Preliminary list supplementing a set of posts at Ordinary Times, whose publication I expect to occur shortly, and which began as a comment on the question of a “libertarian moment” in American politics – whether it ever occurred at all and whether…
The Roosevelt-Marshall welfare-warfare state and the global regime it fought and worked into existence remain intact but under pressure. They still depend on an ability to project beyond themselves, both economically as well as militarily, and both morally as well as practically.
In the libertarian imagination or, as Professor Hanley prefers, the libertarian psyche, the reduction in the power of government (or “government”) means an increase in power for each libertarian or for the individual, which latter, as individuality, is presented as an ideal, but which each individual knows exclusively and therefore universally only through and as him- or herself. The libertarians do not recognize popularly sovereign liberal-democratic government as an extension of themselves, or, put more precisely, of this self. They may exploit or even admire democratic impulses and particular constitutional traditions, but their views are in this sense profoundly anti-democratic and constitutionally anti-constitutional.
Precisely because you are deafened, however, you cannot hear anyone explaining the fact to you, or trying to direct you to shelter: Philosophy says to you, “You can’t hear me – let’s go somewhere quiet,” but you of course cannot make out the words, nor will you read its lips (perhaps you are also blinded by the lightning flashes).
Libertarianism is infant liberal-democracy, the arrested development of the polity fixated at the level of the pre-socialized or socialization-resistant individual – the pre-dialogical, self-sufficient, natural “I-atheist.”
A political identity and a position on political identity may in the final analysis be indistinguishable from each other, and I cannot legitimize my own concept of legitimacy or of political identity without referring to the same to be legitimized, identity-creating or -affirming or -confirming concepts.
The overall dysfunctionality of a political discussion can be the product of countless such lesser dysfunctionalities, though the overall dysfunctionality of that discourse may in turn be what makes it manageable, or manageable enough. We dislike things the way they dysfunctionally are, and that is how we like things.
Ecologism comes as close to dialectical materialism as positive or bourgeois science can while still remaining positive science, somewhat in the same manner as cognitive science and physics approach each other at their limits, but on the level of lived history. Nature itself, including human nature, the working world itself, turns out always to have already filled the revolutionary opening that we workers of the world have never quite managed to occupy. The Earth is the true proletarian.
Democracy Is Obsolete — The League of Ordinary Gentlemen In short: We condemned East Germany for a lot less than what we are doing to ourselves, right this moment. Whoever you vote for in November, that fact will not change.…