Right Wing Extremists: Saving America Since 1776

With the 233rd Independence Day celebration on it's way in America, we thought it would be a good idea to honor the radical extremists that founded this country.  

Now, it might be true that calling Washington, Jefferson, and Franklin "right wing" is a bit historically questionable within the original context of the old Left-Right paradigm laid out in the French Assembly in the late 18th Century. We understand that technically the founders had more in common with what would historically be deemed the "left" than anything.  As Dean Russell wrote last month: 

The first leftist would not be popular in America today. That is true because the original leftists wanted to abolish government controls over industry, trade, and the professions. They wanted wages, prices, and profits to be determined by competition in a free market, and not by government decree. They were pledged to free their economy from government planning, and to remove the government-guaranteed special privileges of guilds, unions, and associations whose members were banded together to use the law to set the price of their labor or capital or product above what it would be in a free market.

 So way back Liberty Maniacs would be about as left-leaning as they come.  Indeed, as many of you know, the left side of the National Constituent Assembly at the beginning of the French Revolution iRight Wing Extremists: Saving America Since 1776n 1789 was comprised of elected representatives that wanted to abolish the established, privileged, preferential treatment of the royal coterie industries and replace the system with markets and freedom.  The right was comprised of reactionary hangers-on, that were resistant to liberty--or at least the rapid changes represented by those on the left.

Of course, political terminology changes like the weather.  The definition of terms in practical politics certainly hold no scientific, immutable hold on the people that use them.  Along the way--in America at least--the left mutated more into statism as the progressive movement took hold while the right became a more comparatively vocal critic of government aggrandizement. 

Not that a false dichotomy of left-right could ever be tidy.  I recall Murray Rothbard's article "Confessions of A Right-Wing Liberal" in David Horowitz's New Left periodical Ramparts in 1968 that explaned the rather odd journey of Rothbard from hardline right-wing Taft Republican to left-wing, war-protesting, black-power-supporting radical within a decade--all without changing his political views one iota. (The former New Left radical Horowitz, now neoconservative author and owner of the site frontpage.com is as great an example as the libertarian Rothbard of how the left-right dichotomy lends itself to confusion more than anything.)

So yeah, "Right Wing Extremist" might not be as historically accurate as we like for this design, but nothing pithy ever is.