Submitted by Tyler
Durden on 11/04/2014
INTRODUCTION By Tyler
Durden
"Whichever side emerges victorious, both
Republicans and Democrats should face up to a much bigger truth: Neither party
as currently constituted has a real future." On this, another
election day sham, it is key to not get discouraged. Things are changing at the
grassroots for the better. The battle of decentralization vs. centralization,
networks vs. hierarchies, will not be easily won, but it will be won. Keep
fighting.
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Whichever side emerges
victorious, both Republicans and Democrats should face up to a much bigger
truth: Neither party as currently constituted has a real future. Fewer and
fewer Americans identify as either Republican or Democratic according to
Gallup, and both parties are at recent or all-time lows when it comes to
approval ratings. Just 39 percent give Democrats a favorable rating and
just 33 percent do the same for Republicans. Not coincidentally, each
party has also recently had a clear shot at implementing its vision of the good
society. If you want to drive down your adversary’s approval rating, just give
him the reins of power for a few years.
- From Nick Gillespie’s
article: Relax—Both
Parties Are Going Extinct
Like so many others out there, in the aftermath
of the financial crisis of 2008, I became terrified about the future.
I knew the financial system was a corrupt fraud (still is), and I became filled
with fear as far as what might happen next. The fear wasn’t that a horribly
dysfunctional and immoral financial system would come unglued, rather the fear
was based in the uncertainty of the general public’s response.
Historically speaking, many of the worst political regimes
are swept into power in a reactionary wave following the destruction
of an older, flawed system. Hence the saying: Better the devil you know than
the devil you don’t. Or even: The road to hell is paved with good
intentions. In other words, if good intentions coupled with tremendous
upheaval can cause a hellish outcome, imagine the potential impact of bad
intentions within such an environment. Those were the thoughts that filled
my head during those years.
Over time, I picked myself up out of the fear bunker. Not
because the media told me everything was ok, and certainly not because the
stock market was rising. I transitioned from my brief period of fear
because I recognized it as the negative and useless emotion it is. Furthermore,
I had taken some precautions to protect myself should the worst case scenario unfold,
but beyond that, I concluded that you need to live your life and try to have a
positive impact on the world, rather than shiver in a corner. In fact, that’s
exactly what the status quo wants, an ignorant population terrified of
everything, paralyzed in a corner. In such a state one can be
more easily manipulated by propaganda.
The other thing that helped me become more filled with
optimism about the future was the things I was seeing at the grass
roots level. The grassroots response from both anti-Democratic establishment
“progressive types” and anti-Republican establishment “libertarians” had
striking similarities. On many of the most significant issues of our day, these
two “activist” groups had a surprising degree of overlap. I first noticed it
with the emergence of both the Occupy Wall Street Movement and the Tea Party.
This venn diagram sums it up well:
I expressed this perspective tirelessly, but it largely fell
on deaf ears.
The defining moment where I think both sides finally
realized how much they have in common, came last year when Rand Paul
filibustered on drone strikes. I outlined my thoughts in the post: #StandwithRand:
The Filibuster that United Libertarian and Progressive Activists. Here’
an excerpt:
Personally, I would have
preferred the issue that united libertarian and progressive activists to have
been the Federal Reserve, since it is the core cancer of this country and
indeed the world. Without Federal Reserve funding, none of the awful things our
government and multi-national corporations do at home and abroad would be
possible, but you don’t always get what you want. If civil liberties is
the issue that does it, so be it.
I follow an eclectic group of
people on Twitter. Several of them are what would be best described as
“progressive” journalists and activists. When I witnessed several of them
tweet in support of Rand Paul, my antennae shot up straight into the
stratosphere. Then I realized that Rand had quoted the work of several of
them on the Senate floor (including one of my favorite journalists Glenn
Greenwald), and I knew I something special was happening.
Ever since the dawn of Occupy
Wall Street, I have pushed heavily to try to unite the “tea party” and OWS.
I recognized that at their core these two resistance movements had the
same grievances with “the system.” Unfortunately, the tea party was
largely co-opted by mainstream Republicans, while OWS was crushed by the
Department of Homeland Security and the FBI. In reality, it isn’t about
these two “movements,” rather it’s about ideas. At this stage in the
game, we have very established activists on both the libertarian and
progressive side of things. As someone that reads them all, I can tell
you that the prominent ones on both sides are genuine, moral and intellectual.
What Rand Paul did yesterday
was finally bring the public debate to where it needs to be. In doing so,
he united activists that are quite opposed on many issues (less than they
think, but that’s for another day). This is extremely significant and we
need this momentum to continue. Those of us that care about the core
principles that made this country great need to stick together, find common
ground and not allow the establishment to control the debate any longer.
A year later, we face another midterm election in
which crony establishments from one of the two fraud political parties
will be swept into power. I can still pretty much count on one hand the number
of decent and intelligent members of Congress. Nevertheless, I strongly believe
that the future belongs to those of us in the center of that Venn diagram.
Such thoughts were wonderfully articulated by the
editor of Reason, Nick Gillespie, in a post
from today titled: Relax—Both
Parties Are Going Extinct. Here are some excerpts:
Whichever side emerges victorious,
both Republicans and Democrats should face up to a much bigger truth: Neither
party as currently constituted has a real future. Fewer and fewer Americans
identify as either Republican or Democratic according to Gallup, and both
parties are at recent or all-time lows when it comes to approval ratings. Just
39 percent give Democrats a favorable rating and just 33 percent do the same
for Republicans. Not coincidentally, each party has also recently had a clear
shot at implementing its vision of the good society. If you want to drive down
your adversary’s approval rating, just give him the reins of power for a few
years.
What’s going on? The short
version is that political, cultural, and even economic power has been
decentralizing and unraveling for a long time. Whether you like it or
not, The Libertarian Moment is here, a technologically
driven individualization of experience and a breakdown of the large institutions—governments,
corporations, churches, you name it—that used to govern and structure our
lives. The result is that top-down systems, whether public or
private, right wing or left wing, have less and less ability to organize our
lives. That’s true whether you’re talking about the workplace, the bedroom, or
the bar down the street (that may now be serving legal pot). This is mostly
good, though it’s also profoundly disruptive too.
Indeed, the signal
characteristic of the past several decades of American life has been the ways
in which all sorts of decision-making has been pushed outwards to individuals
or end-users in whatever system you want to gin up. In virtually any commercial
transaction, for instance, even budget buyers have far more information and leverage
than they did 30 years ago (think of the immense difference in the experience
of purchasing a car before and after Edmunds.comcame
online).
Traditional authorities in
social institutions such as churches wield less control too. Our world is in so
many ways more based on voluntary exchange than ever before. As Albert O. Hirschman would put it, we’ve got more ways
of exiting a given situation and giving voice to criticism too. That in turn
leads to a premium on what the economic historian Deirdre McCloskey has
recognized as the “sweet talk” of mutually beneficial exchange and
persuasion rather than brute force. (Sadly, the fact of decentralization doesn’t mean that
centralization by government and other large forces isn’t also taking place.)
As far as his last line here, I would argue that the forces
of centralization see the threat they face and are aggressively doubling down
where they can. Indeed, this battle of centralization vs. decentralization is
the defining battle of our time. For more detailed thoughts on this, check out:
Now back to Nick Gillespie…
For liberals, it’s always
1965 and social justice is just one mega-entitlement program away from
arriving. For conservatives, it’s always 1980 and the next tax cut will solve
all problems forever. Each side can appreciate some but not all
aspects of decentralization. Conservatives and Republicans can embrace it when
it applies to some economic issues and to things like school choice, but they
can’t abide the profusion of sexual and cultural identities and the diminution
of authority in general. Liberals and Democrats may be more comfortable with
some of the latter but then they want tighter and tighter controls and limits
on all sorts of commercial transactions
A key point here he fails to mention is that most of these
self-described “liberals” and “conservatives” are actually from the baby boomer
generation. These folks will inevitably fade away from a generational perspective,
and millennials simply do not think in such terms.
Levin can at least diagnose the
problem and recognize that this leads to an evacuation of traditional politics.
In this, he’s years ahead of Vox’s Ezra Klein, the sort of liberal dogmatist
who isn’t quite able to step outside of his own bubble. Klein recently wrote
about how #GamerGate proves “the politicization of absolutely everything”. Don’t you
see, wrote Klein, that “our political identities [have] become powerful enough
to drive our other identities.” Sure, dead-enders are more bitter than ever. But
what Klein can’t acknowledge is that fewer of us actually invest in our
political identities. That helps explain why party self-identification
keeps heading south and approval for political parties has been on the skids
for a long time.
In a world where you can
personalize and individualize your online experience, your clothing, your work
situation, even your sexuality, why would anyone join up for ossified, rigid,
centuries-old groups such as the Democrats or Republicans?
And that’s why the future of
politics and policy doesn’t belong to doctrinaire Democrats or Republicans who
want to control large swaths of everyday life. It belongs ultimately to the
libertarian decentralists such as Paul who not only understand what is
happening to America but are growing comfortable with it. Americans
are increasingly wary of government’s
power, and they don’t want it to teach a single set of morals
either. Everything is proliferating and people just want a government
that will keep people from starving on the streets and get out of the way as
they go to the corner pot shop to buy edibles to take to their friends’ gay
wedding celebrated by ministers who are not forced to do so.
Amen to that.
So my final conclusion on this, another election day sham,
is to not get discouraged. Things are changing at the grassroots for the
better. The battle of decentralization vs. centralization, networks vs.
hierarchies, will not be easily won, but it will be won. Keep fighting.
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