Too daft to laugh at, as the good folk of northern England would say.
I wonder if these are the kind of people who have to be warned not to inject themselves with disinfectant, but would ignore the warning anyway, because in being 'free' no one can tell them what to do, least of all ‘government.’ Whenever people like this want to justify anything they do, note how often they refer to ‘government’ and take a contrary line. In this world, ‘liberty’ and ‘government’ are by definition antithetical. Reject ‘government’ and you affirm ‘liberty.’ ‘Government’ wrong, non-government not wrong, and anything ‘I’ do right. It’s a closed world, a magic circle of prejudice and delusion.
Donald Trump could tell them to take a running jump, and they would gladly do it. They call it ‘liberty’ and ‘being free.’ The only people they listen to are those who tell them that they are free to do what on Earth they like. There is a long list of people they choose not to listen to: experts, scientists, governments, everyone with a functioning brain cell … Basically, everyone on nodding terms with a reality greater than the holy ‘I’ can be damned. They do what the Hell they like, and that’s precisely what such people bring about on Earth.
I wouldn’t underestimate how deep the malaise has gone, either. Or how far back it goes. Liberty, they say, when they mean licence, said Aristotle in the Politics. The stupidity of people like this show in extreme the basic sophism that is inherent in liberalism. That assertion of the individual’s right to bail out of any collective project and purpose considered inimical to individual liberty is the basic trump card of liberalism. Liberalism is based on the idea of the moral and ontological ultimacy of the individual. This individual is a pre- and self-possessing being prior to society and relations with others, contracting in to society to secure and advance self-interest and contracting out whenever those goods are felt to be threatened. The way I try to get my friends on the liberal left to grasp this point is on climate change. The preservation of the planetary ecology is such an obvious collective good that environmentalist friends are genuinely mystified as to why individuals refuse to ‘follow the science.’ The fact is preservation of the environment is not the ‘moral imperative’ that environmentalists think it is, not without a moral referent that a liberalism, affirming the existential choice of individuals with respect to the good, holds does not exist. On these premises, individuals are entitled to pursue the good as they see fit.
So I don’t do the easy and obvious thing and pick on groups so stupid, hypocritical, and odious as to make all who against them seem reasonable, responsible, and right. I’m willing to bet that many criticizing these libertarian groups themselves subscribe to the same libertarian ideology when it comes to their own pet peeves and concerns; I’m willing to bet that whenever someone like me starts to talk about virtue ethics, communities of practice and character, and the common good, very many attacking the libertarians of the right will reveal themselves to be libertarians of the left.
It’s not just the usual suspects of right wing extremism we should be worried about, in other words, but people who consider themselves of liberal, leftist, progressive persuasion. These are people who often present themselves as the most tolerant of folk. They can actually be the most intolerant, most particularly when it comes to those who argue for common standards and ethics that in some way bind and obligate the individual beyond the ego. These are the people presenting a fake opposition to the libertarianism of the right, fake because basically they affirm the same ethic in the sense of asserting the rights of the individual to choose the good as he or she sees fit. Basic to this ideology is the view that individuals are not to be bound by moral and political commitments that are greater than the individual. The liberal ontology separates two things that belong together – individuality and sociability as two sides of the same human nature. Not only does liberalism separate these things ontologically, it opposes each to the other and turns both into an abstraction and fiction. The liberal ‘individual’ is a fictitious being that exists nowhere except in liberal ideology. At the same time, each, any, and every collective entity – all those supports and institutions which are dimensions of the public life of human beings as social beings – are denounced as external to the individual and hence by definition repressive of individual liberty – morality, law, authority, community, common goods of all kinds, anything greater than the individual and which exists as a check and constraint on the individual liberty. That such things constrain the individual to the greater good, including their own good, is not acknowledged.
As I pondered these libertarians and the reactions they provoked, I was watching one of my favourite rock bands Deep Purple in concert in Zeppelinfeld Nurnberg, Germany July 06, 1985. Introducing ‘Under the Gun,’ lead singer Ian Gillan launched into an ill-tempered diatribe on the things that ‘p**s him off’, ‘all the God-botherers or dog botherers .. people who just generally intrude on your life and want to impose their laws on everyone else.’ That rant makes it clear that the antithesis of ‘liberty’ and ‘government’ goes much deeper and wider than the libertarians of the right. Of course, we can argue about what is meant by the imposition of ‘their’ laws here. Insofar as people do attempt to impose on others outside of legitimate democratic institutions, then we could count that as illegitimate interference. But even that doesn’t persuade, since the presentation of different platforms is itself part of an active and healthy public life, and a condition of democratic persuasion via politics and elections. The abusive denunciation makes it clear that it is people who ‘bother’ individuals who want to be free to get on with whatever it is they are getting on with who are the subject of the attack. But as social beings, whatever people say or day will always necessarily be bothersome to those who think they can somehow be outside of society and be left alone. The actions of everyone, even the ‘everyone else’ doing their own thing seemingly apart from others, will accumulate and in some way impinge on all. This may not be done with conscious moral intent, but it will at least happen at the level of consequences, however unintended. Climate crisis is a classic example.
The rejection of ‘God botherers’ embraces social botherers of all kinds. That mentality lies behind the anti-trade union legislation, for instance, ostensibly made against restraint of ‘free’ trade and allowing people to be ‘free to work,’ as it was put during the great strikes of the seventies and eighties. This was a determined and conscious attempt to break up working class unity and solidarity so as to weaken collective resistance against the power of capital. Once those centres of social resistance are weakened, only individuals that are powerless against collective institutional and systemic force remain, having to take whatever terms they can. That this non-choice can be passed off as free choice makes choosing individuals complicit in their own oppression, defending this oppression in the name of ‘liberty’ against ‘government’ and all forms of collective restraint over power.
That’s an outright statement of libertarianism. And a demonstration of how easily liberal leftists (or leftist liberals) become complicit in the very things they denounce. The result of such liberty is to generate a collective constraint of money, war, power, economic crisis, social division, and ecological collapse that impinges on the freedom of each and all. The individual is subject to forces much greater than himself and herself, none of which he or she can influence or alter; all are subject to external force. The only way to counter such force is to seek a common resolution through the creation of an appropriate and effective public, legitimate, democratically constituted government and authority, grounded in community and law as the embodiment of justice and common good. Those who argue for this could no doubt be dismissed as ‘botherers’ of some description or another, impinging on individual choice and liberty. The problem is that such choice and liberty makes the world and the people in it available for the predation of money and power, with all ‘free’ individuals atomized and rendered powerless in face of collective force. Those wealthy enough to find a little comfort zone for themselves can celebrate ‘liberty’ and bemoan ‘government,’ but most will not have that privilege.
I have said it many times before and no doubt will have to say it again – the problem is not merely Trump and the degeneration of conservatism into a libertarianism that is an ideological project concealing the predation of the rich and powerful, it is a liberalism that is premised on the discrete pre- and even anti-social individual, the individual who is free to contract in and contract out of common causes at will, in accordance with a free choice determined by self-interest and beholden to and bound by no community greater than the choosing ‘I.’ I will carry on being very bothersome. Those subscribing to a libertarian freedom are like babies in the pram, bawling at each, every, and any restraint that gets in the way of their immediate wants.
The libertarians are capital's little puppets, the more assertive of ‘liberty’ the less they actually have it and exercise it. In arrogating ‘liberty’ to themselves they attempt to make those arguing for commonality look like dependent, servile, obedient clients of ‘government.’ These libertarians confront us with something strangely alien and familiar, as an inversion and perversion of the freedom and happiness we seek, the overt expression of a cynical, aggressive, and manipulative politics which takes our greatest values, changes them, and now uses them against us. The result is that we live in a world that seems to be our creation, but which stands against us, our own values stated against us by people who are the agents of money and power, whether as architects or lickspittles.
The switch occurs in the conception of freedom and happiness. A rational freedom holds that the freedom/happiness of each individual is conditional upon and coincides with the freedom/happiness of all individuals, and is constituted through an appropriate public life by way of institutions, social supports, communities, and appropriate relations. The inversion and perversion comes by way of a libertarian freedom that dissolves the other-regarding expansiveness of communal and relational connections into the self-regarding notion of liberty and happiness as a self-possession. The ‘rational’ conception seeks to advance freedom and happiness so that all could come to share in their general good; the libertarian conception sees only empty abstraction in such common endeavour and so condemns it as inimical to individual liberty. The irony is that it is the very liberal ontology that stands at the root of such collective abstraction – one abstraction generates the other. Liberalism dissolves both individuality and sociality into abstraction, reducing the richness of life and all its expansive and inter-relational qualities into a petty-minded, self-centred ecology.
Those espousing individual liberty do not understand that they are the puppets of ‘the economy,’ that slippery euphemism for a capitalist economy that, in the words of Max Weber, ‘determines’ the lives of ‘free’ individuals with ‘irresistible force.’ This is liberty as a licence to free-riding within a system of accumulative imperatives, with capital presiding over all as a global heat machine destroying the biosphere as well as all other conditions of the common life and the common good – connections with others, innate sympathy and kindness, mindfulness toward all things greater than the ego, the soul itself.
‘Do they not realize they're the mere apostles of "The Economy," of a trade system based on free-riding and accumulation?’ The answer to the question is that some do and some don’t. We are talking about the way in which the religious instinct and motive has been transfigured to take the form of a new idolatry, both of words and ‘things.’ Answering that question takes us to the closing pages of Max Weber's The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, where Weber describes how the capitalist economic system "determines" the lives of the "free" individuals living within its confines with "irresistible force." The “light cloak” of religious faith, Weber argues, has now taken shape as an "iron cage" of socio-institutional and systemic constraint. And this "nullity" thinks itself to have achieved the greatest freedom and civilisation in history.
If Weber is right - and I think he has a lot right - then the problem is much wider than this misguided bunch. An awful lot of people across the entire political spectrum think that they are free, when in truth they are subordinate to institutional and systemic imperatives that lie outside of them. At the same time they think themselves 'free to choose.'
I'm encouraged by the evidence that the people of the world remain basically decent. But there instincts for and interests in cooperation seem continually to be thwarted by those who wish to atomize collective institutions and structures, anything that would offer a means of constraining power and canalising it to the common good. The individuals fighting for their freedom against restraint are, in truth, fighting to ensure their unfreedom under the restraint of the external collective force of money and power.
Do they think ‘government’ is going to go away? By ‘government’ I don’t just mean public institutions and laws, I mean any kind of collective force ‘governing’ the world. I would suggest it is better for human beings to govern their common affairs consciously and voluntarily, through deliberation and informed decision-making, than it is to have those affairs ‘governed’ by external forces over which they have little or no control.
Do libertarians think that the capitalist economic system, which determines the lives of each and all with what Max Weber described as ‘irresistible force,’ is going to go away? The smarter people among the libertarian right, the strategists and architects of this puppetry, know fine well that the disablement of government as an agency for social and environmental purposes leaves individuals powerless in face of ‘the market,’ that is, capital. This assertion of liberty has nothing to do with private property and market forces – the real agents that are liberated are those of corporate power.
There seems to be a pact between ‘reality TV’ zero-sum politicians and their followers to deliver the end of the world through a sheer bone-headed selfishness and stupidity that has been raised to the status of necessary principle. It's called libertarianism, and it enchains individuals to the very worst in their natures. Liberty as licence will get us all killed.
It is in fact too simple to claim this as evidence of selfishness and stupidity. It may seem so, when people have to be warned not to inject themselves with disinfectant, because the President of the United States of America recommends it! It’s not that the things that Trump has been saying and doing have not been breath-takingly, jaw-droppingly, head-shakingly, face-palmingly stupid. They have, but that’s not the problem. It is the fact that so many people, people I know not to be stupid, have gone along with it, apologized for it, positively supported it, and turned to attack instead the critics that gives evidence of a catastrophic, apocalyptic, end-of-the-world-scale human malaise. Those innocent souls who still think that the world is on nodding terms with truth and justice, all evidence to the contrary, ask in exasperation: ‘What the hell is WRONG with humanity?’ people ask.
I’ll tell you what is wrong with humanity – left to its own devices, as self-choosing individuals ‘free’ to pursue the good as each sees fit, humanity fractures into a congeries of mini-gods and devils, each negating the other and all nullifying the public realm and the ethics and institutions concerned with the delivery of the common good. Because no-one among such an anti-public will suffer to be ‘bothered’ by anyone or anything telling them what to do. Without an authoritative moral framework and a supportive social infrastructure training in the intellectual and moral virtues and the habits of a cooperative society that recognizes truth and justice, humanity goes flabby, individuals pursuing their immediate wants and desires.
As for Trump’s outrageous comments and the outrage they incite, the whole predictable cycle bores me rigid. I have criticized Trump these past few years. Every time I have made it clear that Trump is not the architect of this crisis but the symptom and personification of it. Remove Trump, and this malaise will remain and will continue to dredge up monsters like him, probably much worse. In truth, we have got lucky with Trump. The man is an incompetent and inefficient buffoon. Had he been competent and efficient, he would have taken what remains of liberalism and progressivism well and truly to the cleaners by now. The terrain is so flabby that the opposition can only offer a docile establishment ‘moderate’ to challenge and check Trump. There is the real malaise – even in the face of crisis demanding radical transformation, too many opt for ‘moderation.’ They lack moral, intellectual, and political courage, and so a malaise that is endemic, not accidental, will continue.
Trump should have been taken as a warning of the worst that is likely to come, if public life and social cohesion and solidarity is not restored. Not enough are heeding the warning. Those issuing the warning, like me, are merely warned that ‘people aren’t ready for socialism.’ They’d better get ready for fascism, then, as the vicious counter-revolution to the revolution you were too pusillanimous to countenance.