On "libertarians"

Regarding my last post, an anonymous commenter asks:

Why do you insist that Angus is a conservative? Are you unable to make a distinction between conservatives and libertarians?

Hint: they are quite different.

Two questions here. The first is easy; I insist that Angus is a conservative because he says a lot of the exact same things that self-described conservatives say. Political ideology is defined by consensus, not by a dictionary. If you are marching in an army, and you point around you and say "I'm not with these guys," I'm going to have to be a little skeptical of your claim. (Yes, I realize that there is a substantial possibility that Angus did not leave the anonymous comment; hence, I realize that saying "your claim" is not entirely appropriate in this situation; it is a figure of speech).

The second question is harder: What is the difference between self-styled "conservatives" and self-styled "libertarians"?

The common answer is: Social issues. Though many conservative politicians and writers call themselves "libertarian," their stances against gay marriage, immigration, and drug use give them away as closet authoritarians. True libertarians, we often hear, agree with conservatives on economic issues (lower taxes, less regulation) and with liberals on social issues (legal marijuana, gay marriage, more immigration).

I do not buy this distinction. As I see it, the American "conservative" ideology is not a rigid and unified canon, but a diverse set of interest groups held together by an unusually stable alliance of convenience. From reading conservative blogs and magazines, watching Fox News, and talking to self-described conservatives, I have grokked that the groups that make up the alliance we call "conservatism" are three: 1. businesspeople and other well-to-do folks who want lower taxes and regulation, 2. ethnic tribalists who think that white, Christian, and Southern/rural people and groups should have political and social primacy, and 3. militarists who want our military to be really big and to go kick peoples' butts. These are known in the press, respectively, as "economic conservatives," "social conservatives," and "neoconservatives." Militarists are the smallest group, so I'll ignore them for now.

What do these groups have to do with each other? Why has this coalition-of-the-willing endured for so long? In a word, socialism. The conservative movement as we know it is an alliance of two groups that felt threatened by the socialist (or "leftist") movement of the 20th Century - economic conservatives because socialists wanted to take their money, social conservatives because socialists wanted to diversify and liberalize their culture. As Wooldridge and Micklethwait document in The Right Nation, economic conservatives had to hold their nose a bit to join with a bunch of moralizing Bible-thumpers, and lower-income social conservatives had to do a bit of doublethink to avoid noticing that conservative economic policies mostly benefit rich people. All this is well known. The difference in priorities between the two main conservative constituencies is undoubtedly why conservatives spend so much time demonizing liberals; they want to keep the focus on the common enemy.

Which brings me to the question: What the heck is the difference between an "economic conservative" and a "libertarian"? Apparently, whether or not that individual publicly endorses the big-tent alliance described above. A true libertarian, we are told, holds true to his ideological self-consistency, and either votes libertarian or not at all.

Which is absurd, of course. On election day, most libertarians hold their noses and vote Republican, exactly as many "greens" and Naderites and assorted other leftists hold their nose and vote Democrat, because at the end of the day, people are not fools, and they understand the two-party system and how it works. In other words, when push comes to shove, libertarians behave exactly like the economic conservatives with whom they are identically one and the same. A few snarky throwaway protest votes do not constitute a separate movement.

And economic conservatives (including many who routinely refer to themselves as "libertarian"), far from being marginalized or disaffected within their movement, comprise the intellectual and ideological leading edge of that movement. It is think tanks like the "libertarian" Cato Institute and publications like the National Review who create and/or promulgate all of the economic ideas that later get parroted at Tea Party rallies and on Glenn Beck's talk show. Why do you think that a bunch of anti-immigration, anti-gay marriage, anti-drug-legalization fire-breathers are snapping up copies of Hayek's The Road to Serfdom? Hint: it's NOT because "libertarians" and "economic conservatives" are quite different.

It is "libertarians" who have created and promulgated the idea that Obama is a leftist, despite his very middle-of-the-road attitude toward business. It is "libertarians" who have given the legions of social conservatives, who hated Obama from Minute 1 because he was black and weird and intellectual, an excuse to associate Obama with Hitler without sounding like the racist tribalist reactionaries that they really are. "Big government!", the Tea Partiers shriek, when in fact they are dog-whistling "Nigger hippie outsider!" The "libertarian" enablers of this little pretense smile behind cupped hands, knowing that when tribal animus propels the Republican Party to power (as it will this evening), they will get their lower taxes and their deregulation. And if gay marriage and immigration take a hit, well, not optimal, but not catastrophic; those issues were never top priorities for economic conservatives anyway.

And those who cast snarky throwaway protest votes on election day will shrug and say "Don't blame me; I'm not a conservative, I'm a libertarian. Don't you know the difference?"

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What gets conservatives' goat

Over at Kids Prefer Cheese, blogger Angus (after merciless heckling from Yours Truly in the comments section) relents and gives me his reasons for thinking Obama is an "uncompromising" far-leftist:

So I started to wonder exactly why I had the perception that Obama was "pretty far left".

Hence this Top 10 signs Obama is a lefty list:

10. His incessant pandering to unions

9. His child-like love for high speed rail

8. His pushing for subsidies for solar, wind, & ethanol (i.e. uneconomic boondoggles).

7. His refusal to understand that electric cars actually burn coal in many parts of the country!

6. His firm belief that a small group of experts can competently run the economy

5. The amazing growth in the Federal budget under his watch

4. His habit of flip-flopping like a boated marlin

3. His inability to consider issues of moral hazard or unintended consequences in policymaking

2. His belief that anyone who disagrees with him is stupid or evil or both

1. His overall superior, moralistic, and condescending attitude

Not much evidence for the "uncompromising" part (what's the difference between "flip-flopping" and compromise, again?). But I'll take what I can get. At last we know what makes someone a leftist in conservative eyes.

Two big points here.

Point #1: Attitude speaks louder than actions. Reasons 1, 2, 3, 6, and 10 are all about attitude, mannerism, and rhetoric, as opposed to real policy actions. This reinforces something I've been slowly realizing over the past few years - in politics, what group or movement you seem to be part of is more important than what you actually do. I think this was behind much of the anti-Bush animus that liberals felt long before Bush launched wars, attacked civil liberties, or even got elected in the first place. And as I've mentioned, I think Obama is seen as anti-business despite his efforts to do things to help business mainly because of his rhetoric lambasting "multinational corporations" and "big business." In other words, politics is first and foremost about coalition-building and allegiance; policy is always and everywhere a secondary consideration.

Point #2: Conservatives really, really love oil and cars. Reasons 7, 8, and 10 on Angus' list are about Obama's support for alternative energy and alternative transportation. At first, this might be surprising - since when does wanting to build trains and support technological R&D make one an uncompromising far-leftist? But if you look carefully, you'll see that this is no oddity at all. Conservatives really dislike any thing that threatens America's dependence on oil or our use of the automobile. The blinding animus conservatives hold for rail is well-documented, as is their decades-long effort to kill alternative energy research. But why? Possible explanations include:

A) The oil industry is the main financial backer of the Republican Party (see: Koch bros., Halliburton, Exxon).

B) Promotion of alternative energy is seen as a backdoor to large-scale government regulation of carbon-producing activity (i.e. everything), which is seen as a backdoor to socialism.

C) Rail transport and dense urban areas both force white people into daily contact with nonwhites, which conservatives really really really don't want.

D) The car is seen as an instrument of individual empowerment and liberty, and hence "libertarians" think we should promote car transport.

I'd say there is some truth to all of these. But it's still sometimes astonishing how central the defense of the car/oil transport structure is to the policy priorities and worldviews of conservatives (and "libertarians"), especially considering how much government spending and regulatory policy has gone into creating that structure. Where social conservatives draw their battle lines on religious issues (abortion) or racial issues (welfare, affirmative action), economic conservatives' wedge issue is transportation and urban structure. Of course, the fact that lots of black people currently live in urban centers probably has a lot to do with the enduring strength of the conservative big tent.

Anyway, thanks to Angus for giving me his reasons for believing Obama is a leftist, and props for making it an honest one. I may never stop being surprised at how much A) attitude and B) transportation issues matter to conservative thinkers. But I suppose that is my fault, not theirs.

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La la la, I can't hear myself

"Angus" at the blog Kids Prefer Cheese gives us a post called "one reality, many interpretations?":

The progressive drumbeat that the Dems are in trouble because Obama was too conservative continues.

Mark Thoma gives a clear articulation of the view:

"I don't know if the centrist, bipartisan seeking, compromising Obama we have seen to date can actually embrace an encompassing vision. He seems afraid to be a Democrat.."

It's hard for me to understand this sentence coming from a person (i.e. Mark) who I like and respect. From my perspective, Obama is pretty far left and uncompromising.

Ah, I think, a conservative blogger. Expecting a list of reasons explaining why Obama is "far left and uncompromising," I instead get the following:

So let me invoke Robin Hanson and try to list things Obama has done that qualify as evidence for Mark's view.

I would say on economic policy the closest thing to centrist & compromising that he's done is appoint Summers and Geithner.

Can you count not pushing for single payer as bipartisan seeking or compromising?

Then there's Guantanamo, renditions, wiretaps, and the like. I view the continuation of these policies as wrong, but are they being continued as a compromise? Or out of bipartisanship?

Oh and then there are the wars. Do they count?

Oh my, there's also no action on immigration reform and the monstrosity that is DADT.

Holy Crap! Maybe Mark has a point.

Ah, I think. An open-minded conservative! Rare breed these days. But here, again, I expect a list of counterarguments; reasons why, despite this well-articulated (though by no means comprehensive) list of evidence for Obama's centrism, the President is actually "far left and uncompromising." I mean, the title of the blog post is "one reality, many interpretations?", right? It sure would be weird if I only got evidence for one of those interpretations, wouldn't it?

But instead I get this:

I see Obama as the worst possible policy mix. Wrong on economic issues, wrong on foreign policy and wrong on social issues too. A Dem should at least get the social issues right!

That Robin H. sure is a smart fellow.

And that is the end of the post. No, I haven't left anything out; the quotes above represent the entirety of the article.

So what we have here is a conservative blogger stating his opinion (that Obama is "far left and uncompromising"), listing a bunch of evidence why he's dead flat-out wrong, and then concluding that there are "many interpretations of reality." Well, heck. Maybe I'm reading this wrong, but what he seems to be saying is: "Even if all the available evidence is against me, I choose to trust my pure instinct as the best guide to what's really true."

This is, in a nutshell, what I see as the big problem with the modern conservative movement. They have left the "reality-based community" for good and all. Instinct is viewed as a proper substitute for facts; a conservative is free to list evidence against his viewpoint ad infinitum, with the blithe and comfortable certainty that none of it really counts.

And where does the instinct that "Obama is far left and uncompromising" come from? It comes from a whole bunch of other conservatives and Republicans saying that he is. And where do they get their certainty that Obama is a leftist? Uh-huh. Yet other conservatives and Republicans. The feeling of consensus is powered by a whole bunch of people repeating the same things back to each other over and over. Conservatives have declared that the communal will of their tribe is more powerful than any outside reality.

Some call this "epistemic closure." I would call it "tribal secession from the intellectual life of the nation."

Update: In the comments thread for Angus' post, I try to press him on why exactly he thinks Obama is an uncompromising far-leftist. He repeatedly refuses (fails?) to state one single fact or piece of evidence that he thinks supports his chosen interpretation of reality. Sigh. It's actually pretty sad. Not that I'm surprised, though; like I said, it's not about evidence, it's about tribal instinct.

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Conservatives know that their real enemy is the Constitution

I argued in a past post that American conservatives' true enemy is actually the American Constitution. Conservatives have always wanted to turn America into a traditional nation, in which membership in the polity is defined by race, religion, and language - the kind of nation that France and Japan and Germany and Korea used to be (and to some extent still are). The Constitution prevents that by ensuring things like freedom of speech and religion, birthright citizenship, and majority rule. Therefore, if conservatives really want to create the blood-and-soil nation they dream of - I called it "Amurka" - they'd have to repeal the very document that they often profess loudly to defend.

Conservatives are starting to realize this. Some prominent leaders on the right have recently begun calling for the repeal of the birthright citizenship provision of the 14th Amendment. I recently discovered that repealing the 17th amendment (direct election of senators) has long been a cause celebre of the conservative grassroots; direct election of senators, of course, is a type of one-person-one-vote majority rule. And now I hear about conservatives pushing to repeal the 16th amendment, which allows for a national income tax (income tax, of course, allows the majority to vote to tax the minority).

So the right definitely knows that birthright citizenship and majority rule are the Constitution's ways of hamstringing their dreams. As for freedom of speech and religion, they haven't come out and said they think the First Amendment should be repealed (probably because it's the "first", and therefore holds special psychological power). Instead, they've concentrated on pushing alternative interpretations of the amendment that allow unification of church and state.

But the broad pattern is clear. Conservatives of various stripes are calling for repeal of multiple parts of the Constitution. Liberals, for the most part, are not (though some would undoubtedly like to repeal the 2nd amendment). Actions speak louder than words; it is clear that the Constitution is biasing American policy towards the liberal side, and conservatives are frustrated about it.

For all their sound and fury about wanting to defend the Constitution, America's blood-and-soil nationalists want precisely the opposite; an America whose identity is defined by a tribe, instead of by a 200-year-old piece of paper in a glass case in Washington, D.C.

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Why the Tea Party doesn't scare me (much)

Could America be the new Weimar Republic? Could a combination of bad economic times, military setbacks, and racial/ethnic paranoia fuel a desire for a strongman to restore, as Glenn Beck puts it, our national "honor"? I'll admit that this possibility keeps me up at night. As Foreign Policy magazine reports, the unprecedented powers that have recently been vested in the office of the presidency (including steady erosion of civil liberties under both Bush and Obama) make it more likely that a Hitler-like leader could ride a wave of nativist paranoia to office and end our democracy.

It's clear that this is on a lot of other Americans' minds as well, even Tea Partiers themselves, who regularly decry Obama as a Hitler figure. But it seems blatantly obvious to me that if a Hitler does arise, his power base will be not the left, but the Tea Party right - the nation's traditionally dominant ethnic group, united around a common religion and culture and political ideology, grabbing their guns and goose-stepping into action for the first fascist strongman who promises to "give them their America back." Already, Tea Party leaders are calling for "Second Amendment remedies" to the nation's problems - i.e., armed insurrection by a disaffected and dispossessed white ethnic core. Don't fool yourself: If America has wannabe Nazis, those wannabe Nazis are called Tea Partiers.

So why am I not panicked about the rise of the Tea Party?

Simply put, it's because they're old.

Jacob Weisberg writes in Slate:

So who are these people and what do they want from us? A series of polls, as well as be-ins like Glenn Beck's Washington rally last month, have given us a picture of a movement predominated by middle-class, middle-aged white men angry about the expansion of government and hostile to societal change. But that profile could accurately describe the past several right-wing insurgencies, from the California tax revolt of the late 1970s to the Contract with America of 1994—not to mention the very Republican establishment that the Tea Party positions itself against.

Angry middle-class men may have outsized political clout, but they are not revolutionaries. To get a Hitlerian takeover, you need the Hitler Youth; you need armies of disaffected young men eager to join organizations like the Brown Shirts and the SS. And American conservatives do not have such an army. They have, in fact, been spectacularly unsuccessful in their efforts to boost white birth rates through religious revivalism and popular exhortation.

Which is not to say Tea Partiers wouldn't like to grab their guns and overthrow the Constitution. They would love nothing better. After all, it's the Constitution that's killing them, through its provision of birthright citizenship, freedom of speech and religion, and majority rule. But they won't do it, because despite the collapse of their housing prices and the steady erosion of their earning power, middle-aged middle-class white folk still live spectacularly comfortable lives. The Tea Party thus seems unlikely to generate any kind of mass organized violence.

The real danger is more mundane: another Bush, a messianic leader for the Right of the type they imagine Obama to be for the Left. Only this time, a Bush-type leader would mean business. No more "compassionate conservatism." No more placating business interests who want more immigration. No more shying away from full assumption of dictatorial powers for the presidency. In other words, a Cheney-type president. A tin-pot mini-Hitler who would smash our national institutions, but who would fall far short of starting a civil war or turning America into a totalitarian state. There are plenty of megalomaniac doofuses lining up for a crack at this job, not least among them (of course) Sarah Palin.

How do we prevent this sorry outcome? One key is to give more relative power to Congress. That requires elimination of the filibuster, the de facto supermajority requirement that has utterly paralized our legislature, and is therefore the number 1 reason that people have no confidence in Congress. A second key is to put pressure on Obama to publicly and explicitly state that the presidency will never have certain powers - arbitrary detention, warrantless surveillance, suspension of habeas corpus, etc. That would set a legal and public-opinion precedent that would help tie the hands of a President Palin.

Because if we can keep the Tea Party at bay long enough - if we can prevent this wave of tribalism from smashing our national institutions - the wave will pass. Racial intermarriage, immigrant assimilation, and demographic inevitability will quiet the Tea Party's rage to a simmering memory. We just have to wait the old geezers out.

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Once again, America destroys Amurka

Reihan Salam's take on the recent Beck/Palin rally in D.C.:

Palin, like Beck, was talking about a spiritual restoration, a return to time-tested virtues that had been celebrated by the more homogeneous America of the past, in which non-traditional families were stigmatized and relatively rare, church attendance was far more common, and the dominance of Anglo-Protestant culture was unquestioned.

But as most of those who attended Beck’s rally understand in their bones, that world is gone. And President Obama, for all his efforts to expand the reach of the federal government, has had very little to do with this deep transformation. Rather, the country has long since been transformed by powerful demographic and economic forces that very much threaten what we might call Glenn Beck’s America.

Instead of accepting or embracing this transformation, a large and growing number of white Americans are, knowingly or otherwise, taking a page from minority protest movements of the past by asserting themselves and demanding recognition from political and cultural elites...

[I]t seems more plausible that Fox News is following its audience rather than leading it — that this anger and alienation has existed for years, and has only now found a decidedly unconventional tribune in the form of Glenn Beck.

I basically agree with this take. There's a bunch of white people out there who see their culture melting away, replaced with modernity and a mishmash of immigrant cultures. These traditionalist whites feel embattled, endangered, under threat, and as a result they're angry and afraid.

But here's the key: they don't know who or what is responsible for the death of their culture. Is it immigration? Is it secularism? Is it sex in movies and rap songs? Is it the first black president? Is it socialism? At various times, these have all been the targets of right-wing rural/suburban white ire, but none of them by itself represents a villain powerful enough to explain the rapidity with which the old white culture - call it "Amurka" - has been eroded. And so the right keeps switching its villains and switching its prophets; Glenn Beck has eclipsed Bill O'Reilly and Rush Limbaugh and Pat Robertson, but there will be another scare and another scaremonger.

Now here's the crucial thing to understand: the right has been going crazy like this for a hundred years. In the 20s, there was Charles Coughlin. In the 50s there was the John Birch society. Has the rural/sururban white lifestyle really been under dire threat for that long?

I think the answer to this question also contains the secret of the identity of the real villain who is destroying Amurka. The dark lord behind the erosion of traditional culture is none other than the American Constitution.

The Constitution was written in order to make America a very special kind of nation. It defends freedom of speech, which ensures that new ideas and new cultural memes will be able to spread as far as the media can take them. It protects freedom of religion, and explicitly forbids any religion from gaining special status in the law. It guarantees due process, which prevents local communities from persecuting residents who stand out. It ensures birthright citizenship, which ensures that America's ethnic mix will never stop changing. And, most importantly, it enshrines majority rule, which means that traditional culture will always find itself overwhelmed by the sheer numbers of the variegated rabble that wants something new. In combination, the Constitution's protections of speech, religion, due process, immigration, and majority rule ensure that the nation's entrenched culture will be smashed again and again and again.

If we look to history, we find that this is not the first Tea Party moment. As far back as the 1800s, the Know-Nothing Party was persecuting German and Irish immigrants, but the Germans and the Irish stayed and redefined the mainstream. Then Germans, Irish, and British Americans teamed up to fight the wave of Eastern Europeans at the turn of the 20th century, and again they lost. At the same time, Christian conservative hysteria failed to make Prohibition stick, failed to suppress the teaching of evolution, failed to suppress the First Wave of feminism, and failed to convince America that Roosevelt's New Deal was a socialist takeover. Amurka - the Amurka of the 20s - died, only to be reborn as a new Amurka when hippies and commies threatened in the 50s, etc. etc.

The point is that America, the nation defined by the values enshrined in the Constitution, is death to the kind of blood-and-soil-and-religion-and-community culture that has grown entrenched in most of the other nations of planet Earth. Glenn Beck's followers are merely failing to protect the kind of society that Japanese and French and Kenyan people have largely succeeded in protecting. That doesn't stop the Amurkans from trying, of course, but as long as conservatives fail to overhaul the Constitution (as they are clamoring to do), they are destined to lose. Amurka will fall...and in thirty or fifty years it'll be reincarnated, as Mexican-Americans join hands with whites to fight the new wave of Indian immigrants (or whoever), and rail against whatever moral and religious degeneracy and dangerous socialism threatens their "traditional" way of life.

The danger, of course, is if conservatives someday do find some way to slay their nemesis - a military coup, or a repeal of one or more Constitutional amendments. If Amurka finally rises up and strikes down America, all bets are off.

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