My Political Theory of Everything Project: A Re-Introduction

The case for separating objective common ground critique and libertarian-specific critique

Photo by Yusuf Onuk on Unsplash

This post concerns the future of my political commentary, and the direction I wish to take it going forward.

When I started doing political commentary regularly in 2017, I did so with the stated aim of reviving and promoting classical liberal values like free speech in the Western political landscape. Back then, there was a very real crisis around free speech and universalism, with illiberal ideas like 'safe speech', 'progressive stack', and 'racism is prejudice plus power' challenging these long-standing norms. The rising tide of illiberalism felt threatening enough that I felt I needed to speak up. Thus began my journey in doing regular political commentary.

However, something important happened during my journey. I found that, to critique bad ideas by standing on my own ideological ground is neither adequate, nor the strongest position to take. Instead, such critique often ought to be taken from the common ground of objective truth, as well as long standing common values. It must be based on a relatively neutral and objective assessment of what actually works in the real world, versus what would only make things worse and make everyone suffer. This is both because not everyone shares the a-priori assumptions of my own ideological ground, and because fighting ideology with ideology often only leads to more entrenched and polarized positions on all sides, which is counterproductive.

My commitment to classical liberalism and libertarian reformism is firm. It has its roots in my opposition towards what happened back in 2003 around the Iraq War, and what happened with the general assault on civil liberties and freedom of conscience during the so-called War on Terror. To this day, I still believe that libertarianism is the only ideology (or family of ideologies) to be truly and primarily committed to peace and non-violence in the contemporary West. Classical liberal and libertarian values fundamentally inform the way I see many issues, from free speech to foreign intervention to trade wars. However, in a democracy, we must accept that not everyone has the same philosophy, and society can only work if we have a common ground that doesn't depend on ideology or philosophy. Over time, I have found myself spending a gradually larger proportion of my political commentary standing on this common ground, rather than on my own preferred ideological ground.

I also happen to find that my classical liberal critique and my 'objective common ground' critique generally point in the same direction, and go hand in hand with each other. This, I believe, simply demonstrates the soundness of classical liberal values and positions, at least in the context of contemporary Western politics. However, I also think it's important to note the differences between the two types of critique, and maintain some clear separation between them, because of the different angles they are coming from, and the different assumptions they make. Liberal-specific critiques start from the a-priori assumption of liberal values, but 'objective common ground' critiques require only that we start by examining the objective truth, for example through historical examples, to determine whether ideas are likely to be sound or not.

I've decided to call my 'objective common ground' critiques a 'political theory of everything'. This is because its ambitions are ultimately to explain how everything works, at least within the contemporary Western political landscape, so that we can see the path forward to resolving contentious issues more clearly. Of course, this isn't going to replace the need for value judgements. But starting from the objective common ground as to what works and what doesn't would at least lead to less polarization, and less misguided actions on all sides. This is why I have come to believe that we need a body of theory focusing on how things actually work objectively in the real world, if only to compete with the objectively unsound theories our opponents keep using to justify their harmful actions. On the other hand, while such theory should have a focus on an objective and practical interpretation of historical and political events, it should not pretend to be more 'scientific' than it actually is. My own academic background is in the medical sciences, where everything has to be evidence-based, and research findings generally need to be mathematically demonstrated to be more than 95% certain to not be due to random chance to be accepted as valid. I don't think we can aim for that level of precision and certainty when it comes to talking about what is essentially a function of human behaviour with many variations, and we shouldn't pretend so. Instead, we should simply describe what we see, without any of the kind of philosophical sophistry that has characterized much of the postmodern critical theory of the left as well as the intellectually pretentious highbrow reactionary-right philosophies.

Going forward, I will develop my 'political theory of everything' critiques, as well as my classical liberal or libertarian critiques in parallel. The next phase of my 'political theory of everything' project will focus on continuing to debunk the bad ideas coming out of both the postmodern-critical left and the reactionary-populist 'right', and to develop and refine those critiques over time. On the other hand, my libertarian critiques will aim to steer libertarianism back towards a focus on peace and non-violence, and away from ideological dead-ends and misguided alliances.

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TaraElla is a singer-songwriter and author, who is the author of the Progressive Conservative Manifesto, the Moral Libertarian Manifesto and the Moral Libertarian book series. She is also the author of her autobiography The TaraElla Story.