I realize we’re all supposed to pretend that we don’t recognize the enormous and surreal contradictions that are each and every day foisted on us by a cynical, self-serving government that drafts and forces upon us policy based on a rhetorical cocktail of emotional appeals and divisive identity politics, garnished with the tripartite tactic of shame, malign, and shun — everyone everyday is, at any given moment, either a racist, sexist, xenophobe, homophobe, nativist, chauvenist, misogynist, misandrist, ageist, or science denier — a person who wants to punish autistic children, destroy the atmosphere, pollute the ground water, deny the dignity of life to silverfish and chickens, allow instruments of death to wander the street military-style, where of their own volition they mow down defenseless toddlers — and the only way to avoid this, the only path to redemption, is to embrace the anti-foundationalism of the statists and learn to burnish your personal bona fides by adopting their ideological line.
And yet stubbornly and maddeningly, some of us — fringe extremists, mostly on the right wing of the right wing, over where Hitler’s moldering corpse is propped up as a kind of makeshift flag, to hear the “pragmatists” and the “realists” and their leftist kin tell it — continue to cling to our Enlightenment ideals, to logic, to reason, to a belief in objective truths that exist outside of the human capacity to present them, hoary fossils, all of us, standing in the way of the Utopia that will arise once we are cleared out of the way like so many dust-farting speed bumps, our guns and our raggedy old Constitution still clutched in our filthy Purist hands.
— All of which is kind of an aside, but one that I felt like burping out. So there.
Although I suppose to circle back around, Ben Stein does here capture the absurdity of what we’re being forced to pretend we can’t draw together and assimilate in order to make sense of the scattershot and frankly insane nature of our government and its policies.
There is no coherence left, and this is a feature to the statists. Anti-foundationalists don’t need consistency and in fact reject the kind of “reason” that would force them to treat disparate elements of their policy plans under the oppressive and unfair burden of charges of hypocrisy — which (unless the right is engaging in it, at which time it is a mortal sin) is merely a reactionary desire to force unrelated things into the context of a single set of (man-made) standards.
And Homey don’t play that.
Which means that if you insist on adhering to a set of standards imposed upon us by men in powdered wigs? You’re probably a racist. Or a sexist. Or a xenophobe. Or a homophobe. Or a nativist. Or a chauvenist. Or a misogynist. Or a misandrist. Or an ageist. Or a science denier.
Shame on you.
(h/t Guido)
Since believing that liberty is extremely important and has been egregiously damaged by the statists currently running out of control in DC makes me a racist or whatever else, I guess I had better either embrace those charges or let them slide off of me entirely.
All they have in their arsenal at this point is name-calling. Why would I even consider the opinion of these people to be valid enough to care what they say? I can only hope, for their sake, that when the seeds they have sewn finally sprout and grow unchecked, they get out of the way of the backlash.
That’s epic.
And that’s why it needs to be the new cry. It is a reverse manifesto of sorts; the kernel principle of a movement the intellectual loft and purpose of which I read is to deconstruct the false religion of “progressive” assumption and cant and to refuse to compete with it with its own arguments and on its platforms.
Dismantling collectivism and statism is fundamentally different than and inherently incompatible with just offering an alternative statism, one that merely ostensibly serves what the establishment right assumes are the principled ideals of a different Leviathan.
Don’t think this is a vanishing movement, either. The structuralist right will be wise to reach over to the more sensible of the small-government left, they being more legion than I think many of us realize.
Indeed, the center cannot hold. More than a few know this.
I can only hope, for their sake, that when the seeds they have sewn finally sprout and grow unchecked, they get out of the way of the backlash.
Is it clobberin’ time yet?
Damn close.
Or a misanthrop. It’s past time for an extinction event, the herd needs culling….
Jerry Pournelle has been saying that for 20 years. He even coined the term Anarcho-Tyranny to describe it: The laws are so confusing and contradictory that it is impossible to know when you are violating them, but the tyrants of the bureaucracy always have what they need to send you to jail.
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