My latest Commentator piece tries in very broad terms to explain exactly why it is foolish to say that Libertarians and Socialists are ‘bedfellows’:

Basically, there are only two forms of government:

(a) Those (very few) deriving explicitly from the US Declaration of Independence: Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed

(b) Slavery or subservience, where the consent of the governed is highly qualified (Western Europe) or substantively attenuated (Russia) or faked (Belarus) or openly denied (China)

The Americans’ proclamation of the very idea of the ‘consent of the governed’ was a momentous moral event. It defied every political form of rule that had occurred on the planet up to that point, and continues to defy many political forms that continue today.

Look at us. We cheer lustily when British athletes win medals at London2012, then sing ‘God Save the Queen’. Our supreme loyalty is to a person and family that have never been elected.

Meanwhile over in the United States we see a tragic accelerating degradation in the idea of the consent of the governed, brought about by staggering growth in federal and other state spending and dizzying public debt. This creates a context in which it sounds quite natural for a Democrat campaign video to turn the Declaration of Independence on its head and proclaim that “Government is the only thing we all belong to”, not to mention the bizarre Obama Life of Julia presentation that portrays the modern American woman as a vacuous weak beneficiary of collectivist largesse.

So the Montgomerie/Blond tweetings and Conservative Home’s heretics wildly miss the point. If you start founding your political principles on the core idea of consent, you make government part of the wider idea of contract and time-honoured, cross-cultural codes of individual responsibility supporting contracts freely negotiated and freely accepted. This is where Conservatism and Libertarianism broadly (but of course not wholly) overlap, and where they are radically different in principle from Socialism/Statism.

Socialism/Statism occupy (sic) a totally different political and moral space based on the paramount role of something inhumanly abstract, above and beyond anything as trivial/irrelevant as an individual’s consent: the ’99 percent’, the ‘collective’ or ‘society’ – or (at an even higher level of mystic mumbling) the ‘nation’ or the ‘race’.

Such Socialist/Statist/Nationalist thinking demands in principle the individual’s ultimate loyalty (and therefore subservience) to something that excludes a priori any idea of individual consent. Libertarians and socialists as bedfellows? Drivel!

Yes, there is an all-important, wider social dimension of human existence. But does that wider dimension have an independent, immanent legitimacy? The collectivists claiming that it does want to grab the key to the doorway of that supposed legitimacy, and thereby force others to do things they may not want to do. Slavery…

Hope that’s all clear now.