Well, one of the symmetries is the right-left dichotomy. They both insist on this false alternative. If you watch the "Day in NIght" interview with Ayn Rand, you will see that at one point, discussing the weakness of "belief" Rand starts to use the word "believe" and then catches herself, excusing the weakness of language.

We do it, too. Right and Left are a false dichotomy and at root they are conceptually meaningless.

As you know the World's Smallest Political Quiz is a two-dimensional grid. That is much better. In fact that poll has changed over the decades, suggesting that a proper taxonomy is multi-dimensional.

We use words like progressives, socialists, liberals, and then lump them all together. As I noted elsewhere F. A. Hayek called himself a liberal. Karl Popper and Hannah Arendt also were liberals.

The means determine the ends. If you use bullying and the other tactics of your enemies, you only achieve what they would.

It is impossible to lie, cheat, and steal our way to a limited constitutional government in a capitalist economy. Only reason can bring a reasonable society.

See the comment by Hiraghm below, his choice between controlling people and living in the wild is worse than a false dichotomy because they do not even exist on the same conceptual axis. If anything, that "wild state of nature" is the very tribe or village in which personal freedom cannot exist. See also the comment from Stargeezer to my post "City Air Makes You Free." Many conservatives share the Marxist ideal of a primitive society, "close to the Earth" living "in harmony with nature" shooting animals with guns that arrived miraculously from cities that would not even exist in their utopias.

Then, the next step is that this post gets voted down to zero or minus-one by an intolerant conservative whose god gave them absolute truth - truth that can stand no contradiction. That is clearly the mindset of the totalitarian, whether of the so-called "left" or "right."

Fascism and communism are not opposites, but only two expressions of the same philosophy of Hegelianism, which advocates for an "Idea" that is the final expression of social order, beyond which no change is possible.

I assure you that if we had a world of constitutional government in a capitalist economy, in a hundred years we would not recognize it. If a simple dichotomy encapsulates the distinction, it is between Fantasy and Science Fiction.

Lord of the Rings was a world of magic, the Shire, simple folk, and uncomplicated heroes, founding or regaining family lines of hereditary rulers, and talking trees as the epitome of wisdom. Both "left" and "right" identify with that.

For all of the pro-military and anti-market prejudices of its writers and producers, Star Trek is epitomized by a ship of exploration called "Enterprise" with logical Vulcans, intelligent and commanding women (who may or may not have children, as they choose), where novelty is constantly unfolding, and the scientific method is the accepted mode of knowing the physical world, which is the only world. Every "god" is just another kind of very real and un-mysterious, limited being, usually defeated for their attempt to rule others.

Karl Popper and Eric Hoffer made the same point, but called their Good Guy the liberal. Hayek also considered himself a liberal. To them, statists or collectivists or totalitarians were anti-liberals.

To me - as to Ayn Rand - the idea of a "conservative" is exactly the person who embraces fascism. That is why she wrote about "The Fascist New Frontier." President John Kennedy was a conservative.

If you spend any time among a spectrum of self-identified leftists or progressives or Marxists or communists or socialists, you understand soon that they know what they are talking about and they mean it.

The unthinking people are only that: unthinking.

In 2010, I was in a room with Bill Ayres and Bernadine Dohrn as they spoke to a group of college campus "New SDS" kids. No one was misinformed.

Now, granted that in that audience were at least a couple of "nice" people. (Not them, the kids.) They only wanted the best for everyone and they thought that workers' collectives voting in unions could make the best choices for everyone else -- and given the hard choice, most of them had absolutely no answer for the One Guy Who Does Not Want to Go Along with the Collective.

Some of them waved their hands and called on magic: in the perfect world, everyone would accept their point of view. Others were willing to use force against the errant individual to protect the group. In the world of Bill Ayres and Bernadine Dohrn you do not have a political right to be wrong.

No one was being led down the garden path.

But, you run into the very same people (dressed differently) if you are among a spectrum along the right wing of conservatives or libertarians. Murray Rothbard believed that all banks must be 100% full reserve gold-backed savings institutions -- and anything else was fraud -- and his anarcho-capitalist utopia would have agencies to PUNISH them.

I met a nice young man working for Ron Paul who said that only the government has the right to issue money. It is the same motivation as the leftists: they know what is best for you and they have enforcement mechanisms in place (at least in their dreams) to make you obey.

But they are NOT being fooled one step at a time along a gray-scale continuum. They know full well what they want.

Who is Mark Levin? What is his day job? It seems to me that he is just another world-beater with a Big Idea for everyone else to follow. I did not know anything about him until now when I googled him. The man worked for Edwin Meese, a Reagan administration fascist.
"Beginning in 1981, Levin served as advisor to several members of President Ronald Reagan's cabinet, eventually becoming Associate Director of Presidential Personnel and ultimately Chief of Staff to Attorney General Edwin Meese; Levin also served as Deputy Assistant Secretary for Elementary and Secondary Education at the U.S. Department of Education, and Deputy Solicitor of the U.S. Department of the Interior." -- Wikipedia - Mark Levin.