The libertarian says that no one is my neighbor, while the
liberal wishes to make the whole world my neighbor. The former operates from an atheistic
impulse, the latter’s is pantheistic.
Both converge to deny a nation or a culture, since they see either as
traps. From this, they toss around the
word “fascist” like discursive chump change.
The liberal’s currency is indeed “change”, where research, white
papers, reform programs, facilitators, and consultants thrive. Due to their overrepresentation in academia,
nonprofits, and the media, perfectly useless retoolings of education, social
programs, and institutions form their cottage industry. Think of it as a white-collar WPA.
Libertarians aren’t immune to the change mantra, either. There is the techno-rapture faction that
imagines The Market as something between a Jedi Force and a kind of divine
judge.
In place of the social, both offer abstractions. Liberals, the majority of whom are
uncomfortable with prole-ish social institutions, offer an amorphous
“community”, since that term lies everywhere and nowhere. Theirs is the world of the affinity group,
the ad-hoc collective, the on-line, “solidarity”, and above all, anything that
generates grant money. Libertarians
have backed themselves into an ideological corner, where the commons is a
prison, and the flow of capital constitutes grace. Underlying both groups is a snarky sense of
being above the customs and norms of society that you used to learn about in
school, but no longer do without inflection.
The libertarian believes in a Hobbesian state of nature,
while the liberal has “evolved” to believe that there is no such thing as human
nature.
They both love blank slates and zero-sum games, a
fundamentally infantile obsession with the pure. When you talk to either, you wonder if there
are any adults left in the room.
Liberals have embraced a narcissistic “all roads lead to us”
historiography that castigates ancestors and hides descendants. You, the past, are just an unenlightened
preamble to me, the present.
History for the libertarian is either a fetish or source
material for a conspiracy theory. They
have no patience for the ebb and flow of events, as those detours distract from
their ideology.
Liberals are the descendants of the Puritans, and are
Baudrillard’s “True Latter-Day Saints of the Easy Does It Apocalypse”. Nothing is personal anymore. Everything- your thoughts, what food goes through
your digestive system, your friendships-are political acts that damn you
forever, or are markers for status whoring.
Libertarians are frontiersmen, stripping away culture,
society, moral obligations, and benevolence to some endpoint that lies over the
horizon, where they will have the ultimate freedom to further defeat imaginary
demons and oppressors, and like Ozymandias, erect monuments to themselves.
