Excerpt from Mises scholar's review of the movie Reds

Quote from Jeffrey Tucker's review of Warren Beatty's movie Reds.

For purposes of this piece, let's consider militarism, the draft, and the government-business partnership of war to be pieces of what we can call right-wing government. The film brilliantly portrays how the Right prepares the way for the Left — in both the United States and Russia. The Right gives the motivation and creates the sense of desperation and moral outrage that leads people to embrace utterly implausible solutions like socialism and communism.

Had there been no war and inflation in Russia, there would have been no revolution, and we would have been spared 80 years of communism. In the United States, the communists and socialists would have remained a small group of activists with no rallying cry, no victim story, no tale of capitalist evil to tell to the public and the workers.

The entire story makes an interesting parallel with our own times. Show me an Obama fanatic, someone for whom this man can do no wrong, no matter how brainless his economic policies or how violent his foreign policies, and I'll show you a person who hates the guts of George W. Bush — and mostly for the right reasons.

We all saw this coming for the last eight years. Bush took power with Republicans by his side, and rather than using the opportunity to bring about the humbler foreign policy he promised, or reduce the role of government in our lives, he used his power the way Republicans always have: betray election promises, explode spending, start pointless wars that garner global enemies, vastly increase regulatory power, and attempt a regimentation of cultural life that impedes on people's civil rights and liberties.

It was a mix of policies that seemed to be designed to embolden the Left. By the time the election rolled around, Obama-style socialism was a ripe fruit dangling from a tree. In this sense, a good name for the American Left would be reactionaries, since that seems to be the dominant mode of these people.

This process of right-wing statism giving way to left-wing statism, and back again, provides a summary narrative of the last 100 years of political history, and it is a particularly maddening one for old-style liberals and libertarians, since we see how the two work together, often unbeknownst to the partisans, to build the leviathan state step by step.

It is surely not a far-flung hope that someday societies will learn to reject the militarism and regimentation of the Right without embracing the collectivism and violence against property offered by the Left. And someday perhaps there will come a time when the tide of history will turn back the advances of the Left without emboldening the violence of the Right.

In other words, the goal isn't reaction but progress through liberty.

This is an excellent analysis except for his condemnation of how right-wing presidents always start pointless wars and vastly increase regulatory power. Neither Harding, Coolidge, Hoover Eisenhower, Nixon, Ford, nor Reagan started a war. If you're looking for presidents who started wars in the last 100 years, all you see is Democrats and Bushes who govern like Democrats. Reagan didn't increase regulatory power. I don't believe Ford, Eisenhower, Coolidge or Harding did either.

I'm no fan of Republicans for the other reasons Tucker mentions, but it doesn't do any good to falsely charge Republicans in general with starting wars and increasing regulation. Another interesting point about Tucker's charges is that they all apply much more strongly to Democrats in the last 100 years, yet he charges Republicans with them.