The Rain in Spain

At their hugely popular website ‘Crooks and Liars,’ John Amato and David Neiwert have helped to expose the fact that there is no conservative party in America any more. They show that the right wingers are not conservatives, they are anarchists.

The only law the right wing believes in is the Law of the Jungle. No schools, no hospitals, no job programs, no nothing. Their idea of nirvana is Mogadishu.

-Rep. Alan Grayson

I have come to regard statists of all self-professed [ed. "soi-disant"] political ideologies as crackpot Hobbesians. "The Law of the Jungle"? Well, it works as a minor Dylan lyric. Look, Hobbes was wrong even on his own terms, but a couple of centuries of subsequent investigation, discovery, and revelation about the natural world lead ineluctably to the conclusion that it is not a war of all against all, but a vastly complex, interdependent, and beautiful mechanism for the proliferation and continuation of life. And that is not to say that there is no violence, no conflict, but that taken holistically, "nature" is not some perpetual cataclysm whose depredations we avoid only via the bulwark of civilization, but that it is instead a magisterially complicated and faceted system of systems of systems against whose billion-year evolution our brief species and briefer societies, for all their apparent (to us) ubiquity, pale and thin.

As for anarchy, I am fond of my friend J.R. Boyd's definition:

Stripped of its arbitrary associations, anarchism just means skepticism toward authority.

This being the nut of it, how are we to conclude anything but that the honorable Mr. Grayson, reading anarchy into his political opponents, objects to their insufficiently graceful acknowledgment of his authority--that is to say, the rightful authority in which he believes himself to partake by grace of his membership in a particular temoporary political majority? Are we to take it that "anarchist" is just an insult to hurl at another faction in the palace intrigues? Why not just call them terrorists? Oh, wait . . . what? You have.

Plainly and obviously, the Republican Party, the "tea party" . . . whomever Grayson is talking about, these people are not actually skeptical about authority, and certainly not about state authority. Their emphases are different, but their belief in the efficacy, use, and necessity of an extremely powerful, intrusive government mechanism is not. If so-called conservatives favor the martial over the judicial, say, or the legislative over the regulatory, well, in neither case is any real skepticism about authority observed. These are matters of mechanics, not of essence. Anyway, Republicans are quick to abandon their anti-Federal stance when "the border" is at stake, and Donks are quick to abandon their questions about the military where "humanitarianism" is concerned, and none of them are hollering that we must throw open the doors of the prisons, open the borders, permit everything, prohibit nothing, let the chips fall where they may. Accusing either one or other of the major political parties in this country, whose entire reason for being is the acquisition of political power and control of the government of the nation-state, of anarchism is like accusing the ocean of being dry.