What is commonly referred to as “the right” by the so-called “mainstream media” is actually what I prefer to call “the Deputized Right”—a faux right-wing that takes its marching orders from the left.

More specifically, the Deputized Right is actually nothing other than the neoconservative left that the recognizable left permits to exist.

Anyone with any doubts on this score should consider that neither domestically nor internationally do the recognizable left and the Deputized Right fundamentally disagree on a single issue. Rhetorical nods to “limited government” and the like aside, its positions on immigration, the NSA’s massive surveillance apparatus, military adventurism, “gay rights,” “anti-discrimination” laws, government-run health care, government-run education, and every other conceivable topic differ—when they differ—from those of the recognizable left only in degree, never in kind.

The Deputized Right is every bit as invested in preserving and expanding the power and reach of the federal government as is the recognizable left.  The self-appointed neocon guardians of the counterfeit right are permitted to complain of government “overreach” when it comes to such government-run healthcare programs as the woefully unpopular “Obamacare,” but they wouldn’t think to even remotely suggest rolling back Medicare and Medicaid—government-run healthcare programs whose hold over the medical industry in America they’ve actually helped to strengthen.

Those on the Deputized Right can blast government-run schools when talking of “public education”—as long as they never come even close to recommending anything like a complete “separation of state and education.”  And, of course, they never do.  Instead, Deputized Rightists rattle on about “school choice”—a set of arrangements according to which government still pulls the strings.

Deputized right-wingers are as much in favor of “comprehensive immigration reform”—i.e. amnesty—as are recognizable leftists.

Deputized rightists burst apart with pride in reminding Americans that their party, the Republican Party, was instrumental in helping Lyndon Banes Johnson enact such historically unprecedented “civil rights” legislation as the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.  Such legislation—agitated for, mind you, by the author of the Great Society, an American president who the Deputized Right routinely decries as among the worst of “liberal” politicians to ever occupy the White House—expanded exponentially the federal government’s stranglehold over the states and its citizens.  And yet the Deputized Right not only relishes in its (alleged) role in making it all happen, but spares no occasion to remind Americans of this.

The Deputized Right excoriates President Obama for being a socialist, a hard leftist, etc., while lavishing praise upon Martin Luther King, Jr.—a man who was at least as far to the left as Obama.  At the same time, it demonizes as “anti-American” and even “treasonous” a young American soldier who enlisted in the military to fight in Afghanistan, a prisoner of war who eventually expressed disgust with America for its involvement in the Islamic, Middle Eastern world, while adoring King—even though the latter referred to America as the planet’s greatest “purveyor” of violence during the height of the Vietnam War.

The Deputized Right talks of “limited government” while simultaneously calling for an ever larger, ever more intrusive, military.  But Big Military is Big Government.

The Deputized Right insists that we are in a “War on Terror”—a war against either an abstraction or a bottomless supply of Islamic terrorists. Either way, it is a “war” without end, a war that can never be won.

The “right” is the Deputized Right, which is to say a counterfeit right, a neoconservative left that differs, if at all, only negligibly from the recognizable left.  If only those with eyes would dare to see past the rhetoric of talk radio and the cable news networks, they would realize that the conflicts on display in these media boil down to internecine conflicts between leftists of not so different stripes.