nydwracu niþgrim, nihtbealwa mæst

Borepatch and Aretae have put out endorsements for the 2012 election, so I figure I might as well also. (Let’s assume for the purposes of this post that voting isn’t just large-scale political homeopathy; where’s the fun in admitting that it doesn’t matter?)

If you’ve been reading this for a while, you can guess two things already:
1. Borepatch endorsed Obama and Aretae endorsed Johnson, so I’m going to endorse Romney.
2. It can’t be as simple as just endorsing one candidate.
And you would be right.

I don’t like Romney. I don’t think he’ll be noticeably different from Obama in most regards; they’re both unprincipled chameleons from a hardcore establishment background, although one small benefit to Romney is that he’s more obvious about it. (It really says something about a country that a black father is enough to make people not realize that the son of a senior economist and an anthropology Ph.D., who went to one of the most prestigious public schools in the country, ended up at Harvard Law, and subsequently went off to teach at the University of Chicago, is establishment.)

I don’t like libertarianism either, at least in principle; but in practice, a more libertarian presidency would almost certainly be a better one. A break from the nutty interventionism of the establishment, a veto-happy monkey-wrench in the gears of the Leviathan, may be just what we need in the White House, so the presidential race should be pushed in that direction. Unless Maryland turns out to be a swing state, which, considering that the parts that matter are BDH to the core and packed with USG employees, it won’t, I’ll be voting Johnson.

If I lived in a state where the election results weren’t essentially predetermined, however, I’d vote differently; in that case, sending a message is less important than voting the best realistic option. There are admittedly few differences between Romney and Obama. They’re both firmly on the side of “the 1%”, as much as I hate that term. But the differences are nonzero.

One benefit to Romney is that nobody likes him. He’s a Republican, so the Democrats (and the media… as if that needs to be specified) don’t like him; he’s a blatantly establishment Massachusetts Optimate, so the Republicans don’t like him; and he’s a pasty-white Mormon, so he can’t personality-cult the college demographic. (In the primary polls for my home state, Romney’s favorability increases with age, and Santorum’s, somewhat counterintuitively, decreases.) All other things being equal, the less liked president will be put under more scrutiny, and I’d prefer more to less. The Republicans and the Breitbart crowd have been going after him to a degree, but with few resources and most of the establishment firmly on his side, their capabilities are limited, compared to what could be done if both sides of the media hated the president’s guts.

Even a leftist would find it to their advantage to support Romney; they’re both neoliberals, but if you have to choose between two devils, take the one who everyone knows is a devil. There are still people in this country who think Obama is on the left in any sense but the meaningless electoral one; granted, the ones I know think that mostly because they think it’d be racist to think anything else, but they’re still dumb enough to buy it.

Another difference is that Romney’s appointments will draw from a different crowd. Obama was a college professor, and it’s obvious from his appointments. I can’t imagine Romney appointing someone like Eric “My People” Holder, and really, between his department providing guns to criminals, his lying about his department providing guns to criminals, his obstructing the Congressional investigation about his department providing guns to criminals, and his admission, backed up by his actions, that he sees 87% of the country as foreign, that near-treasonous nut is enough of a reason in and of himself to vote Obama out.

And… well, those are the only differences I can think of. They both make me sick, but one is clearly a lesser evil than the other, and, contra passivism, evil is to be opposed when possible. (Of course, if I had any desire for power, I’d force myself into passivism; but I’d really rather just fish, and the only reason I do anything more is that I can’t not speak out against immediately visible displays of utter idiocy. Besides, voting doesn’t really matter anyway.)

Contra Borepatch, I don’t think there’s much hope for America, and the little hope there is comes neither from the government nor the already thoroughly co-opted and establishmented(?) Tea Party: the government merely responds to the will of certain monitors, so the monitors need to be taken in order to effect any real change. (I hope someone throws Santorum on a talk show like they apparently did Huckabee; he’s the only one around who can articulate a real alternative to liberalism, and if one alternative makes itself known, the people will become aware that alternatives exist, and might even find more. Of course, on a metapolitical level, it’s entirely possible that almost any sort of consensus is better than none at all, but I doubt it, especially since liberalism is running out of unprincipled exceptions that can be reasonably eliminated, if it hasn’t already. And no, a liberalism that pretends that society doesn’t exist is not a real alternative. But that all is beside the point.)

So, to sum up: go Romney in a swing state and Johnson otherwise. Romney is better than Obama, but he still sucks, and Johnson’s platform is less bad, enough so that the GOP should be pushed in its direction.

The New York Times, that modern-day Pravda of left-liberalism, recently ran a review of a book purporting to explain the demise of the American left. The explanation given—that leftists failed, for unknown reasons, to maintain an “animating vision” of socialist utopianism—is, as one would expect given the Pravdan nature of the NYT, absurd, but the reviewer inadvertently mentioned a real explanation for said demise.

The left generally failed, according to Kazin, when it emphasized atheism, collectivism and ideological purity. It has been more successful when taking the form of broad, heterogeneous movements struggling for individual rights. Witness the rise of gay marriage, arguably today’s most effective left-leaning social campaign. Viewed as a utopian dream, it promises to transform the institution of marriage. But viewed as a civil rights matter, it simply aims to include more people in an existing institution.

By this statement, one can easily predict, given any leftist policy goal, whether it will succeed or fail: it will succeed if it involves expanding individual freedom, commonly known euphemistically as “civil rights”, and it will fail otherwise. On its face, this may seem like an odd statement; leftism, after all, is fundamentally collectivist, so why are its successes limited to a domain in which it does not lie? But it fits the reality of the situation well enough that, despite its initial counterintuitiveness, there must be a way to make sense of it.

And, in fact, there is: leftists succeed in implementing any policy goal that moves American society further toward the liberal ideal of maximized individual liberty. (Americans may be confused by this statement, since that ideal is much more commonly associated with libertarianism than liberalism in America, but libertarianism is simply a subspecies of liberalism that believes nongovernmental forces cannot restrict liberty.)

A clear example of this is American feminism, which, according to Christina Sommers, can be divided into two camps: ‘egalitarian’ (that is, liberal) feminism, currently the dominant philosophy in feminism, and ‘conservative’ feminism, the illiberalism of which has gotten it written out of the historical record, despite having been historically far more effective than egalitarianism:

Willard, a suffragist and leader of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union, is another once esteemed figure in women’s history who is today unmentioned and unmentionable. Willard brought mainstream women into the suffrage movement, and some historians credit her with doing far more to win the vote for women than any other suffragist. But her fondness for saying things like “Womanliness first—afterwards what you will” was her ticket to historical obliquy.

Approved feminist founders like Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony promoted women’s suffrage through Wollstonecraft-like appeals to universal rights. Their inspirations were John Locke, Thomas Jefferson, and Wollstonecraft herself. Stanton wrote affectingly on “the individuality of each human soul,” and on a woman’s need to be the “arbiter of her own destiny.”

What then, in practice, is leftism in America? It cannot be proper leftism, because proper leftism, as per Kazin, has not been successful; what has been successful is liberalism, which commonly disguises itself as leftism. This may be confusing to Americans, who have most likely never encountered a proper leftist and, if they have, were most likely too distracted by the rhetorical similarities between the two to tell the difference. (Liberalism and leftism are both progressivist ideologies, but they have one easily noticeable difference: the eschaton that liberalism would immanentize is one of atomistic individuals with maximum license and no connections to anything or anyone, with the possible exception of the benevolent State, whereas leftist utopian projects demonstrate at least a faint grasp of human nature. More on that later.)

American ‘leftism’, considering its in actu effects and its rhetoric of “civil rights” and “individual liberty”, can only be described as liberalism, or, more insightfully, as ultra-Americanism:

But when we look at the actual political motifs in the two kinds of anti-Americanism, we see very little in common – besides of course hatred of America.

Clearly it’s this word anti-American that’s confusing us. If we split it in half we can see the trend clearly. To be counter-American is to resist American political theory. To be ultra-American is to accept American political theory so completely that you become more American than America itself, and you feel America is not living up to her own principles.

But what is American political theory? It is, quite trivially, the dominant political ideology in America. Considering the history of American politics, it is clear the American political theory is fundamentally liberal, and that said history can be summarized as the bringing in line of American society to a distinctly un-nuanced reading of that oft-quoted clause in the Declaration of Independence:

We hold these Truths to be self-evident, that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness

Liberty is license, happiness is hedonism, and our political discourse has been shaped in such a way that liberal hegemony currently goes unchallenged. The left, then, did not die due to lack of an “animating vision”; it was co-opted by liberalism. But how did this happen and what can be done? That will have to wait until next time.