A big part of what I’ve been trying to think through in the course of the years now I’ve been writing this blog is how ideas relate to and influence our experience of reality.  Because of the severity of political crisis we’re currently undergoing, most of my posts have been about political ideas. Most people don’t think things through in the Socratic sense to
evaluate the validity of their presuppositions.  They live their lives
pretty much absorbing the attitudes and values of influential people
around them.  And so political ideas are derivative of mindsets developed in the cultural sphere–ideas that are shaped by one’s religion, one’s ethnicity or regional culture, one’s exposure to compelling teachers, coaches, or other community leaders.

Everyone lives within a system of ideas that shapes his or her cultural sphere, and it transcends individual decency. So, for example, there were lots of decent, otherwise ethical, churchgoing Southern white people who accepted the segregationist system as normal reality, gave little thought to any alternative, and dismissed criticism of it as a kind of cluelessness typical of Yankees or other outsiders.  Segregationism was an ideas system that unconsciously shaped reality and made everyone who lived in it think that it was as normal and natural as cows grazing in the pasture. It was the soup everyone in the South swam in, and you had to be an unusual white person to live there and be outraged by its injustices. 

So in my trinity of social spheres–political, cultural, and economic–the cultural is the most important, because the way an  the cultural sphere shapes an individual influences his attitudes and behaviors in the political and economic.  For people who don’t think much about the cultural presuppositions of their acculturated worldview, It’s mostly an unconscious influence, and its very unconsciousness makes it impossible to discuss rationally.  Nevertheless, the world as our unconscious shapes it for us is the real world.

This is true always and everywhere, and the only antidote is to examine one’s naive cultural presuppositions.  Liberals think they are more enlightened than conservatives, but in my experience they’re just as likely to have an unconsciously shaped worldview.  Attitudes toward abortion are typical in that respect, as are their attitudes on many other issues that they assume to be morally superior than conservative positions. There are lots of examples of it, but I was particularly struck by it when I participated in a teach-in during the nuclear freeze days of the early eighties.  I played the role of  devil’s advocate in a group exercise by arguing the conservative position on nuclear disarmament.  The others in the group were for typical liberal activist types, not necessarily leaders, but people who were part of a disarmament groupthink.  I was really surprised  that when I made some typical pro-arms race arguments, like the historical success of mutually assured destruction, nobody in my group had a vigorous counter for them.  It’s not something they had ever thought about or cared about.  Nuclear bombs were bad, and that was the end of it.

Well, they are bad, and that’s why I was there with them looking for ways to promote disarmament.  But I was surprised at the degree of their naivete.  Their anti-nuclear attitudes were derived simply by assimilating them more or less unconsciously from their liberal cultural milieu. My confronting them with pro-arms race arguments seemed to be the first time they ever encountered them.  Apparently they never met anybody who thought differently from them and challenged them.  They were as naively peacenik as so many southerners were naively segregationist. And so it became clear to me in a way that it hadn’t before why " liberal public opinion" was perceived as so flaky and so easy for serious people to dismiss during the Reagan era.

Serious disarmament thinking or serious people who understand how the world works and yet still look for every possibility to promote peaceful, sane conflict resolutiion were  tarred by association with this larger group of flaky peace-at-any-cost types that developed in the sixties and seventies, and they became a stereotype that made  it easy for a lot of people to dismiss serious arguments for peace. I marched in the Feb. 15, 2003, protest against the impending invasion of Vietnam, and the geist of the event was very much dominated by that kind of naive peacenik mentality that makes such events seem flaky. 

Maybe there’s no way around it.  But I just don’t see people with these attitudes being the power base for building serious opposition to the serious threats that will confront us in the future.  Maybe I romanticize the Civil Rights movement of the late fifties and sixties before King was shot.  But it had a kind of moral seriousness that resistance movements seem to lack now.  There was a discipline, poise, poignancy present in that movement that seems lacking now. 

Anyway, I bring this all up because now because the threat that we all face is as serious now as any we have faced in our history, and there doesn’t seem to be a way to organize a morally serious resistance to it.  And maybe it’s not up to the so-called left in this country to do it.  The leadership might have to come from the principled conservatives who are finally figuring out that that their mostly unconscious affiliation with the Republicans during the Cheney/Bush era has meant supporting the destruction of the very basis of the traditional rule of law and the civil liberties that they care most deeply about.  This realization is not causing them to defect to the Democratic Party but to the Libertarian Party. 

Bob Barr, former GOP congressman from Georgia, and arch-conservative House manager of President Clinton’s impeachment trial, is one of them.  He’s interviewed in a piece appearing into today’s Salon.  Here’s his response to the interviewer’s question asking him why he left the Republicans for the Libertarians:

…the Libertarian Party, among all of the parties out there, is the only one that is true to my core philosophy of working to minimize government power and maximize individual liberty. None of the other parties, and especially the Republican Party any longer, is at all committed to that philosophy. And secondly, my great concern, manifested especially since 9/11, is the assaults on our fundamental civil liberties by this administration. [That’s] personified, for example, in the disregard for the rule of law as exhibited by the warrantless NSA [National Security Agency] electronic surveillance in violation of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. More recently, [there were] documented abuses at the FBI in carrying out certain of the expanded powers granted in the Patriot Act, namely, national security letters. And in January of this year, the testimony by the attorney general that this administration does not believe that the fundamental right to a writ of habeas corpus is an important, fundamental, constitutional guarantee. So what we have is a party, the Republican Party, to which I was very proud to belong for many, many years, no longer being committed to a core conservative philosophy. The Libertarian Party is so committed, and I felt that at the time that it was necessary to make a change because of the seriousness of the assaults on our civil liberties.

Good for him.  If increased defections to the Libertarian Party mean the dismantlement of the Republican Party, I’m all for it. The Republican Party has disgraced itself and has lost any basis for being taken seriously by anyone who values our constitutional form of government and the rule of law. GOP representatives in congress have been lockstep collaborators with the authoritarian drift of the executive branch, and they have failed their country miserably. Any person with any sense of decency who has been publicly associated with the party, should leave it as Barr has done.

Barr is clearly a friend insofar as he is ally in the larger effort to preserve the rule of law.  And I applaud his strong critique of the country’s drift toward authoritarianism from the Libertarian right because it will probably  be taken more seriously by the amorphous middle who still remain unconvinced that the republic is in crisis.

So for the time being I embrace the Libertarians as allies in the struggle to repudiate once and for all the authoritarian right whose factions now dominate the Republican Party, but once that repudiation is effected, Barr and  Libertarians like him need to be taken on by proponents of the radical center.  Libertarianism is another form of unconscious groupthink insofar as its consequences are not thought through.

The idea that small government is some ideal to be striven for is quixotic.  Bigness, for all of the problems that come with it, is necessary and is here to stay.  The important question is whose interests will it serve–the interests of corporate and other wealth-centered power factions or the interests of the commonweal. The Libertarian striving, Grover Norquist style, to limit government, only diminishes the power available to ordinary people to counter the next most significant threat to their freedom and well being–the enormous unregulated and minimally taxed power wielded by the Big Money right, which is a natural ally of the small-government Libertarians. 

If aggregated wealth can’t coopt the government to work in its service as it has done with the crony capitalists driving policy in the Bush administration, the next best thing is to have a toothless, powerless government who will leave it alone to do as it pleases. The smaller the government, the fewer the limits on its power and all the easier to pursue its interests without impediment, and these interests have nothing to do with the commonweal. 

The Libertarians in seeking to tie down one monster, are simply unleashing another.  The problem is not big government, but in insisting that government be accountable to the commonweal.  That’s the principle behind a subsidiarist radical centrism and the publicly accountable social democracy it strives for.  We can argue about what level of government size is appropriate in dealing with different problems that have an impact on the commonweal, but the principle that small government is an end in itself and always superior to big government is daft.