Many on the right repeat the mantra “center-right” nation so often you would think they were parrots.  It’s spin of course, designed to try and reign the expectations of an Obama presidency from the left (which shouldn’t be very high but that’s another topic) and to say basically that “conservatism-is-still-popular-we-just-had-a-lousy-GOP-candidate-and-a-lousy-economy-and the-Obama-campaign-turned-out-its-people.” Bill Kristol wrote this screed the other day in the Times. Brit Hume, in his usual bullying way, said as much on Fox News Sunday “This is a center-right nation and the liberals know it.”

Such labels, conservative and liberal, are so meaningless in the context of current politics compared to their historical definitions it almost seems as though Lewis Carroll was writing campaign speeches. The Democrats are not the inheritors of Adam Smith nor is the GOP the descedents of Edmund Burke.  Both parties philosophies are wierd mixtures of modernist 19th and 20th century ideologies along with peculiarities of race, economics and culture thrown in. But one thing common amongst them and common among the citizens that vote for them is their acceptance of socialism, meaning that the state can redistribute wealth from those who have to other people whether they already have wealth or not. As George Will noted on ABC’s Sunday’s program, 95 percent of what government does is redistribute wealth.

We are already socialists. The nation believes in it in some form or another and the parties respond to the people. The Federal Government uses such instruments as the tax code, the Federal Reserve, the Treasury Departmenty and the Congress to direct that wealth to favored political constituencies like farmers or AIG. Only a handful of politicians in this country reject such pandering. Most go along because they wish to be re-elected instead of selling insurance or practicing law in family court.

If one talks about a “center-right” nation they are talking about “right socialism” not “conservatism” in any kind of traditional sense. At least they’ve dropped that term from their definition.  Right socialism originated in Europe. In fact one could trace it back to Bismarck’s decision to create old age pensions in order to take working class votes away from the German Socialists. Other European conservatives followed.  The Fascists improved upon this model starting with World War I as Mussolini and Hitler combined extreme nationalism and celebration or martial values to their socialism. (Franco was more of a traditional authoritarian conservative than someone who imbibed pure Fascist ideology, otherwise Spain would have tried to conquer Gibraltar. Franco wisely did not do this and thus stayed in power until his death in 1975). The Republican Party of the late 20th Century used such elements in its own rise to power until their fall from the peak this year. Republican “right-socialists” used the Federal Government’s purse strings to give money to favored constituencies like farmers, military veterans, religious groups, old people with prescription drug benefits and oil companies with tax breaks. They tried to assert the government’s authority over education with No Child Left Behind and in a private medical case in the Schiavo affair. When the nation’s financial institutions crumbled and buckled under the weight of bad investments, the Federal Government stepped in to prop them up as any socialist government would. And of course, in order to defend the state that does all these things, the right-socialists established police powers that are common in nearly all socialist countries that limit the right to dissent and allows the government to spy on potential enemies, real or not.

Despite such socialism, these right-socialists persisted in calling themselves “conservatives” and lied to themselves while lying to the nation about how they supposedly supported “free markets” and “freedom” in general for political reasons.  However, the voters got tired of and saw right through their lies. The present economic crisis has caused the right-socialists to be replaced by the more honest left-socialists who have been enabled by their mortal enemies (socialists often take their intra-ideological splits very seriously and almost to the comical point of warfare as they spend vasts sums of money for political apparatuses and television ads designed to win elections the way nation states spend money on their militaries) to enact their version of socialism having been legitimized by the right socialists in the same way the Reconstruction Finance Corporation legitimized the New Deal.

So we’re left to argue which form of socialism still holds sway over the nation. Despite the squawking of the parrots, Obama’s 53-46 victory and left-socialist gains in Congress have at least moved the nation back to the center socialism, if not center-left. The center-right’s problem is that they have been exposed in their treachery. For years conservatives started out in belief in the actual definition of conservatism until the politics forced them towards socialism. (This is what David Stockman meant in his book “The Triumph of Politics: Why the Reagan Revolution Failed”) The conservative tradition of Burke expounded on by people like Russell Kirk or Richard Weaver simply was politically unsellable to the general public when actually tried. This why the Reagan Revolution failed, this why the Gingrich Revolution failed. The politicians then moved to right-socialism in order to survive all the while trying to fool people into believing they were still “conservatives”. This worked until 2008 when no one believed it anymore.

The way to recovery for the Grand Old Party lies down one of two paths: 1). They can start honestly saying they are right-socialists and govern like an old European Christian Democratic Party or Tory Party and drop any pretensions they are “conservative” so they can be truer to themselves or 2). They can reject socialism altogether steer back to a traditional, honest, conservatism and hope to find a politician and the wonks that can make both the politics and the policy work for them instead retreating to right-wing socialism for electoral survival. Of all the discussions and debates going on now as to what future course the GOP may take, this fork in the road, more than better organization or better tactics or upping their count of the white vote to 70 percent, is more relevent to their future course.