Over at the Confabulum, James has raised the following worry about what people are caling the "New Fusionism":
The operative question, of course, is "Which governments?" I’ll accept James’ claim that libertarianism is inherently anti-political. In fact, I’ll go further and hold with Carl Schmitt (though happily not for the same reasons) that classical liberalism in all of its manifestations is inherently anti-political. Benedictinism, however, is no such thing — it merely regards the proper domain of the political as being far more local than the modern nation state. This is not a bug, it’s a feature.
"But both Benedictinism and libertarianism are fairly anti-political worldviews. Any fusion between them would deepen and widen the disconnect between Americans, their citizenship, and their governments."
Further down, James brings his argument to its logical conclusion:
Just so we don’t get our terms confused, let’s call what the neo-Benedictines are doing "quasi-politics" and what the libertarians are doing "anti-politics". The point I want to hammer home is that quasi-politics is not a different concept than politics, but a different conception of politics. Now the important question is whether quasi-politics can ever displace politics if its practitioners refuse to engage in politics. James clearly thinks that the answer is ‘No.’ I am less certain. Just as a critical mass of citizens switching to the untracable, encrypted online money that will soon be practical will spell the death of the taxation state; so too a critical mass of neo-Benedictines positively engaging in quasi-politics while denying the coherence of the political conception of politics could spell the end of politics as we know it.*
"Let’s not kid: Neobenedictines and libertarians can look to a bright cultural future, I wager. But precisely because their successes have been, and will be, so anti-political, they’ll have almost no effect on the size and scope of federal government. And if they see fit to neglect state politics, too, we can all probably say a final goodbye to federalism. Any politically-minded conservative — and I think conservatives of all types need to recognize that we can’t get rid of politics — will probably be troubled by all that."
On the more fundamental point, however, James and I agree. Over here , a lot of members of the disaffected Right have taken to blurring ‘hard’ libertarianism with the kind of conservative federalism that Daniel Larison and John Schwenkler espouse. The fact that the temptation to conflate such vastly different ideologies exists at all is a sign of just how impoverished our political vocabulary has become. As Larison has pointed out in the past , the temptation arises from a perverse definition of ‘center’ which labels all dissenting opinions ‘extreme.’
Don’t get me wrong, a new fusionism of neo-Benedictines and libertarians could acheive a great deal in the short term. I merely wish to caution us against the idea that they are philosophically compatible in the long run given the vast difference between their conception of the relationship between the individual and the state. On my reading, neo-Benedictines hold that individuals should regard themselves primarily as members of political communities, properly understood, even if the communities themselves should not regard their members primarily as subjects of political communities. A ‘hard’ libertarian cannot and will not accept that proposition.
Cheer up, though! As Helen is fond of saying: "The summer fling is an excellent genre."
*I sincerely apologize for this paragraph.
