More on left & libertarian realignment
News flash for libertarians — we’re all left-wingers now, whether you’re personally down with that or not. Why? The neo-conservatives have so thoroughly turned the right toward authoritarianism that any political outlook even remotely describable as “libertarian” is fundamentally alienated from the right at a foundational level. Small government conservatism is officially dead, and with it libertarian right-fusionism.
Glen Greenwald writing in Salon, Neoconservative radicalism has reshaped our political spectrum:
David Brooks’ column in The New York Times this morning contains several important observations. It would maximize clarity in our political discussions if journalists could just ingest Brooks’ central point: the dominant right-wing political movement in this country that has spawned and driven the Bush presidency has nothing to do with — it is in fact overtly hostile to — the ostensible principles of Goldwater/Reagan small-government conservatism. Though today’s so-called “conservatives” exploit the Goldwater/Reagan mythology as a political prop, they don’t believe in those principles in any way. That movement is the very antithesis [emphasis added -- Brad] of those principles.
Brooks comes out and explicitly declares the twin icons of “conservatism” to be every bit as quaint and obsolete as the Geneva Conventions: “Goldwater and Reagan were important leaders, but they’re not models for the future.”
Brooks admits what has been crystal clear for some time — namely, that so-called “conservatives” (meaning the contemporary political “Right”) no longer believe (if they ever did) that government power should be restrained in order to maximize freedom. That belief system, says Brooks, is an obsolete relic which arose out of the the 1970s, and has been replaced by the opposite desire — for expanded government power on every front.
The arguably bright side of this is that left and right are becoming more like what principled radical libertarians like Karl Hess envisioned those terms ought to mean in the first place — re-alignment as clarification, as it were. For more in depth material along these lines, let me refer you to the web site of the Alliance of the Libertarian Left.
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