But generally speaking, I felt to engage in the political process was to sully oneself to such a degree that whatever came out wasn’t worth the trouble put in. I thought it was better to focus on changing yourself and people around you, to not question authority so much as bypass it whenever possible.
But by virtue of our abdication, a very authoritarian, assertive form of government has taken over. And oddly enough, it is doing so in the guise of libertarianism to a certain extent. Most of the people in the think tanks behind the Bush administration’s current policies are libertarians, or certainly free marketeers. We’ve got two distinct strains of libertarianism, and the hippie-mystic strain is not engaging in politics, and the Ayn Rand strain is basically dismantling government in a way that is giving complete open field running to multinational corporatism.
Libertarianism seems to be such an individualistic philosophy, it has never seemed to me all that well organized. I have gotten the impression that the trappings of a party — conventions, platforms, etc. — are anathema, as if by agreeing to anything but the most abstract and intangible ideas would undermine their whole premise. But I do like Barlow’s description of the two strains: it seems unlikely they could be united as a common party or bloc, so I suppose we end up with the less rigid hippie-mythic types lining up with democrats — based on the opposition to the corporate state — and the more doctrinaire types lining with the conservatives, in opposition to state intervention to free markets.
I also found this piece by Barlow interesting and commented on it[1].
I found his high opinion of — or at least respect for — Cheney puzzling at the time: I don’t credit people as being intelligent if they persist in unwise acts or just plain stupidity. There’s much about the war and its cobbled together justification that doesn’t bear out any theories about an insightful or disciplined intellect.