Kevin Williamson: The Smallest Minority
4th August 2019
Interview on C-SPAN.
Kevin dislikes a lot of the same people that I do, so I find his views very agreeable.
Kevin’s basic problem is that he’s a libertarian, and libertarians are (like proglodytes) heirs of Rousseau, people who think that the individual is an autonomous ‘unit’ both socially and economically. The heirs of Rousseau think of existing social relationships that form a culture are like cobwebs, sticky encumbrances that need to be brushed off so that units can go cleanly and efficiently about their business of rationally re-ordering human relationships according to the really excellent plan they’ve just come up with and not sticking with the messy and ugly relationships that ‘just grew’ through historical processes.
Libertarians are better than most Rousseauians but they assume that because individuals are autonomous economic units, which is fairly accurate in the First World (there aren’t a lot of libertarians outside of the First World), they are therefore autonomous social units, which is patently false. Each individual is firmly embedded in a web os social relationships extending from family/friends outward in progressively larger circles until they encompass the entire planet. This is true from cradle to grave; the only way to escape such webs is to dive into the jungles of the Amazon rainforest and spend every waking hour avoiding other humans. Society is like gravity — if you and another human are close enough to interact, you have a relationship whether you like it or not, and the only thing undetermined is what the exact nature of the relationship will be.
Libertarians, like proglodytes, are so in love with their mechanistic, rationalistic view of the world that they never pause to examine how things work in reality, but rather live in a fantasy land where their dreams will come true if they find the right star on which to wish. A lot of them realize this, consciously or not, so libertarianism winds up as a broad smear ranging from libertarianish conservatives near the middle right the way out to radical libertarians on the lunatic fringe. This is why there is no significant libertarian political movement, and why the various Libertarian Parties are such a joke.
But just because they don’t have any of the right answers doesn’t impair the fact that libertarians are pretty good at coming up with uncomfortable questions for the rest of us. And Kevin is very good at that.