Liberty: Heart Of The Matter
Is there a collective reality of god or is it all just personal and individual? I am interested to know more about the government control of religion – I understand that in the Soviet Union and China religion was/is restricted (I witnessed it with my own eyes in the Soviet Union), but from the history books that I see the church was incredibly powerful for at least a thousand years and maybe some of that government control was also born of a desire to rein in monopolistic behaviour?
Part of my current intellectual and political quest is to understand the current state of the world and how things have come to this pass. I think that it is pretty clear that concepts of liberty are at the heart of the matter. For all kinds of reasons, liberty is highly contested now. I think that it is increasingly clear that what we are seeing in the US and to some extent elsewhere is the result of the success of a kind of libertarian plan theorised by James Buchanan, Murray Rothbard, Gordon Tullock et al (and inspired by Ayn Rand, Hayek, von Mises, inter alia), and bank-rolled by right-wing billionaires like the Koch brothers (and many others).
It wasn’t and isn’t a secret plan (any more than the storming of the capitol was a few days ago – everybody knew something was afoot because it was all over social media), not least because Buchanan, Koch et al have published widely and in some cases (eg Buchannan) voluminously, but they also knew that what they were proposing was extreme, radical, and actually not very popular with the majority of ordinary, non-wealthy Americans, so they often used coded language – political dog whistles are one of the results and we can see this operating every day in plain sight.
The libertarian plan could only keep going because of the fortune poured into it first by the Olins and other ultra-right extremely rich donors, and from the 1970s greatly expanded by Charles Koch (though he persuaded many more of his ilk to put millions in too). However, as the 1980 election showed, when David Koch was on the libertarian ticket to be Vice President – which was an utter failure – what really made their plan succeed (and it has succeeded to an astonishing extent) was the extraordinary alliance with evangelicals. How they pulled the latter off is something I am studying since almost all the libertarian theorists I know of were/are atheist. But then look at Trump – he is the ultimate example, proof and fruition of this merger.
I am coming to see that Christianity appears to be highly individualistic and very keen on liberty – not just freedom to worship, but personal liberty too. This all fits perfectly with libertarianism. There are many other operational reasons why the libertarian-evangelical union has succeeded and the story is complicated and complex, many people ask how it is that the Christian right could become the chief enabler of Donald Trump and an unhinged Republican Party, whose actions increasingly make one think of the early 1930s in Germany. Sarah Posner’s book ‘Unholy’ is helpful but one has to read it together with Nancy Maclean’s ‘Democracy In Chains’ and Jane Mayer’s ‘Dark Money’. All fascinating, but frightening stuff. Without this kind of background study, what is going on now makes no sense and all the remedies will fail. This of course is true of anything malignant – if you don’t understand what is causing a bad situation, like an illness or the collapse of a system, you have almost no hope of doing anything about it that will work.