Draping the devil
It seems that the exposure of unseemly Republican aides and politicians, along with the concomitant improvement in odds that Democrats will take the House and Senate, has caused a certain influential New Media Democrat to become overly giddy at the prospect of a return to Democratic rule. But it's not that Markos Moulitsas' notion of godless mega-churches is completely pointless - although one has to wonder if those more committed to aborting and abusing children than raising them will actually see child care as a major draw - only that it's redundant.
After all, hundreds of "real-world destinations for progressives and liberals throughout the Midwest, 'cultural outposts' designed to attract thousands of like-minded liberals" with "a vast left-wing conspiracy component" already exist. They are called "universities" and "colleges," and they are becoming increasingly irrelevant to modern life thanks to their ongoing transformation from centers of learning to centers of left-wing indoctrination.
Even more quixotic than this vision of organized secular religion, however, is Moulitsas' notion of the Libertarian Democrat, an ideological creature every bit as polygeneric as the gryphon, the centaur, the chimaera or the hippogriff, and as mythical. Kos described this incredible creature in a blog post this summer. Incredibly, he even claimed to have located a few of these rare beasts hidden away in the El Dorado of the Mountain West, presumably feral descendants of the lost menagerie that once belonged to Mr. Braddock Washington.
While Kos correctly ascertains that unlike the Reagan-era Republican Party, modern Republicans are no friends of libertarianism or small government, his discovery of a mutated Third Danger is based on a common and overly simplistic political Manicheanism. He writes:
Traditional "libertarianism" holds that government is evil and thus must be minimized. ... The problem with this form of libertarianism is that it assumes that only two forces can infringe on liberty - the government and other individuals. The Libertarian Democrat understands that there is a third danger to personal liberty - the corporation. The Libertarian Dem understands that corporations, left unchecked, can be huge dangers to our personal liberties.
Kos here commits the same error as columnist Eric Alterman, who continually advocates expanded government as a much-needed check on the otherwise untrammeled powers of the mighty multinational corporations. And in doing so, the great mind of the New Media Left ironically shows himself to be trapped in the same 19th century socialist mindset of the Old Media. For, as I have previously explained, corporatism is not capitalism, and there is no inherent rivalry between the great corporations and the national governments.
Indeed, such a rivalry is impossible, since corporations are nothing more than creations of the state, artificial persons created from the clay of legalese and given life in the form of a tax identification number by the secretary of state. As children of the state, they are subject to their masters and helpless before them, not even a corporate giant like Microsoft can hope to stand against the smallest state in the Union, much less an international government, as evidenced by almost $1 billion in fines being levied against it by the EU.
The true relationship between government and corporation is a symbiotic one, with the latter often acting as an agent of the former in preying upon the wealth of the population. Take the insurance industry, for example. The insurance corporations lobby the government for laws requiring automobile insurance to be purchased from an insurance company to receive a license plate from the government. This causes money to flow first to the insurance company, with a cut of the profits then paid to the government in the form of corporate and employee taxes. The partnership between the state and its corporations is necessary, because without the use of government force to deny the roads to unlicensed vehicles, safe drivers who seldom crash their cars and generate pure profits for the public-private partnership would likely never bother to purchase insurance against a low-probability event. And without corporate participation, the revenue collection would simply amount to an overt tax.
Since the relationship between state and corporation is symbiotic, the state will only act as a check on corporations when their activities contravene the state interest, not individual rights or the interests of the populace. This is why online gambling was recently banned, because it primarily benefited foreign corporations without generating income for any domestic governments. The fact that many forms of state-sponsored gambling are unaffected by this gambling ban proves that protection of the financial well-being of individual gamblers was never a factor, the noble rhetoric notwithstanding.
Government cannot be relied upon to act against corporate interests because in most cases, it shares those interests and possesses a direct financial stake in them. Because the Kosian concept of the Libertarian Democrat relies upon the false presumption of rival interests, it is a logical dead end and does not represent "progressivism for a new century" so much as yet another attempt to drape the devil in angel's robes.