Paul,

Good going, you have managed to avoid addressing the problems that the Greens face and diverted to the LNP.

Didn't you know that the Greens were losing members like a moulting chook losing feathers?

Interesting material regarding Hinckley... Take care not to be sucked in to the "conspiracy theories".

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Hinckley_Jr.
http://nstarzone.com/HINCKLEY.html
http://www.infowars.com/why-nancy-reagan-hated-the-bush-family/
http://ninjapundit.blogspot.com/2015/10/communist-and-kgb-links-to-jfk-rfk-mlk.html

Posted by Toni Lavis, Sunday, 3 February 2019 12:35:22 PM-

//Do communists still exist?//
He uses his own definition for Communist that differs from the definition most people use - ... This leads to the interesting situation where you can have somebody who is both in favour of capitalism and a Communist, simultaneously.
It seems a bit weird and nonsensical to most of us, but there is a coherent internal logic to it. It just leads to difficulties in the effective communication of ideas when CM tries to talk about Communism with people who don't adhere to his own personal definitions, and leads him to estimate a much larger number of Communists in Australia than people who follow more conventional definitions of Communist would estimate.

Answer- As Elon Musk says to understand a problem and to innovate you need to go back to first principles- and then reason up from there.

Patrick Deneen seems to have done this in his book "The Death Of Liberalism" by going back to the foundations of Liberal democracy.

Toni Lavis is correct that my definition of Communism is atypical to some- but political concepts such as Communism and Liberal are complicated. For example in Australia Liberal often means the "Liberal Party" (a "Right" party) in the US Liberal means the "Democrat Party" (a "Left" party).

Deneen tries to clarify this terminology by returning to first principles and referring to "Classical Liberalism" as envisaged by John Locke considered the person who invented the principles of contemporary free (Liberal) democracy.

According to Deneen- Locke Liberalism includes both Social Liberalism (Social Diversity) and Economic Liberalism (Free Markets).

"Monarchy" or "Traditional" or "Tribalism" on the other hand originates from non-Liberal principles. Even animals group behavior is a form of tribalism. So based on this analysis there is the "Monarchy vs Liberal continuum" and the "Social vs Economic continuum"- this is a two dimensional political framework. (Hard to represent without pictures on OLO)

Locke as all people are- was a person influenced by the changes of the time. It was a time when villagers had been disenfranchised from the land by monarchs. I'm not an expert on Locke (he wrote Two Treatises of Government) but he appears to be supporting the monarchy of the day and it's policies and envisaging an age of mass community that we have today- because this would provide the rulers with resources for their activities- so much for those peoples homes. It was common at one time for the intelligentsia to have rich benefactors- so it is in their interest to support those with the power- it's still probably the case in a way- see the pharmaceutical industry and their links with the research community.

Back to the concept of Communism-

I'd probably agree with Toni Lavis that my definition of Communism is perhaps different than some- but I believe that after analysis as to the basis of "Communism" and the so called "New Left" perhaps some would agree that they are very similar- to the extent for simplicity they can be considered as clustered in the same region of the political spectrum.

The founder of the New Left is considered to be Marcuse who was a Trotskyist/ New Freudian. Leon Trotsky was a Communist and was a significant part of corporeal communism in Russia.

Some pervasive paradigms-

For Communists and the New Left the biggest issue is the class war between the workers and the employers- Marxism believed that nations, cultures, sexes would be broken down prior to a socialist world- these views seem to be embodied in the policies of liberals (rather than Conservatives or Traditionalists) but especially Social Liberals (those commonly labelled as left).

Marcuse (new left) seems to have acknowledged that capitalism improved the economic status of the "proles" but they were still controlled but the elites. So in a sense Marcuse was from a Trotskyist Communist background but also accepted that the proles wouldn't support communism when their standard of living improved with capitalism so accepted at least some of the benefits of Capitalism- but as a means to achieve a Marxist world.

Unions in some cases can be seen as a form of tribalism- but when dogma is pervasive across the world it becomes globalism. There seems to have been ideological movement within the structure of the workers movements since the 70's towards dogma.

In summary as Toni Lavis has correctly said "He uses his own definition for Communist that differs from the definition most people use"- but he has failed to acknowledge the failure in the definition of political terminology in general usage.

Hopefully this has clarified one of my perspectives that Toni Lavis has highlighted.

Toni Lavis- Thank you for your feedback.