Clay_Allison wrote:
And here I am, my own breed of darwinian individualist, stuck with those retrogrades in the short term for some modicum of personal freedom. If you go the other way you have a bureaucrat regulating everything from your diet to your bowel movements.
Aw, and therein lies a double irony. "The Conservative Movement," as its founders call it, flourished on a threefold alliance: libertarian conservatives (government is bad), corporate conservatives (businessmen are superior citizens) and relgious conservatives (the Bible is the literal word, anyone who isn't born again is going to hell and probably trying to destroy Christianity). The relgious conservatives include a goodly number of Opus Dei-style right-wing Catholics, but are mainly Evangelical Protestants.
Driving evolution out of the schools and public life is one of the goals of the Evangelicals, as they associate it with moral relativism, socialism, feminism, Western liberalism, and the other enemies who have been oppressing them for centuries. However, Western Liberalism was created by the Enlightenment, several generations before Darwin. Social Darwinism, a philosophy Darwin despised, was invented and promoted by business conservatives as the moral foundation of the "Robber Baron" era. As I think J.P Morgan described it, wealth was God's way of saying "this is my son, with whom I am well pleased." If people were poor, it was their own fault, and if they died, it was nature reducing the "surplus population."
So, the principle purveyors of immorality, as the Evangelicals understand it, are their allies the corporate conservatives. As a corrupting influence, a handful of college professors promoting philisophical navel-gazing are a sour fart compared to the storm of moral debasement promoted by relentless consumer culture and the glorification of greed.
Too their credit, the Libertarians caught on to this paradox about five or six years and led the way in criticizing the ruling coalition even before Iraq and Katrina showed the rest of us how hopelessly screwed up it was, and how authoritarian were its ultimate goals.
There you have the second irony. Doctrinaire libertarians supported an alleged "small government" movement that has proved to be a "huge, corrupt, and oppressive government" reality.
But, I digress . . .