“These tools … were not created in America, but in Israel, still another Homeland, enforcing the longest ‘occupation’ in modern history. Thus, the citizens of Minnesota have, as American taxpayers, subsidized an occupation overseas that is effectively a laboratory for their own.”
![HARPERS MAGAZINE
July 2016 Issue
The Ideology of Isolation
by Rebecca Solnit
If you boil the strange soup of contemporary right-wing ideology down to a sort of bouillon cube, you find the idea that things are not connected to other things, that people are not connected to other people, and that they are all better off unconnected. The core values are individual freedom and individual responsibility: yourself for yourself on your own. Out of this Glorious Disconnect comes all sorts of illogical thinking. Taken to its conclusion, this worldview dictates that even facts are freestanding items that the self-made man can manufacture for use as he sees fit.
This is the modern ideology we still call conservative, though it is really a sort of loopy libertarianism that inverts some of the milder propositions of earlier conservative thinkers. "There is no such thing as society," Margaret Thatcher said in 1987. The rest of her famous remark is less frequently quoted:
There is [a] living tapestry of men and women and people and the beauty of that tapestry and the quality of our lives will depend upon how much each of us is prepared to take responsibility for ourselves and each of us prepared to turn round and help by our own efforts those who are unfortunate.](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:3k7nfarm2y7odo3uz4ngqdtn/bafkreihspd5kvrfpksk4nenk34u6pgfzfkckuqx2j5w3fc2pgvk5co5cge)
