The impossibility of hope

I thought about a good bumper sticker the other day. It would say, “Liberals care about other people, and conservatives do not.” I can’t quite see where you would argue with that.

The point is (when we set aside the accepted reality that neither Barack Obama nor John McCain, neither Sarah Palin nor Joe Biden, are telling anything that could be with good faith called “the truth”) that in this election, when people tell us to “vote on the issues,” those people don’t understand what the election is really about. They argue that it shouldn’t be about broad impressions or ideology.

Well, it is. The stereotypes are real. People who will vote Democrat are those who are willing to pay higher taxes so that others will have better lives. Democrats are soft socialists. And people who will vote Republican are those who are used to a lot of money and are firmly entrenched in the middle-class American ideal of self-won success. They sport what the intellectual calls classical liberalism. Anyone who feels he or she is voting for issues, rather than for an ideology, is fooling him or herself.

The ideas of “freedom” and “equality” have competed within the Western tradition of government ideology—they are the dual ideals of democracy, and, as no one ever seems to note, they don’t work together. “Freedom” is freedom from government, freedom from imposition, freedom from taxes—the ability to live out your life with the minimum amount of interference possible. “Equality” is the idea that everyone should have the same rights, the same opportunities, the same conveniences—the ability for everyone to reap the maximum amount of benefit from our “advanced” civilization.

In my view, “equality” is why government is around. “Freedom” is why God made the forest—for people to wander off into and live. Thoreau did it.

So why does equality wait up for freedom? Why do those who are ready for a more tightly regulated society, in favor of a more coherent public good, spend so much time trying to convince the self-interested to work with them? It’s because of another misconception about elections: that the democratic process is intrinsically valuable. A few days ago, we wrote a staff editorial headlined “Vote in the way that makes sense for you.” Its overriding drive was a belief that the democratic process trumps any of the competing ideologies. We espouse individual choice because we value stability more than we value either freedom or equality.

I feel that this belief in the democratic process is silly. If we truly believe that government’s purpose is to make life better for everyone collectively and that if we have keen enough powers of observation to see that nothing will get significantly better without systemic change, we naturally must come to the conclusion that the democratic process is in fact subordinate to our own goal of equality. This leads pretty quickly to the exemplary model you are almost certainly thinking of in order to refute me: communism.

Ah. That’s right. That’s why we so highly value balance. Once you get that far left, you end up on the right again.

What, then, as the earth melts and the last generation untroubled by organic extinction ignores its not yet imminent predicament? Systemic change seems to me the only way to spur the necessary measures—instant and vast—against the destruction of an inhabitable world. But that would necessitate totalitarianism...

What, then, as we lose the cars our parents bought us when gang members steal them for an often-repeated initiation ritual? I can’t imagine anything besides systemic change that could create friendly, productive, real communities everywhere and eliminate the half-destroyed communities that produce people absolutely without hope. But then we would need socialism…

I can’t imagine the world getting much better without the destruction of the democratic process. But with the destruction of the democratic process, I can only imagine it getting worse.

I, personally, am thinking quite seriously about wandering off into the woods.