http://dissentingjustice.blogspot.com/2010/02/mount-vernon-manifesto-more-rightwing.html
My first reaction is that it is obviously true that there is something rather muddled about the whole movement in question--much as people often lament the left is off message. It leads me to believe Doug's contention that the US populace is basically right wing at this point, meaning that it isn't so much that the left is losing because it doesn't have a good message but that the public in question is generally tone deaf to leftish messages in general.
I'm also struck (yet again) by how slender a line exists between right and left libertarians. I don't know how I feel about this philosophically (in principle I would rather not have the oppressive elements of the state), but I'm increasingly unimpressed with grand anti-state arguments. Living in a city (Chicago) where the government, while transparently corrupt and often repressive, generally takes care of a bunch of things, it just makes me tired to imagine trying to find the time in my day to contract with some private entity to clear the streets, build the bridges, and make the trains run on time. Granted we're having some problems with all of this as well, but I don't see how making it a private affair would somehow improve matters. It's a city of almost 3 million people: the only way you're not going to have an enormous entity managing some portion of your life is to go live in some rural community--and even then you have to worry about shit like Monsanto telling you what kind of crops to plant. The answer would seem to lie in the more boring matters of trying to make things work and making public institutions more accountable (though I resist characterizing this in terms of Governmentality since I think Foucault assumes a neo-liberal state as the basic background of this).
I'm being vague and making broad generalizations backed by little empirical evidence, but outside of a fundamental right wing bent to the popular consciousness, I seriously don't know how this angst gets displaced against the government as a concept rather than the government as it exists--and especially how one can think it will be helped by replacing government as it exists (i.e. a state that has trended neo-liberal for three decades) with a more extreme version of that. It seems a peculiarly Anglo American tick, but maybe I'm also being provincial. Anyway, I'm getting tired of Americans or at least that's how I feel this morning. They seem rather adolescent in their desire to have everything given to them but with no strings attached. Being one of them, I can understand that desire, but it is hardly a reasonable request.
s