The Left Is Dead; So Is The Right

 

Something brought up the topic of Kelo v New London on FaceBook the other day and I responded by copying in my essay from 2005, The Old Order Changeth, that I wrote as part of my continuing series for Tampa Bay Mensa's newsletter, The Sounding.  In response, JohnC, my old schoolmate and debate opponent, came back with:

Don't particularly like the call, but all ownership is a social construct, and if you're gonna play the game, you have to bow to the refs' call.

This casual observation is laced with significance.  It encapsulates the entire Weltanschauung of what we think of as 'the collectivists'.  Remember Obama's remark that 'You didn't build this'?  It's right there in that quoted passage: all ownership is a social construct.

While it sounds innocuous enough, there are some unpleasant corollaries to it.  For one, all that income you 'made' last year?  It's not yours.  It was never yours, and you should be absolutely blissful that 'society' allows you to keep as much of it as it does.  Your house, as Suzette Kelo discovered, isn't your house.  Society merely allows you to live there as long as it pleases your community.  Your so-called 'life' also is not 'yours'.  It's only yours for so long as society judges that its continuance benefits society.  This is the rationale under which totalitarian regimes eliminate ethnic groups like Jews, Armenians, or Kulaks: they are no longer beneficial to 'society'.

Libertarians, whether big-L or small-L, will assert that 'I own myself', and from that follows the entirety of the libertarian ethos, prime among which is that I own my life and the results of what I do with that life, whether it's money, or property, or fame, or a felony conviction for armed robbery.  Because I own myself and you own yourself, it follows that I cannot own you, nor you me, and that is the big difference between individualists and collectivists.  It may be the only difference, although 'only' in this context covers a lot of ground.

Of course, the thrust of The Old Order Changeth was that the old left-right paradigm is obsolete, and that the only reasonable way to categorize political views these days is individualist-vs-collectivist.  That, unfortunately, means that John and I will never see eye-to-eye on almost anything political or societal, and we might as well just face the fact that we will each be forever a thorn in the other's side.

It also means that libertarian arguments seem to collectivists exactly as insane as collectivist arguments seem to us.  We are well and truly speaking a foreign language to the other, and while The Golden Rule translates understandably for libertarians, it's likely just gibberish to collectivists.

If you comfort yourself with the thought that our system of government makes it possible for two such incompatible philosophies to coexist side-by-side, I have bad news for you.  While the libertarian live-and-let-live style can tolerate collectivists, the reverse is not true, and we can see the dawning realization of that problem manifested in the vitriolic reaction of the collectivists (generally what we used to think of as 'Democrats') against the not-quite-as-collectivists (generally what we used to think of as 'Republicans').  Meanwhile, the real individualists (generally what we think of as 'libertarians') stand on the sidelines and wonder when this civil war is going to engulf us all.  (If the libertarians ever gain a foothold in government, we're going to catch hell from both of those factions.)

Oh, you think I have mischaracterized Republicans as semi-collectivists?  It's the GOP that wants to ban marijuana and similar substances because you peasants aren't smart enough to figure out that that stuff is bad for you.  While they are friendlier to gun rights than their Democratic counterparts, few of them (in Congress, at any rate) have much of a problem with those 'reasonable restrictions' that seem quite unreasonable to many of their constituents.  And that 'Constitution' thingy?  George W Bush once called it 'just a god-damn piece of paper', and he got elected President twice!  Didn't The Donald just say, in respect of so-called 'red flag laws': "Take the guns first; due process later"?  If the GOP were really as big a bunch of individualists as some people claim, Trump would have been impeached for that!  He wasn't, therefore they aren't.

No, a real individualist would be staunchly upholding the Constitution's seriously-individualistic fundamentals: primarily, a small, tightly circumscribed federal government that rarely makes its presence felt in your town, your county, or your state.  Republican voters may think of themselves as individualists, but they don't vote that way...  enough.

And that's why we should all be preparing for Civil War II.