Rage Boys of the left vs. the Kool Kidz of the culterati

This is an old piece but it's been recirculated lately because someone (Treacher?) finally noticed its conclusion:

Anytime anyone says anything libertarian, spit on them. Libertarians are by definition enemies of the state: they are against promoting American citizens’ general welfare and against policies that create a perfect union. Like Communists before them, they are actively subverting the Constitution and the American Dream, and replacing it with a Kleptocratic Nightmare.

Ah, the old argumentum ad sputum -- the sort of thing that usually merits a time out these days, now that we're too civilized to spank. You might think, well, at least he's anti-communist, but the screed in general is so incoherent that it's difficult to be sure of even that much. It's called "The rally to restore vanity: Generation X celebrates its Homeric struggle against lameness", by one Mark Ames, writing obviously in the wake of the Jon Stewart rally, and it's so ornately, baroquely, ragingly incoherent, in fact, that it exerts a kind of morbid fascination all its own -- here's more, e.g.:

The problem with the Left wasn’t that they were too fixated on proving they were right, or that they didn’t make enough noise before the war about the lies that led us into that war…the problem is that the Left doesn’t stand for anything Big because it’s not guided by a vision or an Ideal. What does the Left stand for? Let me suggest a few things in people’s own personal interests in these decaying times that the Left should stand for: first, people need money. Then if they have money, they need Life. Then they might be interested in “ideals” set out in the contract that this country is founded on. Ever read the preamble to the Constitution? There’s nothing about private property there and self-interest. Nothing at all about that.... That’s what it is to be American: to strive to form the most perfect union with each other, and to promote everyone’s general betterment. That’s it. The definition of an American patriot is anyone promoting the General Welfare of every single American, and anyone helping to form the most perfect Union—that’s “union”, repeat, “Union” you dumb fucks.

So maybe he's a bit of a communist after all, but at the same time an American patriot, someone who believes people need money first, even before Life with a capital L (as distinct from "life"?), but isn't too big on private property, but thinks the Constitution is a "contract", and is really big on perfect unions or Unions (this time case doesn't seem to matter, though who knows). Blah-de-blah-de-blah, you dumb fucks.

Alright. This is fun, but kind of fish in a barrel stuff. What gives poor Mr Ames' zany diatribe a little more interest is that the target he spends most of his time on is, of all people, Tom Hanks' daughter, E. A. Hanks. It seems that, a while ago, she wrote something called "Dear The Left: A Breakup Letter", the gist of which is, admittedly, a little hard to figure out but maybe comes down to the idea that "The Left" has become too preoccupied with protest posturing and has neglected substantive accomplishment. Or something.

Now, just by dint of her parentage, EA is automatically a member of the culterati, and these are the people who set the tone, so to speak, for the herds of what I've been referring to as the bien pensant, or the fashionably orthodox. So maybe, in light of that, we can start to feel a smidgen of sympathy for the Rage Boy after all. Yes, he's loopy and incoherent, and his proposals for lefty Big Ideals -- money, Life, perfect Union or whatever -- are so pathetically thin and meaningless as to be embarrassing, but you can kind of see how he might be driven to an edge of some sort just by the cutesy title alone of EA's "breakup letter". In many ways, I think Ames is a good representative of what's become of the once serious left -- having been hollowed out by the historic collapse of the socialist ideal, they're now mere husks, clinging to a kind of vague, oppositional stance but no longer with any real content or substance other than a few stray abstractions. Then, when anyone even hints that that's the case, all they've got left is rage and spittle.

Little wonder then that the Kool Kidz are looking to move on. Of course they're not serious about politics -- they're serious only about setting and/or following a style, of which political opinions are simple accessories. But that's all right. There's room on the right for fashionistas too.

Labels: conservatives, libertarians, and liberals

Reason magazine is featuring a three-part debate between Brink Lindsey, Jonah Goldberg, and Matte Kibbe on the proper political strategy for "libertarians". Now, I'm okay with the label "libertarian" for want of a better one. I'm also an atheist, pro-drug liberalization, pro-choice on abortion and many other things, pro-Darwin and evolution, anti-capital punishment, etc., etc. I even drink lattes. You'd think I'd be a prime candidate for Brink Lindsey's dump-the-conservatives-move-to-the-center appeal to libertarians, wouldn't you? But I'm not. Here's why: 

First, because the sneering tone of the attack on the popularity of the Tea Party movement is, to put it at its mildest, a nasty expression of the worst sort of pseudo-elitist snobbery current these days. It's pseudo-elitist because it exudes a sweaty yearning to be included in what the author so obviously thinks is a liberal bien pensant Club where you can stand around at gallery openings looking down at imaginary hordes of racist, bible-thumping soccer moms. And it's pseudo-elitist because its explicit notion of an elite -- ironically, its division of society into a nice, clean us vs. an unwashed them -- is not just blatantly self-congratulatory, it's antiquated (see research on education levels). The irony here runs deeper than the inability to see that the simplistic division into good guys and bad guys that he criticizes in the conservative right has more pertinence to his own rhetoric than to his targets'. It also applies to the attempt at intellectual substance that he borrows from Julian Sanchez, in invoking terms like "ressentiment" and "epistemic closure" to describe an actually quite vibrant, varied, and positive conservative movement -- this just misfires when aimed at the contemporary American right wing, but is not inaccurate as a description of an increasingly frustrated, angry, and confused American left.

Second, then, is because, despite my latte-sipping ways, and like steadily increasing numbers of people quite content to be non-elites, I'm finding that my reaction to precisely those features of the contemporary left -- of closed-mindedness and resentment as a character trait -- makes me want to give traditionally conservative themes another look. I'm an atheist, as I've said, but I've long since grown out of that adolescent need to display my superior rationality by disparaging other people's belief systems, and in fact I recognize that we all have and need such systems, whether they're traditionally religious or not. I think the notion of character, for example, is important. I don't look upon "family" or even "family values" as code, or merely as code, but rather as the names for something else of importance. Even, dare I say it, patriotism seems to me to be a good and indispensable thing in a world in which the nation is the only means by which a person's rights, freedoms, and most general values can be sustained. It's become customary, of course, for the left to sneer at all such virtues and themes in one context but then, when criticized, hurry to claim them back again, and take offense at the critics. It's what I mean by the frustration, anger, and confusion of the contemporary left, and it seems to me that Lindsey, in his demonization of the Tea Party right, either shares in that or is at least insufficiently aware of it.

So the third reason I'm not impressed with his recommendation that libertarians occupy a political "center" is because I think he's confused about the nature and possibilities of political space. Whatever we might think about the true dimensionality of that space, practical politics forces you into the linear range of alternatives that we've come to call left and right. Now, Lindsay, in his centrist recommendation, obviously doesn't dispute that. But he seems to think you can occupy the center just by somehow mixing together opposites like statist and anti-statist, Big Government and small government. You can't, of course, and the attempt just makes you look not just unserious, but silly, in a way that confirms all the geekish air-head stereotypes of the libertarian. Little wonder not just that "liberaltarian" went nowhere, but that parties named "Libertarian" everywhere tend to be relegated to the perpetual fringe of the political heap. No, if you take politics at all seriously, you often have to choose, who to ally with and, unfortunately, who to ally against. Here and now, the simple fact is that Big Government is a central element in the liberal-left agenda, as it's just not in the conservative-right. There are elements in either camp that anyone will find distasteful, to put it mildly (not the same elements for all, of course), but that's only the more reason why smaller government should be preferable to larger -- so that those elements have less ability to inflict their values on us all through state power.

Lindsey thinks, as he says, that libertarians are "tainted" by their association with conservatives -- I think, on the contrary, that the people who favor smaller government, regardless of the label they choose to pin on themselves, form a natural political alliance against those who wish, from a smorgasbord of agendas, to advance the intrusive power of the state. Such an alliance is good, not tainted -- and more than that, it actually carries with it some real hope.

UPDATE: I forgot to mention that Ilya Somin not only linked to this debate, but added an extensive and valuable comment of his own. Here's my comment on his, from the Volokh Conspiracy:

I largely agree with Ilya’s post on this, but also think a) it goes far too easy on the sneering Brink Lindsey (I like the comment from Serious above), and b) it relies too much on labels or pigeon-holes for very complex sets of political and personal values, beliefs, objectives, etc. — far easier to make needed alliances if we don’t worry so much about the label we paste on our foreheads.

Capitalism vs. corporatism: a meeting of left and right?

Here's a comment on a theme that needs a lot more attention than its gotten so far -- the distinction between capitalism, in the sense of free trade, free markets, and free enterprise, and what we might as well call "corporatism", in the sense of state support for, and involvement with, selected corporate favorites. Corporatism often hides under capitalism, and, on the left especially, is often mistaken for it. But, as the note makes clear, they are two very different political/economic entities, and corporatism has its proponents on both the left (as in, e.g., state control of the economic commanding heights) and the right (as in, e.g., using subsidies as a means of shifting tax money from one sector to a more favored one).

The meeting of cats and dogs left and right comes up in a reference to another post, by an environmental blogger named David Roberts, criticizing Newt Gingrich's advocacy of energy subsidies, and it has the better substance:

Says Gingrich, "a low-cost energy regime is essential to our country." That is one doozy of a non-sequitur. Surely a conservative ought to know that money government spends on energy subsidies is taken from elsewhere in the economy. The externalized health and ecological costs of fossil fuels are paid by the public, with money taken from elsewhere in the economy. Fossil-fuel subsidies don't reduce costs, they shift costs. The burden is moved from energy companies to the public. The result is what we have today: energy that looks cheap because most of its costs are hidden from view. ...

There is no plausible interpretation under which Gingrich could be characterized as pro-market. He is pro-business, or more precisely, pro-some-businesses, which is very different -- the opposite, even -- of pro-market.

via Instapundit