Forget for a moment the racist charges, von Mises’ism’ness, anti Civil Rightedness–all of it. The libertarian appeal has had to find sometimes obscure pockets to work its ideas into the American conversation because libertarianism is not properly a traditonal mainstream ideology, only when convenient is it called in. This has changed, and it knows no party.
Even if you glance at various titles by Rothbard, you can see the appeal to other areas of thought:
Murray Rothbard's "Anatomy of the State"
On January 3rd, about three blocks from my front door and in the gym of my old high school, a gathering of neighbors will get together and decide support for seven figures running for the nomination of the Republican party for the 2012 election. This will be repeated across the state in thousands of similar places. The question ‘why does Iowa matter?’, may be obvious to some. Iowa flung Barack Obama to victory in 2008 over Hillary Clinton in the democrat’s caucus and changed America’s WASPy presidential politics forever (for the bored, fortunately, conspiracy theories have adjusted). From Iowa, candidate Obama was able to convince Democrats across the country. He did this by outsmarting Clinton’s campaign, understanding the opportunities and the rules of the nomination process nationally, they used voter technology to win but the media was a decisive factor.
This cycle the same populist, anti-war, and egalitarian mood put libertarian Ron Paul in close contention for first place in Iowa, the Paul campaign has the strongest ground game in Iowa. Despite this the media responded with a level of bias against Paul that is utterly disturbing. Obama fared well with the support of the media, after all, Iowa Caucuses are part media event, when they do not go the media’s way, the condemnation is severe.
The funny thing is Iowa’s dovish politics, if Ron Paul headlines it, Iowa no longer matters in the nomination game. They’ve missed the story in their kingmaker function, about Iowa and the coming libertarian century: this is an issue of the return to language. The problem is two-fold. Media has demonstrated its increasing grasp on ‘the political’ by mastering the means of sovereign decision: ‘the essence of the political’, as proliferating technologies—yet they underestimate the libertarian rejection and the orthodox mood in libertarianism that is an expression of human authenticity against the taxonomic groupings of a media state and their phony narratives. The new libertarians believe they outwit the narrative makers, affirming individual rights as the beginning and deference for the rights of others in the world. In what is supposedly a post-racial era (at least the beginning of the review of race-categorization on both polarities of American politics) media struggles to understand the story. If Obama was the figurehead of racial mutuality, Paul’s supporters demonstrate the mood in the polity to return to the natural rights of authentic language in the face of media’s core function of narrative creation. Simply put, the link between Obama and Paul is the end of effective identity politics, of not only identity construction, but placing that identification into a story. The emergence of the status of language in relation to technology is thus the emergence of Substance as it relates to the question of Self toward a new care for finite being.
First, media bias focuses on a strong, albeit small, yet vocal group of evangelical Christians in the western portion of the state as the true nature of republicans here in Iowa. This is utterly distracting. Because fear of theocracy sells more ads, these people bang-out a lot of headlines. When it comes to decisions and policies it is true these people are in want of power but is a minor tale in politics today. If you want to gauge their leader, Rick Santorum has surged and captured what Michelle Bachmann obtained in the early straw poll last summer. Both of these candidates are sure losers in the general election, their success is utterly manufactured. The problem is that Ron Paul took a close second place in that same straw poll and reflected a change the media largely ignored. And while Bachmann and Santorum have switched positions as the Christian darling, this has nothing to do with the consistency and cross-party sentiment found in Paul’s and Obama’s support here and across the nation.
What to take away from the Iowa Caucuses is this. Even if Paul takes first or second in Iowa and New Hampshire, the Republican Party will make sure he is not the nominee and the media will abide. Just as special interest made sure Obama would not enact any meaningful change once in office—yet some of this had to do with the residue of racism deep in the paleoconservative memory of America. Now that this is exposed, the deeper profundity of 2008 will most likely be lost in 2012; that language and memory have been released in media systems that can no longer be contained. In every grasp at identifying an individual, the polity is returned to the force of its own language. Obama will defeat Romney, should he be the one, but my bet is that the best competition would be found in whoever captures the new libertarian mood, right now that’s Paul—and that mood is the return to language that knows no political affiliation. We will have to wait another four plus years to see where the return to language takes American politics and how the media will adjust its grasp on our imagination. From my perspective this is a positive change, and by positive I mean an affirmative signal that “God is death,” following Derrida, that finitude matters as that which defines the infinite, that death and God are inseparable and the figures who run for office must reflect and defend mortality over sainthood, that is, the media’s beatific certitude it has calcified in its increasing grasp of subjectification toward the inanity of the nonhuman faux pas. Thus, today, politics demands a vigilance, a watchfulness—not for the messiah or the false messiah and not to enact the dialectic of the religious; not for the conquering of time toward the ultimate truth, rather, toward the care for what is inescapably human: avoiding the collision of Substance and Self facilitated by ‘the political’, the false notions of reconciliation and eternal life by the abuses of being. Ours is a return and care for mortality, the continuity of a dignified existence, that being is finite and the richness of life should not be defined by withdrawal from the temporal realm, but to embrace it.