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Friday, June 10, 2011

Commentariat Forever Pining for the "Independent" "Libertarian" "Middle" Messiah

Apparently Nick Gillespie and Matt Welch have written a book called, The Declaration of Independents: How Libertarian Politics Can Fix What's Wrong with America.

Of course the so-called "independent voter" in America is for the most part a completely idiotic ignoramus who votes on the basis of his stomach contents or the status of his erection or the random promptings of the tee vee from moment to moment without much evidence of historical awareness, socioeconomic context, consideration of practical governance, or critical thought.

The real "declaration of the independents" could never be compassed between the covers of a book, but is more reasonably conveyed by scanning the random belches and vapid comments forever scrolling the twitterverse, or surveying the walking dead cramming a rush-hour subway train at 8:30 in the morning on the way to the City, faces planted in their cellphones or staring saucer-eyed into the abyss.

Apart from that, though, I do find myself wondering if the day will ever come when the Commentariat will not re-discover with breathless amazement every couple of months or so the surely, surely saving power of "libertarian politics" which have never had nor will ever have any existence at all apart from their function as occasional hypocritical rationalizations for the cruelty, corruption, and plutocracy of the killer clowns of the Republican Party.

Phony libertopian pieties intoned like muttered prayers to the clicking of rosary beads have been the incessant soundtrack accompanying every act of anti-governmental dismantlement and looting along the long road to our present catastrophe from frowny-faced Nixon to smiley-faced Reagan to two-faced Clinton and it simply beggars belief that they would be offered up once more, yet again, even as we stand amidst the smoking ruins of our infrastructure and civic institutions, wading in a soup of toxic greenhouse sludge, hiding from a white-racist authoritarian mob of science-denialist theocrats and paid corporate-military thugs waving rifles and placards blazoned with the same libertopian pieties.

"Libertarianism," "Independent Voters," and the "Moderate Middle" in America amount -- at best! -- to an unthinking incoherent morass of right-wing policies wedded via magical thinking, selfish parochialism, and junk education to ambivalent left-wing aspirations toward opportunity, fairness, and effective governance. It is a symptom if not the very substance of our crisis and not any kind of solution.

But it doesn't matter, there's nothing to stop it, on and on and on it goes, the same magic spell, "libertarianism," "independent voters," "moderate middle," "fiscal conservatism, social liberalism" will be intoned again and again by The Serious before the door to tomorrow that never opens with perfect smug self-assurance with perfect metronomic regularity right up to the moment we all needlessly idiotically drop dead from starvation, a warlord's bullet, or poisoned fumes.

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