Taken from the comments on this post.
Are Stalinists and Nazis nothing but progressives and conservatives who are willing to use extreme coercion to get rid of oppressors or barbarism, respectively?
My initial inclination is to leave Stalin and Hitler out of the three-axis model. It might be best to limit that model to the Anglo-American political tradition.
Your leanings are libertarian *now*. When they weren’t, how did you view the world then?
When I was in high school and on the left, I was all about the oppressor-oppressed narrative. Majoring in economics in college helped to change that. Also reading David Halberstam on Vietnam. He was a fierce opponent of the war, but he never took the view that the war was an outgrowth of capitalist oppression, which was the standard line of the New Left in those days. I would now say that I lost my faith in the oppressor-oppressed axis, although I do not think I could have articulated my views that way at the time.
Today, I would say that my three-axis model has made me somewhat skeptical of everyone–progressives, conservatives, and libertarians. Or, more positively, I think that at least sometimes the progressives get it right (oppression is the right issue on which to focus in some cases) and conservatives get it right (barbarism is a legitimate worry). Often, I think that the libertarian focus on the dangers of government power is the most useful framework. But I think that the worst thing is to be so stuck along one axis that you do not even realize that you are stuck there.
It’s so easy to relate to progressive narratives at a young age, but all it took was some scarcity thought experiments to make me start questioning them, in my late twenties. I even had a set of early writings labeled “Neither Victim, Nor Aggressor” before life circumstances pushed me towards what seemed a more conservative bent, later on. But when I think of conservative leanings now, it seems there is a familial circumstance to conservatism that may not necessarily be as (truly) free market as what one at least hopes for in libertarian thought. Would private schools in the South really offer freedom of choice in learning, for instance. For me, free markets – especially in knowledge and skills use – are only possible with plenty of flexible but well understood guidelines – guidelines that preserve freedom of choice in education, especially.
As long as you’re taking questions, can you discuss some examples of issues where you think it’s right to focus on one axis or another?
Leaving Stalin and Hitler out of it is probably a good idea, but I have to take issue with the comment that Nazis were somehow conservatives. The National Socialists were radicals who wanted to replace Christianity with paganism, reprogram the human race and rebuild society from the ground up. They were “to the right” of Communists in as far as they allowed private ownership of industry to continue, albeit under total state direction and control. The Nazis reintroduced barbarism to European civilization. They were anything but conservative.