Society Without An Organizing Thesis – OpEd

For the last 250 years, the United States, Great Britain, and most of the developed world have been guided by the principles of liberalism (John Locke, David Hume, Adam Smith, etc.) — that free markets, free people (freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, freedom of religion, etc.), and free and fair elections lead to better decisions over the long run than governance by a handful of elites (monarchs, lords, barons, experts, bureaucrats, etc.).

That’s self-evidently true — a million, or 330 million, or better yet, 8 billion people all using their creativity and ingenuity to solve problems are always going to come up with better ideas over the long run than even the most clever elites.

(For more on this seeThe Wisdom of Crowdsby James Surowiecki — the book is brilliant even though Surowiecki has since turned into a vile Branch Covidian).

But then in the early 1900s progressives came along and said, ‘Now hold on. Markets sometimes produce wondrous things. But they also produce endless booms and busts, horrors like adulterated meat, and deadly externalities including pollution. What is more, the much-lauded competition in the marketplace does not stay a competition for very long. Some firm eventually wins and when it does, it starts buying up its competitors and other sectors of the economy and we’re left with oligopolies and monopolies controlled by robber barons. And that’s the opposite of freedom.’

Progressives were right about that. So they proposed anti-trust to break up monopolies and the regulatory state to set certain minimum standards for foods, medicines, workplace safety, etc., and limits on factory pollution. And for the most part, society agreed.

So the system that we’ve lived under for the last century has beenLiberalism + Progressivism= free markets, free people, and somewhat free and fair elections plus anti-trust to prevent concentrations of market power and regulation to smooth out the business cycles and mitigate the worst downsides of capitalism.

But then something very strange happened. The regulatory state became predatory. The regulatory state figured out that they could collude with big business to enjoy the benefits of monopoly. This is much worse than regulatory capture. This is a modern form of fascism — without racism, nationalism, or even militarism (which makes it even more lethal and efficient than the German or Italian forms of fascism that we study in the history books). The state and the managers of capital now work together to amass wealth for themselves at the expense of society — under the guise of pandemics and public health.

So the ENORMOUS problem that we now face is that both liberalism and progressivism have failed. Free markets created concentrated power that became predatory and genocidal AND the regulatory state created concentrated power that became predatory and genocidal and now the largest firms and the state have merged into one entity.

(Communism and socialism failed too because societies run by an expert vanguard are a disaster, but you already knew that.)

THAT’S why everyone is walking around dazed and confused — there is no central organizing thesis of society that makes sense anymore.

The three proposed reforms on offer are all nonstarters:

Conservatives likePatrick Deneenwant a return to virtue. If a return to virtue was going to work it would have already worked by now. Also, most old school academic conservatives have nothing to say about the rise of the biowarfare industrial complex (they don’t even know what that is) and so they are useless in the current fight.

Classic economic liberals want a return to liberalism. It’s not at all clear (to me at least) how we get from our current state of genocidal monopoly capitalism back to an era of yeoman craftspeople and it’s not at all clear how, even if we could get there, we wouldn’t just end up with monopoly capitalism all over again.

The modern left is so completely addled by too many vaccines that they just want the regulatory state to genocide harder. Said differently, the modern left fully embraces fascism and is not even proposing alternatives.

So that’s where we’re at. Conservatism, classical liberalism, and progressivism lie in smoldering ruins. Monopoly capitalism and the progressive regulatory state rule like global warlords censoring anyone who thinks for themselves, jailing political opponents, and maiming and killing people in large numbers with toxic injections.

Our society is now a strange hybrid of the Middle Ages, the Third Reich, andBrave New World. We have two classes — lords and peasants; we are in the midst of a very profitable genocide; and it’s all infused with surveillance technology, mind-altering drugs, and wall-to-wall propaganda.

The urgent task for the Resistance is to define a political economy that addresses the failures of conservatism, liberalism, and progressivism while charting a way forward that destroys fascism and restores freedom and human flourishing. That’s the conversation that we need to have all day every day until we figure this out.

• Source: This article was published at Brownstone Institute and republished from the author’s Substack