The Only Winning Move

It’s interesting to look at the history of ideas as an evolutionary process, by which parent ideas adapt defenses to survive their circumstances which they then pass on to their descendendants. Presumably, we’re all aiming at The Truth, whatever that is, and we try out solutions until one seems to fit. And once one seems to fit, people become invested in it, often beyond the merits of the idea. Which is not unlike natural selection, really - since an individual creature doesn’t usually opt out of the gene pool once he realizes his geneset is less than ideal. Rather, he resorts to various kinds of gaming the system. Rape is presumably one of these, and it’s an interesting question whether this kind of thing is an adaptive advantage (in that strong-willed, physically capable, aggressive genes get passed on), or a polluting of the selection process (no reason it can’t be both, I suppose).

An analogy in the history of ideas would be things like Faith, or False Consciousness. Marx must have realized early on that his system was not viable because it had the huge problem of explaining why workers went to great lengths to obtain the very factory jobs that it was claimed were oppressing them. Typically, one does not leave his home, move somewhere else at great expense and then stand in line begging to be oppressed! So it was necessary to invent “False Consciousness,” by which workers were confused about their circumstances. The Revolution was delayed because people weren’t educated enough … or something.

Maybe it started out as a mutation, but now it’s in the geneset of the Left, and it won’t let go! The reason why it’s helpful to think of it as a kind of genetic inheritance, actually, is because I see False Consciousness being employed even when it can’t POSSBLY be the right analysis (Marx, at least, really was dealing with largely uneducated contemporaries), almost as if by reflex.

Take, for example, the constant references to “raising awareness” about the dangers of smoking in campaigns to ban same. Does anyone HONESTLY think there’s anyone alive who doesn’t know not only that smoking is dangerous but also in exactly what way it’s dangerous? Can anyone POSSIBLY believe that people are still confused on this score? Back in the “Mad Men” 60’s, of course, it was not only possible but likely that a good chunk of the population was confused. I’m guessing no one who truly paid attention ever thought that inhaling chemically-treated smoke would be good for them (certainly not when it’s the kind of chemicals that go into cigarettes!), mind you, but advertisements of the day definitely promoted the idea that smoking might be healthy. I don’t think it’s a stretch to believe that a lot of the not-so-conscientious actually bought it. But now? Everyone in my generation saw pictures of blackened lungs when they were 6 and can quote the cancer statistics in their sleep. We’ve all seen the video about the guy who talks though a hole in his neck. We’ve all had our heartstrings tugged with weepy stories about people watching their loved ones slowly die, and we’ve all been shocked with the horror of something SO ADDICTIVE that someone would actually smuggle a cigarette into an oxygen tent and inadvertently blow himself up. Awareness is raised as high as it’s going to go, and so any talk of “raising awareness” at this point is just transparent: the person advocating it is just asking the government to foot the bill for his political campaign. The thing is, False Consciousness is so ingrained in the Left at this point that I don’t think the people looking to “raise awareness” of that of which everyone is already very much aware actually notice the contradiction. If they sat down and thought about what they were doing, they’d spot it in an instant, of course, but politics, as we all well know, isn’t always about rational thought so much as herd mentality. You don’t like smoking, and your friends don’t like smoking, and you and your friends are all left-wingers, and someone floats the idea that smokers might not know what they’re doing, and because everyone in the group is steeped in leftist political training that idea seems as natural as the sun rising, and no one does it the courtesy of a second though. Kind of the way that religious types, if they really stopped to think about it, would know that God didn’t make the subway late to punish them for eating too much jam, and yet the idea that God pulls even such minute strings as these is so ingrained in their thinking that they don’t think twice about it. At least, that’s the only way I can explain it to myself.

Another more personal example. I am the TA (”AI” in IUSpeak) for a Topics course called “Language and Politics” in which we analyze the speeches of political actors as linguistic devices. In essence, looking at language as a kind of technology that political actors use to get what they want. Well, the other AI is a big feminist and recently voiced a concern that we weren’t doing enough analysis of speeches by women (never mind that Margaret Thatcher and Sarah Palin have featured prominently so far). I fired back that we were choosing speeches that well illustrated the concepts we were covering in class, and that I didn’t appreciate the suggestion that me and the main instructor had been ignoring speeches by women for sexist motives. And so of course the leftist fell back on her training: he wasn’t doing this on purpose, but Society-capital-S has trained him so well in the language of male superiority that he doesn’t even know he’s excluding women anymore. (!!!) Not only that, but when asked why she felt it was important that we have x number of speeches by women - where x is an integer that can only be accessed internally by her by polling her own private feelings, as far as I can tell - she honestly said, and I can’t stress enough that this is a real quote:

I believe that it is worthwhile to do, to make women more visible in our class presentations, and to demonstrate that politics, for good and for bad, is not just about what men have to say.

And I’m left scratching my head trying my damndest to imagine a person who thinks that politics is “just about what men have to say.” Honestly? No, she simply can’t actually believe this. This is like “raising awareness” of the dangers of smoking. Everyone is already well aware that politics is “not just about what men have to say.” Because just like with smoking, everyone in my generation and afterward has heard countless times already just how much politics USED to be just about men, but how women are making headway now and how wonderful a thing that is, and how someday there will be a female president, etc. And of course you look around you and you know this is true. The Speaker of the House is female. The Secretary of State is female. That same female Secretary of State came within inches of the presidency herself a year and a half ago. There are two women on the Supreme Court. The previous Congress (110) had a record number of women - 90, which is just under 20%. It’s true enough that women are underrepresented (as a proportion of the actual population) in politics - certainly in US politics. But it’s safe to say that there are enough of them that no one is confused about politics being an exclusively male domain. I mean honestly, what does my co-worker think, that Nancy Pelosi and Hillary Clinton just sit there at meetings and nod their heads while the men are talking? That Margaret Thatcher did this? The Sonia Sotomayor does this? That all those countless majority opinions that Sandra Day O’Connor authored were ghostwritten? Again, I think it’s just reflex - kinda the way you instinctively hit rather than grabbing a gun when threatened, just because that’s what’s in your geneset. False Consciousness is so deeply embedded within the ideological geneset of the Left that it’s what they resort to in a pinch, even if they can’t possibly really mean it.

I wonder if Libertarians have something like this? In our caricatured version I suppose answering “the market will fix it” to any social challenge is one such thing. But that’s a caricature - I think those of us (and I’m definitely one) who count as market fundamentalist Libertarians don’t reach for the market explanation as so much a reflex as out of a real belief in it. The difference, in other words, is that I’m aware that I’m a market fundamentalist, and that usually when I offer “the market will fix it” solutions it’s not because I’m parrying with something that I learned from waxing on and waxing off, it’s because I’ve actually thought about how market mechanisms will respond to the problem and sincerely believe that they will work.

But then, we’re none of us ever as self-critical as we should be, so maybe I do put too many eggs in the “market” basket out of sheer reflex from time to time. Or maybe I and libertarians like me have other tics that I’m just not consciously aware of. Maybe. But my genuine guess is that we don’t, and that’s because Libertarianism isn’t in the spotlight enough to put Libertarians on the spot often enough (har) to develop these kinds of kneejerk defenses. That may be changing, though. One can hope!

Interesting (though in retrospect probably obvious) thought gelled out of a discussion with Alexis about animal rights: there are both raising and lowering solutions to inequality problems, and a lot of times people get pigeonholed into saying things they don’t really mean by failing to consider the raising solution if they’ve already thought of the lowering solution, or vice versa.

I’m not just borrowing terminology from Syntax. “Raising” and “Lowering” for meta-politics is this: when you’re confronted by a percieved inequality, such that one group is, from where you stand, getting an unfair share of the attention surrounding something, there are two broad ways of evening things out. You can “raise” the other groups to the status of the privileged, or you can “lower” the privileged to the status of the excluded. And of course two corollaries probably go without saying here: (1) that of course one can both raise and lower at the same time in the same problem space and (2) that raising and lowering will in many situations be empirically indistinguishable anyway, as they are relative terms.

I wonder whether there isn’t a correlation between awareness of the existence of “lowering” solutions and predilection for libertarian political tendencies.

Consider gay marriage. The fundamental injustice is that heterosexuals have de facto property rights that homosexuals do not. And here is an issue where I think that the “raising” solution is inappropriate. Typically this issue gets framed in terms of what gays are being denied, and so the obvious solution that occurs to everyone is to extend the marriage franchise to include them. We have hetero marriage, so it seems unproblematic to extend this to include homo marriage. But to me this isn’t the REAL issue, and assuming that it is is a mistake that leads to all sorts of nasty side effects. For example - it leads people to make the frankly ludicrous suggestion that love between the members of a homosexual couple is somehow less real until the government puts a stamp of approval on it. The idea that anyone’s feelings need legitimizing by the state is laughable in any other context, and yet on this issue people buy into it because they cannot think how else to articulate their frustrations. Another nasty side effect is that the problem of government sanction of lifestyle is not eliminated, merely transformed. Other kinds of a priori legitimate relationships are left out in the cold, such as polygamy, polyandry, group unions, temporary unions, and good ol’ fashioned living in sin. By continuing to exclude these groups, people who argue that the government should stay out of people’s bedrooms ironically end up legitimizing its role there.

None of these problems come with the “lowering” solution, however. The lowering solution is to take official sanction away from heterosexual couples. It just says “fine, we agree, this privilege is no longer justified (if it ever was), so now you have to live like everyone else.” Under the lowering solution, the government really does get out of everyone’s bedrooms, and everyone is on a level playing field. To the extent that there are legal marital unions, it’s up to the people involved and their lawyers to hammer out a contract.

I think lowering type solutions appeal to libertarians because they are minimalist. We don’t say it out loud often, but one of our motivations for wanting to shrink the government - in addition to just wanting to leave people free - is wanting to make the law clear and accessible. And lowering solutions typically do that. They ELIMINATE special exceptions in favor of laws that apply to everyone equally. To the extent that laws can be made simple and universal, the system itself becomes simple, universal, and easier to maintain.

My question is whether this is a general category of thinking that extends to other domains as well, such that people with libertarian sensibilities could be identified by their positions on other issues. And I think it’s possible it can. The discussion with Alexis was about animal rights, but including animal cognition. She’s a vegetarian, and her reasoning there is that animals are sentient, and so we owe them moral consideration - what is typically called an “ethical vegetarian.” And I really agree - that animals are sentient and that we owe them moral consideration. I will not use products that I believe are unnecessarily tested on animals, and I prefer to eat meat (such as beef) that I know has been killed humanely. I don’t have any ethical problem with eating animals - since this seems to be the natural order, and humans are certainly evolved to be ominvores - but I can certainly understand the case from the other side. I have a problem with any moral system that extends full rights to animals - but only because of the communication barrier. Animals don’t seem to extend rights to me, and since rights are reciprocal, I can’t really do it unilaterally, etc.

In any case, the relevance to raising and lowering is that I hear a lot of goofy opinions about animal cognition that I think are the result of applying a raising solution when a lowering one is more appropriate. A lot of vegetarians (though not Alexis, I should hastily add!) - wanting to persuade people to give up meateating - are led to make exaggerated claims about the mental abilities of animals. It is a raising solution in that it attempts to raise animals to the status of humans, and it doesn’t work because it’s self-evident that animals do not have the same range of reasoning abilities nor the same mental capacity that humans do. The lowering solution avoids this problem though - and the lowering solution here is to give up on the idea that human mental abilities are different in kind, in favor of saying they are just different in magnitude. In other words, give up on the idea that humans have souls - at least for political and ethical purposes, which is independently appropriate in a secular society anyway.

And this extends, much more interestingly, to the question of whether machines can think. As far as I’m concerned, they can, and this is not an interesting question. Edsger Dijkstra puts it nicely:

The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than the question of whether a submarine can swim.

In other words, computers only don’t think if you’re willing to ascribe some sort of unjustified mystical status to human thinking. If you’re not - and I’m not - they do. They recieve inputs, process them internally, and produce outputs. It’s thinking - just as humans do. It may not be done according to exactly the same methods - and certainly it’s not done in the same medium - as human thinking, but if we ever replicated a human brain in silicon it would be essentially the same. This falls under the rubric of “to the rational mind, nothing is inexplicable, merely unexplained.” Human thought - especially consciousness - is largely unexplained, but I reject the idea that it is inexplicable! And this is, it seems to me, a lowering solution rather than a raising solution. The raising solution would be to say that there IS something inherently mysterious about thought, but that computers (bzw. animals) can do it - whatever it may be - too, and so they’re in the privileged group. Mine and Dijkstra’s opinion is a lowering solution because it asserts that there’s nothing special about human thinking - it is just thinking, and if there’s a difference between human and computer thinking then it’s a difference in complexity and wiring, not in fundamentals. I am a meat machine.

Applying raising solutions when lowering ones are more appropriate also accounts for the ease with which people are confused by the charge that Atheism is a religion. This is a raising solution - but to an insidious end. In using it, Chrisians seek to afford Atheism the same categorical status that their religion has in hopes of avoiding their burden of proof (this, at least, is already a named fallacy). So they say things like “Atheism is a faith, because it’s asserting that which can never be satisfactorily proven: the existence of a negative.” But of course Atheism is making no such claim. What believers fail to understand is that atheists aren’t as concerned with them as they are with atheists. Not believing in God has the same status as my not believing in all those other things that I don’t believe in because I have not been supplied with adequate evidence: unicorns, leprechauns, the Loch Ness Monster, magic, telekinesis and so on. It’s not that these things are a priori impossible, it’s just that (a) believing in them would require some revisions to the model of the way the world works that I’ve built up on the basis of my experiences, and (b) although I might be willing to do that if I had seen convincing evidence of their existence, there isn’t any such convincing evidence. The burden of proof is on the people who believe in unicorns, leprechauns, the Loch Ness monster, magic, telekinesis … and God. *I* am the one who is owed an explanation - and everyone knows this, and they further know that the burden of proof has never satisfactorily been met, and so one sneaky way around this problem is shifting it to me by “generously” “raising” Atheism to the status of a religion. My point here is that I think so many people fall victim to it because there is a general tendency to err on the side of raising solutions. But the lowering solution is the appropriate one: religion is a hypothesis about reality that has to meet the same burden of proof as any other. It may well be that individual believers have access to information that they cannot share with the rest of us (because it is available only by mystical and personal revelation), and that obviously suffices to ground their own beliefs, but it is inadequate for anyone else. I am an Atheist until someone can show me either that there is a God (in which case I will become a believer), or that it is likely that there is a God (in which case I will become an Agnostic). I call myself an Atheist because I do not overlook lowering solutions to the same extent that most people do. (Most people - recently including Noah, to my mild chagrin - implicitly accept the validity of the raising options and call themselves “Agnostics” out of a misguided sense of fairness).

So this sort of error is pervasive. Now, I’m not making any claim that it’s always an error to prefer the raising solution to the lowering one. But I guess I am making the claim that people are more likely to err on that side than the other - if only because they are more existentially comfortable with “building things up” than “tearing things down.” One of the reasons why Libertarianism is a hard sell is because it tears things down, and if we’re going to sell it at all we face the problematic task of selling a system of negative liberties as a progressive step forward. People are inherently unsatisfied with answers that are “none of the above,” and too frequently that’s what our answer is. But of course I assume in general that there are also cases where the raising solution is appropriate in an environment where the lowering solution has been applied instead.

An interesting question is which Socialism is? I can see the case both ways. On the one hand, it’s a lowering solution because it focuses on bringing down the rich and powerful to the level of everyone else. On the other hand, it’s a raising solution, because it focuses on extending the status of the privileged to all citizens. But I think what asking this question at all really serves to illustrate is that we can’t always extend neat models of categorizing things to all domains. Socialism is neither a raising nor a lowering solution - it is simply a category error, based on false assumptions about the purpose of government and the ends of human society.

I’ve read a number of opinions on the Sotomayer nomination over the last couple of days, and so far Will Wilkinson’s is the least useful. It wants to make two points - either of which could’ve been expanded into something informative with even a modicum of research, but neither of which is.

The first is that hysterics in politics are annoying and counterproductive. Well, right - nothing terribly original here. It’s true that the usual suspects are already engaging in all the expected hyperbole and insinuation - “going crazy right on cue,” to take a line from the post. But you wouldn’t know that from reading Wilkinson - who doesn’t bother to even quote or link any of it, much less engage and refute it. As such, Mr. Wilkinson’s paragraphs have the character of a beauty pagent contestant talking about world hunger. “In my happy tomorrow, there will be open and informed discussion in place of partisan bias, and no one will deceive their fellow man for petty political gain!” Sounds great, Will, but how do we get there from here? I admit I don’t know either - but I’m pretty sure aimless complaining isn’t the way.

The second point is that since Sotomayer is the best we could’ve hoped for from a president Obama, any rhetorical effort on this issue is probably misplaced anyway. This is asserted with a cheerful acknowledgement that he’s done no research to verify that Sotomayer is acceptably moderate - that, indeed, he barely knew her name before the nomination. So we hate politics because it’s full of deceitful hyperbole and base manipulation, but having said so we’ll give politician Obama the benefit of the doubt on his political appointee without further inquiry? Wha…? Even if Wilkinson can’t manage to be consistently cynical, surely the default Libertarian position here is to assume that any nomination from someone as libertarian-UNfriendly as Obama is something to be suspicious of? It’s a bit like the customer in a used car dealership saying “look, I know all about used car salesmen - know how slippery you guys are - so instead of haggling or comparison shopping I’m gonna just assume that you’re making me as fair an offer as can be expected, given who you are.” FAIL!

A thoughtful article from a for-real libertarian would be just about the opposite of this. If it mentioned the predictable Republican griping at all, it would at least put it in the context of how recently the Republicans found themselves on the other side of the gun and offer some suggestions for how to break the cycle. What it certainly WOULDN’T do is assume - based on no evidence whatever - that Obama’s nominee is acceptable and that there were probably no better compromises available. And if it couldn’t be bothered to do the careful research required to say something informative about the nominee herself, it could at least avail itself of secondary commentary from other prominent libertarians, nearly all of whom have given good reasons why people who share our political concerns would be wary of Sotomayer. Attaboy, Will, take Obama’s word over Richard Epstein’s, or Damon Root’s, or even the Cato Institute’s - yes, THAT Cato Institute, the one that pays his salary. THAT’s how we hold up the Libertarian cause - by trusting the motives of Democrat politicians over our own commentators!

The thing is, when he’s picking apart political philosophers, Wilkinson does sometimes post really thoughtful stuff. But I grow increasingly suspicious of blindspots where traditional leftist causes are concerned. The M.O. is always the same: he never says anything that’s wrong, per se, but rather omits a lot that’s right and relevant. Like now - when he can’t be bothered to do a quick Google search involving the names of libertarian legal scholars plus “Sotomayer.” Maybe we could all get together and scrape up a bunch of money and bribe some prominent Democrat to give Wilkinson an award of some kind - complete with ceremony, plaque and celebratory dinner with obligatory keynote speech about liberalism in the post-conservative meltdown or something. Having the praise from the left he so obviously craves hanging on his office wall, maybe he’d feel better about delivering the libertarian commentary he gets paid to deliver?

A prime example of why I am suspicious of Wil Wilkinson’s understanding of and devotion to Libertarian principles is this April 10 entry on his blog, called “Libertarian Ideal Theory as Silent Complicity,” in which he attempts to refute that class of Libertarian who cite Libertarian opposition to state regulation of marriage contracts as a justification for not taking sides on the debate about whether gay marriage should be legal. After a stirring excerpt from the NYTimes about a couple whose first date was interrupted by the police because the man was black and the woman white, Wilkinson draws the standard, and tired, parallel with gay marriage. If we agree that anti-miscegenation laws were unust - as we surely do - then shouldn’t we think the same of a marriage scheme that limits marriage contracts only to a certain class of citizens?

The answer is an unequivocal YES - as Wilkinson well knows. What’s got me scratching my head is where these “Libertarians” are who disagree with him on this?

Let’s state this clearly for the record so that there will be no more confusion. NO ONE who condones state restriction of certain property contracts to certain classes of people on the basis of their heterosexuality, and who thinks that these contracts can only be entered into once and with one person only, can properly call himself a Libertarian. So Mr. Wilkinson can stop wringing his hands here: there is NO SUCH THING as a Libertarian who defends the restriction of marriage contract rights to heterosexual couples. There are, however, PLENTY of Libertarians who think that people should be allowed to use the term “marriage” to refer to what to them seems like the appropriate class of referent. So - if your religion doesn’t recognize “marriage” as a thing that happens between gays or polygamists, then I respect your right not to refer to such couples/groups as “married.” Having no religion myself, I don’t have any particular objection to calling a gay couple “married.” I do have the reservation that the cultural obligations that go along with religious marriage have not had the time to evolve in the gay community, and on this basis I prefer that we not assume that everyone who declines to call gay couples “married” is a bigot. But as to the main point, Mr. Wilkinson is burning a straw man: there are no honest Libertarians who think that marriage contract rights should be restricted to heterosexuals.

Why, then, does one so frequently see people employing Mr. Wilkinson’s line of argument? I think the confusion comes from the fact that a lot of Libertarians, myself included, take issue with a lot of the rhetorical tactics of the gay rights movement - especially the kind of disingenuous analogies with the Civil Rights Movement on display in Mr. Wilkinson’s NYTimes except that they frequently draw. If I am correct in assuming that Mr. Wilkinson does not object to polygamous marriage contracts, or indeed group-marriage contracts of any kind, then it’s perfectly consistent of him to draw analogies with racial injustice. It is quite another thing, however, when most gay rights supporters draw the analogy, and that’s because they don’t really mean it. They’re all for marriage rights for gays, but ask them what they think about Mormons in southern Utah being allowed to take multiple wives and see what they say.

The fight for state recognition of gay marriage is, in the minds of its supporters, not really a rights-based crusade, and Libertarians therefore rightly object to their misappropriation of memories of racial injustice to support their bigoted cause. What most gay marriage supporters are in effect arguing for is the continuation of the current discriminatory regime, only with a slight expansion to include their friends’ preferences on the list of government-approved relationships. This is NOT a cause that Libertarians should approve of or get involved in.

I’m all for gays having the right to marry - but not if it commits me to condoning the state’s privilege to approve only those classes of relationships that are politically fashionable. Doing so is merely substituting one problem for another. It isn’t “silent complicity” with anything to point out this bit of hypocrisy on the part of the gay rights movement, and it is only Mr. Wilkinson’s silent complicty with the new class of bigot that allows him to claim otherwise. To be clear - Mr. Wilkinson and other Libertarians are free to support legal recognition of gay marriage under the current state-run regime as a step to a fully privatized marriage contract system without any objections from me. It isn’t the route I choose, but there’s nothing inconsistent in their position. My objection is to their assumption that those of us who are less than enthusiastic about the gay rights movement are “silently complicit” with bigotry. We are not, it is insulting to imply that we are, and more importantly doing so accomplishes nothing outside of further muddying an already misrepresented and needlessly divisive issue at the expense of people who are actually their allies.

There’s an interesting bit of speculation on Division of Labour as to whether libertarians will really be able to either sit this one out (perhaps by voting for Bob Barr) or even vote for Obama.

In spirit, it’s highly similar to a recent post of mine, and even complains about some of the same studiously noncommittal comments from Reason contributors that seem to indicate that a lot of them are casting about for excuses for vote for Obama. But it seizes on a different aspect of the issue - namely the merits of the theory that libertarians should vote strategically against the Republicans in order to cost them the election and force them back into our free-market, small-government camp (i.e. illustrate to them that they need our votes to win, and that those votes aren’t theirs for free).

Brad Smith (the author of the bit) considers this strategy folly because it never yields the desired results. By way of evidence, he cites two elections in which one of the two parties ran an extremist, lost, and was forced to shift back to the center for the next election. This would, of course, be Goldwater v. Johnson 1964 and Nixon v. McGovern 1972 - where Goldwater was a small-government extremist who lost in a landslide, and McGovern a big-government extremist who lost in an equally-humiliating landslide. The Republicans put up Nixon next time, and the Democrats went with Carter - both considered moderates.

I think this misses the point, though. While it’s true enough that the public rejected Goldwater and McGovern pretty handily, I wonder whether Goldwater is an appropriate analogy for Bush? It would seem to be just the opposite: Bush is more like Nixon - a centrist who runs an imperial presidency that loses no love on free-market reforms and shows no desire to shrink the size and scope of government. That is, the whole complaint about President Bush is that he is INsufficiently conservative. The same libertarians who want to punish the Republicans now wanted to punish them in 1972 - which is indeed why the Libertarian Party was founded: as an objection to the Nixon Administration. The whole point was to make Nixon fight on two fronts - against not only his ultra-leftist opponent, but also to fight to retain the small-government base that so strongly objected to his Vietnam and price control policies. It didn’t work, of course. Nixon positively thumped McGovern, and the Libertarian Party polled next to nothing. But hey, it was a first-year freshman effort.

A more appropriate analogy would be Bush I losing in 1992. Here was a moderate Republican to whose policies a lot of small-government-minded voters objected. Many decamped first to Pat Buchanan, then to Ross Perot, costing the Republicans the presidency. When the Republicans reemerged in the 1994 midterms, they seemed to have learned their lessons, and the so-called Republican Revolution of that year rallied around a document that promised small-government reforms. So I think Smith has it exactly wrong. When you consider applying this strategy against a moderate incumbent in order to make the party more extreme - which is the whole idea, after all - I think it DOES work.

Of course, on the larger point of whether we can afford this strategy this year, I think I agree with Smith: we can’t. Obama is pretty far left, and although he definitely seems tempermentally better-suited to the presidency than McCain in my book, his policy proposals are not the sorts of things that Libertarians can afford themselves the luxury of allowing to pass. The Democrats are going to get a majority in Congress - possibly even a fillibuster-proof one. With the kind of economic policies that Obama is proposing, there are very real implications not only for our pocket books, but for the future of economic self-determination in this country. Voting to keep Obama out of the White House is the only thing for lovers of liberty to do. All I’m saying is that this need not be seen as a repudiation of the general strategy, which - conra Smith - does seem to work when applied in the right environment. This IS that environment - the question is really one of whether we can afford the price. We cannot.

Via Distributed Republic (which got it from here), a much-needed Taxonomy of Libertarians:

1. Randians/Objectivists/Egoists - Meet John or Jane Galt. While most card-carrying Objectivists assert that they are not libertarian in name, the movement started by Ayn Rand (author of The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged) was and is an important influence on the thought of modern American Libertarianism (Cathy Young says that “Libertarianism, the movement most closely connected to Rand’s ideas, is less an offspring than a rebel stepchild.”). They imagine an individualist/collectivist and egoist/altruist dichotomy and put it at the heart of their entire worldview as the supreme good vs. evil (along with some peculiar axioms like “A is A” and “existence exists”). According to those influenced by Randian Egoism, greed is a virtue, while compassion is a deadly sin. The word capitalism can stimulate a spontaneous orgasm. They are prone to histrionics and delusions of grandeur.

2. Dominionists - Business giants and empire-builders, moguls, magnates and tycoons who don’t want antitrust laws, industry watchdogs, trade unions or environmental, worker, or consumer regulation to get in the way of their ambitions. They often fund libertarian and right-wing think tanks and organizations. Silicon Valley had many Dominionist younglings in the 90’s until most of them perished tragically in the bursting of the dotcom bubble.

3. Market Fundamentalists - Focused on libertarian theories of economics/political economy, Market Fundamentalists believe the capitalist free market is best for the common good, and any interference with said market is contrary to the common good. They frequently use concepts like “the wisdom of the market” and “the invisible hand,” etc. Austrian and Chicago schools, neoclassical economics, neoliberalism, etc.

4. Naïve Libertarians - This was a hard to name category (I also considered “propagandist libertarians”). Naïve Libertarians are like Market Fundamentalists, except they usually parrot Market Fundamentalist arguments and harp on “how liberals are weakening America” instead of coming up with arguments and ideas of their own. They believe hardship doesn’t befall people who do what they should do, the environment isn’t in any real trouble and environmental/pollution problems are negligible, and big corporations are really responsible and good on their own (”Greenhouse gas emissions? Those are just ‘unrequested carbon surpluses’”). They are likely to listen to/host right-wing talk radio or do/follow right-wing journalism, and usually amount to little more than apologists for the Right.

5. “Liberty” Libertarians - Their libertarianism arises primarily from their ideas on the metaphysics of personal liberty, around concepts like “non-aggression” and “self-ownership.” Libertarian philosophers are usually in this category, some of whom were founders of the modern American libertarian movement.

6. Libertarian Republicans - More traditional conservatives; Republicans who are against neoconservative big government and/or the religious right; conservative critics of the Bush administration. They consider themselves the true conservatives, and usually base their libertarian ideas on their perspective on the U.S. Constitution. “Goldwater conservatives;” Republican Liberty Caucus.

7. Crazy Libertarians - Primarily concerned about gun rights and privacy. Many survivalists, conspiracy theorists, tin-foil-hatters, etc. tend to fall into this group. They are likely to live in a rural area, with an impressive arsenal and weeks worth of food stocked up to secure against a New World Order threat.

8. Lifestyle Libertarians - Like the Crazy Libertarians about guns, but also for drugs, sex, alcohol, uncensored material, not having to recycle, driving without a seatbelt, driving without a seatbelt at 100mph, driving without a seatbelt at 100mph while receiving oral sex, etc. They are basically people who want to do whatever they want. If conservatives want government to be your daddy, and liberals want government to be your mommy, Lifestyle Libertarians want to get rid of daddy and mommy and stay up all night eating ice cream and watching after-dark cable.

9. Localist Libertarians - Anti-Federalists, they would rather have autonomy distributed to the community level, like town halls, local school boards and churches, than a strong federal government or any centralized power. More Main Street than Wall Street, they are communitarians and traditionalists, largely Catholic, often Scouting enthusiasts, people with Norman Rockwell paintings throughout their homes, etc. More compassionate and worker-oriented than other libertarians, and more likely to be concerned with local environmental problems.

10. Left-Libertarians - A special category. Left Libertarians believe big, powerful government is as oppressive and bad as big, powerful corporations. They are anti-war (including the War on Drugs), pro-choice, and against government favors for corporations (or against large corporations altogether). They usually favor participatory action and mutual aid over government for social justice and environmental causes, as well as smaller, more local businesses and community-centered marketplaces. They may caucus with right-libertarians (”vulgar libertarians” is a commonly used phrase) for strategic purposes, which is the primary reason they are on the list at all. They are also likely to work with Green parties. Often Georgist on physical property and against extensive and restrictive intellectual property (and a major front behind Open Source), they are related to others of the broad libertarian left–agorists, mutualists, libertarian socialists, cyberpunks and anarchists; also “Buddhist Economics.”

I’ve been waiting for one of these for a long time - precisely because it’s equal parts difficult and essential to sum up the finer shades of the Libertarian caucus to outsiders. It would be nice to have an index card that you could simply hand the curious, and this is as good a proposal as I’ve seen.

I have my nits to pick, of course. Let’s start with “those who are on the list but shouldn’t be.” There are two: (2)Dominionists and (4)Naive Libertarians. I object to (4)Dominionists being on the list on the grounds that they’re not really Libertarians but rather infiltrators. Libertarianism is not a cause for them so much as a convenience. It’s sort of like how Bill Clinton getting himself on film praying in church every week is less than convincing to certain members of the religious right. He needs their votes; he doesn’t represent their cause. As for (4)Naive Libertarians - they are definitely an identifiable category and definitely associated with “Libertarianism,” but more as hangers-on than contributors. As the description makes clear, they don’t really have any ideas of their own - mostly they’re just anti-leftists. This kind of faction exists in any party, really, and I don’t think it’s correct to confound the philosophy of the movement with their reasons for joining. It’s exactly the same trick that gets played by pointing to Ann Coulter as the prototypical conservative and failing to mention the George Wills and Bill Buckleys of the movement. Bill Buckley is a Consevative thinker; Ann Coulter is merely an anti-Democrat. She may vote Republican, but you wouldn’t attend one of her talks to find out what Republicanism is all about.

Next, let’s talk about the last two categories. I think these could safely be collapsed into one without misleading anyone about essentials. The differences between these groups are really of temperment. Left-libertarians are direct descendants of the 60s street preachers, and localist libertarians of commune hippies. They both got lumped into the “New Left” category in the 60s, and I see no reason to separate them out now. Localist libertarians are, like their commune hippie forebearers, in complete sympathy with the politics of left-libertarians, they simply disapprove of (or are anyway not interested in getting involved in) potentially violent street protests and political maneuvering to accomplish their goals, preferring to drop out and go somewhere else. I think if I were to hand out this list, I might draw a line above (9) and put a caption that says “left wing starts here,” and then color the background red.

Finally, there are some unnecessary weasel words that might should be removed. For example - the “peculiar” in front of “axioms” in the description of (1)Randians/Objectivists/Egoists. I happen to agree that the brilliance of Ayn Rand’s “Epistemology” is … how to put this? … somewhat overstated by her followers. But I don’t see any need to editorialize about that in presenting the facets of the Libertarian caucus to an outsider. Similarly, to the extent that one keeps (4)Naive Libertarians on the roster, a better name should really be found for them. As stated, I’m for leaving them off altogether, but if we’re going to include them as a contributing member of the caucus it’s best to present rather than judge. The same goes for (7)Crazy Libertarians. They could have been called “Survivalist Libertarians” or “Outback Libertarians” with no loss of descriptive precision.

As for which category I fall under… Like with most members of a coalitionist party, there are several categories here that could suitably fit me, I suppose - but to pick just one I’ll go with (3)Market Fundamentalists. When it all comes down to it, I’m a worshipper of the free market (a former paramour called it my “version of a religion”), and my primary political concern is seeing that it be allowed to function. This stems from a deep skepticism that any individual or group of individuals has enough knowledge to successfully regulate something so complex as human affairs. If evil has a name it is Social Engineering. To comandeer an oft-cited quotation for use as a slogan, I believe in “human action, not human design.” It also has its roots in the same source of my love for science fiction, I think. I love technology and progress. I find little in the world more objectionable than the luddite types who want to go live in the woods and smoke mushrooms with the deer. I like a good nature hike as much as the next guy, but that is only one avenue of personal enrichment. ALL the others depend on my ability to exchange goods, services, and ideas with fellow sentient beings, and that requires a functioning civilization. Wealth, comfort, science, progress, achievement - these are such stuff as dreams are made of. And when you come right down to it, I guess I am a consequentialist free marketer as much as I am a moral one. Perhaps that will form the subject of another post, but for an overview you could do worse than this essay. In particular, I relate to Friedrich Hayek, whom the essays describes as “constantly struggling between his Scottish heritage in the form of a Humean love of the empirical and his Germanic debts to Kant.” As a researcher, a human, a philsopher, I feel the same way. I am very much in awe of Kant’s work, and it is a foundational influence, but at the end of the day I suppose I am simply less impressed with the moral than the practical. British and not German, as it were. So of all the picks here, I suppose (3)Market Fundamentalists is the one that best applies to me.

I consider this some small reason to be hopeful that the libertarian message is getting out. The following graphic is a network analysis of book purchases on Amazon done by Valdis Krebs, whose blog is the newest addition to my daily reading roll.

Basically, it works like this. Krebs takes the “people who bought this book also bought” data from Amazon and clusters the political bestsellers. His clustering methodology isn’t entirely clear. The network patterns you see are generated automatically by software. I’m assuming that’s also more or less true for his cluster identifications. The point I’m not too clear on is how the purple nodes get there. Krebs claims in one part to have colored the nodes himself based on subjective impressions of the content of the books. Fair enough. In another part, however, he speaks as though he’s “surprised” that Ron Paul and George Will’s books end up in the purple zone. This suggests that at least some of the coloring was done on the basis of cluster proximity. It might have been better to use two different visualization approaches here. That is, precolor all the books based on compiler’s impression of whether they’re left or right and then use an additional mechanism to show membership in software-discovered clusters. As it stands, Krebs seems to be confounding a natural expectation of how the book should cluster with how it does cluster, which isn’t as informative as it might be.

Of course, as I say, it’s sort of difficult to me to discern the exact methodology from the post, so there’s the real possibility that I’m being unfair to Krebs by mischaracterizing what he’s actually done.

In any case, the clusters he arrives at jive pretty well with what we might expect the political landscape to look like. One of Krebs’ readers notes that the clusters are really support for and opposition to the Iraq War. Seen in that light, the facts about the purple “buffer zone” make sense. First - the conservatives who find themselves in the “buffer zone” are mostly people like Ron Paul, George Will and Pat Buchanan who, if they have anything in common at all, share a strong stated opposition to neo-cons. Indeed, the relative proximity of the three books to the “red” cluster backs this up. George Will (”One Man’s America”) is closest - which fits, since while he certainly pulls no punches criticizing the Bush Administration, he usually makes it clear that the Republicans are still preferable to the Democrats in the big picture. Pat Buchanan (”Churchill, Hitler and the Unnecessary War”) is a bit more convincing as an anti-neocon (and certainly harsher in his criticism of Bush), but unlike Will he’s also a member of the Religious Right. His positioning shows alienation from the red group, but no real compensatory membership in the blue group. (Indeed, his book is arguably the most isolated on the display.) And then there’s Ron Paul, who from where I sit looks like a blue group member on straight clustering alone, actually. His book was bought almost exclusively by people who also bought other “blue” books, save that a lot of people who bought Buchanan seem to have done so at the same time they did Paul. Indeed, the only other link from Paul goes to Lew Rockwell’s book, which is about what we’d expect. The only reason Lew Rockwell is selling this book in the numbers he is is because Ron Paul’s high profile is acting as his ad agent (anyone who knew who Lew Rockwell was before the campaign probably doesn’t feel the need to buy his latest book - we know the script).

So yeah, I find it wholly convincing that the divide is really along pro- and anti-Iraq War lines. I would just add that I think support for and opposition to this particular war is a proxy for party identification (so we come full circle). I’ve admitted before on this blog that my own support for the war took a long time to drop off precisely because it was more a reaction to the anti-war crowd (which I see as largely self-defeating, irrational anti-patriots) than a firm belief in the policy. And for their part, it’s pretty clear to me that the most vocal anti-war protesters are pretty selective in which wars they oppose. There was no problem with Clinton going into Somalia or Bosnia, for example. The people who buy the blue books are against war as a tool for advancing national interest; the people who buy the red books are against foreign spending for anything other than national interest - and, I suspect, what defines the purple group is an actual principled opposition to war. That is, most of them seem to be people who agree with the red group’s requirement that foreign spending - if it be done at all - only ever be done in direct national interest, but with the additional proviso that war should be avoided. Not “at all costs,” mind you, but that it should be avoided.

Under those terms, I’m proudly purple.

The interesting point is that the war issue seems to be doing a good job selling libertarian books to “blue” readers. Which is a Good Thing in one way. Anti-Capitalism is so entrenched on the left that they’re unlikely to come to free market arguments by any other method. It’s a Bad Thing in another way, though, and that’s in the sense that for strategic reasons I think it’s probably more important that we reach red readers ahead of this election. That is, if we’re serious about getting libertarian policies passed in the next couple of decades, then reminding Republicans that a large part of their natural voting base is less interested in God and displays of patriotism than it is in just getting the government off our backs so we can go about living our own lives in our own ways. (And what better way to do this than giving them a shock by splitting McCain’s vote?) Any way you slice it, that message is antithetical to Democrats, so short-term inroads with that voting block are unlikely. They’re a tougher nut to crack, and honestly I think “cracking” the Democrats means more winning over their supporters to our side than it does merely winning their sympathies on policies. So I can see long-term positives in getting blue readers to read libertarian books. It won’t have an effect overnight, but exposure to free market thinking is desperately needed “over there.” What I’m not seeing are short-term positives in terms of waking the red readers up to free market thinking. They seem to be drifting further and further right, to a national security patriot state that we obviously can’t support.

What it’s looking like, really, is the early 70s all over again, when libertarians were mostly about being against Nixon and the Vietnam War and tended to identify (irrationally, if you ask me) more with the counterculture of the left than with the free market and civil liberties principles that make me a libertarian. We can see more or less eye-to-eye with the Democrats on things like gay marriage and marijuana legalization, but these are superficial issues. Rights and liberties begin with private property, and I think we’ll only ever have so much in common with a party like the Democrats that has only conditional support for property rights.  (We’ll have more long-term luck convincing the Republicans that marijuana legalization is consistent with their belief in property rights than we will getting it passed with the help of the Democrats at the cost of more welfare programs, higher taxes, etc.) So there’s a real sense in which Krebs’ plot shows that we’re reaching the wrong crowd.

Check it out. Here’s Michael Goldfarb - otherwise known as the McCain Campaign’s Deputy Communications Director - on how much he doesn’t want the Ron Paul vote:

Allah beat me to the punch on this, but let me just say to Ron Paul supporters everywhere, and on behalf of the New Right (by which I assume Paul means the Jew Right), get lost.

There should be plenty of room for the Paulnuts in Obama’s big tent. If Rev. Wright isn’t exactly a 9/11 Truther, at least he’s breathed new life into the Pearl Harbor Truther movement. Imagine a newsletter coauthored by the Reverend and Lew Rockwell–now that’s racial harmony.

Yeah, this guy’s gonna be just splendid with the masses. Maybe he’ll manage to insult the entire Republican base piecemeal before November and we Ron Paul supporters won’t even have to split his vote for him.

Actually, though, I think the real point of this is the elephant in the living room that wasn’t mentioned: Bob Barr. Ron Paul supporters are more likely to vote Libertarian than to run to a big-state Socialist like Obama, and Goldfarb knows it. This is yet another way of not mentioning what the Republicans don’t want to face. They have a serious problem in November in the form of a huge likelihood that the LP is going to matter this time in the way Ross Perot did in 1992 - by which I mean it just may cost McCain the White House. I think it is no coincidence that everyone from Mike Huckabee to Michael Gerson has been trashing libertarians recently. The line is that we’re supposed to be the ones to blame for the Republican Party’s recent failures. Quite transparently, it’s just the other way around. Bush is being punished by the electorate because he abandoned small-government principles, not because he is insufficiently statist. The evangelicals and the neocons see the writing on the wall, and this is them grasping at straws.

Via Econopundit, this interesting graph showing the nations plotted by the percentage of the population that believes luck is the main determinant of their outcome vs. the percentage of its GDP that country devotes to social spending. Maybe it’s not a stunning revelation, but there is a correlation:

Econopundit’s analysis:

So what do we learn from this? Although many other factors are involved (meaning the observations don’t all exactly line up in a straight line) there’s a reasonably good positive correlation between, on the one hand, belief that luck (rather than hard work) determines income, and, on the other, the percentage of GDP a nation decides to devote to social spending.

I think the correlation is a bit clearer than Antler gives it credit for being. Notice that all the nations well below the line (i.e. not Chile, Australia or Iceland) are developing countries. They’re up-and-comings, maybe, but definitely “not there yet.” If you were to plot this group separately, you would have a regression line with almost exactly the same slope, just lower down on the plot. Ditto that cluster at the top. If you were to plot Austria, France, Sweden, the Netherlands and Belgium on a plot by itself, you would get a regression line that was maybe slightly steeper, but not by much. In other words - if you eyeball this graph, there are three pretty obvious clusters of nations - call them “social spending tracks” - and each of those three clusters shows the same pattern between belief in luck as main determinant of success among a nation’s population strongly positively correlated with how much emphasis that nation places on social welfare spending. I consider the pattern robust, and the more interesting question becomes one of what accounts for the three “tracks” of nations we see?

The sticking point, obviously, is Germany. We would get a pretty clear pattern if I could be allowed to include it in the top group, rather than the middle group it seems to cluster with. If Germany could be in the top group, it would be pretty clearly the group that Rumsfeld called “Old Europe,” i.e. the EU establishment. (Yes, Sweden’s not in the currency reform, but it’s culturally exactly what Rumsfeld was complaining about.) The middle cluster would be the “standard” first world. And the lower cluster the group of nations that seem poised to leave the third world (some - Turkey and Brazil - having already achieved this now properly belong to what we might call the “second world”).

In any case, this graph lends credence to something that I’ve believed on annecdotal evidence from my own life for a long time: that support for Socialism is motivated in large part by insecurity. I’ve noticed an unmistakable patterns among my own friends and acquaintances that’s just like the one on the graph: the more socialist a particular friend/acquaintance is, the more likely he is to carp about how “it’s all luck” or “it’s all who you know” or any of that. People who believe that effort is rewarded more often than not tend to be more capitalist. Not that annecdotal evidence from my life is conclusive exactly, but it makes inuitive sense that it should be this way, and this graph goes some way to confirming it.

Of course, there are obvious omissions from the graph. Why these nations and not others? Where, in particular, are Mexico, China and Japan?  More interesting would be to have included the Eastern Bloc as well.  These nations are culturally more likely to believe that luck and connections determine individual success than average, I would imagine, and yet they are often in the news these days for relatively free-market approaches to taxation (Romania and Estonia in particular).  Their inclusion might seriously skew the trend.  The paper this came from is here, but I won’t have time to read it. Maybe they explain their choices better there.

In any case, if this is to be believed the lesson for libertarians is this. If we want to shrink the size of government and return economic decision-making to individuals, we need to play up stories about self-made men in popular culture - because apaprently the more people think their effort will be rewarded, the more libertarian they become. Alternately, I suppose, the lesson could be that corruption is a self-fulfilling prophecy. Once you turn your nation into a welfare state, then conenctions do matter, because the government runs everything, and so the beast feeds on itself.