A hundred years ago, the mere mention of mere anarchy was sufficient to put ladies of class into a dead faint, and the centre was somewhere to the right of today's Republican Party. Today, we have the advantage of hindsight and the memories of a century of blood-dimmed tides that make mere anarchy look downright attractive. We also have a centre not very far left of the GOP, and it's time to ask if the left/right dichotomy has not been superseded by more basic considerations - or, indeed, if it ever had any validity at all.

When the Estates General convened on May 5, 1789, they proceeded to do more than make the tottering French monarchy superfluous and eventually put an end to it. By the simple expedient of seating themselves on opposite sides of the chamber, the Third Estate (the commons) on the left and the First and Second (clergy and nobility) on the right, they created a fictitious division which haunts us to this day. While the "left" nominally represented the interests of the common man and the "right" the prerogatives of a decaying feudal order, the two groups in actuality acted as flip sides of a coin: state power. Was it to be used to the advantage of the aristocracy, or to the advantage of the proletariat? In the near future, Proudhon and Bakunin would be raising the question of whether the state should be allowed to stand at all. Across the Atlantic, the Americans were offering one answer - that it should stand, bound by the shackles of constitutional limits.

Yeats was perhaps more prophetic than he knew. Today, left and right represent classes of ideas more than they represent classes of people, but they still enshrine an attitude toward the prerogatives of the state that is increasingly untenable. The right wishes to blind, deafen and gag us while leaving us free to spend our money. The left wishes to rob us blind while cheerfully acknowledging our right to protest. At the centre, the emphasis on freedom as such disappears completely. It's the first item on the table when something has to be sold to purchase a new regulation.

The best lack all conviction because the heads or tails of state power are both losing calls. The worst are full of passionate intensity because power is an aphrodisiac. And the ceremony of innocence....

A great writer once held that all men are endowed with certain unalienable rights, and that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

A great speaker once stood forth to demand that he be given liberty, or death.

Transcending left and right, and sacrificed by both, stands the principle of self-ownership and freedom within the constraints of non-initiation of force. The necessary focus -- one that is increasingly standing forth as the only viable alternative to the slow political suicide of the world's nation-states - is liberty as the central tenet of political organization.

Are the parties currently in power amenable to this conception? The same writer who defined our unalienable rights posited that the sole purpose of government was to secure those rights. In today's wheel-and-deal political milieu, I sincerely doubt that any two figures of major importance in those parties would acknowledge Thomas Jefferson's dictum as having any validity whatsoever. They're too busy dickering over which subsidy will be handed out to the victim of what regulation.

The left hand knows damn well what the right hand is doing, because they are attached to the same tired old corpulent body. The corruption is systemic, not random. It is terminal, not treatable. Any honest person who has heretofore classified themselves as belonging on the "left" or "right" is fast running out of excuses to belong to either of the two essentially identical groups constituting the American political status quo.

The GOP's faux dedication to economic freedom is of no more utility than the Democratic crocodile tears for the civil liberties they sacrifice on a daily basis beneath the Capitol Dome. These parties are corpses that have yet to cease kicking. The choice now is between mere anarchy or civil society, between liberty accompanied by blood in the streets or liberty achieved by agreement between rational men.