This post is the text of an e-mail I sent this evening to bartcop, one of the best liberal websites, a no-bull broadside of satire and vitriol by a self-proclaimed ‘okie with an iq of 65’ who says he could destroy the republicans if he were running the democrats’ campaigns (and i agree). the topic was the folly of george w. bush running up a deficit by borrowing from communist china; but see, although china is a dictatorship, the matter of it still being a communist state is another matter. here’s what i said to bart:

This used to confuse the hell out of me: the statement, by people who, I knew, knew what they were talking about, that “the extreme left and the extreme right meet.” How could this be? Took me years to get it, but follow me here. Extreme Left (Communism) can become Extreme Right (Fascism) because these extremes *agree* about more than they disagree about.

Disagreement: Communists are against great private wealth, for central state control of the economy, and against religion. Fascists are for great private wealth, for corporate control of the economy, and use religion to make their rule seem legitimate. In its essence, fascism is feudalism expanded to include new social structures (used to be owning land made you a baron, but owning Microsoft is just as good; used to be, being bound to the baron’s land made you a serf, but being bound to servitude in a Saipan garment factory is just as bad).

Agreement: both Extreme Left and Right believe that there should be only one ruling Party (theirs), that violence against their political opponents is acceptable, that democracy should exist only insofar as propaganda purposes require, and that the ruling elite (themselves) deserves special privileges.

Thus an extremist can go from one extreme to the other without ever ceasing to be an extremist. Mussolini started as a Marxist, then founded Fascism and got in bed with the wealthy landowners and the Church. But he never changed his mind about anything in the previous paragraph, did he? Napoleon did much the same thing, starting out as an officer of the French Revolution and in the end making himself an emperor and his relatives kings.

And so it is with the Chinese. Deng Xiaoping saw what happened to the Soviets, and gradually steered China toward its present condition (as an article said, “The Chinese seem to have cracked the code of Western Capitalism.”) China is now a de facto fascist state, with its ‘iron rice bowl’ of social welfare broken and replaced by “It’s glorious to get rich” entrepreneurialism, a one-party government communist now only in name. Where the State once owned the industries, now the industries own the State, and the State pays lip service to its Communist past. They still persecute religions, though; that’s one part of the Marxist ideology that evidently still works in the eyes of the ruling elite. Remember Falun Gong? They stomped it like a roach.

Incidentally, my brother-in-law lives in Japan and says Japan is a communist country, from a social welfare standpoint, and it’s a hell of a lot more livable than China (or here, for that matter, nowadays; he isn’t much inclined to come back).