When I first read that Sean Wilentz piece a few days ago, about halfway through I settled on the notion that he was actually just doing a favor for someone at the magazine. Wieseltier or Foer or Hughes called Wilentz into his office and said, “Look, this isn’t gonna be pretty, but you’ve gotta be the bag man on this one. We’re TNR. This has to happen. There’s water that needs to be carried and we settled on you. We’ll make it up to you.” It was self-deception, obviously. I suppose it was just easier to think that someone could only write something so comprehensively obtuse out of the need to take one for the team. But I’m sure Wilentz is a true believer.

That essay has been attended to, and if I’m frequently pessimistic about the world of online commentary, let me say with real happiness that the internet can still get the job done. There have been so many comprehensive eviscerations of Wilenz’s shameless smears that very little else needs to be done. In particular, I am thankful for Will Wilkinson and Henry Farrell and Peter Frase‘s thoughts on what it means to be a liberal, and what it means to be a leftist, when it comes to the state.

My deeper worry, though, is that in its focus on some conception of the state vs. some conception of the private sphere that includes economic enterprise, this discussion is reaching its expiration date. And the consequences frighten me.

I will risk being declared one of the bad ones, in league with the libertarians that secretly pull our strings,  in saying that my biggest fear, nowadays, is no longer that we will become Galt’s Gulch. I no longer actively fear the dismantling of the necessary governmental structures that allow a free society to function. Not because I think it would be a good thing– in fact I think it would be ruinous– but because I don’t think there’s actually a constiuency for it. I doubt there ever really was. Don’t take that as an idealistic reading of movement conservatism, but instead a cynical reading of American power. I simply think that the affluent white people who are ultimately every politician’s prime constituency like the brick-and-mortar state too much. They don’t, actually, want the street lights to go out and they don’t, actually, want the garbage to collect on the street and they don’t, actually, want to trip over homeless people on their way into the Whole Foods. The state is entrenched not merely because of the nature of bureaucracy but because the people who matter want it that way. Whatever their affection for Fox News.

No, what I really fear is not so much President Ayn Rand as President Mike Bloomberg, a corporate-government fusion that is so complete in its character and so compatible in its language that no one knows where one ends and the other begins. I fear a culture of the affluent where the use of the government to get what they want is as natural and untroubling as the use of their money. What I fear is a world where we are all under the power of vast forces we can’t control and don’t really understand. I fear a world where you wake up and somebody’s seized your house but you can never quite get to the bottom of whether it’s the governor using eminent domain or Bank of America using some sort of contract you don’t remember signing. You send letters and make phone calls and they route you around from one agency to the next, the first a government office, the next some department of some bank, and at the end you are staring at letterhead with no better idea of what happen. I fear I already live in a world where I know that someone’s reading my emails but I’m not sure if it’s the NSA or Google or if the distinction even matters anymore. This is what I fear. This is what keeps me awake at night. Those guys– in the Upper East Side– the ones who beat us up with nightsticks. Were they police offices or security officers? Does it matter?

When I say “left-wing” I mean left-wing as in Fred Hampton, not left-wing as in Mayor Daley. If this is too injurious to a good-government vision of left-wing practice, well. Vaya con dios, I guess.

None of that means that I have any more agreement with any given libertarian than I say I do at any given time. Yes, as it happens: I like Julian Sanchez on IP law and Wilkinson on war and Radley Balko on the prison-police complex and Katherine Mangu-Ward on sin taxes. If this, for some, connects me on some sort of chain of evil to the Koch brothers then, well, I’m afraid I’m never going to be the kind of person to please those people in the first place. I grew up in Connecticut, a place where the geographical distance between amazing affluence and soul-crushing poverty is so small that the distinction between state repression and the hand of capitalism blurs away. If you’re a black guy from Bridgeport, driving through Greenwich county, you know that one wrong turn could put your life, very literally, in danger. And at that end of the gun, the distinction between whether it’s the cops or it’s the well-armed private security teams that patrol the communities of the fabulously rich is almost entirely academic.

I have always been frustrated by the conservatives and libertarians who refused to draw a distinction between the TSA strip searching an Arab man at the airport and the public servant who sends out SNAP cards. Because those things are not the same. Yes, they are both “government” in some abstract sense, but they are not the same. The government’s capacity for violence, which is what makes it the government, is not the same as the necessary goods that only government can provide. The fact that the TSA agent is just a poor guy who needs work, that he’s caught up in the system the same as the people he routinely degrades, is more reason to hate that system, not less.

I used to think it was only people on the right who refused to see that distinction. Thanks to Sean Wilentz, I have been disabused of that approach. Well: if we’re really going to go for a straight teams approach, if we’re going to really break it down by sides, I insist that the people who say that they’re “pro-government” explain why the poor and minorities– precisely the people who American liberalism has always claimed to fight for– are so comprehensively afraid of the cops. That is what “the government” means, first, in the American inner city: it means the violent apparatus of the state. There are a host of goods that government can give the urban poor, but their primary interaction and first understanding of the state is of the cops who harass, brutalize, and degrade them. If your pro-government self-definition prevents you from really think that through, you’ve lost the thread.

Higher ed administration is one of my areas of interest, both personal and academic. From here inside the academy, I stay informed through listserves and committees and word of mouth. And what amazes me, not just here but all over, is how hard it is to tell where the directives are really coming from. Who’s in charge? Some new policy got passed. Who passed it? Well there’s a big Gates Foundation grant and they had conditions– the governor is really pressing for this assessment– Pearson says they’ll do it for $45 a student– I think the Board of Trustees appointed a committee– Arne Duncan is making noise…. That’s the secret: nobody knows where one jurisdiction ends and another begins. Nobody knows who’s in charge.

My disagreements with the libertarians I sometimes admire are deep and irresolvable. With someone like Wilkinson, the real no-bullshit incommensurability is likely where the project of human liberation really ends. Because for me, liberating people has to mean liberating them from the economic coercion that is the first and primary threat to their freedom, in their real lives. Freeing people from violent coercion and freeing them from economic coercion are one and the same. That is an opinion that most libertarians find absurd. They’re entitled to that opinion; I am committed to mine. Still: if I find Wilkinson’s opinions on this topic frequently frustrating and wrong, I find the dopey it’s-all-just-good-government-to-me credulity of a Josh Marshall terrifying. Their lack of fear for the violent apparatus of the state demonstrates the limits of their empathy and the endpoint of their liberalism, of their political practice.

That this line of thinking obliterates a meaningful distinction between more and less left-wing, I take as a feature, not a bug.

I am an immensely privileged person. And yet I live every day in a web of power that dictates the path of my life in minute detail. My greatest fear, and if I’m being honest, my prediction, is that the death of real autonomy and self-ownership will define the next epoch of human life. And I particularly fear because these old arguments about the corporate state vs. the governmental state are so inadequate to the cause of opposing this control. I think of my granddaughter, living in the world we’re growing into, going to a workplace where the boss says “Fuck me or you’re fired,” and with the weight of economic coercion, sees no alternative but to acquiesce. She then heads home to a computer where she writes in a private diary about the horror of that experience. Through her Facebook, she receives a message from the NSA: what’re you up to, here? Because it seems subversive.

I imagine her flipping through a history book, reading about the hoary old fight between the pro-corporate and the pro-government, and thinking, what’s the difference?