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The coming triumph of libertarianism?
While the increasingly tyrannical EU spreads its tentacles over Europe, while the increasingly empowered tyranny of Islam spreads terror and sharia across more and more of the world, Reason magazine is celebrating the Libertarian Moment. Reading this supremely confident, ecstatically triumphalist, wildly overcharged rant by Reason’s editors Nick Gillespie and Matt Welch makes me feel as though I were locked in a room with two speed freaks (i.e., Methedrine addicts). If you were to mention to the authors the threats to freedom represented by the EU and Islam, they would reply that that’s just “politics,” and, as they put it, “Politics, always a crippled, lagging indicator of social change, will be the last entrenched oligopoly to be squashed like a bug on the windshield of history.” Squashing politics like a bug on the windshield of history? Squashing established institutions (since, to libertarians, all established institutions are unfree and therefore oligopolies) like bugs on the windshield of history? Isn’t that a rather Marxian image for a libertarian magazine? Didn’t the Communists promise to destroy every existing institution and society on earth? The threatening language—the language of the ideological juggernaut crushing everything in its path—is indeed that of Communism. However, this is not really a surprise. As I’ve always said, libertarians are Communists turned inside out. Let us further understand that among these entrenched oppressive institutions to be squashed like bugs on the windshield of history are traditional marriage (homosexual rights is at the top of Gillespie’s and Welch’s list of things to celebrate), traditional morality (their moral ideal is unconstrained and ever pullulating individual choice, particularly consumer choice), and traditional nationhood (their political ideal is a world of absolutely free individuals, so it’s axiomatic that nations and national borders must go). It is as though Gillespie and Welch had read Plato’s daimonically brilliant account of distopian Democracy in Book VIII of The Republic,—the picture of a society without moral and spiritual truth, a society ruled by totally liberated desire and the constant, entrancing flux of “diversity” (a word Plato himself uses repeatedly)—and said, This is great! This is our ideal! Strangely, while the authors boast of the inevitable progress of history that squashes like a bug every existing institution, it doesn’t seem to occur to them that the same progress of history may wipe out their own ecstatically libertarian society. As they apparently see it, total moral and cultural liberation plus advanced technology, particularly computer technology, means an escape from the rise and fall of civilizations of which Gibbon and Toynbee tell us, an escape from the ups and downs of human society as delineated in The Book of Judges, a final exit from the tragic cycles of history described by Plato and Polybius. And this explains why Gillespie and Welch don’t fear the Tyranny, that, according to Plato, develops inevitably out of Democracy—the tyranny, in our time, of the transnational left, the tyranny of the UN and the EU, the tyranny of Islam that our diversity-addicted Democracy welcomes and empowers. According to Gillespie and Welch, all those tyrannies are just old political and religious stuff foredoomed by the Internet, libertarian culture, and libertarian business. For Gillespie and Welch, the totally liberated humanity that will remain when all the bugs of civilization have been squashed on the racing windshield of history represents nothing less than the End of History.
LA writes:
I’m not the only person who thought the authors were on psychoactive drugs when I read this article. Here’s a comment at the Reason site:Gintas writes:
I think the Libertarian Party got about 0.4 percent of the presidential vote. Ride that wave to victory!LA replies:
If, as Gintas says, the Libertarians are of no importance to speak of, then there is the implication that they were not worth the kind of serious critique I gave them. But if it’s true that they have no significant influence, then it’s also the case that never have intellectually marginal figures written an article of such triumphalist elan.Gintas writes:
I believe the “lifestyle libertarians” like Gillespie and Welch vastly overrate their own importance. They certainly talk big (in this case, cosmically and comically big), not that most people notice. The libertarian party has been around a while, and there is still no movement, no political power to speak of. Posted by Lawrence Auster at December 01, 2008 02:03 AM | Send Email entry |