The Goth Kids of Politics

How socialists and libertarians are more alike than either will ever admit.

Cosplayers portraying the Goth Kids from South Park.

American Dreaming contributor Johan Pregmo has a new piece out in Merion West about the problems with cultural relativism: “Stop Pretending All Cultures Are the Same.”

---

We live in the horseshoe era, where the political left and right have gone so far to their respective extremes that they’ve nearly converged in some twilight zone off the grid. When one espouses isolationism, or speaks approvingly of racial segregation or essentialism, or demands that the government step in to commandeer or retaliate against a private business, or calls for books to be burned, one no longer automatically knows which “side” they belong to. Our political tribes have flushed their principles down the toilet in the pursuit of maximum political bloodlust and emotional gratification. As a result, they are blurring into the same mass of sewage even as polarization pierces the stratosphere.

This development has emerged over the past 10 years, but there is a comparable dynamic that precedes it. The OG horseshoes are socialists and libertarians. Unlike the rest of the political landscape, their similarities aren’t the product of modern derangements warping them into fun house versions of themselves. Rather, these schools of thought have always relied on many of the same philosophical assumptions and psychological attitudes. For all that libertarians and socialists hate and oppose each other, what they see when they glare across the battlefield of ideas is closer to the contents of a mirror than either wants to admit.

The similarities between socialism and libertarianism begin with a shared foundational assumption: that people are fundamentally decent and rational. Socialists must have faith that a society without private means of production — where one’s productivity must always be directed toward the collective good — will not automatically break down amid humanity’s natural selfishness. For a governing slogan like “From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs” to work in practice, socialists must believe human nature is inherently self-sacrificing beyond friends and family. They must believe that man in his original state can be relied upon to work with the utmost industry and ingenuity and take from the fruits of his labor only that which he needs, leaving the rest for the benefit of the community. 

Libertarians have an economic outlook that is superficially opposite, but which relies on the same delusions about human psychology. They must trust in the innate fairness, rationality, and decency of people to behave themselves and act with consideration toward others, the environment, and posterity in the near-total absence of government regulations, social policy, and statute laws. Governed only by social and market incentives such as public disapproval or upsetting one’s customers, libertarians must have an almost religious faith in the baseline virtuousness of human nature. The myths of homo economicus (the “economic man” who always acts with perfect rationality in pursuit of reasonable self-interest) and the noble savage (the unacculturated man living in a state of nature whose pure humany goodness has been unperverted by modernity) both predate the concepts of libertarianism and socialism. But each has come to embody the naïvely optimistic assumptions these ideologies rely upon to make their visions for society seem remotely feasible.

This shared optimism translates into reductionism in both diagnosis and prescription. Socialists ascribe the root of all evil to capitalism. Libertarians attribute all of our problems to the state. Both posit fantastical outcomes if only we listened to them and did this one simple trick — abolish capitalism or gut the state. Humanity is being held back by evil forces, and once we vanquish these foes and cast off our chains, we will soar into a new dawn on the wings of prosperity! Pick your utopia.

For all of their mutual optimism, however, socialists and libertarians share a deep pessimism about progress and a distrust bordering on paranoia of the “establishment” or “system.” Their utopian fantasies and hostility toward the status quo incline them to regard the powers that be with conspiratorial skepticism. All data that run counter to their narratives must be cooked. All inconvenient history is spin-doctored propaganda. Behind every major decision is a concerted and nefarious effort to control and exploit. Problems are exaggerated at every turn. Everything is “oppression” to a socialist and “tyranny” to a libertarian. Naturally, no true progress can ever be had in such a system. To socialists, capitalism can do no good. To libertarians, the state can do no good.

To this frame of mind, anything that resembles a step in the right direction is seen as a transparently fraudulent ruse to distract people with gaudy but insubstantial pseudo-progress with one hand while surreptitiously robbing them with the other. There are some reform-minded libertarians and socialists, but for too many, only the direct leap to socialism or unfettered libertarianism will do. Everything else is merely the corrupt establishment trying to placate the populace to suppress the appetite for real change. The contradiction and clash between total pessimism about progress and total optimism about human nature produces conspiracism. If man is innately good but the society he lives in is bad, surely some malevolent outside force is keeping it this way. And yet, change is hopeless.

The way in which libertarians and socialists cope with this manufactured predicament is with a mutually adolescent and petulant sort of nihilism. Both seem to revel in the attitude that we’re screwed; that politics is mere entertainment and spectacle — something they are simultaneously obsessed with but which they also regard as passé and pointless to seriously engage in. Observing the unpopularity of their schools of thought, socialists and libertarians become lazy critics of the status quo; sniping from the peanut gallery, bereft of achievable ideas, and apprehensive to step into the arena. They hide behind a mask of sardonic amusement at a world gone mad as an analgesic alternative to the elbow grease, uncertainty, and vulnerability of doing actual work in pursuit of realistic change.

Adversaries resembling each other is nothing new. Many of the bitterest group resentments stem in part from the unconscious realization that those other horrible people over there remind us a little too much of ourselves. Just ask the Hutus and Tutsis, Jews and Muslims, Protestants and Catholics, or the participants of most civil wars.

Socialism and libertarianism, in their purest sense, are inversions of one another more than true opposites. Mirror images. The formulas are the same; only the variables are different. Humanity is being held back by X. If only we tore down X, our problems would be solved. But X controls society and has corrupted every area of life and rigged the system against us, so all we can do is impotently scream at the evil Y’s or fruitlessly argue among ourselves over increasingly esoteric minutiae.

To be fair, there are many elements of socialist and libertarian thought that have merit. There is such a thing as government overreach or corporate greed. There are limitations to what the market or state can effectively steward unilaterally. There are areas where free markets beautifully channel self-interest in productive and benign ways, and there are areas where market incentives fall far short. There are regulations and public programs that help millions of people, and those that are wasteful, burdensome, or cause more harm than good. This is why neither the state nor the market should be left a monopoly and why checks and balances are needed.

The world is too complex for any one-size-fits-all approach, and the tribal purity politics that so often accompany them are dead ends. Politics in the real world, if it wants any hope of success, must be flexible. It must know how to adapt and work with others. Radical, uncompromising ideologies can’t do that. They can’t grasp the difference between compromising on one’s maximally ideal policy agenda and compromising on one’s principles. But if your principles lead you to spurn potential allies, burn bridges, stay home, and achieve nothing rather than making deals and getting some of what you want, it doesn’t matter how true you are to those principles, because they’re useless. If pragmatism isn’t found among your principles, they’re all just for show.

Talk of finding common ground and building consensus is met with eye rolls in many quarters, but it’s not merely the best path toward progress, it’s the only one. The fact that libertarians and socialists soon learn to give up on the real work of politics in favor of becoming political goth kids demonstrates this rather well.

See also: “The Ingrate’s Prayer”

---

Subscribe now and never miss a new post. You can also support the work on Patreon. Please consider sharing this on your social networks. You can reach me at @AmericnDreaming on Twitter, or at AmericanDreaming08@Gmail.com.