Much of what I read seems patently absurd. The writing has the form of reasoned argument, but not the content. The writing isn't entirely content free, but the content is narrowly selected for convenience.

I predict Obama’s unabashed embrace of throwback, dirigiste, soak-the-rich “liberalism” will not prove popular with generally pro-market, well-to-do voters who crossed over for the first time to pull the lever for a Democratic president. Yet the not-very-religious remain repelled by social conservatism all the same. As I’ve said, it doesn’t matter to me whether the Republicans become more liberal on “values” issues or whether Democrats adopt more sensibly market-oriented social and economic policy. Either way, by signaling the desire of contemporary Democrats to move even further left than is feasible in the U.S., Obama draws attention to the unoccupied space in American politics.

The problem with this argument is that the Democrats are so completely illiberal on values issues and so very religious in a dark green pagan sort of way, as recently discussed in Creeps and Cranks. Liberaltarianism, as defined by Wilkinson, is only a mirror of the old alliance of market oriented thinkers with social values people of the right. I suspect that there are as many and more that are repelled by this other flavor of social conservatism, and so optimism is naive.

I think that the confusion arises from failing to consider many of the attributes of the Democrats, focusing only on the "dirigiste, soak-the-rich" economic issues and ignoring the methods used to accomplish the attacks. In some cases the method is the objective. The fact that some of the currently rich might be harmed is a bonus, even though some of the currently rich and soon to be rich prosper at the expense of society as a whole.

I see a sort of thread running through some other posts in today's reading. Nick Cohen uses a current event to retell some of the sordid history of the 1930s - which we seem to be reliving, this time as farce.

Martin Kettle says in the Guardian

Hobsbawm is 91 and a Companion of Honour, an award given to only 45 Britons for outstanding achievements and whose motto is “In Action Faithful and in Honour Clear”. He has been told by MI5 he is not entitled to see the file, for which he applied under the Data Protection Act.

Ministers face the potentially embarrassing task of having to explain to parliament why Hobsbawm, who joined the now defunct British Communist party in 1936 and is widely regarded as one of the world’s leading Marxist historians, is worthy of receiving such an exclusive distinction from the Queen but is not trusted to see his own security file.

Now obviously files from the mid-20th century should be released but as my account of the period from What’s Left? shows, they may not make comfortable reading.

On 23 AUGUST 1939, Nazi Germany and the communist Soviet Union signed a non-aggression pact. This shocking fact was the greatest trauma socialists of my grandfather’s generation had to confront. . .

It is platitudinous to say that communism and fascism were substitute religions whose adherents would adopt any tactic as long as their prophets assured them that it would bring the Promised Land closer to view, because it doesn’t fully explain what made people communists in the first place . . .

Read Cohen's post to get the full flavor of the intellectual knots that ideologues tied themselves into in order to maintain their dirigiste opposition to the British, going so far as to embrace fascism as well as communism, though both totalitarian systems did far more harm to the socialist principles such ideologues claimed to hold.

One of the threads of these intellectual knots deals explicitly with the pagan nativism of the fascists.

Heidegger’s notorious engagement with National Socialism (beginning in 1933) was not merely a personal mistake, but rather was consistent with aspects of his philosophy. The Nazis regarded socialism, capitalism, and democracy as degenerate movements that threatened the Aryan race. Heidegger’s disillusionment with “real historical” National Socialism began when he saw the Nazis embrace the same industrial technology as did the USSR and the USA. For Heidegger, technology refers not so much to technical devices, as to the worldview that compels us to create ever more powerful technical devices. The technological worldview is one-dimensional: to be is to be raw material for enhancing the power of the techno-economic system. Heidegger developed a reductionism all his own: In his view, modernity aims only at the increase of power. Hence, modern ideals of freedom, emancipation, liberation, and self-realization are illusory.

Not long after the end of World War II, here is what Heidegger had to say about modern technology:

Agriculture is now a mechanized food industry, in essence the same as the manufacture of corpses in the gas chambers and death camps. The same thing as the blockades and reduction of countries to famine, the same thing as the manufacture of hydrogen bombs.

This infamous passage, which generated immense criticism upon its eventual publication in the 1980s, immediately came to mind when I read James Hansen’s own (in)famous claim in The Guardian (February 15, 2009) that,

The trains carrying coal to power plants are death trains. Coal-fired power plants are factories of death.

If you crawl into bed with the Democrats and American liberals you will sleep with fanatics that to me seem as repellent as the religious conservatives that Wilkinson focuses on to the exclusion of the religious liberals. It fails to justify such strange bedfellows.

The only principled position that I can see is opposition to concentrated power. At this time that means opposition to the Democrats, just as it meant opposition to the Republicans not so long ago. They are both repellent when looked at closely. The best we can do is divided government that denies either of them great power. Trying to fluff up one or the other as the lesser evil ignores the fact that they are both evil and should be hobbled as best we can.