(a right winger’s reaction to Perry’s “Giving libertarianism a left hook” article)
I must confess that this idea of a ‘left hook’ for libertarianism is one that I find simultaneously intruiging and implausible
Intellectually I know that Perry makes a very good case when he places traditional ‘left’ and ‘right’ ideas within meta-contexts that, to a large degree, are no long relevant or useful
Certainly arguments about civil liberties generally do, and have for some time, found a more sympathetic audience among Guardianistas than Daily Mailers but, speaking from personal experience, when I have tried to link these to economic liberty, I have run into a veritable Berlin Wall of denial and rejection
I appreciate however, that the term ‘left’ is not monolithic and embraces people with all manner of varying worldviews and epistomolgies and, whilst we may be able to reach some, many (if not most) will be horrified by our vision of a more prosperous, dynamic, healthier and innovative world because those things are poison to them. The essence of the marxist project is deeply anti-life and anti-human and it’s adherents first and last ambitions are destruction not creativity. A better world is the antithesis of their unstated aims
However, I am prepared to acknowledge that I am carrying more baggage then a Spanish hotel porter. My own roots lie in the Conservative Right and my fear and hatred of socialism is so instinctive and visceral that it’s rather akin to a form of arachnophobia. If I see a leftist scuttling across the carpet I cannot help but to run out of the room screaming “kill it, kill it. Hit it with a slipper and kill it”
Personally speaking it is going to take a great deal of patient aversion therapy in order to let one of them crawl over my arm
Still, I would be foolish to rule this out entirely purely because I have grown terminally weary of trying to reason my socks off with the inbred, pin-striped merchant bankers (in every sense of the term) who infest Conservative Central Office these days
