“Augustinian” Theology and the Republican/Libertarian Denial of Society

http://politics2100.wordpress.com/2010/10/12/theology/


n the foregoing posts, I chronicle how libertarian ideology has led the Republican Party astray, misleading the American public about the real problems and solutions for our common challenges.  The resurgence of libertarian ideology started during the late 1970’s and the 1980’s when the post-WWII consensus about how advanced industrial societies should be governed came under question after the Vietnam War, the 1970’s energy crisis, and bouts of inflation.  One of the more important Transatlantic figures in the resurgent right was British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, whose electoral victory in 1979 showed the way for Ronald Reagan’s electoral win in 1980.  As a conservative MP of a new school, Thatcher was a student of the founder of neo-liberalism, Friedrich von Hayek, who attempted to create an economics based almost exclusively upon the action of individuals in the marketplace.  Thatcher’s 1987 statement “that there is no such thing as society..only individuals and families” is an almost programmatic expression of Hayek’s beliefs and economic prescriptions.
While Thatcher apparently tried to back away from this statement in her memoirs, the absurdity of it has not been fully exposed and explored, given that at the time it was uttered, neoliberalism was in the ascendant and has continued to have an inordinate influence over political discourse in all parts of the political spectrum.   Blindness to or denial of society runs throughout the libertarian/neoliberal philosophy; economic policy prescriptions from most political groupings to this day are marked by the avoidance of viewing society as a system or whole.  Though President Obama is nominally from a political tradition that believes in government as an integrative force in society, his utterances in his first years in office have tended to support or be only mildly critical of this ongoing denial of how society and the economy function as a system; he has instituted policies that support social systems in a manner that is, to the say the least, subtle and seems half-hearted.  He and the Democrats are now harvesting the consequences of their neglect of these issues.