It’s 2nd December 2009, ans this place does not really feel any different from what it did on 30th November (2009.)
David Davis
The fact that the UK is no longer a Sovereign State, I mean.
Libertarians, these last 50 years, have spent too much time hailing the virtues of Sovereign Individuality, and Rand has much to be blamed for here.You just can’t go off and do a John Galt any more, however good it makes you feel to read about it, in a world where all the Statists have guns and satellites, and you have nothing except, possibly a candle if you are allowed the fat (meat-eating) and string (global rain forests) to make it. (And nothing to light it with, for Health and Safety.)
Simultaneously Libertarians have spent too little time thinking about the inevitably-partly-Statist environment under which we all have for now to operate. Too much effort has been devoted, with the best of intentions, to suggesting via think-tanks lots of interesting and entirely logical ways of “increasing choice” while simultaneously negating the influence of The Enemy Class.
Since the Enemy Class is currently in charge, this will no longer do. It is a waste of effort, since (a) they won’t listen and (b) they’ll “surveille” and then take down names. Some protection of an at least slightly non-fully-statist environment ought to have been undertaken, such as the British Conservative and Unionist Party, as an example of something we’d have liked to take over and redirected to proper objectives.
Perhaps, in our trying to take over Conservative Movements here and there, we ought to have covertly hidden our neutrality towards things like Guns, Drugs, Homosexuality, low tax, Rock Music, fast cars, gender-equality and proper education, until we’d got proper control of whatever movement it was we were trying to subvert. Our Policy Position should have resembled The Daily Mail for as long as it was convenient to do so, and as we are all more sexy than 1,000 Paul Dacres and Melanie Phillipses, we would have wiped the floor: Obama would be begging under a Chicago flyover by now, if we had thus had our way.
The future of libertarianism as a mass philosophy, if one exists, lies not in think tanks: these have been, are and will be bright stars of reason and correctness for sure, but are increasingly designed to be surrounded by armed Endarkenment backed up by a comatose population, which has been first disarmed, then de-educated and de-mobilised, and finally starved on purpose all together for one objective.
The passing of the UK into history in its form as a Soveriegn State does not seem to matter to most people in any way much. There is still the Wireless Tele Vision, which broadcasts much the same material as on Monday: Non-Denominational-Community Winter Trees still appear in all shops, slightly earlier and slightly more expensive than usual: Cheryl Cole still has “nights out” while wearing various items of clothing: the Tele Vision News still broadcasts footage of a “house fire” in which a “mother and young children died while a man was seen running away”, accompanied by a grieving Chief Constable who “appeals for information” while stating that “_his thoughts are with_”.
Perhaps it does not really matter that this is happening, or even that it happens against the background of public apathy about big things and shallow voyeurism about tiny ones. Except that both these trends are driven by and happening in a State which has actively sought to being them about. It did this so it can refortify itself behind a more powerful wall of absolutism, the EU (or should I say the USE?) than would have existed if Lisbon hadn’t been able to happen.
In 2010, Libertarians ought to consider how best to help existing parties and statists tactically, who have the best chance of forming British governments which are specifically not this one: even if it means only a slowing of the drift towards slavery for now and not even a cessation of the drift. This is better than falling down a torrent.
If that does not work, then one day perhaps we have to consider the alternatives.