Against Politics

Toward a depoliticized society

Variants of interventionism

Posted on | September 23, 2009 | Comments Off by Aschwin de Wolf

At Secular Right Heather Mac Donald makes the following observation:

We are not moving from pure capitalism to pure socialism, we are moving from an already highly regulated, corporate- and individual-welfare-saturated economy to an even more regulated and redistributed economy.  (And we didn’t get to our welfare-saturated state without popular support for trying to minimize risk, however unwisely.)  The difference is one of degree, not of kind, which is not to say that we couldn’t easily reach a tipping point where differences in degree become paradigm-shifting.  Conservative commentators are right to warn about the consequences of our present course, I just wish they did so with a little less recourse to Manichean, conspiratorial, or absurd rhetoric.

It is becoming increasingly evident that the mainstream conservative resistance to socialism and identity politics is more strategic than principled in nature. As a general rule, Republican Presidents have grown government as much as Democratic Presidents have.  After eight years of Bush it can even be doubted that Republicans  in power are less “socialist” than the Democrats. This should not surprise anyone who looks at practical politics from a Machiavellian perspective. Politics is the art of redistribution and there is little reason to assume that most of those who practice the rhetoric of limited government are serious about it. Most libertarians and (secular) conservatives fail to recognize that the cult of politics itself is the problem and (mass) democracy is biased towards interventionism.

Further reading: Razib Khan – Left tactics for Right ends

Category: Politics
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