by Quagmire

Originally posted on the American New Right blog

As Preston and his comrades are busily outlining a functional anti-state strategy (and as a functional anti-state movement is busily coalescing around them) they have grown into a lightning rod for thunderstorms of left-wing hysterics. These have predictably emanated from those echo chambers of our institutions of lower learning known officially as the left-libertarian message boards.While I dedicated a past entry to defending his honor, I’ve neglected to pair my defense with a sturdy offense. My contempt for these over-protected mocha sippers is apparent from even the most cursory glance at this blog. My rationale for such a low evaluation, however, is not. So, while avoiding a backslide into rhetorical strawmen and ad hominem assaults, I have prepared this expanatory eviscreation.

A defining factor in the left-libertarian mindset is a decisive split from reality, one that renders them incapable of understanding, much less opposing, our current state of affairs. This is not unique to this faction, but likewise plagues the broader left of which they are an obvious subset. Specifically, they all but base their approach on the Marcusean identity politics inherited from the now graying New Left. This should not shock us in the least, given their origins as products of our academic idiot factories where those remnants have long held sway. Like their youthful disciples, these stale leftovers hail not from the underclass hordes whose interests they’ve appointed themselves to speak for, but from the very same strata they (correctly) attribute their misery to.

Somewhere between washing the mud off their legs and swapping cocaine for rogaine they found themselves at the helm of the very establishment they once told us we could never trust (a helm inherited, no doubt, from their bourgeoise folks.) With this dubious ascension the hollow nature of their rebellion became apparent so they started singing a different song. The establishment is your friend, the caring mama bear who will shelter you from white hoods, shaved heads, and tanned necks… and all the other nefarious nasties lurking under every bed and in every closet. Such scares are but a figment of the alzheimer’s encroached imagination of this mama bear. This time it’s the parents who are seeing and hearing things. And, another historic first, this time the kids actually listen to their parents. And…no break with tradition here…the kids repeat what they hear.

This effectively traps us in a cultural way back machine, with university engineered and approved TAPS teams chasing after ghosts that stopped hauntin’ these parts long ago, blind to their own status we should pull our covers over our heads for. When the well-off (and well-financed) anti-establishment agitators stormed the castle, they didn’t take a wrecking ball to it. They walzed on into the throne room of the new ousted monarch, assumed the throne, and unleashed a terror over the kingdom all their own. Meet the new boss, same as the old boss. The aging W.A.S.P. feudal lords were thrown out, but the feudal system itself was not…their positions were merely assumed by those cut from a more colorful cloth.

So, if you’ll allow me to transition from medeaval conquest back to modern hauntings, we arrive at an unsettling conclusion. Not only do the young false exorcists of the modern Left lack the theological know-how to properly expel spirits, they themselves are the spirits that need exorcising. So, if you’ll allow me me to time-warp yet again back to the middle-ages, we find that it is in fact the former lords and ladies of our cultural kingdom that need to take up arms. For those taking up arms with thems, the strategic implications are clear…and which I will share in common English.

In this world of “hate speech” legislation and “sensitivity training”, is it really that radical a move to wail about “institutionalized racism”…or to defend free speech and open inquiry for the insensitive? Is it that bold to crusade in favor of “women’s rights” in this era of family courts and university-mandated feminist studies…or to act on behalf of father’s rights? Is railing against “homosphobia” that radical a cause in a country where the lifestly is mostly viewed as an amusing novelty…or to agitate for freedom of speech and association for bible thumpers who find it a bit over the top? Is it that courageous to prattle on about “peace” and “non-violence”…or to snag a position on your local NRA chapter’s leadership board? I find these truths self evident. It’s indeed an odd paradox where conservatism has become radical and leftism reactionary.

The liberal-capitalist status quo takes as its basis the atomized individual, and its reason de’ etre that individual’s whims and wants. In this societal conception, these faceless particles construct their own mini-realities through an impersonal web of economic interaction and exchange. Preffered social relations are those concieved materially, with those that aren’t submerged under pavement. This process, starting at the dawn of modernity and within recent decades shifting into high gear, is effectively dissolving traditional ethnic groups, national boundaires, and cultures. How can effective ressistance, then, be found among those who dismiss such things as archaic abstractions (to be disposed of, naturally, so we can finally discover our universal “humanity”)?

For all the shrieking over alt.anarchism’s supposed “collectivism”, I fail to detect any flaw in a social system hardwired for organically constituted communities. If living and working with those you share commonalities with is such cardinal sin, why not just have the nanny state intervene for reprogramming purposes? Because a liberal universalist agenda doesn’t fit all, but a state enforcing it does, the answer to the debate over which side is more prone to authoritarian slipups is clear.

In his televised 1971 debate with Noam Chomsky, no less a leftist icon as Michel Foucault dismissed then contemporary radical movements on the grounds that their underlying philosophy was often wholly in line with that of the prevailing regime. His AIDS-related passing in 1984 was unfortunate, as he never got to see the realization of this observation among the inanities posted on the LL messageboards.

One from the Right, by Thomas Sowell

Elites may have more brilliance, but those who make decisions for society as a whole cannot possibly have as much experience as the millions of people whose decisions they preempt. The education and intellects of the elites may lead them to have more sweeping presumptions, but that just makes them more dangerous to the freedom, as well as the well-being, of the people as a whole.

One from the Left, by Kevin Carson

By making capital and land artificially scarce and expensive, the state forces workers to sell their labor in a buyer’s market and thereby reduces the bargaining power of labor. The owners of land and capital are thereby enabled to collect scarcity rents.

The economic effects are destabilizing. Income shifts from workers, who work mainly to meet their consumption needs, to rentiers with a high propensity to save and invest.  The result is a chronic tendency toward overaccumulation and underconsumption.

At the same time, the state subsidizes the most centralized, capital-intensive forms of production, leading to mass-production industry with overbuilt plant and equipment that’s constantly plagued with idle capacity.

Another once honorable organization falls into the clutches of PC and does the bidding of the therapeutic state. Article by Stephen Baskerville.

Congress is at the bottom, but the military and the police are in the top three. See the poll results.

“In the nineteenth century, a liberal was a person who championed individual liberty in a context of laissez-faire economics, who defined liberty as the absence of coercion, and who regarded the state as an ever-present threat to personal freedom and responsibility. Today, a liberal is a person who champions social justice in a context of socialist economics, who defines liberty as access to the means for a good life, and who regards the state as a benevolent provider whose duty is to protect people from poverty, racism, sexism, illness, and drugs.“

-Thomas Szasz