Speechless

from Peter Radford

It is rare for me to find words hard to come by. Now, however, I have arrived at such a point. I am speechless. Almost. The debt crisis is now moved beyond absurd. It is no longer theater to be analyzed by our seemingly never ending stream of experts – experts whose accumulated knowledge is either vacuous or worthless since they all are actors on the stage they pretend to critique. It is open civil discord. It is a revolution in our way of life being forced on us by a few zealots whom no one can resist.

That this is so is blatantly obvious.

A few hardcore revolutionaries within the Republican party have taken the entire economy hostage. They have seized control of the debate, frozen it, and turned it into a violent overthrow of civil discourse. They have replaced it with simple, straightforward, and callous threats. Do as we say, they tell us all, or we will destroy you. And we really don’t care if we destroy you all because we have utter contempt and disregard for your values, your opinions, and your way of life.

They have inverted any agreeable concept of liberty such that it is a tyranny of the few. The seek to impose their will and their opinions on us all. They seek to undo what has been a consensus construction of our economy, and erect in its place their own vision. A vision based upon a deep and abiding faith in the lack of society, the lack of community, the lack of collective action, the lack of centrality, the lack of anything other than a host of supposedly liberated individuals engage in endless tussle and conflict. It is a negation of modern life. It is a desperate attempt to reconstruct a pre-industrial economy, built around local pockets of pseudo-democratic cells of “free” citizens entering into locally negotiated relationships and with no distant or central state to diminish whatever they do. No matter how repressive that may be. This naive, pristine, and entirely fictional world will allow the strong to emerge even stronger. It will condemn the weak. It will condemn the poor. It will replace our modern world with a neo-libertarian mosaic of local elites, It will banish cooperation. It will disallow affiliation with anyone the locals perceive as the “others”.

It, like many of the movements in the world today, is based on fear of the other.

An inability to achieve is always the result of interference of the other. The collapse of the post-war social contract has opened the way for these revolutionaries to lay the blame for our malaise on the inefficiency of government and its endless interference in our lives. Only the destruction of the state can cure our problems. In particular the central state is demonized because it protects the other. It transfers wealth from one to another. It is thus a violent, oppressive, and satanic existential threat to any individual wanting to be free. Free, that is, in a libertarian sense.

So the revolutionaries seek to to destroy the body politic and raise in its stead a much diminished and neutralized mini-state that does nothing other than to police the borders. A policing even more necessary in order to keep out those others who want to enter and disrupt the quiet of the local fragments of America.

This vision is not that of most Americans. Time after time voters have expressed a desire to maintain wealth transferring machinery of the central modern state. Even now the vast majority want to continue the effects of having that machinery. They do not see it as intrusive or counter to a modernized version of liberty. They see it a necessary counterpoint to the vicissitudes of the ebb and flow of a free market based economy. Though most would not articulate it that way. The central state provides sufficient ballast in our lives that we can accept the risk of our highly volatile private economy. The state evens things out just enough that we tolerate the enormity of the wealth accumulated by those who rent seek or who own capital. Remove that ballast and for most the future becomes one of clinging on. It is a world of constant fear of calamity, not one of rugged self-constructed assured success.

The rough and tumble libertarians reject this fear as weakness. A weakness they treat with contempt.

This debt ceiling debate was never about the debt. This is why arcane arguments about modern monetary theory entirely miss the point. This is not about debt, the repayment of debt, or how to pay for government services. It is about abolishing those services. It is about expunging the welfare state from the record. Paying for services is thus not relevant. This is about the imposition of the libertarian vision on the rest of us. It is about the seizure and destruction of the central state apparatus.

That the zealots cannot be appeased should be no surprise. History has taught us appeasement only acts to incite extremists to adopt a more aggressive stance. That the Republicans have rejected proposals that represent a total sell out of progressive values is testimony to this. They want more. And they are prepared to pull the entire place down to get it.

Which is why I am speechless.

Almost.