Would a Communist America (G-d forbid!) even invoke "socialist patriotism" at all?
The bottom line seems to be that those out of power hate the government and the military, those in power support it. When the Left was on the outside looking in, it posed as anarchist champions of "liberty." When they come to power, government and army become their tools. I suspect that in your scenario the Abbie Hoffman types would be the first to be shot by Leftists who were actually serious about ruling and governing (leftwing anarchists didn't last long under Lenin or Stalin).
Similarly, I wonder to what extent the libertarianism of many on the Right is just a convenient pose for the disenfranchised (i.e. now that socialism of various degrees has become the norm), to be abandoned if and when the leftists are removed from power.
(Another centralizing ruler for whom American conservatives have warm feelings is Chiang Kai-shek, whose nationalist ideology was opposed to the federalism which some of his and Sun Yat-sen's opponents advocated. Chiang also criticized capitalists and expropriated some businesses to state ownership.)
Chiang Kai-Shek was in many ways a distributist. While it is true that he nationalized some businesses and lands, he also sold off some of the appropriated lands to turn de facto serfs into property owners. His logic (and that of many distributists) was essentially one of "Why should people be anti-Communist and defend private property unless there's some reasonable expectation that they will be property owners themselves?" In a society where a few families and their cronies lord over all property, it's not hard to understand why peasants see Communism as their only salvation. Chiang-Kai Shek turned this around by making the peasants property owners and giving them a stake in defending private property and enterprise. That's something that many right-wing ruling juntas forget elsewhere.
Another centralizing, "big government" right winger who is hailed by even neo-conservatives is Augusto Pinochet.
Well, many neo-conservatives are all for centralizing big government and the welfare state, they just resent that it's run by a "D" rather than an "R" (or they would prefer that the "D" be more along the lines of an LBJ than a Clinton or Obama, for whatever reason). So their support for authoritarian centralized governments isn't all that surprising.
Belatedly, I would like to point out that Brazilian ultra-traditionalist Catholic Plinio Correa de Oliveira considered Franco not as a true conservative Catholic, but as a "national socialist" posing as a conservative Catholic
I would have argued that it's the other way around. Franco was a traditionalist Catholic who adopted some of the rhetoric of Fascism to win the support of authentic Falangists like Primo de Rivera at home and military aid from Mussolini and Hitler abroad.
I agree with you 100%, although it must be remembered that Italian Fascism, German Nazism, and Primo de Rivera's original conception of Spanish Falangism were revolutionary movements, and to a certain extent anti-traditional, though not to the extent of Communism. Moreover, Fascist totalitarians (and to some extent the non-totalitarian European right) are often atheists or agnostics who view religion as a cultural relic to be exploited for purely utilitarian purposes.
By all accounts, the ruling Saudi Royal family aren't particularly pious. They like their booze, their whores, and just about everything else that the Koran condemns. That doesn't change the fact that Saudi Arabia has the strictest Shariah law of any Middle Eastern nation. Similarly, it really doesn't matter that Mussolini was himself probably agnostic or atheist, he forged an alliance with the Catholic Church (basically creating the Vatican as an autonomous entity) while the Left's goal was to minimize the Church's influence and power.
The point at which the American right breaks off from the right in Europe and elsewhere is the point where social classes based on traditional aristocracy give way to those based on ownership of the means of production by upwardly mobile individuals. To Communists the capitalist class structure is a huge improvement over everything that preceded it but it is still a class division--the last to be overcome and abolished. To the European right it is at this point where the traditional aristocracy gives way to the capitalist that the "revolution" begins. Just as American conservatives simply cannot wrap their heads around how the European right is "right wing," so European rightists cannot see American-style capitalism and "free enterprise" as anything other than a destructive and corrosive acid that begins the destruction of civilization and inevitably paves the way for Marxism. Other than the "palaeos," I don't think American and European right wingers will ever understand each other.
While most paleoconservatives are libertarian strict constructionists, you also see some sympathy for European-style rightwing ideas among some. One instance of this is the romantic attitude of many on the traditional Right for the Confederacy, which is probably the closest thing to a European-style feudal system on American soil.
There are also rightwingers who are skeptical of laissez-faire capitalism for other reasons. Pat Buchanan, for example, was often (wrongly) criticized as a "crypto-socialist" by his neo-conservative and libertarian opponents for opposing free trade and other aspects of laissez-faire. Like the most on the European Right, Buchanan recognized that certain aspects of laissez-faire are caustic to social conservatism and traditionalism. You can't have stable communities with an economic system that forces people to change jobs and relocate just to survive, which is why Buchanan made preserving America's industrial base a centerpiece of his agenda (whether this is desirable in itself or not is open to debate and beside the point). The same is true for immigration: laissez-faire libertarians who put profits first want cheap immigrant labor, traditionalists oppose it.
As a Theocrat, I don't know where I fit on the spectrum, or even if I'm on it at all.
Obviously theocracy is right-wing, even though it's probably even more against the grain of American politics than the European-style right.
Again, thank you so much for your intelligent and intellectually honest posts on this topic, ek. They are a joy to read.
Sure, though it can be frustrating when only 1 or 2 readers are on the same wavelength.
This is very true. Although today's neo-Confederates are not really Confederates in the traditional sense. For one thing, they advocate protectionism while the actual Confederates were free-traders. For another, neo-Confederates are part of the same Right that includes the Germanophilic Midwestern non-interventionist Republicans, whereas the Confederates were certainly not pacifists (and neither were Southerners of the World War II era, who were already serving in foreign militaries against the Nazis and Japanese before America even entered the war).
And of course the third is their admiration of centralizing big government dictatorships elsewhere while advocating "states' rights" and calling Abraham Lincoln a Communist dictator at home.
As for Chiang, the Kuomintang started out as a left wing party under Sun Yat-sen and at one point collaborated with the USSR and the Chinese Communist Party. Some of this ideological fellowship persists to this day in the Kuomintang, which still retains the "Leninist" party structure it adopted during the collaborationist years.
Are you sympathetic to right wing alternatives to capitalism? Your last post sort of gave this impression. There have in the past been Falangist and National Synidicalist parties in the United States (with ties to the Lebanese parties), but I don't know if they're still active.
I wish you had commented on the JBS theory of Communism as a front for capitalist consolidation.