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Thursday, March 04, 2010

Falling In Love Again With Fascism; Or, The Teabaggers Are Just Not That Into You

The Tea Party Movement is the latest excrescence of the idiosyncratically American commercial-militarist rightwing imaginary -- like the Warbloggers and the Cult of Bush before them, like the Gingrich Revolution with its Contract On America and the Militia Movement before them, like the Reagan Revolution and the Moral Majority and Operation Rescue before them, like the Ayn Randroids and the "Silent Majority" before them, like McCarthyism and the Birchers before them, like the Business Plotters of the White House Putsch and the Mont Pelerin Society before them….

It is rather flabbergasting for progressive-minded folks to see Republicans on the tee-vee on a daily basis insisting on the need to "return" to their guiding Ideas of "smaller government and lower taxes," to hear the bloody-minded anti-government zealots in the streets screaming about the socialism of a single step toward the kind of healthcare system cherished by the citizens of nearly every other reasonably free industrial nation on earth for generations, to hear mainstream media pundits describing white-racist warmongering theocratic anti-civilizational rhetoric as some kind of "populist uprising" or as a serious movement offering up radical "new ideas."

I say that this is flabbergasting to hear just now of all times, because of course anybody the least bit sensible knows all too well that the collapse of the financial fraudsters was brought about by the deregulatory fervor of free-market ideologues, just as the illegal immoral Iraq War was inspired by the fantasy of installing a free market utopia in an oil-rich American client state, just as the dot.bomb was suffused with the irrational exuberance of privatizers and libertopians claiming that digital networks would somehow produce a "Long Boom" instead of the inevitable debacle that eventuated instead -- as it always does and will when people pretend that nothing is something, and pretend that high hopes are real products, and pretend that speculation is investment, and pretend that markets and people are perfectly rational and then pretend that such perfect rationality consists of robotically calculating hyperbolically self-promoting insistently materialistic greed-glutted sociopathy.

In other words, it is flabbergasting to hear Republicans and so-called "libertarians" and "Teabaggers" insisting that the way to cope with our current disaster is to do again and do more of what we did to bring about the disaster in the first place.

The first thing to say about this, however, is that we shouldn't feel flabbergasted by this paradoxical state of affairs, because it has happened so incessantly already that it is surely perfectly predictable by now. More to the point, we should stop wasting time being flabbergasted by the enthusiastic "rediscovery" of libertopian delusions by those who always make precisely the same enthusiastic "rediscovery" of libertopian delusions in the aftermath of whatever disaster was last brought into being by the last enthusiastic "rediscovery" of libertopian delusions.

The second thing to say about this is that democratically-minded people really should instead be making some effort to understand just what it is that renders this "rediscovery" of libertopian delusions so incessant and so enthusiastic in the first place. More to the point, we should actually take the trouble to make a clear compelling positive case as to why acting on these libertopian delusions will be exactly as disastrous in its effects this time as it always is and why good accountable government and a robust welfare state supported by progressive taxes is the only way to bring about a more equitable, diverse, consensual, prosperous outcome at last.

The Republican Party is indeed a political party devoted to getting its members elected to government office, and though the Party is well-pleased to capture and deploy libertopian delusions and the enthusiasm of anti-government ideologues in the service of getting its members elected to government office, the delusive libertopians and anti-government anti-tax ideologues often seem shocked and crestfallen for some unfathomable reason to discover that the Republicans they explicitly champion or implicitly facilitate do not upon arrival in office thereupon dismantle the very government all their energies all along have been devoted explicitly in word and deed to controlling.

Contrary to the delusive libertopians the anti-governmentality of Republicans inevitably takes the form instead of governing incompetently and corruptly.

For this reason, the delusive libertopians and anti-government ideologues typically declare themselves to be "outsiders" of the Republican Establishment, although none of their insurgent independent energies or organizing or agitating have any kind of material existence at all except to the extent that they are captured and deployed by the very "compromised" Republicans they fancy themselves external to. Individual anti-government ideologues confronted with the inevitable and incessant mean-spirited excesses and serial war adventures and disastrous regulatory and budgetary failures that attend the Republican governance that has eventuated from their endless mouthing of free-market pieties and their support of Republicans as the best on offer because they tend to mouth the same free-market pieties typically declare themselves to be "outsiders" as well, "libertarians" rather than Republicans, although, again, none of their insurgent independent energies or organizing or agitating have any kind of material existence at all except to the extent that they are captured and deployed by the very "compromised" Republicans they fancy themselves external to.

This is not an accident, this is an inevitability.

Let's say it again: It is not an accident that Republican anti-governmentality takes the form of incompetence and corruption rather than the form of anarcho-capitalist elimination of government to make way for the "spontaneous order" of free market Libertopia. It is inevitable because political parties have no reason to exist if government doesn't exist (this is even more palpably the case for failed foolish Libertarian Third Party organizations), but also because the very idea of "spontaneous order" is incoherent.

"Markets" are not spontaneous upwellings out of natural tidal forces of "supply and demand" but are constituted and maintained through laws, treaties, protocols, norms, institutions that are entirely artificial and historically contingent. Markets cannot provide an alternate "spontaneous" organizing principle to government because markets are first of all not spontaneous at all and second of all because markets are actually utterly dependent precisely on government for their form and force.

To not understand all this is not to have a new idea: It isn't new. It isn't even an idea. To not understand all this is to be stupid. To not understand this is to not understand at the most basic imaginable level what you are talking about.

In much the same way, these delusive libertopians and anti-government anti-tax zealots often seem shocked and crestfallen for some unfathomable reason to discover that the Republicans they explicitly champion or implicitly facilitate upon arrival in office immediately begin to dismantle civil liberties, behaving precisely like the tyrants they warn us about out of office, installing dictatorships around the world, declaring illegal wars for financial gain, spying on citizens without warrants, torturing people, suspending habeas corpus, engaging in black ops with secret budgets for reasons of state that are treated as state secrets.

Again, this is not an accident, this is an inevitability.

Market fundamentalists like to crow about their non-violence, libertopians like to declare that they are the only ones who consistently advocate the "non-initiation of force" in human affairs. This is because they have simply defined anything that passes as a market outcome or contractual transaction as "non-coercive" by word-magic, by fiat. It doesn't matter to them should the contract be made under conditions of duress like those that prevail when one party to a transaction knows considerably more about the stakes and likely outcomes of the transaction than the other so that it is "a free agreement" between a well-informed insider and an ignorant or misinformed person, or one party to a transaction possesses considerably more resources than the other so that it is "a free agreement" between a comfortable prosperous elite-incumbent and a person one paycheck away from homelessness, starvation, or a sick child without access to medicine or any prospect of a better life. Market ideologues commend as "non-violent" what actually amount to conditions of brutal injustice, arbitrary inequity, profound exploitation. They celebrate and in fact demand a world suffused and stratified by endless violence, and then indulge in the further rhetorical violence of declaring their fantastic festival of violence as the essence of non-violence itself.

So, too, market ideologues defend as an expression of individual "self-defense" rather than state violence all national military spending and war preparations, thereby, again more or less by word-magic, by fiat, transforming the violence of actual war-making and provocative war-preparation into a defensive non-initiative quasi-"nonviolence."

But because anti-government pro-market ideology inevitably makes this exception in its excoriation of government expenditure for military spending, and since "Defense" in the context of a global nation-state system of inter-dependent mass-mediated industrial technoscientific societies is inevitably vastly complex and ubiquitous and ongoing and incomparably expensive this means that superficially anti-government Republicans and libertarians can attack government interference in the market while at once championing that interference through vast public spending on "Defense," they can attack welfare spending for the vulnerable while at once championing welfare for the already-rich through investment in private defense industries, they can demand smaller government while endlessly enlarging military armadas and hierarchies, they can rail against tyranny while advocating an ever-expanding militarism that is always tyrannical without a sufficient countervailing check of democratic accountability.

In market ideological discourse, across the spectrum from mainstream and Movement Republicanism to the canon of market libertarian classics -- from Mises, Hayek, Hazlett, Rand, Rothbard, Friedman, Norquist, and De Soto, to the neoliberal futurists of the Global Business Network and the original Teabagger Ron Paul -- it is quite characteristic to extol the practical virtues of competition unencumbered by government interference (although, as I've already pointed out, what counts as "competition" in free market ideology is always and inevitably maintained by means of state governance), it is quite characteristic to extol the moral virtues of enterprise devoid of force and fraud (although, as I've already pointed out, what counts as "non-coercive" in free market ideology always and inevitably amounts to contractual transactions and market outcomes suffused with coercive duress and stratified by coercive inequities), it is quite characteristic to denounce tyranny and public expenditures (although, as I've already pointed out, what counts as liberty and small government in free market ideology always and inevitably champions non-democratic militarist hierarchy treated as expressions of individual self-defense and vast public expenditures and state planning of the economy stealthed as defense spending).

Yet again: To not understand all this is not to have a new idea... It isn't new. It isn't even an idea. To not understand all this is to be stupid. To not understand this is to not understand at the most basic imaginable level what you are talking about.

Every ten years or so the mainstream media in America seems to "re-discover" market libertarians and falls passionately in love with what they always seem to think is the new idea that government should be dismantled to create an "opening" for liberty and prosperity to spontaneously emerge out of America's unique entrepreneurial genius and kind-hearted native generosity.

But this American exceptionalist stealth-authoritarian market ideology is not new, and what passes for its ideas are not new either. The ideas are always stupid. The ideas are always recipes for disaster. These serial inevitable libertopian "insurgencies" that reject the Republican Establishment and then immediately re-invigorate precisely that Republican Establishment they will go on to reject again when its efforts go on to yield the same outcomes they always do seem to me to represent the endless episodic reiterations of a deep seated apparently inextirpable American orthodoxy, an eternal insistent pre-emptive incomprehension of the most basic conditions on which lawfulness and prosperity depend for their actual functioning in the real world.

No matter how many times the libertopians hit upon the fabulous ideas that eating civilization is compatible with having it, that looting sprees are compatible with keeping stuff, that denying interdependence is a way of accomplishing independence, that militarism is compatible with liberty, and all the other fragrant flowers in their fabulous garden of facile falsehoods, it will always remain just as true that they are completely wrong about everything and that disaster will always ensue precisely to the extent that they manage to accomplish anything remotely like the outcomes they so fervently desire.

And in the end all of this breathless excitement and ferment always ultimately just amounts to cover for the richest of the rich (and those pathetic rubes who either fancy that one day they too will number among the rich, or who imaginatively identify with the rich and the spectacle of their obscene enjoyments in defiance of their own interests) who pretend that having lots of guns to protect their pleasure palaces and photogenic serfs while almost everybody else on earth grubs around in ignorance, illness, injustice and filth in the midst of warlords and priests and greenhouse storms somehow represents a vision of civilization worthy of the name.

Until Democrats consistently condemn free market ideology as the anti-democratizing anti-civilizational discourse it is, and until Democrats make and champion their own positive case for good democratic government funded by progressive taxation of income (including investment income) and property to provide nonviolent alternatives for the adjudication of inevitable disputes in a world of diverse stakeholders and to maintain a legible libertarian scene of informed nonduressed consent (which requires universal basic guaranteed income, healthcare, lifelong education, and wholesome housing, equal recourse to the law, equal rights to free expression, assembly, organizing, the franchise, office seeking, and access to reliable information and publication), until Democrats clearly decry the anti-democratic politics of the commercial-militarist right and just as clearly defend the democratic politics of equity-in-diversity, peer to peer, you can be sure that they will never manage much more than to be called in generation after generation to clean up after the messes of libertopian authoritarian wish-fulfillment fantasies gone incessantly disastrously wrong, each time worse and worse and worse, until finally the whole earth perishes in an orgy of genocidal war machines or a swarm of climate catastrophes, famines, and pandemics.

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