The Anti-Governmentality Will Never Govern Well

Kos is one of the growing number of progressives who are coming, at long last, to "get it," and to say it loud and proud: Republican cronyism, incompetence, theft, fraud, and war-profiteering are not unfortunate accidents. On the contrary, they arise directly and inevitably from the anti-government ethos of Movement Conservatism itself, from the defining market libertarian philosophy that has ruthlessly taken over the Republican party from the Reagan era to the present epoch of the Killer Clowns... ever more resolutely driving America off the cliff, all the while.

I recommend his recent posts describing the quixotic efforts of poor wingnut Newt Gingrich to salvage electoral viability for the Republican Revolution (you know, the one with his own irrationally exuberant libertechian fingerprints all over it) by insisting on some shred of commitment to competent governance from Republicans while the demon spawn of the Movement, grinning grubs like Tom DeLay, respond like clockwork by accusing Newt of Lurving Big Gu'ment for his efforts (see today's "Government Is Not Working" as well as Kos's earlier "Republican Implosion" for more).

Of course, all this is just a straightforward application of my regularly reiterated point that the failure of Movement Conservatism is likewise a failure of market libertarian ideology. (For my shrill market fundamentalist peanut gallery I refer, mind you, to the real world failure of market libertarian ideology. You are quite right, as True Believers always are, that the never realized never realizable abstract ideals of libertopianism from which you derive your statuesque certitude remain as intact as ever. They are, after all, in stricto senso incapable of "failure" inasmuch as failure requires some actual connection to reality.)

As always, for me, the key lesson here is that the democratic left must be especially vigilant as the smoking Hindenburg of Movement Conservatism becomes a mushroom cloud. We cannot allow Republicans to run for the "cover" of professed "libertarianism" when it is market libertarian slogans and arguments that fueled Movement Conservatism from the get-go. America's native anti-intellectualism, conformism, exceptionalism, privilege, complacent acquiescence to elite mismanagement will offer up endless inducements to the most superficial change and reform, to looking the other way as the cast of corrupt characters changes party rather than corruption itself suffering defeat, from earnest elite professions of "lessons learned" conjoined with stealthy consolidations of the status quo, and so on.

To argue, as Movement Conservatives have always done, that "government is the problem" (when the problem has always been unaccountable unresponsive undemocratic governance) and that "privatization" and "deregulation" and "tax cuts" without end are the "answer" (which always translates to welfare for the rich and bullets for the vulnerable, even when advocated by otherwise perfectly nice people) is to express an outlook and rhetoric and policy that is absolutely continuous with the most extreme and marginal market fundamentalist ideology of the anarcho-capitalist. And hence to retreat from Republicanism into market fundamentalism is not to learn from one's mistakes but to retreat into the Bunker. The democratic left cannot let the Right (including the neoliberals in notionally "left" partisan formations, the neoconservatives, the free market ideologists, the corporate globalists, and so on) get away with this kind of facile bait and switch.

One hopes that all of this is a lesson Kos himself is taking to heart, and that his occasional genuflections to "Libertarian Dems" are at an end.