Across the political spectrum, there seems to remain only a single shared belief: the government is the enemy.
Center-right ideology claims to want the smallest possible government, maximizing individual liberty at the expense of social safety. Center-left ideology claims to want a robust government that protects and provides for people, but rejects every aspect of the existing system and has failed to reform even a fraction of it to match their vision (In the United States, at least. Many other countries seem to have made decent progress). Centrists are statists only because they have a naive and incomplete understanding of the world.
Of course, far-right ideology is also statist in its authoritarianism, and far-left ideology is ultimately anarchist and seeks to eliminate the state completely. Real political ideology is not a line or a horseshoe or even a compass, but generalizations about left-wing or right-wing dominate the debate. Such is the messy reality of a system that has been reduced to a two-party us-versus-them duopoly by politicians and mainstream media.
The point is that virtually everyone agrees that the system is broken, although the solution to the problem differs drastically. The only people that are satisfied with the current system are those that are served by the state: the wealthy, and those that wield the power of the state itself.
By most historians’ accounts, the state was established to protect property rights. Those that accumulated great resources or wealth– usually through exploitation or violence– established a system that gave a veneer of legitimacy to their conquest and subjugation of the less fortunate. Whether the state took the form of kings, emperors, democracies, or republics, it has always been a tool of the powerful to preserve their power and wealth.
With the rise of modern “liberal democracy,” the elite learned that it could give people the illusion of agency and equality, so that they would believe that the state serves them instead of serving the powerful.
But there has never been a government where this has been true. Every state is corrupt, manipulated by the wealthy elites that are the enemy of true democracy, because they know that in any real democracy, the masses would destroy them without hesitation.
The state exists to preserve itself, because it is a tool of the rich and powerful to maintain order and obedience among the population. The left knows this; the right knows this.
The state does not serve you. All systems of government exist to maintain roughly the status quo, which is that a handful of people remain at the top and control 98% of the wealth, and hundreds of millions of us spend our lives toiling away for their scraps, and fighting one another when one person’s crumb is larger than the other’s.
The truth is that there can be no civilization without a state. Even the staunchest libertarian or the most radical anarchist will take great pains to describe their vision of a stateless society, one in which humans enter into personal contracts or they cooperate by consensus. But as they are pressed for details on the specifics of how these systems will work, they will begin to describe systems that sound increasingly like some version of a centralized governing body.
But this is not a justification for tolerating the modern state as it exists today. Under this system, we are all slaves. Many of us do not realize we are slaves; many others lack the imagination to envision an alternative. The rest of us participate in the charade because we feel powerless to change it. And only a select few reject the system completely and fight for either a far-left or far-right vision of liberation. They are often called the “lunatic fringe.”
But if we were to set aside our political identities and our prescribed ideologies, we would see that virtually all of us across the horseshoe or the compass want the same thing. And if we all stopped fighting each other to shift the state an inch to the right or to the left to pretend that we’ve “won,” we could work together to eliminate this corrupt and oppressive system and build something new that works for all of us.
Stop fighting for crumbs. Start fighting the real enemy.
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