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1. In the time of the Roman Republic, and in many other places and times, politicians directly bought votes. What’s better, this or the modern mode of corporations buying politicians? I’d say the former is less pernicious, while a liberal no doubt would say we’ve made progress.
2. This is another example of how liberals care only about the form, the surface, and nothing about the substance of things. As long as you don’t literally see money changing hands on the streets, things are somehow “cleaner”, and that’s a positive good. This primacy of form and process over substance and result is the core of the liberal pathology.
3. Conservatives are no better, but we’re disputing among those who claim to care about what are called “progressive” ideas. There, real believers in democracy and freedom, real fighters for them, must view the liberal ideology as the main enemy. For example, if we’re fighting for the hearts and minds of people who are vaguely worried about GMOs and industrial/corporate food in general, who’s our main rival: Conservatives or “libertarians” who will openly spew the Monsanto prerogative, or liberals who will say, “We’re concerned too, which is why we need to keep voting Democrat and petitioning the FDA and lobbying for better legislation. And good news! We just got part of the legislation we need, the Food Safety Modernization Act. We’ll keep working for a federal GMO labeling bill. So we’re on it, and all you people need to do is keep writing us checks and voting Democrat. Beyond that, you can go back to sleep. Please, stay asleep.”
4. The example of the differing mechanisms of election bribery also demonstrates how liberals are just another form of conservative, because part of the reason why they like the modern way better is that for a politician to directly buy the votes of the poor is to directly give money to the poor. Liberals, just as much as conservatives, have a visceral loathing for this, because just as much as conservatives they viscerally loathe the poor.
5. Similarly, liberals don’t mind the corporate purchase of elections any more than conservatives do. (Again, as long as it’s not too formally brazen: Thus their finicky aesthete’s distaste for Citizens United. But they have no principled objection to corporate ownership as such of elections in general, which is the basic structure of things.) This is because just as much as conservatives they agree that corporate officers and the rich are Galtian supermen, and that their ownership of society and its institutions, as de facto (and increasingly de jure) private property, is normative and desirable.
6. If you disbelieve any of this, just look at the evidence record of what policy liberals support. (I.e., Democrat Party policy, and analogous parties and policy throughout the West.)
7. Liberals are less and less inclined to dispute any of this. On the contrary, they increasingly avow it, because although liberalism has always been just another form of authoritarianism, it’s only nowadays that liberals are really finding themselves as open thugs, openly celebrating all the most powerful forms of organized crime – corporatism, Galtism, militarism, police statism, prisonism, and the cult of “authority” and Fuhrerprinzip as such.
They used to whine about evil even as they always, systematically, collaborated with it. Today they’re openly evil. This has been Obama’s primary role, to normalize the corporate liberal version of fascism.
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Volatility 
Russ good points , however we make assumptions way too often about the intent of individuals we disagree with and demonize them for being manipulated when money as the object of their obsession. Separating money from the process is indeed the desired process we should work on. Unfortunately not all things in life can be so black and white when we can never know the thoughts of others and only guess at them through the behavior we observe..surely we are more intelligent than this… or are we?
The ideas and assumptions you bring are good fodder for a fight, what happened to peace? Can we not see anything but evil from those that oppose us? perhaps we are a bit naive and their is a fine line between that and being gullible if you do not listen to all the facts..
Dave Outlaw
Comment by W David Outlaw — March 14, 2013 @ 11:12 am
Dave,
For me, personally, there’s more than a little frustration with so-called “liberals” and “progressives” because they should– by their own professed ideology– be seeking to jettison the current system and start fresh. Instead, under the guise of attempting to improve that system, all they accomplish– most of them unwittingly– is the perpetuation of that system, typically in a manner that makes it more oppressive. There can be no doubt that “liberal” leaders like Obama (who is actually more conservative than Reagan) do indeed intend the consequences of their actions.
I view this kind of post to be a challenge to those who self-identify as liberal or progressive to question whether their actions truly further their intentions, not as an indictment or demonization of run-of-the-mill rubes (be they liberals or conservatives).
This is the money sentence to me: “There, real believers in democracy and freedom, real fighters for them, must view the liberal ideology as the main enemy.”
I agree with Russ.
The liberal ideology is a honey pot for people who are predisposed to think beyond their own immediate self-interests and likely to want to help others help themselves. The liberal ideology turns such people into the enablers of a co-dependent relationship with those addicted to power. “He hits me because he loves me. If I just try harder to make everything the way he likes it, he won’t hit me any more.”
And this isn’t by accident. Yes, there are rubes who really don’t understand that they’ve been trapped into supporting what they claim to abhor. They and their intentions are beside the point. Co-opting the political will of the rubes is the point of the liberal ideology, which did not develop organically but was manufactured for broad consumption. The history of the formation of neoliberalism demonstrates this point quite well, and once you understand what the leaders of the neoliberal movement did and how and why they did it, it is quite easy to see parallels in the formation of exploitive hierarchiers going back thousands of years in an unbroken and discernible chain.
Comment by Tao Jonesing — March 14, 2013 @ 11:10 pm
I think the co-dependency/enable diagnosis is spot-on, and I’ve seen quite a few liberals make it themselves (though I don’t recall any of those actually breaking with the pattern).
You also hit the mark on neoliberalism (a term which correctly denotes how the late-modern system is a recalibration of liberalism in principle; for example JSMill would no longer qualify), a temporary “soft” fascism which the corporate elites find preferable in many ways to the older “hard” variety. But this is purely a strategic and contingent choice on their part. The moment they feel they must switch to classic fascism, they’ll try to do so. They’re already laying the structural groundwork with the paramilitarization of the state and, legalistically, the criminalization of a vast array of normal human activities, especially in the realm of food production.
I hope this post can challenge some self-defined “progressives” who are that way just out of inertia and the ignorance about alternatives. Most of all I hope it can help convince self-defined radicals to break completely with liberalism.
Comment by Russ — March 15, 2013 @ 5:59 am
“This has been Obama’s primary role, to normalize the corporate liberal version of fascism.”
Yep. I’d argue that was FDR’s primary role, as well. Republicans and Democrats, liberals and conservatives: all any of them are really about is normalizing a version of slavery where the chains are “economic” and, therefore, invisible. When the slaves don’t see their chains, they don’t realize they are enslaved and, therefore, can’t see their masters.
And that’s the whole point of all Western political systems, which trace their roots back to Plato. As, Alan Ryan argued:
“Almost all accounts of the history of political thinking begin with Plato. This is a paradox, because Plato’s political thought is anti political. Readers of the Republic see that in the polis of Plato’s imagination, there is no politics, and are puzzled; but throughout European history there has been a current of thought that seeks the resolution of the conflicts that “ordinary politics” resolves in the creation of such a degree of social harmony that the conflicts which everyday politics resolves have simply disappeared, and politics with them . . . The founder of European political thought is the founder of anti political thinking.”
As I’ve said before, there is no paradox, as “European” (more properly “Western”) political thought seeks to marginalize and eliminate the role of the polis in how it is managed. The point of “politics” is to provide the masses the illusion of power, not actual power. And whenever the “politics” of antipolitics begin to fail, we find those who pretend that antipolitics failed because of the polis. And those same people decry the violent reaction of the polis to being violated.
The reason “liberals” are showing their true colors is that politics as usual are failing even as their lives become enriched by a system that coddles them. the same system that is causing politics as usual to fail.
Comment by Tao Jonesing — March 14, 2013 @ 11:15 am
I’ve previously written about Obama’s repeatedly broadcast disdain for “stale debate”, “tired debate”, and other phrases broadcasting his hatred for democracy politics. (Although his “base” is supposed to “understand” him to mean the Republicans, he really means dissidents, including them, and they’re supposed to understand that too. That they do so is proven by their willingness to attack, in their typical cowardly-bully way, actual citizens who criticize the evil policies of Obama and the Dems.)
https://attempter.wordpress.com/2010/07/12/federalism-concentration-assault-and-evasion/
This kind of terminology, always yearning to declare an end to all discussion, has been spewing from Obama since at least the beginning of his presidency. He deeply loathes democracy.
You mention how the system casts some crumbs to middle class liberals. But they too feel increasingly under pressure. Liberal stupidity matches liberal depravity on this point, since as we’ve seen during Obama’s time, there’s an equally puzzling “What’s the matter with Massachusetts?” to go alongside “What’s the matter with Kansas?”, as liberals, just as much as conservatives, show their willingness to continue following the same criminals who are economically destroying them.
Comment by Russ — March 15, 2013 @ 5:58 am
Good replies.The one of reminding us of Plato intent was on the money. (Opps 🙂 we are supposed to separate that from concept of politics… sorry I will try another aphorism. how about …. Plato’s intent was to bring out patterns of things we put our values in…
hows that? Is It not odd that we always seem to digress into the origins of where we started and see the circle we have developed into. (Russ you brought this out when you reminded us of what independence was and not the concept of hierarchical representation and who gets to be the top dog to get knocked down by the next top dog….Gentlemen we are chasing our tails!). if we are ever going to get out of this geometric delirium we must chart our course using a linear concept. The problem is clear and I believe we departed into an circular philosophy of reward and punishment with our dear friend St Augustine…Now had we gone with the idea that we really are not evil and must be controlled and instead thought of how to be magnanimous society we could put ourselves back on track…. whats wrong with the idea of doing good because its the right thing to do…. because its the right thing to do and forget the reward and punishment? how about putting our value in our relationship with our neighbor and seeing to it that his needs were met and we communicated in an atmosphere of trust?? what the matter with Massachusetts and whats the matter with Kansas can then be put intro whats the with us or the larger concept the U.S.?
Comment by dave — March 18, 2013 @ 7:00 am