Those who’ve made their way into the counterculture must admit that seeing the Left-Right dichotomy unmasked as kabuki theater was one of the hardest pills to swallow. With the exception of the Zoomers, every living generation of Americans was conditioned to support the Red Team against the Blue Team or vice versa. Learning that Team Red was long ago paid off to take a dive came as a shock.
Learning that Republicans are the electoral version of the Washington Generals, paid to take a dive against the Democrats’ Globetrotters, naturally raises the question of why. Pulling that thread unravels the whole sham of Conservatism and Liberalism as opposing ideologies. Liberalism attempts to enshrine freedom as an absolute divorced from objective good. Conservatism accepts the same basic premise but adds sundry temporary restrictions based on taste and social mood.
Astute readers will spot the fatal flaw intrinsic to all Liberal ideologies, including Conservatism. Establishing personal freedom as the ne plus ultra of human action precludes any possible limiting principle on self-expression. Taking away objective value reduces everything to a matter of preference.
We see this dynamic at work in the common internet straw man which reframes a moral claim as opposition to “something you don’t like.” It’s a clumsy substitution of an arbitrary preference statement for a value statement, but most people are so mired in Liberal assumptions that they fall for it. That’s how moral idiots reframe opposition to pedophilia as curmudgeonly hating on just another form of self-expression.
And it works, because by accepting the Liberal moral frame, Conservative objections to any exercise of personal freedom are automatically rendered arbitrary.
The pedos over at the Lincoln Project seem hell bent on proving Conservatives are just slow members of Team Shitlib. Their tiki torch stunt is what you’d get if Woke Cultists with a time machine tried to blend in at a 1950s Klan rally. But that’s essentially how republican Boomers perceive the Culture War.
Unfortunately, that conditioning runs deep. A phenomenon that’s been creeping into dissident circles lately is the sad spectacle of formerly redpilled folks falling back into Liberal modes of thought. A lot of these guys came out of Libertarianism during the Trump years, so their backsliding is understandable, even though they should know better.
Trump’s failure to achieve much of anything may have driven many Ys and Xers into a form of nostalgic despair. Perhaps they’re convinced that if they spout the same Barry Goldwater quotes they used to in high school civics class, Ludwig von Mises will appear and set the clock back to 1995.
It’s magical thinking fundamentally no different from the cargo cultism of the Left. Like religious converts with buyers’ remorse, relapsed Libertarians think that reciting the old formulas and performing the familiar rituals will deliver them into a promised land where they can homestead–and probably grow weed–far from the watchful eye of Big Government.
Of course, Big Government is no less an amorphous bogeyman than White Privilege. The former results from primitive speculation on cause and effect applied to the observed reality of the government perpetrating evil. “The government does evil. The government is big. Therefore big government is evil.”
What you never hear from Libertarians is precisely what “Big Government” means. Nor do they propose any realistic means of making it smaller. They closest they come are pie in the sky allusions to rolling federal spending back to 1995 or 1985 or 1955 levels.
All of this is just smokescreen for the fact that government’s size isn’t the source of our woes. It’s hard to think of bigger governments, in the sense of the scope of government power, than monarchies. Yet not even the most tyrannical king would seriously entertain the notion of replacing his subjects wholesale with a foreign people. A king ruled a nation, which was a large extended family. He had skin–and blood–in the game.
The scourge besetting the West arises from the fact that our leaders no longer have the least thing in common with us. The democracy hailed by the Lincoln Project has enabled the ruling class to insulate themselves from all accountability for their actions. After all, their logic goes, you voted for them, so you deserve the blame for their misrule.
It’s not the size of the government that counts. It’s the quality of the people in it and their degree of attachment to their constituents. Our corrupt oligarchs won’t voluntarily part with one iota of power anyway, so the solution to the size and malice of the government is the same.
They seek to replace us, so we must replace them.
