Musings on Me, Me, Me and Greatest Good for the Greatest Number Liberalisms

 

When looked at dispassionately, something most people are unable to do, of course, there have clearly been two forms of liberalism that have dominated the core nation world of wealthy Northern and Western European states and European settler nations like the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand since the Enlightenment: narcissistic or me, me, me liberalism and greatest good for the greatest number liberalism. One of the reasons this obvious fact has been missed and continues to be missed by so many, of course, is because of the dominance of demagoguery faux mass democratic societies.  For the vast majority of masses, fed as they are on the often delusional, conspiratorial, and manichean binary ideologies of the elites, ideology creates "reality" and one of the realities ideology has created is the ahistorical notion that narcissistic liberalism, particularly in its right wing populist form, is actually conservative when it isn't.

Laissez-faire or narcissistic liberalism, whether in its elite, middlebrow, or populist form, has been the dominant or hegemonic of the two, dominating many Western nation-states until the Great Depression of the 1930s. Utilitarian liberalism briefly dominated Western political culture from the Great Depression to the oil crises, deindustrialisation, and globalisation of the 1970s through the 1990s, all of which, in turn, allowed economic oligarchs to regain whatever political and economic control they had briefly and not always cheerfully ceded with a vengeance. While utilitarian liberalism has not disappeared and is stronger in some Western nations like the Scandinavian countries of Europe and in some intellectual circles even today, narcissistic liberalism came to dominate in nation-states, particularly in those nation-states that really mattered like Imperial America, the dominant economic, political, cultural, and geographic power of the post-World War Two era.

There have been and are a host of myths associated with both forms of liberalism. Laissez faire liberals like to talk the free trade talk but have had and continue to have no problem accepting government wealthfare and of engaging in the monopolistic and cartellistic managerial practises associated with corporations pointing up the hyperbole or hypocrisy of their keep the state out of the economy rhetoric. After all, if Adam Smith is right and the economy works best all on its own, managers are unnecessary. Narcissistic liberals have also developed ideologies--one assumes it helps some of them sleep at night--by which they convince themselves, or at least convince others, the demagogued masses, that greed will raise all floating boats despite the reality that only a very few boats actually float, a fetish that points up the theological and dogmatic underpinnings of narcissistic liberalism. 

Utilitarian liberalism, despite its reformist rhetoric, has often been limitedly reformist in practise. Its elite political practitioners, after all, have had and continue to have close ties with economic elites and its political practitioners are hardly, as is true of virtually all politicians and of all humans for whatever reason, immune to the personal "pleasures" of plunder and power and the perquisites that have typically accompanied both. Utilitarian liberalism, in other words, reminds analysts that they need to explore the always present differences between rhetoric and reality. As with the narcissistic liberals utilitarian liberals have developed their own comforting myths that presumably help them sleep at night including the one that they really want to help the poor and American minorities though they have never been really able to clairfy how they can do this by cosying up to the economic elite and doing much of their bidding just like their narcissistic liberal kissing cousins.

One of the fundamental problems for the once seemingly invincible greatest good for the greatest number liberalism  (seemingly invincible from the vantage point of the early 1960s) today is that core nation-states have become too big, too unwieldy, too complex, too one size fits all bureaucratic, too impersonal (at the same time that it is dominated by oligarchic personal networks), too distant, and too consumerist (I buy therefore I am) oriented, to be able to manage the corporation that we call a core nation-state today. This inability of elites to be able to manage large territorial and governmental entities is almost certainly one of the reasons, money and power and the global nature of megacorporations are others, for the revival of political, economic, cultural, and geographic regionalism we have seen in federalist states like the US, Canada, and Australia since the oil crisis, deindustrialisation, and globalisation. 

The solution to this state of affairs would seem to be obvious: core nation-state downsizing, a downsizing that would play out in the development and emergence of smaller nation-states like Quebec or alliances between regions such as that along the west coast of Canada and the US. Of course, there are countervailing forces which make the obvious solution to deal with the multiplicity of problematic "issues" difficult including nationalism with its associated delusions and its inherently manichean and hence binary hallucinations amongst them my cock is bigger and harder than yours militarism and holier than thou populist Big State paternalism.