isolationism and bitcoin libertarianism

... and they just said
what they always say

I don’t think of Trump or Trumpism as particularly isolationist, which is the standard charge by the neo-liberal crowd. An isolationist does not increase the already horrific amount of money devoted to the American military. That isn’t just a symptom of some deeper non-isolationism – that is the whole ballgame. Rather, Trumpism exists as another twist in the long logic of power that has made it unthinkable, for the establishment, that the U.S. could for good reasons simply cease to be a superpower. That logic makes it the case that if, say, China, with its newfound wealth, does things in Africa, this is a net minus for the U.S. – because it is always a binary, always win/lose, with our “rivals”.

Fundamentally, I can’t think of any political reason to countenance the seizing of excessive world power by any nation. It has always puzzled us that the right, which doesn’t trust the state to deliver mail, trusts the state with the means of ending the human species. This, indeed, is straining at the gnat and swallowing the ICBM missile. My view is that this disproportion shows the fundamental contradiction in a theory of the state that starts out with an anti-statist ideological coloration while having no real philosophy of governance – that is, having no recognition that governance is in question in every organization. In other words, the question of governance is in play in both the power held by public and that held by private entities. Fetishizing the “contract” – an all purpose, ontological bandage here – allows the anti-statist not to look at the results of the exercise of private power. Given the course we are going in this world of ours, it is only a matter of time before a corporation builds its own nuclear missile. To the cheers, no doubt, of bitcoin libertarians.