there, but they hardly exist in sufficient numbers now to threaten democracy in North America…”

Anyhow, with that as background, let’s consider the issue of whether or not totalitarian Communism is left wing or right wing, even in the political sense.


The beginnings of totalitarian Communism

The Bolsheviks, who eventually became the Communist Party, came to power in Russia in the October Revolution of 1917. Their two most prominent leaders at that time were Vladimir Lenin and Leon Trotsky. Bolshevism/Communism was considered left wing at the time in large part because the revolution involved an overthrow of the traditional Russian authorities, the Russian monarchy, or Czar (Actually, the October revolution was preceded by a February 1917 Revolution, in which a parliamentary type of government came to power after overthrowing the Czar). The October revolution was followed shortly by the Russian Civil War (1918-21), in which the monarchical forces, known as the White Russians, attempted unsuccessfully to regain power from the Bolsheviks, with some help from the United States and some European powers. Shortly after that, with the melding together of additional territories, Russia morphed into the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) – The Soviet Union for short. In 1922, Lenin suffered some strokes, from which he never recovered, and he died in January 1924.

In 1922 before his health problems began, Lenin appointed Joseph Stalin as General Secretary of the Communist Party. In that post, Stalin moved to consolidate power, so that by the time that Lenin died, Stalin was in pretty good position to move into the vacuum of power created by Lenin’s death. Lenin noted Stalin’s extreme opportunism before he died, and consequently told some of his followers that Stalin was too ruthless to be trusted and should be removed from his position. But it was too late. In short order, Stalin became the leader of the Communist Party, and thereby the leader of the Soviet Union.

Stalin’s most notable talent was ruthless political in-fighting. From the time of Lenin’s death in 1924 until Stalin’s total consolidation of power by the late 1930s, Stalin’s reign was characterized by a massive series of bloody purges – one after the other. Just after he used one ally to wipe out what he considered to be a threat to his power, he would recruit another ally to help him wipe out the former one. Consequently, by the late 1930s, all but a small handful of the original Bolsheviks were gone. Michael H. Hart summarizes the process in his book, “The 100 – A Ranking of the Most Influential Persons in History”:



The Soviet Union under Stalin as a right wing dictatorship

So, the question we should ask ourselves is: In what sense if any was the Soviet Union under Stalin – under whose leadership the Cold War between the United States and the USSR began – a left wing government? It is true that the ideal of Communism is “a theory or system of social organization based on the holding of all property in common, actual ownership being ascribed to the community as a whole or to the state.”

But what does that definition have in common with the actual Soviet Union as it existed under Stalin (or his successors)? Stalin was a mass murdering tyrant. The idea of “holding of all property in common…” under Stalinism was a sham. Stalin had unitary control over everything. He purposely starved millions of peasants to death just to consolidate his power. How is that consistent with “holding of all property in common”? Hart summarizes the crux of Stalin’s reign:


If Stalin’s USSR was so “left wing”, then the Nazi-Soviet pact of September 1939 becomes a little difficult to explain. True, Hitler turned on Stalin’s USSR and invaded it less than two years later. But that was just a matter of one warlord turning on another. What was the difference between Hitler and Stalin? They were both ruthless mass murdering tyrants.


The similarities between Stalin’s Soviet Union and George W. Bush’s regime

In his book “Ghost Plane”, Stephen Grey, Amnesty International Award-Winning Journalist for Excellence in Human Rights Reporting, meticulously documents the illegal and horrendous system of torture and other human rights abuses that George Bush perpetrated upon the world as part of his so-called “War on Terror”. In his book, copyrighted in 2006, Grey estimated that 11 thousand men and boys fell victim to this evil system since the onset of George Bush’s “War on Terror”. Here are some excerpts from Grey’s book, in which he compared George Bush’s “War on Terror” with the USSR under Stalin:



Conclusions

Let’s return to the crux of the definition of right wing: Promotion of social hierarchy and obedience to authority. What primarily characterized Hitler’s, Stalin’s, and Bush’s regimes if not the promotion of hierarchy – with Hitler, Stalin, and Bush at the top of their respective pyramids? Promotion of hierarchies like that doesn’t come without severe costs. In their grasping for ever more power and wealth, violence is necessarily employed, often with many hundreds of thousands or millions of casualties.

And what enabled those bloodthirsty regimes to exist if not millions of right wing authoritarian followers whose foremost psychological trait was a propensity for obedience to authority?

That is essentially what right wing regimes are – ruthless systems in which the elites at the top of the pyramid make every effort to maintain and increase their wealth and power, at the expense of everyone else. If their nation’s countrymen don’t like it, that’s too bad. Those who get in the way do so at great risk, and they often pay the ultimate price. There are wars, torture, and innumerable casualties.

So, the idea that Stalin’s totalitarian rule was the work of a leftist regime is nothing but a very sad joke. It has been used by the right wing elites of the United States of America for many decades to support their agenda. It is well past time to put that myth to rest.