Don’t Vote for the Barbarians

Rod Dreher has brought to our attention Alasdair Macintyre’s 2004 essay urging the importance of not choosing “between two politically intolerable alternatives…”

“Why should we reject both? Not primarily because they give us wrong answers, but because they answer the wrong questions. What then are the right political questions?”

He goes on to argue that the right questions involve the means for the protection of human life from conception to birth and allow for human flourishing. In 2008, the only candidate asking and answering such questions was Ron Paul with his consistent ethic toward life in policies seeking the elimination of the federal advancement of abortion as well as in his advocacy of non-interventionism. However, instead we are left with the barbarians:

“What matters at this stage is the construction of local forms of community within which civility and the intellectual and moral life can be sustained through the new dark ages which are already upon us. And if the tradition of the virtues was able to survive the horrors of the lask dark ages, we are not entirely without grounds for hope. This time however the barbarians are not waiting beyond the frontiers; they have already been governing us for quite some time. And it is our lack of consciousness of this that constitutes part of our predicament. We are not waiting for a Godot, but for another – doubtless very different – St. Benedict.” Macintyre, After Virtue, 263

What are libertarians to do in this dark age? Part of the answer lies here.

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