here's a sortof interesting piece of political/cultural commentary by mark lilla. he frames the whole thing in terms of "radical individualism"="the libertarian mob," as against...well, what? obviously the basic contrast of individualism is to collectivism, but it's hard to sit there and squarely endorse that term: there are too many corpses stacked up in its name.

lilla doesn't really define 'individualism': it appears to be a kind of narcisstic self-obsesssion and material acquisitiveness. "It [tea party ideology] fires up emotions by appealing to individual opinion, individual autonomy, and individual choice, all in the service of neutralizing, not using, political power." "It appeals to petulant individuals convinced that they can do everything themselves if they are only left alone, and that others are conspiring to keep them from doing just that." really "petulant" is not an argument. always in such a discussion, the intellectual ridicule is near the surface: you are so stupid is really all they ever say. we are reason. you are emotion.

of course i personally would associate individualism with an emersonian or kierkegaardian development of independence and conscience. at any rate, the opposition is completely tendentious. lurking in the background of lilla's view is a constant appeal to authority, of scientists and state institutions. homeschooling, for example, is supposed to be an individualistic outrage upon the body politic.

really since lilla refuses to formulate his opposite of individualism, let's call it authoritarianism. in many  ways the left of now is just like the left of the thirties or fifties, or 1848: envisioning the state as the agent of collective action.

the problem is that the state cannot be the agent of collective action while it rests on coercion. it's as though i put a gun to your head and then declared what we had decided to do. precisely like that, in fact. so if you have a situation of non-individualism produced by coercion - which is always at the heart of the marxist-leftist vision - you cannot have collective action. not until people are fully autononomous are they actually sharing in the decision-making, do you see? the emergence of actual community is impossible in a condition of large scale coercion, for example telling you what your children must do all day under penalty. if a collective consciousness, a collective decision-making procedure were to arise, it would only actually be collective insofar as each person's particpation was free.