Liberty & Power: Group Blog
Entries by Chris Matthew Sciabarra
Wednesday, February 25, 2009
The Journal of Ayn Rand Studies: 10 Years and Counting
The Journal of Ayn Rand Studies was first published in the Fall of 1999; our Fall 2008 issue (running just a little late) is now out, and marks the beginning of our Tenth Anniversary Celebration.
The abstracts for the newest issue appear here; the contributor biographies appear here. There have been a few changes over at the JARS site... and more are coming. New indices for the Table of Contents and the Contributor Biographies are now on the site. Also, JARS has recently been picked up by the indexing service, Scopus.
The newest issue includes the following articles:
Mind, Introspection, and "The Objective" - Roger E. Bissell
The Peikovian Doctrine of the Arbitrary Assertion - Robert L. Campbell
Economic Decision-Making and Ethical Choice - Kathleen Touchstone
Reviews and Discussions
Re-Reading Atlas Shrugged - J. H. Huebert
Plato, Aristotle, Rand, and Sexuality - Fred Seddon
Reply to Fred Seddon: Interpreting Plato's Dialogues: Aristotle versus Seddon - Roderick T. Long
Rejoinder to Roderick T. Long: Long on Interpretation - Fred Seddon
Reply to Peter E. Vedder, "Self-Directedness and the Human Good" (Fall 2007): Defending Norms of Liberty - Douglas J. Den Uyl and Douglas B. Rasmussen
Rejoinder to Douglas J. Den Uyl and Douglas B. Rasmussen: Difficulties in Norms of Liberty - Peter E. Vedder
Enjoy!
Cross-posted at Notablog.
Tuesday, October 14, 2008
Saving the Free Market from Itself
This morning, President George W. Bush announced further "unprecedented and aggressive steps" that will help to "shore up" financial institutions and the U.S. economy during this time of crisis. He's delighted that globally, governments are moving to "strengthen" market institutions by providing more "liquidity," that is, by "purchasing equity" in major banks worldwide. The Federal Government will now purchase equity shares in this country's banks as part of its "$700 billion financial rescue plan." Oh, the banks will be able to buy back these shares with money from "private" investors when they get back on stronger financial footing. And, in addition to stepped up efforts by the FDIC, the Federal Reserve Bank will become a "buyer of last resort for commercial paper."
Inflate, inflate, inflate! And let's coordinate this on a global scale, if our national efforts are too puny!
Finally, Bush said that his economic advisors, led by Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, will provide further details on how this "rescue plan" will take shape:
They will make clear that each of these new programs contains safeguards to protect the taxpayers. They will make clear that the government's role will be limited and temporary. And they will make clear that these measures are not intended to take over the free market, but to preserve it.
Up is Down. Right is Left. Freedom is Slavery. We come not to bury the "free market," but to save it... just the way FDR saved capitalism!
But, to paraphrase another Savior of the Free Market, who enacted wage and price controls to save "capitalism" from itself... "Let us make one thing perfectly clear": There is no free market. And the "capitalism" they are "saving" has nothing to do with "free markets." Call it "state capitalism," or "corporatism," or "neofascism." Call it whatever the hell you want... but don't call it a "free market."
As I argued recently, the state and the banks are virtual extensions of one another, two aspects of the same structure, a "state-banking nexus," if you will. The effective nationalization of financial institutions in this country is just a continuation of a long history of government intervention.
Cross-posted at Notablog.
Wednesday, October 1, 2008
A Crisis of Political Economy
I have just published a rather hefty tome on my Notablog, entitled "A Crisis of Political Economy." Lots of links therein, and thanks especially to some of my colleagues here at L&P who gave me so much from which to draw!
Comments always welcome.
Tuesday, September 9, 2008
WTC Remembrance, 2008 Installment
Since 2001, I have posted an annual 9/11 remembrance at Notablog. This year, my subject is firefighter Eddie Mecner. The essay is posted here.
Tuesday, August 26, 2008
DNC, Moore, and Laissez-Faire Capitalism
The Democratic National Convention began last night, providing a few high moments for the party faithful. But I got a few chuckles while catching up on my reading last night.
Michael Moore tells the New York Daily News: "At this point, we need to try anything---and Obama is anything. And if he doesn't do the job we can throw the bum out in four years." (Just don't forget the old maxim: the job of the new president is to make the last president look good. Granted, a President Obama would have to go a long way to achieving that goal.)
Oh, and in a very interesting NY Times magazine article on "Advanced Obamanomics," David Leonhardt calls Obama a "free-market loving, big-spending, fiscally conservative, wealth redistributionist." A study in contradiction. What else is new? The article contains this classic howler:
The government has deregulated industries, opened the economy more to market forces and, above all, cut income taxes. Much good has come of this---the end of 1970s stagflation, infrequent and relatively mild recessions, faster growth than that of the more regulated economies of Europe. Yet, laissez-faire capitalism hasn't delivered nearly what its proponents promised. It has created big budget deficits, the most pronounced income inequality since the 1920s and the current financial crisis.
Laissez-faire capitalism? Laissez-faire capitalism?
It's a fairly typical exercise by contemporary political pundits; every so often, just "free-up" the mixture of regulation and market forces in the everyday see-saw of mixed economic policies and then blame laissez-faire capitalism for the mess.
Anyway, after some truly rousing Olympics in Beijing, the real political Olympics have only begun; pass the popcorn.
Cross-posted to Notablog.
Saturday, August 23, 2008
The More Things "Change"...
I just posted a few musings on the upcoming nominating conventions of the two major U.S. political parties at Notablog. Check it out here.
Sunday, August 10, 2008
After Multiculturalism
Today, I posted another installment in my SITL series; I discuss a new book by John F. Welsh, entitled After Multiculturalism: The Politics of Race and the Dialectics of Liberty. Though today's entry is a detailed review of sorts, I had provided a blurb for Welsh's book, which appears on the book's back jacket. I wrote:
John F. Welsh provides a comprehensive survey of libertarian and individualist thought on race and multiculturalism. Examining such thinkers as Ayn Rand, Murray Rothbard, Lysander Spooner, Albert Jay Nock, and Max Stirner, Welsh's provocative book demonstrates the analytical power of dialectical-libertarian perspectives. Exploring multiple, interconnected levels, Welsh offers a fundamentally radical critique of racism in all its guises, while challenging current models of thinking on this volatile subject. This is truly a much-needed addition to the growing scholarly literature.
To read my larger discussion, take a look at Notablog.
Tuesday, July 8, 2008
New Spring 2008 Journal of Ayn Rand Studies
Just a little note to inform readers that the newest issue of The Journal of Ayn Rand Studies has been published; you can check out its table of contents, with links to abstracts and contributor biographies here.
Tuesday, April 22, 2008
Socialism After Hayek
Today at Notablog, I post Part 2 of my series on how my "Dialectics and Liberty" work has been engaged in the scholarly literature. I examine a fascinating book by Theodore A. Burczak entitled Socialism After Hayek, which advances the discussion of a post-Hayekian socialism that takes into account those "intractable Hayekian knowledge problems."
Tuesday, March 18, 2008
Marx, Reason, and the Art of Freedom
Over at Notablog, I begin a series in which I discuss how my own "Dialectics and Liberty" work has been treated in the literature. Today, I revisit a book by Kevin M. Brien, entitled Marx, Reason, and the Art of Freedom, whose second edition deals with a review I wrote back in 1988.
Tuesday, February 19, 2008
New Journal of Ayn Rand Studies + Call for Papers
The newest issue of The Journal of Ayn Rand Studies has been published; readers can check out the table of contents, with links to abstracts and contributor biographies here.
I'd also like to take this opportunity to post the journal's "Call for Papers" on the topic of "Ayn Rand, Objectivism, and War." Details and deadlines can be found here and here.
Wednesday, January 30, 2008
Rudy Giuliani: A Preliminary Autopsy
I have posted a few reflections on the collapse of Rudy Giuliani's campaign at Notablog.
So much more 2008 political theater to come...
Friday, January 18, 2008
IESS Entry on "Objectivism"
I've authored an entry on Ayn Rand's philosophy, "Objectivism," which appears in the new International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, a 9-volume, 4000-page work published by Macmillan Reference USA, edited by William A. Darity, Jr. (Detroit: Macmillan Reference USA, 2008). The article can be found in Volume 6: Oaxaca, Ronald - Quotas, Trade, pp. 6-8, but the people at Gale / Cengage Learning have been kind enough to give me permission to post the PDF of the article on my home site.
You can access the essay as a PDF document here.
Cross-posted at Notablog.
Wednesday, December 5, 2007
L&P Inside Higher Ed
L&P is mentioned in today's Inside Higher Ed, where I also plug a few L&P member blogs. Take a look at Scott McLemee's piece, "Around the Web."
Thursday, September 20, 2007
Conference Board Review: Atlas at 50
There are several essays out there discussing the forthcoming 50th anniversary of Ayn Rand's novel, Atlas Shrugged. One such essay, written by A. J. Vogl, editor of The Conference Board Review, was just published in the magazine's September-October 2007 issue. (Vogl interviewed me, among others, for his article, and a summary of my own comments appears here.)
There will be more on the golden anniversary of Atlas in the coming weeks, so stay tuned.
Cross-posted at Notablog.
Tuesday, September 11, 2007
WTC Remembrance, Annual Series
This year, as part of my ongoing annual series, "Remembering the World Trade Center," I have posted the newest installment, a Notablog exclusive: "Charlie: To Build and Rebuild."
It tells the story of Charlie Pomaro, who, as a young man, helped to build the Twin Towers, and who, in 2001, helped to pick up the shattered pieces.
An index of previous installments in the series is available in today's Notablog entry here.
Tuesday, August 14, 2007
New Journal of Ayn Rand Studies
Just a note to announce the publication of the new issue of The Journal of Ayn Rand Studies, which features contributions from some of our esteemed L&P associates, including Stephen Cox and David T. Beito.
For information on the new issue, check out the table of contents and abstracts here and the contributor biographies here.
I'm also delighted to announce that the Jounral has entered into an electronic licensing relationship with EBSCO Publishing, the world's most prolific aggregator of full-text journals, magazines, and other sources. For further information, see Notablog.
Monday, June 25, 2007
Atlas Shrugged Companion Published
I have finally received my own copy of a new book edited by Edward W. Younkins entitled Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged: A Philosophical and Literary Companion, published by Ashgate.
L&P readers will note the presence in the volume of several L&P contributors: Lester H. Hunt, Steven Horwitz, Robert L. Campbell, Peter Boettke, Stephen Cox, Roderick T. Long, and yours truly.
I have not read the new Younkins anthology yet, but the range of topics, from the philosophical, political, and aesthetic to the literary, economic, and historical, is quite impressive.
See Notablog for further details.
Wednesday, April 18, 2007
Miklos Rozsa: A Centennial Celebration
Granted, this is not directly relevant to either Liberty or Power, but I have been celebrating the centennial of composer Miklos Rozsa's birth at Notablog. For those who are interested, check out the various links in today's post.
Monday, March 26, 2007
Dialectics and Liberty (in German)
I recently heard from Matt Jenny who, with a few of his libertarian friends, runs a small German left-libertarian groupblog named paxx:blog, which includes a webzine, paxx:zine. The webzine has already published translations of articles by my Liberty & Power Group Blog colleagues, Roderick T. Long (a German translation of "Beyond the Boss: Protection from Business in a Free Nation") and Sheldon Richman (a German translation of "U.S. Hypocrisy on Iran").
This week I join Roderick and Sheldon with a German translation of "Dialectics and Liberty" (links to the English PDF), which appeared in the September 2005 issue of The Freeman. The German translation can be found here.
Cross-posted to Notablog.
Friday, March 23, 2007
Ayn Rand Goes Swedish
Just a note to let readers know that there's a new issue out of the Swedish magazine Voltaire, which focuses on Ayn Rand. Guest editor Mattias Svensson translated a revised version of my own essay, "Atlas Shrugged: Manifesto for a New Radicalism." Read more about this issue and its contents here.
Tuesday, December 19, 2006
Joseph Barbera, RIP
I grew up on a steady diet of Hanna-Barbera cartoons, among other favorites, including "The Flintstones," "The Jetsons," "Yogi Bear," "Jonny Quest," and "Huckleberry Hound."
So when I found out about the passing of Joseph Barbera, I paused for a moment to recall all the joy his wonderful animation brought me.
And this passing comes after the recent passing of Chris Hayward, a writer responsible for many of the characters featured on "Rocky and Bullwinkle," among other timeless TV shows (hat tip to David Beito).
Cross-posted to Notablog.
Friday, November 17, 2006
New Fall 2006 Journal of Ayn Rand Studies
The new Fall 2006 issue of The Journal of Ayn Rand Studies has been published. The issue includes essays from contributors such as Steven H. Shmurak, Marc Champagne, Fred Seddon (two from Fred!), Algirdas Degutis, Susan Love Brown, David Graham & Nathan Nobis, Kirsti Minsaas, Greg Nyquist, Gregory M. Browne and Roderick T. Long. And I'm delighted to report that with this issue, Roderick joins the Editorial Board of JARS!
Check out the abstracts for the new issue here, and the contributor biographies here.
Read more at Notablog.
Wednesday, November 1, 2006
Mid-Term Elections, 2006
I've received a bit of email from people who were wondering why it is I have not commented on the upcoming mid-term elections. "Sciabarra, you're a political scientist, for Chrissake! What do you think?"
Well, let's leave aside the question of how much science goes into politics: It's always nice to know that some people find value in what I say. But with all due respect: There's not a dime's worth of difference between the Democrats and the Republicans. I have not changed my views of this two-party, two-pronged attack on individual freedom by one iota: A Pox on Both Their Houses! In truth, however, the modern Democratic Party has always been honest about its Big Government agenda. But the "small-government" GOP has long embraced the politics of Big Government. As the majority party, they are a total, unmitigated disaster for individual liberty, whether they are religious rightists or so-called "progressive conservatives"—who are actually much truer to the GOP's 19th-century interventionist roots than so-called "Goldwater" or "Reagan" Republicans (those who embraced the rhetoric of limited government, while still paving the way for a growth in the scope of government intervention). You have to chuckle when even Hillary Clinton sees the hypocrisy: "The people who promised less government," she said, "have instead given us the largest and least competent government we have ever had."
Still, I must admit that my political perversity would like very much to see the Bush administration get a royal slap across the face, such that the Democrats take the House of Representatives and, at the very least, close the gap in the GOP-controlled Senate. This is purely a strategic desire: Party divisions can have utility in frustrating the power-lust on both ends. In any event, I think it's probably true that the GOP will suffer a setback, and I have been saying so for over a year.
Please understand, however: THIS WILL DO NOTHING TO CHANGE THE CURRENT DOMESTIC OR FOREIGN POLICY DISASTERS. I don't mean to shout, but with regard to foreign policy alone: The Democrats handed this administration the current foreign policy debacle on a silver platter. They will not challenge one inch of the Bush administration's Iraq policy or its ideological rationalizations for that policy: that "democracy" can be imposed on societies that have little or no appreciation of the complex cultural roots of human freedom.
Either way, I'll be watching the results of politics-as-bloodsport on Tuesday, November 7th.
Cross-posted at Notablog.
Tuesday, September 5, 2006
Remembering the World Trade Center: Sixth Installment
Today, I add the sixth installment of my "Remembering the World Trade Center" series. Whatever one's views of the historical and political causes and consequences of September 11, 2001, I believe it is important to "Never Forget."
As the fifth anniversary of that day approaches, I post this tribute to:
Cross-posted to Notablog.
Friday, August 11, 2006
Ayn Rand at 100
A new book entitled Ayn Rand at 100, edited by Tibor Machan, makes its debut on Wednesday, August 16, 2006. And it is being published by the Liberty Institute in India!!! The book synopsis states: "Eminent authors discuss the impact [Ayn Rand] has had on their contribution to philosophy and, most importantly, Rand’s Indian connection."
A reprint of one of my Rand Centenary articles appears in the anthology, along with an essay by one of my L&P colleagues, Roderick Long. Here's the Table of Contents:
Preface : Tibor R. Machan: Ayn Rand at 100
Chapter 1: Bibek Debroy: Ayn Rand - The Indian Connection
Chapter 2: Tibor R. Machan: Rand and Her Significant Contributions
Chapter 3: J. E. Chesher: Ayn Rand’s Contribution to Moral Philosophy
Chapter 4: George Reisman: Ayn Rand and Ludwig von Mises
Chapter 5: Robert White: Ayn Rand’s Contribution to Liberal Thought
Chapter 6: Roderick T. Long: Ayn Rand and Indian Philosophy
Chapter 7: Chris Matthew Sciabarra: Ayn Rand - A Centennial Appreciation
Chapter 8: Fred Seddon: Ayn Rand - An Appreciation
Chapter 9: Elaine Sternberg: Why Ayn Rand Matters: Metaphysics, Morals, and Liberty
Chapter 10: Douglas Den Uyl : Rand's First Great Hit, The Fountainhead
Cross-posted to Notablog.
Saturday, June 10, 2006
Privatizing Gay Marriage
I am a bit behind in my newspaper reading, so I was particularly surprised by an article published in Thursday's New York Daily News. Written by Rabbi Michael Lerner, "The Right Way to Fight for Gay Marriage" argues that all unions should be privatized. Lerner, who is chair of the Network of Spiritual Progressives, writes:
... marriage ought to be taken out of the state's hands entirely. Let people be wed in the private realm with no official legal sanction. Then, religious communities that oppose gay marriage will not sanction them, and those like mine that sanction the practice will conduct it. Rather than issuing marriage certificates or divorces, the state would simply enforce civil unions as contracts between consenting adults and enforce laws imposing obligations on people who bring children into the world.
This approach is far more likely to be a winning strategy for those who wish to beat back the assault on gay rights.
I suppose what is most surprising to me is that a genuinely libertarian argument for privatizing marriage made it to the Op Ed of one of the most highly circulated daily newspapers in America.
Cross-posted to Notablog.
Monday, May 22, 2006
New Spring 2006 Journal of Ayn Rand Studies
It gives me great pleasure to announce the publication of the Spring 2006 issue of The Journal of Ayn Rand Studies. The issue features a dialogue on Ayn Rand's ethics, with contributions from Tibor R. Machan, Frank Bubb, Eric Mack, Douglas B. Rasmussen, Robert H. Bass, Chris Cathcart, and fellow L&P'er Robert L. Campbell. In addition, there are articles covering topics in epistemology (Merlin Jetton) and literature (Kurt Keefner and Peter Saint-Andre). Other contributors include fellow L&P'er Sheldon Richman on Thomas Szasz and Ayn Rand; Max Hocutt on postmodernism; Steven Yates on capitalism and commerce; and David M. Brown on the new Ayn Rand Q&A book.
For subscription information, see here.
Cross-posted to Notablog.
Tuesday, April 18, 2006
An Interview, Conducted by Jason Dixon
I've been super busy putting the finishing touches on the forthcoming Spring 2006 issue of The Journal of Ayn Rand Studies. But I've finally had the opportunity to publish, as a Notablog exclusive, an interview of me conducted by Jason Dixon.
Interested readers can check out that interview here. And the comments section is open here.
Wednesday, March 22, 2006
Iraq: A Perception Problem?
Today, ABC's "Good Morning America" reported on the Bush administration's claim that "negative" stories on the war in Iraq are playing right into the hands of the "enemy," and that the press is to blame for the sagging public support of the war. Bush's declining poll numbers are the result of negative publicity.
Such sagging public support, of course, has nothing to do with any erosion of the public's faith in the administration's competence, eh? Or the fact that Iraq is steeped in sectarian conflict, careening toward civil war? Nah. Nothing to do with those things.
On one level, of course, Bush is absolutely right: The press tends to focus on car bombs and murders and kidnappings as news. Well. DUH. Pick up any newspaper and the story is the same locally. Watch any local news broadcast and the story is the same there too. The news often reads or sounds like a police blotter. That has been the tendency in local news for as long as I've been alive. Why on earth would this tendency be different on a national or global level? Crime is news in this culture, and whether the criminals are local thugs or foreign ones, the play's the same.
But there is no direct correlation between news coverage and public perception, unless one believes that people are sheeple. Interestingly, even though NYC newspapers and newscasts focus on local crime all the time, it has not altered the public perception that crime is down in the Big Apple, as part of a long-term trend. And there is a good reason for this public perception: Crime is down. In reality. There were over 2,600 people murdered in NYC in 1990; that number dropped to under 600 by 2004. Whatever the continuing negative focus of the press, the reality of life in this city has inspired people's positive perceptions.
Perhaps the Bush administration needs its own reality check. The downturn in public opinion on the Iraq war is not simply the result of press brainwashing. The public perception has changed because things in reality are not going as well in Iraq as the administration claims.
I guess the administration is just frustrated with the "reality-based community." And here they thought that they created their own reality.
What is the administration's alternative? Planting positive stories in the press? Paying off journalists who ask sympathetic questions? Or maybe the press should simply be "embedded" into an official Ministry of Propaganda.
Sigh.
Cross-posted to Notablog.
Monday, March 20, 2006
Chris Tame, RIP
I just received a phone call from Sean Gabb of the Libertarian Alliance. Sean tells me that my pal, Chris Tame, passed away at 3:37 pm, London time. Having battled cancer these many months, Chris's passing was, as Sean describes it, peaceful.
I'm very sad to hear this news, and I extend my deepest condolences to his friends and family. I was fortunate enough to speak with Chris last week; it was a "goodbye" phone call, as he knew the end was near. I will miss his almost daily "Ayn Rand Watch" postings, his warped sense of humor, and, most of all, the intellectual engagement. But I know that his legacy will live on.
A press release will follow from Sean very soon. (I've added that release at the Notablog post here. Kenneth R. Gregg has also added it to the comments section here.)
Update (23 March 2006): Sean Gabb has published an Obituary for Chris Tame here and here.
Chris Tame: 1949-2006
Saturday, March 18, 2006
Chuck Hagel vs. Neocon Numbskulls
Yesterday, I posted at Notablog a brief piece that cited a fine principle enunciated by GOP Senator Chuck Hagel:
You cannot in my opinion just impose a democratic form of government on a country with no history and no culture and no tradition of democracy.
Yeah. How 'bout that?
Read more of my mini-rant here.
Wednesday, March 8, 2006
Meme of Four
Steven Horwitz has tagged me for the "Meme-of-Four" (dammit indeed!)
Okay, here goes.
Thursday, February 2, 2006
The Kings of Nonviolent Resistance
It is no longer news that Coretta Scott King, the widow of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., passed away this week. She was 78.
An advocate and practitioner of nonviolent resistance, Martin Luther King Jr. once uttered a classic statement: "I have decided to stick with love. Hate is too great a burden to bear."
While a lot of discussion has ensued over the nature of the "love thine enemy" philosophy that seems to underlie King's statement, I think there is a truth therein, which was made even more apparent by King's wife. Coretta Scott King often repeated her husband's maxim: "Hate is too great a burden to bear." But she added: "It injures the hater more than it injures the hated."
I've talked about the effects of hating in other posts dealing with everything from Yoda to my articulation of "The Rose Petal Assumption," so I won't repeat my reasoning here. Suffice it to say, there is an internal relationship between hatred, fear, anger, and suffering, and, often, the transcendence of one brings forth the transcendence of all.
I think what the Kings focused on was not "loving one's enemy" per se, but the practice of a positive alternative in one's opposition to evil. Nonviolent resistance is not equivalent to pacifism. It is not the renunciation of the retaliatory use of force; it entails, instead, the practice of a wide variety of strategies—from boycotts to strikes, which remove all sanctions of one's own victimization. One refuses to be a part of a cycle that replaces one "boss" with another. One repudiates real-world monsters, while not becoming one in the process. For as Nietzsche once said: "Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And if you gaze long enough into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you."
Nonviolence is not a social panacea, and sometimes it is absolutely necessary to use violence in one's response to aggression. But much can be learned about how to topple tyranny from the lessons provided by the theoreticians and practitioners of nonviolent resistance.
It's fitting that today I've marked Ayn Rand's birthday, for Atlas Shrugged is one of the grandest dramatizations in fiction of the effectiveness of fighting tyranny through nonviolent resistance. It is no coincidence that, while writing her magnum opus, Rand's working title for Atlas was "The Strike." Of course, Rand was no theorist of nonviolence, but her novel is instructive.
For further reading on the subject of nonviolence, let me suggest first and foremost the books of Gene Sharp, founder of the Albert Einstein Institution. See especially Sharp's books, The Politics of Nonviolent Action and Social Power and Political Freedom.
Cross-posted to Notablog.
Thursday, January 5, 2006
International Encyclopedia of Economic Sociology: Libertarianism
As I mentioned here and here, I wrote an entry on "libertarianism" for the International Encyclopedia of Economic Sociology. The entry surveys those who have contributed to a libertarian "sociology," thinkers such as Herbert Spencer, Carl Menger, F. A. Hayek, Ludwig von Mises, Murray Rothbard, and Ayn Rand.
I am pleased, today, to publish that entry, with permission from Routledge, on my website:
Cross-posted to Notablog.
Wednesday, January 4, 2006
International Encyclopedia of Economic Sociology: Karl Marx
I just received my copy of the International Encyclopedia of Economic Sociology from Routledge. Some time ago, I told the story of how I came to author two articles for that newly published reference work. The 2006 volume includes two essays authored by me: one on "Karl Marx," the other on "libertarianism."
Today, with permission from Routledge, I publish an HTML version of the essay on "Karl Marx." Given my comments today in this thread, I am happy that the essay on Marx highlights one of the most appealing aspects of his work: his use of dialectical method. Readers should point their browsers to the following link to take a look at the essay:
Tomorrow, with permission from Routledge, I will publish my Encyclopedia article on libertarianism. Stay tuned!
Cross-posted to Notablog.
Tuesday, December 20, 2005
Philosophers of Capitalism
Okay, more shameless self-promotion...
Today, I received my copy of a new book edited by Edward W. Younkins, entitled Philosophers of Capitalism: Menger, Mises, Rand, and Beyond.
The book features contributions from a number of friends and colleagues, including, of course, Ed Younkins himself, along with Sam Bostaph, Doug Rasmussen, Barry Smith, Walter Block, Richard C. B. Johnson, Larry Sechrest, and Tibor Machan, among others. Some of the articles were previously published; my own is a revised version of a piece I wrote for Philosophical Books, surveying "The Growing Industry in Ayn Rand Scholarship."
You can order it from Laissez Faire Books or Amazon.com.
Cross-posted to Notablog.
Tuesday, December 13, 2005
The 9/11 Money Trough
I have been following the week-long series in the New York Daily News focusing on the "9/11 Money Trough," the entirely predictable corrupt financial feeding frenzy generated by the infusion of massive government funds in the months and years after the attacks on Manhattan. It brings to mind what Errol Louis said about the promised revitalization of New Orleans in the aftermath of Katrina; he said that billions of dollars were about "to pass into the sticky hands of politicians. ... Worried about looting? You ain't seen nothing yet."
Well, we've seen it here in NYC. I highly recommend the series to readers.
Cross-posted to Notablog.
Friday, December 9, 2005
Bill Bradford, RIP
I am very deeply saddened to report that my dear friend Bill Bradford passed away on Thursday, December 8, 2005 at the age of 58. He was the founder of Liberty magazine and a founding co-editor and publisher of The Journal of Ayn Rand Studies. He died at his home in Port Townsend, Washington, surrounded by family and friends, after many months of battling cancer.
Stephen Cox, the new senior editor of Liberty, has announced that "an upcoming issue [of the magazine] will feature a commemoration of Bill’s life. His work will continue."
I've posted a bit more at Notablog, but hope to contribute my thoughts more formally to that upcoming commemoration.
Rest in peace, friend.
Monday, December 5, 2005
The Freeman: Dialectics and Liberty
The September 2005 issue of The Freeman includes my essay, "Dialectics and Liberty," which offers an introduction to dialectical method and its role in the works of such writers as F. A. Hayek and Ayn Rand. That essay finally makes its cyber-debut today! Another in a series of essays and interviews on the occasion of the tenth anniversary of the publication of my books Marx, Hayek, and Utopia and Ayn Rand: The Russian Radical, the article is available as a PDF here:
Cross-posted to Notablog.
Sunday, December 4, 2005
Antiwar Masters of Horror
I've long been a fan of so-called "horror" films, in addition to sci-fi and fantasy.
Unfortunately, the Showtime series "Masters of Horror," thus far, has been a bit of a disappointment to me; it's a mix of schlock and gore, with just a few thrills thrown in for good measure. I prefer horror to have a purpose, maybe a bit of "Twilight Zone"-like morality play at work. At the very least, it should be suspenseful, rather than predictable.
I did enjoy Friday night's episode, "Homecoming," directed by Joe Dante, which made a few biting political points. For me, the funniest right-wing caricature was played by Thea Gill, who was a "skank"-like right-wing pundit, curiously comparable to Ann Coulter. It was quite a change for Gill, who portrayed the mild-mannered Lindsay in "Queer as Folk."
The Dante-directed "Homecoming" gives us a zombie tale, in which fallen soldiers come back from the dead to right the wrongs of a Presidential administration that involved them in a no-win war. No spoilers here; if you haven't caught the episode, check it out.
Cross-posted to Notablog.
Friday, November 18, 2005
The Illusion of the Epoch
President Bush and his VP have been railing against the "Democrats" for "rewriting" the history of the 2002-2003 march toward war. (Some good commentary on this can be found here, here, and here.)
In the meanwhile, the critics keep a comin' and most of them, indeed, were former champions of the war. Vietnam combat vet, and current Democratic Congressman John P. Murtha, who supported the war, now calls it "a flawed policy wrapped in an illusion..."
The flaws have been legion. And the illusion? Well, H. B. Acton once spoke of communism as "the illusion of the epoch." For me, the biggest illusion of this epoch is a neoconservative one: that it is possible to construct a liberal democracy on any cultural base whatsoever. Now, I'm not looking to re-open the tired debate over whether it was right or wrong to go to war in Iraq; but even the politicians realize that the time has come for a debate about the future of that war.
But that won't stop the administration from its tarring of critics, like Murtha, as a "Michael Moore ... liberal" because he is questioning the wisdom of the war. Except the charges won't stick this time, because even though the President doesn't read polls, apparently, the politicians in his own party are reading the handwriting on the walls of the Pew Research Center and the Gallop organization. The American people are becoming increasingly pissed off over this war and its conduct. And if current trends continue, the party in power, gerrymandering notwithstanding, is going to suffer in the 2006 midterm elections.
I'm tickled, of course, that the administration puts such a priority on "consistency" in its defense of the US invasion and occupation of Iraq. As the ineffectual John Kerry said, effectively, during one of the 2004 Presidential debates: Consistency is great... but "you could be wrong!" Cheney is so busy reminding opponents of the war about how they've changed their positions that he doesn't even recognize how far he's come over the last decade or so.
Cross-posted to Notablog.
Thursday, November 3, 2005
Iran, Again
After last week's pronouncements by Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad that Israel should be "wiped off the map," there's been a lot of saber rattling about Iran. (I've written on the subject of Iran a number of times over the past few years; see here, here, and here, for example).
There is nothing shocking or unexpected about Ahmadinejad's rhetoric. The Iranian theocrats have been talking like that for years. Their overthrow of the US-backed Shah was a clarion call for fundamentalists across the Islamic world to mobilize against both Israel and the United States. Many others in the Islamic world have uttered the same view, including those who reside in countries that are, ostensibly, current US allies.
The fact is, of course, that US actions in Iraq have emboldened the Iranian regime significantly; some are even suggesting that the US was the "useful idiot" for Iranian foreign policy goals to undermine a hostile Baathist regime in Iraq, substituting a friendlier Shiite majoritarian theocracy in its place. With the antagonistic Taliban held at bay in Afghanistan on its eastern flank, and Hussein gone on the western side, Iran has emerged as a central geopolitical power in the Middle East—and was made so in significant part as the direct result of actions taken by the United States, purportedly in our own defense.
But it is a state that is in a deepening cultural crisis, a crisis that will have profound political ramifications over time.
Today, I've read an interesting NY Times essay about "Our Allies in Iran." It's the kind of title that is meant to surprise. The writer, Afshin Molavi, makes some very important points. Molavi states:
The new president's confrontational tone threatens to deepen the isolation of Iran's democrats, pushing them further behind his long shadow. Western powers have a dual challenge: to find a way to engage this population even as they struggle to address the new president's inflammatory rhetoric. By the time Mr. Ahmadinejad was elected in June, a sustained assault by hard-liners had left Iranian democrats disoriented and leaderless, their dissidents jailed, newspapers closed and reformist political figures popularly discredited. But democratic aspirations should not be written off as a passing fad that died with the failure of the reform movement and the replacement of a reformist president, Mohammad Khatami, with a hard-liner, Mr. Ahmadinejad. The historic roots of reform run deep in Iran, and support for democratic change remains widespread.
Iran's modern middle class, which is increasingly urbanized, wired and globally connected, provides particularly fertile soil for these aspirations. The Stanford University scholar Abbas Milani has described Iran's middle class as a "Trojan horse within the Islamic republic, supporting liberal values, democratic tolerance and civic responsibility." And so long as that class grows, so too will the pressure for democratic change.
Molavi warns, however, that war against Iran could have an adverse effect on that country's "democracy-minded middle class," providing "additional pretexts for the regime to frighten its people and crack down on dissent." Anything that undermines Iranian contact "with the foreign investors, educators, tourists and businessmen who link them to the outside world," says Molavi, undermines the movement toward political and cultural reform. That movement requires a strong private sector and a growing civil society in Iran, which can be encouraged by an extension of the global market. Such an extension would nourish "a strong and stable middle class" and the "inevitable winds of change" so crucial to peace and prosperity in the region.
It is ironic that those who speak glowingly about the need for "democratization" in Iraq as a key to Mideast peace are the same people who now speak about the need for military action in Iran, which would most assuredly sabotage the trends toward democratization in that country.
The saber-rattlers tell us that they are worried about the long-run problem of a "nuclear" Iran. Fair enough. But they don't seem to worry about the long-run consequences of military intervention in Iran, given the current context in Iraq, a context that the saber-rattlers themselves did much to create. As Arthur Silber writes here:
We now have a voluminous record, in news accounts, in government documents and in other forms, to prove beyond any doubt that the Bush administration gave almost no attention to the aftermath of the Iraq invasion. No one had any serious question about our taking down the Saddam Hussein regime, except about how long it might take and the details. Despite that certainty, we know that the Bush administration did not listen to many of its own experts and planners about what should be done once Saddam was gone. To put the point simply, the Bush administration never seriously addressed the multitude of inordinately complex issues encompassed in the question: What then?
This much is true, and this much we can agree with, as Arthur puts it: "Iran is run by viciously destructive and dangerous leaders." But as people clamor for military action against Iran, they are not asking and answering the crucial question: "What then?"
I often wonder, for example, how the Shiites in Iraq, with whom the US has cast its political lot, would deal with a US military strike against Iran. How long would it take for a strike against Iran to destabilize the situation with the US's Shiite-Iraqi allies? The Sunni insurgency against the Shiites in Iraq has been awful; I can't even begin to think of the conditions that might arise should a Shiite insurgency unfold against the US—a Shiite insurgency aided and abetted by its own ideological brethren in Tehran.
And what then? In addition to the internal combustion of Iraq, might there not be counterattacks from other Arab governments? Might not the Mideast be thrown into further chaos? And what if additional US troops are needed to "finish the job" started by planes and missiles? Where are these troops coming from? How long before military conscription is reinstituted?
As Richard Cohen tells us today in the New York Daily News, in the Middle East, "bad could get worse."
The central problem in the Middle East is not strategic. The central problem is not the spread of nuclear weapons of mass destruction. The central problem is the spread of ideological and cultural weapons of mass destruction. And these weapons have been manufactured at a maddening pace for generations by countries like Saudi Arabia, a US "ally." As Jason Pappas reminds us (see here and here), the Saudis have been funding the worldwide proliferation of the very jihadist ideology that targets Western values and institutions.
But the odds are very slim that there will be any fundamental change in the relationship between the United States and Saudi Arabia. That's because the House of Sa'ud remains a key player in US global political economy (see here). The dismantling of that neocorporatist politico-economic system is not likely to happen anytime soon.
And yet, despite its role in the proliferation of jihadist fanaticism, the collapse of the House of Sa'ud at this point could be catastrophic: it would most likely lead to the transference of power into the hands of the very worst jihadists, those who have been a by-product of Saudi education.
Yes, it's one gigantic mess of internal contradictions at work. But, currently, I have no reason to believe that a military attack upon Iran would resolve these contradictions, without engendering a host of newer and far more lethal ones.
Comments welcome. Cross-posted to Notablog.
Friday, September 16, 2005
Bush, Krugman, and the Old Deal
Today's NY Times article by Paul Krugman, "Not the New Deal," gave me a few chuckles.
With George W. Bush projecting a huge federal government effort to reconstruct Louisiana and Mississippi and other areas affected by the devastation of Hurricane Katrina, fiscal conservatives are already murmuring. But little stands in the way of this vast projected increase in government spending.
As my colleague Mark Brady has asked: "Did You Really Expect Anything Else?"
A Bush critic such as Paul Krugman is busy objecting to a Heritage Foundation-inspired plan that would include "waivers on environmental rules, the elimination of capital gains taxes and the private ownership of public school buildings in the disaster areas." But he also believes that "even conservatives" must recognize that "recovery will require a lot of federal spending." Since this will have an appreciable effect on the deficit, Krugman wonders "how ... discretionary government spending [can] take place on that scale without creating equally large-scale corruption." Given the Bush administration's penchant for awarding so much pork to favored corporations in places like Iraq, Krugman is understandably concerned about "cronyism and corruption."
This, says Krugman, is in marked contrast to the efforts of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, whose "New Deal" provided "a huge expansion of federal spending" without corruption or cronyism. The New Deal, says Krugman, "made almost a fetish out of policing its own programs against potential corruption. In particular, F.D.R. created a powerful 'division of progress investigation' to look into complaints of malfeasance in the W.P.A. That division proved so effective that a later Congressional investigation couldn't find a single serious irregularity it had missed." For Krugman, FDR was committed to "honest government," because he understood that "government activism works. But George W. Bush isn't F.D.R. Indeed, in crucial respects he's the anti-F.D.R."
Is Krugman kidding me?
Throughout his presidency, Bush has looked to such American Presidents as Woodrow Wilson and FDR for inspiration. Bush believes that FDR himself "gave his soul for the process" of taking America out of the Depression and into a world war against authoritarianism.
As for the New Deal: There are no "honest government" spending programs that don't involve some kind of structurally constituted cronyism and corruption. That's just the nature of the beast. And FDR's New Deal is no exception. It was, in many ways, a paradigmatic case, no different from the "war collectivism" policies of World War I or World War II, all of which entailed using the vastly expanding power of government to privilege certain groups at the expense of other groups. Not even Herbert Hoover's response to the government-engendered Great Depression was "laissez faire" (see Rothbard's "Herbert Hoover and the Myth of Laissez-Faire" in A New History of Leviathan, and, of course, his fine book on the subject).
A cursory look at Jim Powell's recent book, FDR's Folly: How Roosevelt and His New Deal Prolonged the Great Depression reveals "why so much New Deal relief and public works money [was] channeled away from the poorest people." From its inception, the New Deal was inspired by the corporatist model of Italian fascism. Even Krugman's beloved Works Progress Adminstration was constructed on the basis of patronage schemes. Citing economic historian Gavin Wright, Powell tells us that "a statistical analysis of New Deal spending purportedly aimed at helping the poor" gives us evidence that "80 percent of the state-by-state variation in per person New Deal spending could be explained by political factors."
Mainstream politics offers no genuine opposition to FDR's Old "New Deal" or Bush's New "Old Deal," not when "conservatives" and "liberals" are united in their support for massive government intervention.
Cross-posted to Notablog.
Wednesday, September 14, 2005
The Comic Book Geek Revolutionaries
Throughout the years, I have met a number of libertarians who were, growing up (and, uh, are still...) "Comic Book Geeks." I don't know if there have been any statistical surveys correlating "Comic Book Geek" beginnings and libertarian ends. But you might want to take this test or this test to examine your own "Comic Book Geek Purity."
There are a few CBGs among us at L&P, including Roderick Long and Aeon Skoble, the latter of whom is the central focus of my Notablog post today: "The Comic Book Geek Revolutionaries."
Tuesday, September 13, 2005
New Fall 2005 Journal of Ayn Rand Studies
Today, the Fall 2005 issue of The Journal of Ayn Rand Studies has been published. It begins our seventh volume, our seventh year.
Here is the Table of Contents:
The Rand Transcript, Revisited - Chris Matthew Sciabarra
Mimesis and Expression in Ayn Rand’s Theory of Art - Kirsti Minsaas
Langer and Camus: Unexpected Post-Kantian Affinities with Rand’s Aesthetics - Roger E. Bissell
The Facts of Reality: Logic and History in Objectivist Debates about Government - Nicholas Dykes
Ayn Rand versus Adam Smith - Robert White
Feser on Nozick - Peter Jaworski
Kant on Faith - Fred Seddon
Seddon on Rand - Kevin Hill
Reference and Necessity: A Rand-Kripke Synthesis - Roderick T. Long
Reply to Ari Armstrong: How to Be a Perceptual Realist - Michael Huemer
Rejoinder to Michael Huemer: Direct Realism and Causation - Ari Armstrong
Abstracts for this issue are available here; contributor biographies can be found here.
Print-out and mail-in your subscription form today! (Shameless commercialism...)
Thursday, September 8, 2005
New Installment in My WTC Remembrance Series
I've added a new installment to my annual series, "Remembering the World Trade Center." Noted at Notablog, this newest essay is entitled:
Burke was the principal of the public high school closest to Ground Zero on September 11, 2001.
Tuesday, September 6, 2005
Santorum and Big Government Conservatism
For several years now, I have been going on and on about the continuing growth of the religious right in conservative circles. My antipathy to theocratic conservatism had been at fever pitch long before I wrote my essay, "Caught Up in the Rapture," which, with its sister essay, "Bush Wins!," predicted a Bush victory a good six months prior to the 2004 election.
In this context, a recent Jonathan Rauch essay, "America's Anti-Reagan isn't Hilary Clinton. It's Rick Santorum," has been making the rounds all over the blogosphere; it's a dissection of Pennsylvania Senator Rick Santorum's anti-libertarian philosophy.
What one will not find in Rauch's essay, however, are two words: "Bush" and "Iraq." In my view, Santorum's new book, It Takes a Family: Conservatism and the Common Good, is only the newest manifestation of a religious conservative movement, whose titular head is George W. Bush. Whereas the religious conservatives wish to remake the culture and politics of this country, the neoconservatives wish to remake the culture and politics of the Middle East. Together, these tendencies make for one very potent anti-libertarian, anti-individualist politics.
What hope does a religiously based conservative administration have to inspire secular, liberal democracies in the Middle East when it is at war with both secularism and liberalism at home?
I discuss these themes in greater depth at Notablog.
More on Hurricane Katrina
I don't think there is much I can add to the discussion of this horrific human tragedy. But I have a few thoughts, which I've posted to Notablog.
My best wishes to all of those who are dealing with this catastrophe.
Thursday, August 18, 2005
More Anniversary Posts
As I mentioned here, I've been celebrating the tenth anniversaries of my first two books in my "Dialectics and Liberty Trilogy": Marx, Hayek, and Utopia (which was published 10 years ago today) and Ayn Rand: The Russian Radical (which, though my second book, was published 10 years ago, this past Sunday).
In any event, over the last few days, I've had a number of new posts to Notablog, including links to an interview conducted by Sébastien Caré and an interview conducted by Sunni Maravillosa.
Today, Ed Younkins also posted his review of my book, Total Freedom (which was published five years ago); the review has generated some discussion at SOLO HQ.
Sunday, August 14, 2005
Ten Years After
File this blog entry under the category of "Self-Promotion." I suspect I'll be forgiven a bit of that by my L&P colleagues, who know my admiration for Ayn Rand.
On this date, ten years ago, my book Ayn Rand: The Russian Radical was published by Penn State Press. It was actually my second book, but it arrived four days before the publication of my first book, Marx, Hayek, and Utopia, by SUNY Press. These books, together with my Total Freedom: Toward a Dialectical Libertarianism (also published by Penn State Press), make up my "Dialectics and Liberty Trilogy."
So, this week, I'll be looking back at Notablog, at L&P, and at SOLO HQ, which publishes one of my retrospective pieces today, entitled "Ten Years After." There will be interviews posted to different sites throughout the week, and additional pieces will be published into the Fall 2005 semester.
Thanks to those readers who have given me their support, even if they didn't always agree with my conclusions.
Thursday, August 4, 2005
The Art of Cyber-Pedagogy
Yesterday, I read a really interesting article by Michael J. Bugeja in The Chronicle of Higher Education, entitled "Master (or Mistress) of Your Domain" (shades of Jerry), with the descriptive subtitle: "Creating a Web site for your latest book can showcase the work and aid your case for tenure and promotion."
I'll put aside the issue of aiding one's case for tenure and promotion. I'd like to suggest that it might actually aid one's cause (which might not actually aid one's tenure or promotion). And I think more classical liberal and libertarian scholars should consider doing it.
First, let's take a look at Bugeja's points. He writes:
For better or worse, the Internet is playing a larger role in editorial decisions about books and in promotion and tenure evaluations. It is commonplace for external reviewers to Google Web sites or troll databases before rendering their decisions on behalf of publishing houses and institutions. Search committees also are using the Web to evaluate the writing or scholarship of job applicants before inviting them to on-campus interviews. ...
I advise authors to create a Web site with the title of their texts as the domain name and to assemble other sites with domain names identifying their scholarship. ... Authors are responsible for getting their books reviewed, purchased by libraries, and adopted by professors for use in research or in the classroom. In the past, that required an author to fill out a questionnaire for the publisher, identifying editors, book reviewers, and colleagues who might have interest in the work. The Internet has changed that.
Bugeja explains how he marshalled his own resources to promote his own work. Who is a better salesperson than the person who authors the work and knows it, inside-out? He "e-mailed reviewers and technology columnists, directing them to the Web site" he had established for his book, "asking if they would like a copy. Several said yes, generating reviews and citations that I added to my site under 'latest news.' Without the site, the book would have died along with the trees that gave it life at the printing press. Instead, it went on to win a research award with reviews in top publications. That's the benefit of a book site."
Bugeja tells us that his book site boosted classroom sales too. He reminds us that those who surf the web expect some things for free. The Internet may not be a "medium for professors concerned about copyright issues or intellectual property," but Bugeja encourages authors "to share [their] pedagogies or methodologies," giving readers, potential teachers and students alike, "all manner of free information, including lectures for each chapter; sample syllabi for large, middle-range, senior, master's, and doctoral classes; end-of-chapter materials; forms for paper assignments, journal exercises, and presentations; sample midterms and final exams; a bibliography; and an index." He even provides
a 103-page instructor's manual in both Word and PDF formats. Online manuals save the publisher printing costs and allow potential users to manipulate syllabi, lectures, and other downloads. The most popular free feature on my site is a twice-monthly teaching module meant to stimulate classroom discussion. To date, I've added more than two dozen such modules to the site on content too topical to include in a new edition but nonetheless related to the concept of the work.
I especially like Bugeja's suggestion that authors archive "reviews, recent articles, and information about" themselves. I've been doing such things for over ten years now on my own site, and I've had URL forwarding for the titles of all of my books. Just try typing totalfreedomtowardadialecticallibertarianism.com or, more simply, marxhayekandutopia.com, and see where that takes you. I'll never forget how my pal and colleague, Lester Hunt, once characterized my site. Linking to it from his site, he wrote: "Chris is a true liberal. In the interest of provoking dialogue, he puts some very adverse criticisms of his controversial work on his site, together with his replies." I think that's actually very important. And I think more liberal/libertarian scholars should be doing it precisely because it documents the history of a discussion of a particular work, while also providing the basis for future dialogue.
The one thing authors should not supply, of course, is: the book. But links to services where you can order the book online are always helpful. As Bugeja puts it: "That's the point of the site, and all links lead to that outcome."
I've not yet put a syllabus for my books online, but I do have one available for use in a cyberseminar that I give now and then on my "Dialectics and Liberty" trilogy. But Bugeja has given me a good idea about developing more study guides and syllabi for my various publications so as to facilitate their use in the classroom.
It would be a good idea, I think, if those in the liberal/libertarian academy do more to develop these kinds of web resources in a more formal manner. It is one way to develop a "parallel institution" of learning, while at the same time providing a blueprint for the use of such materials in established institutions of learning. Additionally, it gives each of us, as authors of the works, a chance to frame the discussion in a way that is most likely to generate further interest in our own contributions and the contributions of our colleagues in the libertarian academy. I've seen some development of this model on the sites of some of my colleagues; in the light of Bugeja's essay, I think this is something that can benefit each of us individually and the cause of liberty more generally.
Cross-posted to Notablog.
Tuesday, July 26, 2005
Revolutionary Jokes
I really like the name of this magazine. In it, Carl Schreck reviews a new book by Bruce Adams entitled Tiny Revolutions in Russia: Twentieth-Century Soviet and Russian History in Anecdotes. I've not read the book, but it does look as if it is "No Laughing Matter," insofar as it shows how jokes served as a means of critiquing the Soviet police state.
Here are a few excerpts from Schreck's piece:
Jokes, or anekdoty, were indeed risky business in the Soviet Union, Bruce Adams maintains in the introduction to "Tiny Revolutions in Russia," his light if thoroughly entertaining recap of Soviet history told through a mix of amusing, tragicomic, baffling and plain unfunny jokes that will strike a familiar chord with any foreigner who has shared a couple bottles of vodka with a table full of Russians.
George Orwell was the first to dub jokes "tiny revolutions," but it's an especially fitting title for Adams' book, which reminds us that humor can have very serious consequences when the joke is on a totalitarian regime. The eight years Nobel laureate Alexander Solzhenitsyn spent in prisons and labor camps came as punishment for jokes he had made about Josef Stalin in his private correspondence, Adams writes. "The anecdotes were necessarily underground humor shared only with close friends."
So, how about a few jokes?
When no African delegates showed up at a Comintern Congress, Moscow wired Odessa [a very cosmopolitan port city with a large Jewish population]: "Send us a Negro immediately." "Odessa wired right back: 'Rabinovich has been dyed. He's drying.'"
"Who built the White Sea-Baltic Canal?" "On the right bank -- those who told anecdotes, on the left bank -- those who heard them."
Because the BBC always seemed to know Soviet secrets so quickly, it was decided to hold the next meeting of the Politburo behind closed doors. No one was permitted in or out. Suddenly Kosygin grasped his belly and asked permission to leave. Permission was denied. A few minutes later there was a knock at the door. A janitress stood there with a pail: "The BBC just reported that Aleksei Nikolayevich shit himself."
Read the whole article here. And check out Adams' book here.
Cross-posted to Notablog.
Thursday, July 14, 2005
Paglia, Rand, and Women in Philosophy
Camille Paglia, who contributed to the anthology Feminist Interpretations of Ayn Rand, which I co-edited with Mimi Reisel Gladstein, has raised her voice in defense of women philosophers who were marginalized by a recent BBC-Radio 4 Greatest Philosopher poll that placed Karl Marx at the top. Paglia writes in The Independent:
For most of history, the groundbreaking philosophers have all been men, and philosophy has always been a male genre. Women had neither the education nor the time to pursue the life of the mind. ... Now that women have at last gained access to higher education, we are waiting to see what they can achieve in the fields where men have distinguished themselves, above all in philosophy. At the moment, however, the genre of philosophy is not flourishing; systematic reasoning no longer has the prestige or cultural value that it once had. ... Today's lack of major female philosophers is not due to lack of talent but to the collapse of philosophy. Philosophy as traditionally practised may be a dead genre. This is the age of the internet in which we are constantly flooded by information in fragments. Each person at the computer is embarked on a quest for and fabrication of his or her identity. The web mimics human neurology, and it is fundmentally altering young people's brains. The web, for good or ill, is instantaneous. Philosophy belongs to a vanished age of much slower and rhetorically formal inquiry.
Paglia is spot on with regard to a number of points here. Systematic reasoning is clearly at a disadvantage in a culture that embraces atomizing and dis-integration as the preferred mode of analysis.
But there are a number of women thinkers, says Paglia, who merit our attention. Among these: Simone de Beauvoir and Ayn Rand. Paglia writes:
Both Simone de Beauvoir and Ayn Rand, another favourite of mine, have their own highly influential system of thought, and therefore they belong on any list of great philosophers. Rand's mix of theory, social observations and commentary was very original, though we see her Romantic sources. Her system is broad and complex and well deserves to be incorporated into the philosophy curriculum. Simone de Beauvoir's magnum opus, The Second Sex (which hugely influenced me in my youth), demonstrates her hybrid consciousness. It doesn't conform to the strict definition of philosophy because it's an amalgamation of abstract thought and history and anthropology—real facts. The genre problem is probably why both these women are absent from the list. But Plato too was a writer of dramatic fiction—so that it is no basis for dismissing Rand.
It's a worthwhile read.
Hat tip to David Boaz.
Cross-posted to Notablog.
Friday, July 8, 2005
"Home" is Now London
I wrote a brief reflection piece at Notablog on the terror attacks in London. Here's an excerpt:
Suffice it to say, we have been told by the leaders of the "coalition of the willing" that "we" have to "take the war to the terrorists" and fight "over there" so that "we" don't have to face death and destruction "over here." Or as President Bush put it: "Either we take the war to the terrorists and fight them where they are ... or at some point we will have to fight them here at home."
Well, "home" is now London.
And fighting terrorists "where they are" does nothing to stem the tide of their ever-increasing numbers.
Read the whole post here.
Sunday, July 3, 2005
"If We Don't Change the World...
... the world's gonna change us."
That's what Duncan Hunter (R-CA), Chairman of the House Armed Services Committee said today on "Meet the Press."
And in that simple phrase, Hunter has summarized one of the crucial constructivist principles at the foundation of the Bush administration's stated neo-Wilsonian initiative in the Middle East.
Thursday, June 30, 2005
Iranian Death Throes?
Having seen various recent blog posts on Islam and secularization (including this one by Jason Pappas), I found this morning's NY Times essay by Abbas Milani of the Hoover Institution an interesting read. In "The Silver Lining in Iran," Milani argues, in essence, that the tightening of reactionary forces in Iranian politics is actually a sign that the reigning mullahs are in their death throes. For Milani, the ruling "cabal of conservative mullahs and Revolutionary Guards who have absconded to ivory towers with their dogma and greed for power" have ignored "serious signs of crisis [as] they masterminded Mr. Ahmadinejad's victory." This is the same President-elect Mahmoud Ahmadinejad that is being fingered by former US hostages of the 1979 embassy crisis as one of their captors.
Milani continues:
Nevertheless, contrary to the common perception, this election is not so much a sign of the Iranian system's strength as of its weakness. Last week's presidential election is only the most recent example of the tactical wisdom and strategic foolishness of Iran's ruling mullahs. ... In the process they may have unwittingly opened the door for democracy - because their hardball tactics have created the most serious rift in the ranks of ruling mullahs since the inception of the Islamic Republic. The experience of emerging democracies elsewhere has shown that dissension within ruling circles has often presaged the fall of authoritarianism.
Mr. Ahmadinejad's presidency will force a crisis not only in Iran's political establishment but also, and even more important, in its economy. Only a huge infusion of capital and expertise, along with open markets, can even begin to address the country's economic problems, which include high unemployment, a rapidly increasing labor force, cronyism and endemic corruption.
And only an "infusion" of "security and the rule of law" will help, says Milani. But the president-elect is too busy opining "that the stock market is a form of gambling with no place in a genuine Islamic society. Not surprisingly, Mr. Ahmadinejad's election brought about the single greatest plunge in the Iranian stock market's history. The day is already known as Black Saturday, and the president-elect has been scrambling to undo the damage since." As the ruling clique turns to "the old populist slogans of revolutionary justice, economic autarky and pseudosocialism, ... they have helped bring Iran one step closer to democracy."
When certain groups are threatened, it is only natural that they will fight that much harder to retain or expand their influence. I think an argument can be made that this is indeed the case in Iran, but the regime still has a lot of mileage left in its gas tank and can do a lot of damage to the growth of opposition forces.
I know that it's comparing apples and oranges to some extent, but I wish I could be as optimistic on the home-front, especially with regard to the US's own home-grown reactionaries among the religious right. One would like to think that in their successful attempts to bolster their own political power, their influence too is waning.
In any event, it will be very interesting to see how the anti-mullah, more "democratic" movement among Iranian youth (noted here in a number of posts) will proceed.
Cross-posted to Notablog.
Friday, June 10, 2005
Wilson Lives
I am way behind in my reading but finally had the opportunity to read Barry Gewen's interesting review essay from the NY Times Book Review (5 June 2005), "Forget the Founding Fathers." Gewen's focus is on "the constantly change narrative of American history" and the move toward "a globalized history of the United States." He discusses, among other books, Margaret MacMillan's Paris 1919: Six Months That Changed the World, which I have not read. Though I don't agree with Gewen on many points, his comments on how "American idealism can go wrong" are worth repeating:
MacMillan's focus is on Woodrow Wilson at the end of World War I. A visionary, an evangelist, an inspiration, an earth-shaker, a holy fool, Wilson went to Paris in 1919 with grand ambitions: to hammer out a peace settlement and confront a wretched world with virtue, to reconfigure international relations and reform mankind itself. Freedom and democracy were ''American principles,'' he proclaimed. ''And they are also the principles and policies of forward-looking men and women everywhere, of every modern nation, of every enlightened community. They are the principles of mankind and they must prevail.'' Other leaders were less sure. David Lloyd George, the British prime minister, liked Wilson's sincerity and straightforwardness, but also found him obstinate and vain. France's prime minister, the acerbic and unsentimental Georges Clemenceau, said that talking to him was ''something like talking to Jesus Christ.'' (He didn't mean that as a compliment.)
As a committed American democrat, Wilson affirmed his belief in the principle of self-determination for all peoples, but in Paris his convictions collided with reality. Eastern Europe was ''an ethnic jumble,'' the Middle East a ''myriad of tribes,'' with peoples and animosities so intermingled they could never be untangled into coherent polities. In the Balkans, leaders were all for self-determination, except when it applied to others. The conflicting parties couldn't even agree on basic facts, making neutral mediation impossible. Ultimately, the unbending Wilson compromised—on Germany, China, Africa and the South Pacific. He yielded to the force majeure of Turks and Italians. In the end, he left behind him a volcano of dashed expectations and festering resentments. MacMillan's book is a detailed and painful record of his failure, and of how we continue to live with his troublesome legacy in the Balkans, the Middle East and elsewhere.
Yet the idealists—nationalists and internationalists alike—do not lack for responses. Wilsonianism, they might point out, has not been discredited. It always arises from its own ashes; it has even become the guiding philosophy of the present administration. Give George W. Bush key passages from Wilson's speeches to read, and few would recognize that almost a century had passed. Nor should this surprise us. For while the skeptics can provide realism, they can't provide hope. As MacMillan says, the Treaty of Versailles, particularly the League of Nations, was ''a bet placed on the future.'' Who, looking back over the rubble, would have wanted to bet on the past?
Little has changed in our new century. Without the dreams of the idealists, all that is on offer is more of the same—more hatred, more bloodshed, more war, and eventually, now, nuclear war. Anti-Wilsonian skeptics tend to be pessimistic about the wisdom of embarking on moral crusades but, paradoxically, it is the idealists, the hopeful ones, who, in fact, should be painting in Stygian black. They are the ones who should be reminding us that for most of the world, history is not the benign story of inexorable progress Americans like to believe in. Rather, it's a record of unjustified suffering, irreparable loss, tragedy without catharsis. It's a gorgon: stare at it too long and it turns you to stone.
Take a look at the whole review essay here.
Cross-posted to Notablog.
Tuesday, June 7, 2005
Reflections on "Most Harmful Lists"
I see the debate is still raging on so many threads both here at Liberty and Power and also at Cliopatria over the topic of "most harmful books of the 19th and 20th centuries." Talk about unintended consequences!
In any event, I decided to say a bit more about this topic at Notablog. In part, I write:
I have long held that there is a distinction between "intended" and "unintended" consequences, not only in a social context, but in a textual sense as well. (The study of the unintended consequences of a text has long been a focus of those trained in the methodology of "hermeneutics," which began in the realm of Biblical interpretation and scholarship.) No author can possibly know all the interpretations and misinterpretations, applications and implications, that might result from his/her writing—given that the context of knowledge changes and that different people coming from different perspectives will engage that writing differently. This does not mean that "objectivity" is impossible in the assessment of a given work. It just means that as analysts, we need to be very careful to distinguish between original intent and unintended consequences (be they good or bad). It also means that we are probably doomed to argue eternally about the legacy of any given writer.
Readers are invited to take a look at the whole post here. Comments welcome.
Saturday, June 4, 2005
Luker and Rand
Ralph Luker posts his reply to my criticisms of his list of the ten most harmful books of the 19th and 20th centuries. A few other people have gotten in on the discussion too, including fellow HNN'er Irfan Khawaja and Grant Jones.
Luker titles his reply, "Listmania and Maturity," and then goes on to express surprise at my use of the word "obscene" to describe his inclusion of Rand's Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead on a list that includes Mein Kampf and Protocals of the Elders of Zion. He also expresses disapproval of a comment left at my blog by Technomaget, who calls Luker, in no uncertain terms, a "moron."
Let me clarify a few things.
First, I am not calling Luker "obscene" and I have not called him a moron either. What I thought was "obscene" was placing a pair of works by Rand on a list that includes titles written by mass murderers. I use "obscene" as a synonym for "offensive" and find that particular coupling of Rand and Hitler very offensive.
If Luker had called his list a list of the ten worst books he'd ever read, or a list of the ten most annoying books, or the ten most useless books, or the ten most immature books, I probably would never have noticed it. But "harmful" carries with it a certain stigma, as I explained in my L&P/Notablog post. Strictly defined it means "causing or capable of causing harm." And on those grounds, I just don't see any reasonable criterion by which to equate Rand's novels with Mein Kampf. As Grant Jones puts it succinctly: "Has any reader of her works built Death Camps?" (brings back memories of Whittaker Chambers' cry, upon reading Atlas: "To a gas chamber—go!") As we say here in Brooklyn: "Fuhgedaboudit! You gotta be kiddin' me!"
Luker states: "In a moment of weakness (it just seemed like years of agony), I read Ayn Rand and I don't worship at her shrine! My lack of admiration for Ayn Rand is well known." Well that's fine. I admire her work but I don't worship at her shrine either. And, again, I would have had little problem if Luker had simply said: "These books suck." But suckitude is not the criterion for "harmfulness," especially when one is drawing up a list of books that crosses the line into Hitler territory.
As for Rand's work being serious or unserious, I'm afraid there's nothing in Luker's post that would give me a clue as to the nature of his assessment. Luker may not like Rand's philosophy, but let me assure him that it is not a "so-called philosophy," as he puts it. It may not be a philosophy with which Luker agrees, but it's a systematic philosophy, with integrated positions in ontology, epistemology, ethics, politics, and aesthetics. It is a philosophy that includes a commitment to realism, ethical egoism, individualism, and capitalism. And it is being taken seriously by people on every end of the political and philosophical spectrum, not only in the pages of The Journal of Ayn Rand Studies but in a growing list of professional scholarly journals (see here).
If Luker would like to broaden his realm of toleration to include a few of us who were at least moved by Rand's work, let alone influenced, and who don't manifest "immaturity" or a "cult-like psychological disorder" or "delayed adolescent omnipotence," maybe we could talk more seriously. Ad hominem masquerading as psychological diagnosis is no substitute for discussion.
Cross-posted to Notablog.
Friday, June 3, 2005
The Fountainhead... Most Harmful Book?
Cliopatria HNN'er, Ralph E. Luker, gives us a list of the "Ten Most Harmful Books." I have to admit that I've got a real problem with the whole category of "harmful books," not because I believe that no book can do harm, but more because I think "harmful" comes with a stigma attached to it ... that perhaps such books should not be read. But it is the books that are most "harmful" that often require the most study.
Some of Luker's books are predictable: Hitler's Mein Kampf, Lenin's What Is To Be Done?, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, and so forth. But on that list, Luker mentions Ayn Rand's two mega-novels, The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged. Jonathan Rees chimes in and thanks Luker for including Rand on that list, since her books offer "a philosophical excuse for extraordinary selfishness."
Rand's work has been an inspiration to people of all different walks of life, including individualist feminists, libertarians, conservatives, and even a few liberals, those who see in architect Howard Roark, protagonist of The Fountainhead, an exemplary model of artistic integrity, self-esteem, and authenticity. These same liberals may not like Rand's advocacy of laissez-faire capitalism, but not even they would suggest that those who have emulated Roark will be predisposed to go out and blow up public housing projects.
To be fair, I personally know a few people who were deeply harmed by some of the more "cult-like" aspects of the Objectivist movement, and by some of the brutal comments that Rand made on such subjects as homosexuality. I'm not in any way belittling the real hurt and damage that some have experienced in that context.
But all this is a far cry from the mass murder of the Nazis, Soviets, and Maoists. If the most significant policy-maker to come out of the Randian movement is Alan Greenspan---who, himself, has departed fundamentally from his earlier Randian views in favor of the abolition of the Fed ... can't we have a sense of proportion here?
Even poor Herbert Spencer, whose Evolution of Society [ed: I was wondering about that title] also makes Luker's list, wasn't the "Social Darwinist" his critics make him out to be. Roderick Long, where are you?
Mr. Luker, at the very least, couldn't you provide us with the reasoning behind your list? Right now, I find it unreasonable. For this Rand-influenced libertarian scholar, I find it obscene, quite frankly.
Cross-posted to Notablog.
Sunday, May 29, 2005
A Mothers' War
Of all the tributes that I've read this Memorial Day Weekend, this one, entitled "A Mothers' War," by Cynthia Gorney, had particularly poignant passages. The story centers on Tracy Della Vecchia, who runs a website for mothers nationwide whose children are fighting, and being injured, and dying, in Iraq. Tracy's son,
Derrick Jensen, has spent three birthdays in a row deployed in Iraq. There are about 140,000 American troops stationed in Iraq; 23,000 of them are marines. As this article appears, Corporal Jensen should be somewhere near Falluja. He is an infantry radio operator, which sounded to Tracy like a good, safe job until she found out that radio operators carry big antennas, which make them easier targets. She let me stay at her house for a while this winter partly because I am a reporter and happen to have a 22-year-old son who is not in the military. Tracy thought people like me might want to know something about what it's like to live all the time with that kind of information about your child, to go to sleep knowing it and wake up knowing it and drive around town knowing it, which makes it possible to be standing in the Wal-Mart dog-food aisle on an ordinary afternoon and without reason or warning be knocked breathless again by the sudden imagining of sniper fire or an explosion beneath a Humvee. Still. Derrick has been shipped home twice since President Bush delivered his May 2003 speech in front of the "Mission Accomplished" banner on the deck of an aircraft carrier, and shipped back twice. He has had one occasion of near death that Tracy knows about in some detail; there are others, she assumes, that Derrick has so far kept to himself. "During the first deployment," Tracy said to me once as we were sitting in her car, a lipstick-red PT Cruiser with a yellow "Keep My Son Safe" ribbon magnet on the back, "the only emotion I could imagine him having was fear." ...
Tracy's closest friends in the world right now are other parents whose sons and daughters have served in Iraq or are serving there now. Some of these parents think the war is righteous, some think it was wrongheaded from the outset and some, like Tracy, have made fierce internal bargains with themselves about what they will and will not think about as long as their children and their children's comrades remain in uniform and in harm's way. The women Tracy meets every week for dinner, each of whom has a son in the Marines or the Army, have a "no politics" rule around their table; this was one of two things I remember Tracy telling me the first time she took me to a gathering of the mothers. The other thing was that draped over a banister in Tracy's house was an unwashed T-shirt Derrick had dropped during his last visit home. I thought Tracy was apologizing for her housekeeping, which I had already seen was much better than mine, but she cleared her throat and said that what I needed to understand was that she hadn't washed the T-shirt because if the Marine Corps has to send you your deceased child's personal effects, it launders the clothing first. "That means there's no smell," Tracy said. She let this hover between us for a minute. "I've heard from so many parents who were crushed when they opened that bag, because they had thought they'd be able to smell their son," Tracy said. ...
When I woke the next morning, it was barely light outside, but Tracy was already at her computer. She was smoking at her desk, which she usually doesn't do, and her face was bleak. "I got a D.O.D.," she said. A D.O.D. is what Tracy calls a death notice from the Department of Defense. These notices come to her as e-mailed press releases, each with a headline that identifies the service the deceased American belonged to ... She had walked around with it all day ... she had known ... only that it wasn't Derrick, first because the Marines had not come to her house ... "The knocking on the door." ... Tracy jammed her cigarette into the ashtray, hard. "And the way I'd react: You've got the wrong house. I just talked to my son. This can't be right. Denial is the first thing. And knowing there's just complete and total despair in somebody's home right now. This is their Easter." She started to cry. "And I feel so grateful, and then so guilty," she said. "Nobody's going to say, 'Thank God, it wasn't my son.' But that's what we're all thinking."
Read the whole article.
Cross-posted to Notablog.
Saturday, May 21, 2005
Darth Vader and Altruism
I haven't seen "Revenge of the Sith" just yet, but I enjoyed today's column by John Tierney in the New York Times: "Darth Vader's Family Values." I especially like the fact that he cites my pal and colleague Dan Klein on "The People's Romance." Tierney writes:
The People's Romance is [Klein's] explanation for why so many Americans have come to love bigger government over the past century. Their specific objectives in Washington differed—liberals stressed charity and social programs for all, while conservatives promoted patriotism and spending on national security—but they both expanded the government in their quest for a national sense of shared purpose.
The result, though, has not been one happy community because America is not a clan with shared values. It is a huge group of strangers with leaders who are hardly altruists—they have their own families and needs. Tocqueville recognized the inherent problem with the People's Romance when he described citizens' contradictory impulses to be free while also wanting a government that is "unitary, protective and all-powerful."
People try to resolve this contradiction, Tocqueville wrote, by telling themselves that democracy makes them masters of politicians, but they soon find that the Force is not with them, especially if they're in the minority. Republicans used to rail helplessly at Democrats for taxing them for destructive social programs and curtailing their economic liberties; now Democrats complain about the money squandered on the Iraq war and the threat to civil liberties from the Patriot Act.
For those Democrats, the signature line in this "Star Wars" is the one spoken after the chancellor, citing security threats, consolidates his power by declaring that the republic must become an empire. Senator Padmé listens to her colleagues cheer and says, "So this is how liberty dies, with thunderous applause."
She's disgusted with them, but their enthusiasm is understandable. The chancellor has tapped into their primal desire to unite in one great clan with a shared purpose. They're in the throes of the People's Romance.
I'm looking forward to seeing the concluding episode of George Lucas's myth.
Cross-posted to Notablog.
Friday, May 20, 2005
Irritable Over Iran and Iraq
I have posted a few reflections on the increasingly cozy relationship between Iran and the new majoritarian Shi'ite Iraqi regime at Notablog.
Comments welcome.
Sunday, May 8, 2005
Taking the Ad Hominem Out of Art Appreciation
At Notablog, I've posted a few thoughts about how art appreciation is slowly being infected by various shades of "political correctness" coming from both the left and the right.
See "Taking the Ad Hominem Out of Art Appreciation." Comments welcome.
Thursday, April 28, 2005
Spencer, Long, and a New Encyclopedia
In light of all the good discussion on Herbert Spencer that we've seen here and here on L&P, I wanted to share some good news.
A couple of years ago, I was asked to do an encyclopedia article on "Karl Marx" for the forthcoming International Encyclopedia of Economic Sociology, to be published by Routledge. Amazingly, there was not a single entry offered for Herbert Spencer (who many view as one of the founders of sociology) or of any of the great classical liberals. I knew that Spencer had fallen out of favor with sociologists over the years, and that too many working in that discipline had a tendency to dismiss (wrongly, I might add) the work of classical liberals as somehow too "atomistic" and not worthy of the sociological imagination.
Whatever the reason, I was quite frankly shocked that nothing on Spencer, liberalism, or libertarianism had been scheduled for discussion in the encyclopedia. So, I asked the fine editor if he would be interested in one additional contribution from me: a general, broader piece on libertarianism, that is, on the relevance to sociology of theorists working in the classical liberal/libertarian tradition. The editor accepted my offer. And instead of writing a sole piece on Marx, I wrote two pieces.
The entry on libertarianism brought into the encyclopedia a discussion of the works of Herbert Spencer (to whom I devote much space, relatively speaking), Carl Menger, F. A. Hayek, Ludwig von Mises, Murray Rothbard, Ayn Rand, and others.
I've just been informed today that the encyclopedia is due out in October 2005; I'll be sure to note it here when the time comes.
Thus, this is my way of thanking Roderick Long doubly: not only for his continuing work on Spencer, but also for offering constructive commentary on my essays before they were submitted to Routledge.
Cross-posted to Notablog.
Wednesday, April 27, 2005
Same-Sex Marriage and the 2004 Election
I've written ad nauseam about Election 2004, still of the conviction that the issue of same-sex marriage (and its connection to the broader issue of "moral values") had an important impact on the outcome. I have always believed "that other issues, especially the war, had an effect in shoring up Bush's winning coalition." Still, "the anti-gay marriage ballot initiatives were promoted by GOP strategists to bolster one aspect of the winning Bush coalition"; without "the socially conservative vote," which supported those initiatives, Bush could never have won such states as Ohio—indispensable to his national electoral victory.
One recent analysis of the Presidential election comes to a similar though much more informed statistical conclusion. Gregory B. Lewis, in the April 2005 issue of PS: Political Science & Politics, concludes that the "same-sex marriage" issue "mattered ... less than some issues but more than most. ... At the state level, even after controlling for Bush's vote share in 2000 and the general conservatism of the state population, popular disapproval of homosexuality influenced Bush's share of the 2004 vote and may have contributed to party switches by New Hampshire and New Mexico." Lewis admits that "[t]he vote was close in Ohio despite relatively high disapproval of homosexuality." But the question remains: "Would it have turned out differently without same-sex marriage on the agenda?"
That question will inspire many different answers. But I think the evidence strongly suggests that without the support of socially conservative Protestant and Catholic voters, who came out en masse to vote against same-sex marriage, Bush would have lost to Kerry.
In the same issue of PS, even those with a dissenting view (such as Hillygus and Shields) argue that the "values-based appeals," though not the only crucial issue, served to reinforce Bush's appeal among his supporters. As I have argued for months, this was part of the Rove strategy: without that support among Bush's core constituency, Bush does not win re-election.
Whatever one's views on this subject, I think the implications are becoming clearer with each passing week. Social conservatives believe that the Bush administration owes them. Of greater importance is the apparent belief of the administration that social conservatives are owed.
Cross-posted to Notablog.
Monday, April 25, 2005
Democracy and Saudi Arabia
I've had a lot to say about Saudi Arabia, and about the Bush administration's Adventures in Mideast Democracy.
Well, in Episode #2,345 of this Quixotic Political Saga, the Saudi royal family, which has been a trusted US "ally," "has been under pressure from Washington to engage in political reform at a time of social tension and a two-year campaign against the state by militants associated with al-Qaeda." Today, the news tells us:
Candidates on an alleged "golden list" backed by religious clerics have swept the final round of Saudi Arabia's first nationwide municipal elections. Islamist candidates won all the municipal council seats contested in the holy cities of Mecca and Medina. They also fared well in northern towns as well as the comparatively liberal port of Jeddah, according to results released on Saturday. Women were barred from the polls, which were presented as a step towards more popular participation in public life.
Of course, the regime itself will pick "roughly half" of 1,200 councillors, which might "dilute" the power of Islamicists. Not that the Saudi regime is all that liberal by comparison. After all, this election news comes on the heels of another news story that the Saudis had detained 40 Pakistani Christians who were caught "attending a service in Riyadh" in a private home. The police also found (horrors!!) "Christian tapes and books." Since one cannot practice any religion other than Islam in Saudi Arabia, this is a crime, in case you were wondering.
I get exhausted pointing out the obvious. This is a regime that is allegedly a "friend" of the United States government. Let's put aside the prospects for democracy among "unfriendly" regimes. Of what use is procedural "democracy" when a "friendly" regime schools its citizens in a fanatical ideology of intolerance, when it marginalizes and criminalizes women, non-Muslims, and freedom itself? Of what use is "democracy" when the dominant culture would bring about a political condition that might make the current Saudi regime appear "moderate" by comparison?
Cross-posted to Notablog.
Saturday, April 9, 2005
The Apocalypse Will Be Broadcast
I've been writing about the rise of the religious right for quite a while now, most recently in connection with the re-election of George W. Bush. Starting with my essay, "Caught Up in the Rapture," I have argued that the political impact of the religious right is second only to its cultural and economic impact, which is growing significantly:
Christian merchandising is a $4.2 billion industry, which includes a $100 million video game business. The Christian book market is particularly lucrative: Evangelist Rick Warren has sold 15 million copies of his book, The Purpose-Driven Life: What on Earth Am I Here For? There are even Christian diet books that sit alongside Atkins and South Beach manuals: The Maker’s Diet helps you to lose weight by eating just like Jesus. From number one best-selling books such as The Da Vinci Code to "Joan of Arcadia" on television and "Bruce Almighty" on the silver screen, God is Hip and Hot. ... A blockbuster film such as "The Passion of the Christ"—which was condemned initially as "anti-Semitic" by some critics—has now grossed nearly $400 million. That figure does not include director Mel Gibson’s cross-promotional merchandising efforts—sales on such items as metal replica crucifixion nails and thorn-adorned necklaces and bracelets. ... [And the] 12-volume LaHaye-Jenkins work—from its first installment, Left Behind, to its action-packed finale, Glorious Appearing: The End of Days—now qualifies as the best-selling Christian fiction book series of all time[, having] sold in excess of 60 million copies in the past nine years.
Ultimately, the Left Behind series is not simply a religious narrative. It is a political one. Glenn W. Shuck, author of Marks of the Beast: The Left Behind Novels and the Struggle for Evangelical Identity, argues persuasively that "the novels have less to do with escaping and more to do with remaking the modern world" (emphasis added). It is the kind of "remaking" that Friedrich Hayek would have characterized as thoroughly rationalist or "constructivist" in its political implications.
Except that in this instance, the "Left Behind-ers" are praying that God will be the ultimate constructivist, and fix things for good. The fact that so many of them voted for George W. Bush as His messenger is not a comforting thought.
Well, God makes a prime-time appearance on NBC in a major network mini-series that begins this Wednesday, April 13, 2005. As Frank Rich puts it (hat-tip to Arthur Silber): "It's all too fitting that 'Revelations,' which downsizes lay government in favor of the clerical, is hijacking the regular time slot of 'The West Wing'" (the show aired its season finale on April 6th). Fitting indeed. The typically liberal "West Wing" is being replaced by a Left Behind knock-off that will merge an "X-Files" sensibility, an Omen-like horror quotient, and an apocalyptic scenario worthy of the Millennium Group.
In the end, of course, the Apocalypse is not the most disturbing prospect; it's the fact that the Apocalypse has become so marketable in this culture.
Friday, April 1, 2005
April, May, June, July ... Fools
So much in the news on this April Fool's Day, 2005. For example, the "final verdict" on prewar "intelligence" has been issued. It is, of course, nothing of the sort. The "final verdict" won't be issued for years and years. But this particular verdict does make it appear that there were plenty of fools running America's "intelligence" community. American "homeland security" is gravely dependent on the quality of its intelligence. That should make all of us feel very safe.
And then, on the heels of the departure of NBC's Tom Brokaw and CBS's Dan Rather, another Long-Time Talking Head will be Leaving the Airwaves—this coming December: Ted Koppel, long-time host of ABC News' "Nightline." I've actually been a fan of "Nightline" for many years, if only because it does offer an opportunity for a more comprehensive look at the news of the day, with more in-depth interviews and coverage than that offered on the nightly news broadcasts.
I'm also a religious viewer of the Sunday morning news broadcasts, but I have found them infuriating for the last few years. I spend most Sunday mornings doing a most un-Godly thing: Cursing at the TV Screen. Not only because of what is being said, but because it's the same people saying the same things. Ted Koppel puts his finger on it. As the NY Times reports this morning:
Mr. Koppel said he had been concerned about what he saw as the uniformity of all the Sunday public affairs programs—particularly when a viewer can flip from one channel to the other and see people like the secretary of defense or secretary of state interviewed on each. "That seems to be the general understanding in Washington these days," Mr. Koppel said. "The administration sets the tone and theme and presents the same guests to all the programs at the same time. I don't think anyone is served by that."
Quite honestly, let me put it another way: ARRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRGHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!
There.
That felt better.
[begin rant] Why don't they just call the Sunday morning news programs: The Condi Rice Show? Or The Don Rumsfeld Show? Or The John McCain Show? Or (up until recently) The Colin Powell Show? EVERY DAMN WEEK, the same people, over and over and over again. On every channel. Sometimes simultaneously. Taped broadcasts putting to rest the maxim that one can't be in two or three different places at the same time. Who needs a Pentagon Channel? [/end rant]
April Fool's Day? The Washington establishment makes fools of all of us, every day of the year.
Cross-posted to Notablog.
Friday, March 25, 2005
The Costs of War, Part II
My post "The Costs of War" has elicited more than a dozen comments so far, raising a number of issues. At Notablog, I continue to "think out loud," taking an opportunity to expand on some of the points made in my former post, having benefited from onlist and offlist exchanges on the nature of moral complicity and responsibility in wartime.
Read "The Costs of War, Part II" here.
Wednesday, March 23, 2005
The Costs of War
Rather than clutter L&P up with my rather lengthy musings on the war and some of the moral issues raised by it, I wanted to mention that I have posted "The Costs of War" on Notablog.net. One of the issues I discuss is the issue of "moral complicity" in war. Surprisingly, I find some commonality among some rather disparate people: Ayn Rand, Ward Churchill, and Osama Bin Laden.
Comments welcome.
Monday, March 14, 2005
New JARS: Ayn Rand Among the Austrians
Volume 6, Number 2 of The Journal of Ayn Rand Studies has just been published. This Spring 2005 issue is the second of two symposia celebrating the Ayn Rand Centenary. It is entitled "Ayn Rand Among the Austrians," and it features the articles and contributors listed below. This landmark anthology surveys Rand's relationship to key thinkers in the Austrian school of economics, including Ludwig von Mises, Murray N. Rothbard, and F. A. Hayek. (Some of our L&P colleagues are among the contributors to the issue.)
Spring 2005 Table of Contents
Centenary Symposium, Part II
Introduction: Ayn Rand Among the Austrians - Chris Matthew Sciabarra and Larry J. Sechrest [a PDF version of this article is available online here.]
Ayn Rand and Ludwig von Mises - George Reisman
Ayn Rand and Austrian Economics: Two Peas in a Pod - Walter Block
Alan Greenspan: Rand, Republicans, and Austrian Critics - Larry J. Sechrest
Praxeology: Who Needs It - Roderick T. Long
Subjectivism, Intrinsicism, and Apriorism: Rand Among the Austrians? - Richard C. B. Johnsson
Menger, Mises, Rand, and Beyond - Edward W. Younkins
Two Worlds at Once: Rand, Hayek, and the Ethics of the Micro- and Macro-cosmos - Steven Horwitz
Our Unethical Constitution - Candice E. Jackson
Teaching Economics Through Ayn Rand: How the Economy is Like a Novel and How the Novel Can Teach Us About Economics - Peter J. Boettke
Reply to William Thomas: An Economist Responds - Leland B. Yeager
Rejoinder to Leland B. Yeager: Clarity and the Standard of Ethics - William Thomas
For article abstracts, click here.
For contributor biographies, click here.
For information on subscriptions, click here.
Thursday, March 10, 2005
Islam and Pluralism
There is a thought-provoking article by Reza Aslan in this week's Chronicle of Higher Education. Entitled "From Islam, Pluralist Democracies Will Surely Grow," the article asserts that "it is pluralism, not secularism, that defines democracy," that "Islam has had a long commitment to religious pluralism," and that democratic change is therefore not as unreachable a goal as some might think.
Aslan is worth quoting at length:
For most of the Western world, September 11, 2001, signaled the commencement of a worldwide struggle between Islam and the West -- the ultimate manifestation of the clash of civilizations. From the Islamic perspective, however, the attacks on New York and Washington were part of a continuing clash between those Muslims who strive to reconcile their religious values with the realities of the modern world, and those who react to modernism and reform by reverting -- sometimes fanatically -- to the "fundamentals" of their faith. ...
When politicians speak of bringing democracy to the Middle East, they mean specifically an American secular democracy, not an indigenous Islamic one.
There exists a philosophical dispute in the Western world with regard to the concept of Islamic democracy: that is, that there can be no a priori moral framework in a modern democracy; that the foundation of a genuinely democratic society must be secularism. The problem with that argument, however, is that it not only fails to recognize the inherently moral foundation upon which a large number of modern democracies are built, but also, more important, fails to appreciate the difference between secularism and secularization.
Clearly, if the Western world itself had to wait for full and complete secularism in order to achieve even a modicum of freedom, it would still be waiting. But it is a key point, I think, to insist that the secularization of the Western mind took centuries and that such secularization has been a key ingredient in the evolution toward free insitutions. Aslan continues:
As the Protestant theologian Harvey Cox notes, secularization is the process by which "certain responsibilities pass from ecclesiastical to political authorities," whereas secularism is an ideology based on the eradication of religion from public life. Turkey is a secular country in which outward signs of religiosity, such as the hijab, are forcibly suppressed. With regard to ideological resolve, one could argue that there is little that separates a secular country like Turkey from a religious country like Iran; both ideologize society. It is pluralism, not secularism, that defines democracy. A democratic state can be established upon any normative moral framework as long as pluralism remains the source of its legitimacy.
I take certain issue with some of these claims, especially since the "normative moral framework" of an "Islamic democracy" might "force the rights of the community to prevail over the rights of the individual," when the individual's behavior (e.g., drinking or gambling) goes against "Quranic commandments." Alas, if prohibitions on drinking or gambling were the only thing to worry about from within the Islamic world, then it would not be much worse than old Sunday Blue Laws or gambling prohibitions in New York State. Still, I find this nexus of rights, pluralism, and secularization to be persuasive:
... neither human rights nor pluralism is the result of secularization; they are its root cause. Consequently, any democratic society -- Islamic or otherwise -- dedicated to the principles of pluralism and human rights must dedicate itself to following the unavoidable path toward political secularization.
Aslan thinks there is a certain inevitability in the democratic-pluralistic developments in the Muslim Middle East, but I'm not so sure. "It will take many more [years] to cleanse Islam of its new false idols -- bigotry and fanaticism -- worshiped by those who have replaced Muhammad's original vision of tolerance and unity with their own ideals of hatred and discord. But the cleansing is inevitable, and the tide of reform cannot be stopped. The Islamic Reformation is already here. We are all living in it," Aslan writes.
How might the United States encourage this kind of political secularization? It's one thing to introduce procedural democratic rules into countries like post-Hussein Iraq. But it's quite another to actually achieve some sort of liberal democracy, because, as Aslan suggests, political secularization is crucial to that achievement. There are hopeful signs that this process is underway in such countries as Iran, for example. But there is something to be said about a "laissez faire" U.S. approach to Iran under these highly volatile conditions. As Stephen Kinzer writes in "Clouds Over Iran," in the current issue of The New York Review of Books:
One of my Iranian friends, a graduate student in his twenties, recently wrote this to me: "The US government is helping Iran's government with its continuing hostility.... Every time the State Department or White House speaks about human rights conditions in Iran, our government uses this against reformers. It says that reformers are supported by the United States. Many reformers are in jail because of these accusations. Many newspapers have been closed. The United States should be concerned about Iran's problems, but this policy is hurting the reform movement. Non-intervention is the best help the United States can give to Iran's people." ...
There is every possibility that in time, Iran will return to the democratic course from which the United States so violently forced it in 1953. If Americans allow events there to proceed at their own pace, they will finally see the result for which they hope. It is also the result most Iranians want: an Iran that respects the will of its people and helps to stabilize a dangerously unstable region. ... Seeking to destabilize [Iran] will intensify its leaders' sense of isolation. Attacking it will turn its remarkably pro-American population into America-haters once again. Military intervention could set off a wave of patriotic indignation that will solidify the mullahs' regime rather than weaken it, and would probably set the cause of democracy back a generation. "Regime change" would probably not even turn Iran off its nuclear course, since most Iranians of all persuasions agree that their country has at least as much right to nuclear power as Israel, Pakistan, India, and North Korea. Treating Iran as a member of the world community with its own set of reasonable hopes and fears, however, might lead it toward responsibility, peace with its neighbors, and perhaps even democracy.
Alas, this might be wishful thinking. But it is certainly in keeping with many of my own observations (archived here) about the delicate evolution toward liberal democracy and cultural secularization that is required not only in Iran, but throughout the Middle East.
Cross-posted to Notablog.
Tuesday, March 8, 2005
Foer and "The Joy of Federalism"
I'm a little behind in my reading, but I wanted to pass along a link to another interesting article by Franklin Foer (one of whose pieces I previously discussed here). In "The Joy of Federalism," Foer traces the historical development of a "liberal federalism" as a bulwark against the growth of the federal government under the Bush administration. As Foer puts it:
Like many of his predecessors, [Bush] entered office promising to rescue the states from federal pummeling. Yet his administration has greatly expanded federal power, and some conservatives have been complaining. Writing in National Review two years ago, Romesh Ponnuru observed that "more people are working for the federal government than at any point since the end of the cold war." State governments have their own version of this complaint. They say the Bush administration has imposed new demands—federal education standards, homeland security tasks—without also providing sufficient cash to get these jobs done. The Republican senator Lamar Alexander recently told The Times, "The principle of federalism has gotten lost in the weeds by a Republican Congress that was elected to uphold it in 1994."
The whole essay is worth a good read.
Sunday, March 6, 2005
A Primer on Murray Rothbard
SOLO HQ has published my brief "Primer on Murray Rothbard."
Wednesday, March 2, 2005
From Ryan to Sipowicz
I know this is old news already... but since I posted on this topic here and here back in November, I felt an obligation to report that the FCC ruled that the unedited showing of "Saving Private Ryan" did not violate its guidelines on "indecency." This should send a signal to those 66 ABC affiliates who chose not to air the film in the wake of FCC crackdowns and fines in the post-Janet Jackson Boob Era.
It's interesting that the FCC suggests that it's all a matter of context. Saying "FUBAR" ("Fucked Up Beyond All Recognition") in "Saving Private Ryan" is okay, but would probably be cause for a fine if, say, Chris Rock had uttered it on the Academy Awards broadcast. In this atmosphere, it's understandable why Steven Bochco, co-creator of NYPD Blue, which ended its 12-year run last night in a glorious finale, would be reluctant to launch such a show today. As Bochco puts it here: "I don't think today we could sell NYPD Blue in the form that it launched 12 years ago ... I had hoped, and I think probably everybody in television had hoped, that NYPD Blue would pave the way for a more open approach to programming, a more adult, 10 o'clock kind of programming. But there's no question that over the course of the last 10 years, the medium has become increasingly conservative."
Well, either way, I'll miss the drama of Andy Sipowicz and the cops at the 15th Precinct. And I'll switch over to premium cable channels if I'd like a dose of "blue" language and images.
Cross-posted to Notablog.
Tuesday, March 1, 2005
Changing Politics, Changing Culture
At "Not a Blog," I posted some musings on neoconservative ideology, and the nature of political and cultural change. As I state in my conclusion:
I am in full agreement with the neoconservatives ... that a freer world is more desirable and that it is a necessary (though not sufficient) ingredient in the creation of a more secure world; my fundamental problem with the neocons is that they do not understand the complex conditions that foster either freedom or security.
Read the whole post here.
Tuesday, February 22, 2005
Islam and Democracy
I just wanted to recommend a new article by David Glenn, "Who Owns Islamic Law?," which has been published in the February 25th issue of The Chronicle of Higher Education. It asks a key question about the relationship between democracy, Islam, and secularism: "Will Iraq's political forces manage to find a consensus about what role, exactly, Islam should play in the public sphere?"
While some insist on "authentically Islamic" enforcement of "Shariah" or "traditional religious law—in all spheres of life, from banking to inheritance to the performing arts," others argue "that lines must be drawn between mosque and state—even if those lines do not look exactly like Western secular pluralism." One professor of political science, M.A. Muqtedar Khan, insists: "'There will be no Islamic democracy unless jurists permit the democratization of interpretation.' ... In Mr. Khan's view, political elites in the Muslim world have for centuries restricted the development of democracy and political accountability by hiding behind religious principles that they proclaim to be fixed in stone." Khan is concerned "that basing government around consultation and shura ... could lead to majoritarian tyranny. 'Even if shura is transformed into an instrument of participatory representation,' he wrote, 'it must itself be limited by a scheme of private and individual rights that serve an overriding moral goal such as justice'."
Some others have observed, however,
that "secularism" has been so thoroughly discredited in the Muslim world by Kemal Atatürk's ruthlessly anticlerical regime in Turkey and by the later secular-authoritarian governments in Algeria, Egypt, Syria, and Iraq. Only in Iran, which has suffered under a clerical tyranny for decades, do reformers now commonly talk about secular pluralism.
The fundamental challenge for would-be democracy-builders in Iraq and elsewhere is the contested relationship between Islam and the public sphere ... Where religious authorities and institutions once had breathing room from the state and their own spheres of influence, ... colonial regimes brought everything under the heel of the government. (And their postcolonial successors have been happy to do likewise.) ...
This, then, is the dilemma for reformers today. Centrist Islamists and liberal reformers would like to develop a model in which Muslim institutions are independent from the government and vigorously inform public governance, but do not swallow all of society in a totalitarian project like the Taliban's. ...
Mr. Khan, meanwhile, insists that the most urgent danger of authoritarianism lies in entrusting Islamic thought and interpretation to an elite corps of scholars and jurists. ...
Mr. Khan acknowledges that his is very much a minority view. He is nonetheless excited about the current intellectual climate. "Two weeks ago I was at the Stanley Foundation and one-third of my audience was Muslims," he says. "Afterward we spent the whole night having a Muslim-Muslim dialogue. We disagreed about everything. But we did come to consensus on one point—and that is that the discussions are getting more sophisticated. There is no doubt about it."
I recommend the article to your attention.
Cross-posted to Not a Blog.
Thursday, February 17, 2005
Perversion at the NY Times
Maureen Dowd's article, "Bush's Barberini Faun," seems to have actual embedded links to such sites as workingboys.net and hotmilitarystud.com (though there appears to be some kind of login for the latter).
Did the paper know that the webmaster (and I use "master" in a narrow sense) would be embedding those links?
I don't know about you, but I'm still laughing.
Update: The links are gone. Somebody must have gotten wind of it. :)
Miklos Rozsa: A Singular Life
My Free Radical article celebrating the life and work of composer Miklos Rozsa was published today on SOLO HQ:
"Miklos Rozsa: A Singular Life"
Sunday, February 13, 2005
Boston Globe on "Ayn Rand's Campus Radicals"
Today, Christopher Shea has written a "Critical Faculties" piece for The Boston Globe focusing on "Ayn Rand's Campus Radicals," offering further evidence of the proliferation of Rand scholarship. He mentions my work and the work of other Rand scholars, as well as the important role of The Journal of Ayn Rand Studies. He also cites a forthcoming JARS essay by Austrian economist and L&P colleague Peter J. Boettke.
Cross-posted to "Not a Blog."
Thursday, February 10, 2005
Inside Higher Ed: Zizek Loves JARS
As I say in my "Not a Blog" entry here, Continental philosopher Slavoj Zizek's affection for The Journal of Ayn Rand Studies may be a sure sign, for some, that the periodical is indeed decadent. But take a look at Scott McLemee's Inside Higher Ed essay here, and "Add a Comment" if you wish.
Wednesday, February 9, 2005
Liberty and Freedom
In the light of our continuing discussion of various "Isms" (see recent additions to this conversation by Kenneth R. Gregg, "Capitalism, Mutuality, and Sharing" and Sheldon Richman's "I, Liberal"), I just wanted to bring a recent NY Times article to the attention of readers.
Historian David Hackett Fischer, author of Liberty and Freedom: A Visual History of America's Founding Ideas, tells us that "Freedom's Not Just Another Word." He speaks of a monument in Baghdad that declares, in essence, that "Freedom is not a gift from people with tanks," but something to come from within. Fischer remarks, however, that "[t]here is no one true definition of liberty and freedom in the world" on which people coming from different traditions or different places can agree. "And, yet," he writes, "there is one great historical process in which liberty and freedom have developed, often in unexpected ways." He continues:
The words themselves have a surprising history. The oldest known word with such a meaning comes to us from ancient Iraq. The Sumerian "ama-ar-gi," found on tablets in the ruins of the city-state of Lagash, which flourished four millenniums ago, derived from the verb "ama-gi," which literally meant "going home to mother." It described the condition of emancipated servants who returned to their own free families—an interesting link to the monument in Baghdad. (In contemporary America, the ancient characters for "ama-ar-gi" have become the logos of some libertarian organizations, as well as tattoos among members of politically conservative motorcycle gangs, who may not know that the inscriptions on their biceps mean heading home to mom.)
Equally surprising are the origins of our English words liberty and, especially, freedom. They have very different roots. The Latin libertas and Greek eleutheria both indicated a condition of independence, unlike a slave. (In science, eleutherodactylic means separate fingers or toes.) Freedom, however, comes from the same root as friend, an Indo-European word that meant "dear" or "beloved." It meant a connection to other free people by bonds of kinship or affection, also unlike a slave. Liberty and freedom both meant "unlike a slave." But liberty meant privileges of independence; freedom referred to rights of belonging.
It's of interest that Fischer points to an ever-evolving proliferation of meanings for both words, however (and some of this is reflected in the ever-evolving meaning of the word "liberal," for example). "Through 16 generations, American ideas of liberty and freedom have grown larger, deeper, more diverse and yet more inclusive in these collisions of contested visions," Fischer observes. For Fischer, the "rights of individual independence" and the "rights of collective belonging" are essential parts of the same fabric.
Fischer might find some agreement on this point with thinkers of the Scottish Enlightenment who emphasized both liberty and the connections among social actors who constitute a civil society. But even neo-Aristotelian defenders of genuine liberalism would agree. For example, philosophers Douglas Den Uyl and Douglas Rasmussen, in their book, Liberty and Nature: An Aristotelian Defense of Liberal Order, defend the view that there is a link between free commerce and friendship, especially so-called "civic friendships" and "advantage-friendships." Their view of human freedom entails a "thick" theory of the person, fully in keeping with the rational and social character of human beings as projected by Aristotle. So, in a sense, both "liberty" and "freedom" as Hackett describes them, are entailed in any robust defense of liberal order.
Just some more grist for the mill in our definitional explorations of meaning.
Cross-posted to Not a Blog.
HomoRandian.com?
There has been a lot of discussion at L&P about a wide variety of subjects, and keeping up with it all is virtually impossible. I did note however that Bill Marina made the following comment in his Liberty and Power Group blog post, "Reflections on Homosexual Behaviors":
Wow, certainly a lot of blogging of late here at the old Liberty and Power Blog, mainly about Ayn Rand and then homosexuality ... If Blogs had meta tags like web sites, and if the name of the Blog was determined by the content, our ISP might suggest ours be called something like the "HomoRandian" Blog. Or, did La Rand make the ultimate pronunciamiento on that as well?
Well, Bill, I'm absolutely certain that there are a few HomoRandians on board here, but let's not forget that the Ol' Girl just celebrated her Centenary, and even the non-HomoRandians and the non-Randians here and everywhere—from the NY Times to the Chicago Tribune to the Philadelphia Inquirer—have focused on this once-in-a-hundred years marker. So cut us a little slack.
But since you've asked, as a matter of fact, La Rand did make the ultimate pronunciamiento on homosexuality; she thought it was "immoral" and "disgusting," and it prompted Moi to write a monograph about it: Ayn Rand, Homosexuality, and Human Liberation. Why, that might make a fine founding document for HomoRandian.com! I better go reserve that domain name right now... just so I can redirect the URL to libertyandpower.org...
Cross-posted at Not a Blog.
Saturday, February 5, 2005
"Capitalism" and Other Isms
I'm delighted to see so much discussion over the issues raised in my last post, "'Capitalism': The Known Reality." I'd like to advance the discussion a bit, and to respond to some of the discussants as well.
First, let me say that this issue of how to define "capitalism" is not an issue that is distinctive to "capitalism." In the wake of the Iraq war, I'm starting to feel as if the entire libertarian movement, broadly conceived, is in a theoretical convulsion over the very meaning of the term "libertarianism." One critic, R. J. Rummel, has gone so far as to draw a distinction between the "libertarian" and the "freedomist," a neologism if ever there were one, which is roughly his way of distinguishing between "isolationist" and "internationalist" stances. It's getting so bad that unless we start using modifying adjectives to describe our various positions, we'll end up getting lumped together with viewpoints that are anathema to our perspective.
In recent intellectual history, this was first manifested, perhaps, in the battle over the word "liberalism," which seems to have been forever lost to those who advocate "welfare-state" liberalism. It is no longer identified in the United States as synonymous with the "classical liberal" conception. Try using "neoliberalism" and a whole host of other problems result, especially since some in Europe have used that term to describe a position in which the state helps to "preserve" competition.
A similar intellectual battle is taking place in various circles over the heart and soul of "anarchism" (as some of our discussants have pointed out in recent threads) and over Rand's "Objectivism" (as I've pointed out in the concluding passages of my essay, "In Praise of Hijacking"). In this regard, I was struck by something Roderick Long said here:
Rand embraced terms like "capitalism" and "selfishness" as a kind of the-hell-with-it defiance. I'm not inclined to embrace those terms, but I confess my liking for "anarchism" expresses a similar mood.
But Rand's battle over use of the word "selfishness" is worth considering. Most dictionaries defined this term as "concern only with one's own interests," usually with the connotation "at the expense of others." Even Rand felt the need to use a modifying adjective—"rational"—to describe her ethical position: "rational selfishness." But in many ways, she was engaging in a deconstruction of conventional meanings—a transvaluation of values, if you will—which overturned traditional conceptions, replacing them with reconstructions or what Grant Gould calls "revisionis[m]" of her own. In some respects, this is entirely understandable, however. Gould is right to say here that "[u]nless we want to populate the whole three-dimensional space with technical terms that nobody will understand or remember (and I'll admit, it's tempting) we need to defer to the wider understanding of terms." Or else a parade of neologisms will follow, and we'll be consigned to a Tower of Sociological Babel.
I have argued that Rand was engaged in a grand, dialectical revolt against the kind of ethical dualism that reduced all of morality to a bout between competing sacrificial creeds: those who would sacrifice others to themselves and those who would sacrifice themselves to others. Arguing for a reverent concept of benevolent, rational "selfishness" that extolled neither masters nor slaves required the use of an established term as a means to transcend its conventional limitations. This is not an unusual problem for more dialectically inclined thinkers who often use terms that have conventional meanings, terms that have "been tainted by a vastly different, one-dimensional philosophical context," as I write in Ayn Rand: The Russian Radical:
To avoid such terms entirely, Rand would have been compelled to invent wholly new terms at the risk of becoming incomprehensible. By using known terms, she might appear to have actually endorsed one pole of a duality. Thus, in the conflict between egoism and altruism, for example, she is an egoist. In the conflict between capitalism and socialism, she is a capitalist. But such a one-sided characterization profoundly distorts Rand's philosophical project. She is not a conventional egoist. Her ethics constitutes a rejection of traditional egoism and traditional altruism alike. Likewise, Rand is not a conventional capitalist. ...
Since this is relevant to the larger issue—the meaning of "capitalism" and "libertarianism" and so forth—I'd like to quote at length from my discussion in the Rand book:
Rand's defense of capitalism is similar in form to her defense of "selfishness." In fact, Rand titled her collection of essays in social theory, Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal, for much the same reasons that she entitled her collection of essays on morality, The Virtue of Selfishness: A New Concept of Egoism. Both "capitalism" and "selfishness" have had such a negative conceptual history that Rand needed to reclaim these concepts and to recast them in a new and nondualistic framework. [Nathaniel] Branden remarks that he had told Rand of his preference for the word "libertarianism" as an alternative to "capitalism," since the latter term had been coined by anticapitalists. For Branden, "libertarianism" signified a broader, philosophical characterization which addressed the issues of social, political and economic freedom. But Rand refused to renounce the concept of "capitalism," just as she rejected any attempt to couch her ethos of rational selfishness in more neutral terms.
Unfortunately, however, by using words like "selfishness" for something positive, and "altruism" for something negative, the Randian still faces enormous rhetorical obstacles.
Interestingly, though Rand's approach to capitalism is not Weberian—there is no connection made between capitalism and the Protestant work ethic, for example—her definition of capitalism is pretty much an "ideal type."
Following her literary methods, Rand seems to have extracted and emphasized those principles which, she believed, distinguish capitalist society from all previous social formations. She began with the real concrete circumstances of the historically mixed system, breaking down its complexity into mental units. She constituted her vision of capitalism on the basis of such abstraction, having isolated and identified those precepts which are essential to its systemic nature. In this regard, she eliminated the accidental and the contingent in order to focus instead on the philosophical ideals of the capitalist revolution. Such a revolution was incomplete because its principles had never been fully articulated and implemented. Rand views her own project as the first successful attempt to articulate the moral nature of the capitalist system, ideally understood, thus making possible its historical fulfillment.
Let's recall what an "ideal type" is. As our L&P colleague Pete Boettke puts it in his explanation of "equilibrium" in economics as an "ideal type":
An ideal type is neither intended to describe reality nor to indict it. It is instead a theoretical construct intended to illuminate certain things that might occur in reality; empirical investigation determines whether these phenomena are actually present and how they came to be there. In this view, disequilibrium is not necessarily a market failure; something less than perfection may yet be better than any attainable alternative. Deployed as an ideal type, equilibrium analysis allowed economists to describe what the world would be like in the absence of imperfections such as uncertainty and change. The descriptive value of the model lay precisely in its departure from observed reality, for this underscored the function of real-world institutions in dealing with imperfect knowledge, uncertainty, and so forth.
And so, Rand, and other thinkers, such as Murray Rothbard, have engaged in a similar defense of "capitalism" as a moral ideal, which is, in fact, an "ideal type," a "one-sided accentuation," as Max Weber put it, of specific aspects or vantage points. The ideal type is conceptually pure, and speaks to the essence of the phenomena at hand, even though it "cannot be found empirically anywhere in reality. It is a utopia.”
But is it utopian? That's a question for another day.
The reason I've raised the issue of the effectiveness of using "capitalism" as a word to describe the ideal libertarian social system, however, is that the conceived ideal departs significantly from the Western reality that is often described with the same word. (I like Lisa Casanova's "corporatism," but alas, even that has problems. See here, for example.) So when left-wing critics rightfully argue that laissez-faire has never existed in its purest form and that state intervention has typically marked the historical expression of "capitalism," it becomes almost an impenetrable communicative exercise with those critics, since they see state intervention as part of the essence of "capitalism."
Steve Horwitz has argued, as have others at L&P, that these rhetorical issues extend to "anarchism" as well. He prefers to call himself a "radical libertarian" (the way I've called myself a "dialectical libertarian"). But given the recent conflicts over the meaning of the term "libertarianism," I think we'll find ourselves involved in an infinite regress of "Ism Debates." Because now, instead of arguing over the corruption of the word "capitalism" (or was it always corrupt?) or the corruption of the word "liberalism," we have to face the conflicts between those who are paleolibertarians and those who are "liberventionists" and so forth, each of whom claims that the other is corrupting the -ism. The same battle takes place within conservatism, among paleoconservatives and neoconservatives and God-knows-what-else. And we've even seen here at L&P, similar battles over the meaning of the term "feminism."
In the end, I do agree with Steve that we all need to focus on "real world systems." Because, whatever we wish to call our ideal, the potential for creating that ideal—or for creating the conditions within which it might emerge—grows out of that which exists, that which is. Different contexts of meaning are part of "that which is." Since meaning is embedded in context, and different people operating in different traditions attach different meanings to their terms, the advocates of freedom have lots of work to do.
The best we can do is to define our terms as clearly as possible and to show sensitivity to the translation problem when engaging those who operate with a different model. The worst we can do is to allow others to pin on us meanings and ideals to which we don't subscribe, making us into apologists for "that which is," rather than visionaries for that which might be.
Friday, February 4, 2005
"Capitalism": The Known Reality
Reaching out to the Left has been the source of much good discussion at the Liberty and Power Group Blog. So I'd like to pick up on that thread, yet again.
After reading this comment by Jake Smith in response to my "Market Shall Set You Free" post, I took a stroll over to Kevin Carson's Mutualist Blog, which he subtitles "Free Market Anti-Capitalism." It's a provocative subtitle, actually. I've been having an ongoing discussion with a friend of mine for months about the nature of capitalism, so any subtitle that calls for "Free Market Anti-Capitalism" is intriguing on the face of it. (Kevin also has a very interesting book out, entitled Studies in Mutualist Political Economy.) He writes:
If the market and the state have coexisted historically, they can be separated logically. The question of whether class differences originally arose from successful competition in the market, and the state was then called in to reinforce the position of the winners; or whether the class differences first arose from state interference, is a vital one. The fact that the state has been intertwined with every "actually existing" market in history is beside the point; social anarchists themselves face a similar challenge—that the state has been intertwined with every society in history. The response, in both cases, is essentially the same—the seeds of a non-exploitative order exist within every system of exploitation. Our goal, not only as anarchists but as free market anarchists, is to supplant the state with voluntary relations. If the absence of something in historical times, in a society based on division of labor, is a damning challenge—well then, they're damned as well as we are.
The questions of whether state capitalism is an inevitable outgrowth of the free market, of whether decentralized and libertarian forms of industrial production can exist under worker control in a market society, etc., are at least questions on which we can approach the Left with logic and evidence. They are, for the most part, rational and open to persuasion. At the very least, there is room for constructive engagement. And remember, it is not an all-or-nothing matter. It is possible, if nothing else, to reduce the area of disagreement on a case-by-case basis.
Well, questions concerning "free-market anarchism" aside, I agree that the market and the state can be separated logically, and I also agree that the class question is a vital one. And I'm the first to advocate constructive engagement with all parties. But as I suggested here, there is a problem that must be confronted when dealing with "capitalism." Let me explain further.
So much has been said about Ayn Rand's defense of "capitalism: the unknown ideal" that we often forget that the very term "capitalism" was coined by the Left. As F. A. Hayek puts it in the book, Capitalism and the Historians:
In many ways it is misleading to speak of "capitalism" as though this had been a new and altogether different system which suddenly came into being toward the end of the eighteenth century; we use this term here because it is the most familiar name, but only with great reluctance, since with its modern connotations it is itself largely a creation of that socialist interpretation of economic history with which we are concerned.
Hayek found the term even more misleading because it is almost always "connected with the idea of the rise of the propertyless proletariat, which by some devious process have been deprived of their rightful ownership of the tools for their work."
And yet, Rand proudly took up the mantle of "capitalism," defining it as the only moral social system consonant with human nature and "based on the recognition of individual rights, including property rights, in which all property is privately owned." For Rand, this "unknown ideal" had been approximated in history but it had never been practiced in its full, unadulterated laissez-faire form. It was largely undercut by state intervention.
But we have to ask here: Did Rand—and do free-market advocates in general—redefine "capitalism" in such a way as to make it a neologism? (I address the issue of whether Rand engages in such neologistic redefinition with terms such as "selfishness," "altruism," and even "government" in my books, Ayn Rand: The Russian Radical and Total Freedom: Toward a Dialectical Libertarianism.) If real, actual, historically specific "capitalism" has always entailed the intervention of the state, are leftists onto something when they "package deal" state involvement in markets as endemic to capitalism? Of what use is it to keep claiming that libertarians are champions of "capitalism" when that system as it exists is a warped, distorted version of the ideal so many of us hold dear? (I'm leaving aside questions concerning the possibilities for the emergence of a genuinely libertarian social system.)
Now, it may be true, as Ludwig von Mises has argued, that there is a bit of "envy" at the base of the "anti-capitalistic mentality." And it may be true that some socialists would oppose market relationships regardless of the presence of the state because they oppose the very notion of individual enterprise and private appropriation. But the fact remains: Laissez-faire capitalism has never existed in its purest form. Libertarian free-market advocates know this. But even Marx knew it. He argued that existing systems were only approximations to that pure form, "adulterated and amalgamated with survivals of former economic conditions," the kind of mercantilist and neomercantilist state involvement whose "antiquated modes of production" had inhibited the progressive character of markets. (It's this aspect of Marx's work that has been captured in Meghnad Desai's book Marx's Revenge: The Resurgence of Capitalism and the Death of Statist Socialism.)
This problem of definition is not simply an epistemic one or even a semantic one. It has practical implications. When neoconservative advocates of U.S. intervention in the Middle East talk about "nation-building," about building "free markets" and "capitalist" social conditions abroad as part of the march toward "democracy," those who live in that region of the world do not understand "capitalism" as anything remotely like the libertarian ideal. (Indeed, neocons don't understand it either!) U.S. capitalism as such is equated with "crony capitalism" or with what Rand called the "New Fascism": the intimate involvement of the U.S. government in the protection of business interests at home and abroad through politico-economic and military intervention. It's not simply that the left has "package-dealt" us this bill of goods; it is what exists and it is what has existed, in an ever-increasingly intense form, from the very inception of modern "capitalism."
Indeed, one of the most insidious forms of state intervention has been in the area of money, banking, and finance. And if Austrian economists are correct that the boom-bust cycle itself is rooted in the state-banking nexus, then that nexus and its destabilizing effects have been around in various incarnations ever since "capitalism" was given its name. And this is certainly something that even Marx understood. As I put it in my book, Marx, Hayek, and Utopia,
Marx shares with his Austrian rivals an understanding of the political character of the business cycle. Yet the implications of his analysis are vastly different. While [the Austrians] argue for the abolition of central banking, and the separation of the political sphere from money and credit, Marx advocates using the credit system as a mechanism for socialist transformation.
Marx believes that capitalism, based on the dualism between purchase and sale, makes an exchange economy necessary. The exchange process makes possible the emergence of pseudotransactions through an inflationary credit system. Like [the Austrians], Marx views the state as the source of inflation. The state's central bank is the "pivot" of the credit system. Its artificially-induced monetary expansion engenders an illusory accumulation process in which "fictitious money-capital" distorts the structure of prices. This leads to overproduction and overspeculation. Real prices—those that reflect actual supply and demand—appear nowhere, until the crisis begins the necessary corrective measures.
Marx views the business cycle as an extension of intensifying class struggle. The state's ability to thrust an arbitrary amount of unbacked paper money into circulation creates an inflationary dynamic that favors debtors at the expense of creditors. The credit system becomes an instrument for the "ever-growing control of industrialists and merchants over the money savings of all classes of society." It provides "swindlers" with the ability to buy up depreciated commodities. Yet the credit system is a historically progressive institution, according to Marx. Despite its distortive effects, it accelerates the expansion of the global market and polarizes classes in capitalist society. It facilitates socialized control of production and capital investment.
One would find a very similar, though more detailed, analysis in the works of Mises, Hayek, and Rothbard, with different implications, as I've stated above.
Some of this discussion can be viewed as a complement to Arthur Silber's discussion here, and Gus diZerega's comments here. If libertarians continue to use the word "capitalism" as some kind of ahistorical ideal, if they refuse to look at the fuller cultural and historical context within which actual market relations function, they will forever be dismissed by the Left as rationalist apologists for a state-capitalist reality. That's ironic, considering that so many Leftists have been constructivist rationalist apologists for a different kind of statist reality. But it does not obscure a very real problem.
Reaching out to the Left or to any other category of intellectuals requires a translation exercise of sorts. Real communication depends upon a full clarification of terms; if we end up using the same term to mean different things, I fear we'll be talking over each other's heads for a long time to come.
Cross-posted to Not a Blog.
Wednesday, February 2, 2005
Reflecting on the Ayn Rand Centenary, Conclusion
In Part I of my reflections on the Rand Centenary, I discussed the growth of a veritable industry of Rand scholarship. In Part II of this series, I examined a particularly interesting example of "unintended consequences" in the intellectual history of our time: How Rand's ideas have influenced even those in the "counterculture" whom she would have disowned.
Popular Culture
Today, I'd like to expand on the previous parts by offering additional evidence of Rand's growing impact. The material here is excerpted from an introduction that I wrote to the Fall 2004 Journal of Ayn Rand Studies symposium on Rand's literary and cultural impact. The essay, "The Illustrated Rand," makes its electronic debut today as a PDF here. As I write:
In addition to the encouraging growth of Rand references in scholarly circles, there has been a remarkable growth in such references throughout popular culture. That development is not measured solely by her influence on authors in various genres—from bodybuilder Mike Mentzer to fiction writers Edward Cline, Neil De Rosa, Beth Elliott, James P. Hogan, Erika Holzer, Helen Knode, Victor Koman, Ira Levin, Karen Michalson, Shelly Reuben, Kay Nolte Smith, L. Neil Smith, Alexandra York, and so many others. It is measured also by the number of Rand-like characters or outright references to Rand that have appeared in fictional works of various lengths and quality. Among these are works by: Gene Bell-Villada (The Pianist Who Liked Ayn Rand); William Buckley (Getting It Right); Don De Grazia (American Skin); Jeffrey Eugenides (author of the 2003 Pulitzer-Prize-winning Middlesex); Mary Gaitskill (Two Girls, Fat and Thin); John Gardner (Mickelsson’s Ghosts); Laci Golos (Sacred Cows Are Black and White); Sky Gilbert (The Emotionalists); Rebecca Gilman (Spinning into Butter); Terry Goodkind (books in the Sword of Truth series, such as Faith of the Fallen and Naked Empire); David Gulbraa (Tales of the Mall Masters; An Elevator to the Future: A Fable of Reason Underground); Robert A. Heinlein (The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress); Orlando Outland (Death Wore a Fabulous New Fragrance); Robert Rodi (Fag Hag); Matt Ruff (Sewer, Gas, and Electric: The Public Works Trilogy); J. Neil Schulman (The Rainbow Cadenza; Escape from Heaven); Victor Sperandeo (Cra$hmaker: A Federal Affaire); Tobias Wolff (Old School); and, finally, Tony Kushner, whose play Angels in America, adapted for HBO, includes a discussion of the “visible scars” from rough sex, “like a sex scene in an Ayn Rand novel.”
The Kushner drama is not the first time that Rand’s name has been heard on television, however. Rand has made her way into countless television programs. From questions on game shows, such as “Jeopardy” and “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire,” to the canceled Fox series “Undeclared,” and such other series as “Columbo” (a 1994 episode with William Shatner, “Butterfly in Shades of Grey”), “Home Improvement,” “The Gilmore Girls” (two episodes: “A-Tisket, A-Tasket” and “They Shoot Gilmores, Don’t They?”), “Frasier,” and “Judging Amy,” the Rand references are plentiful. In Gene Roddenberry’s sci-fi series “Andromeda,” there is a colony called the “Ayn Rand Station,” founded by a species of “Nietzscheans.” In Showtime’s “Queer as Folk,” a leading character, free-spirit Brian Kinney, is described as “the love-child of James Dean and Ayn Rand.” [Rand has made a measurable impact on "Queer Culture," as I argue in my monograph, Ayn Rand, Homosexuality, and Human Liberation—ed.] And the WB’s “One Tree Hill” showcased Rand’s work in an episode entitled, “Are You True?” The main character, Lucas, is given Atlas Shrugged by a fellow classmate. Increasingly frustrated by his basketball troubles, Lucas is told “Don’t let ’em take it: Your talent. It’s all yours.” By the end of the episode, we hear Lucas’s voice-over as he walks to the basketball court: “Do not let your fire go out, spark by irreplaceable spark.” Reading from the John Galt speech, he tells us: “Do not let the hero in your soul perish.”
In the light of the animated motion picture, "The Incredibles," I've discussed here as well Rand's presence in illustrated media: from cartoons to comics. "The Illustrated Rand" examines this impact in much greater detail, paying specific attention to Rand's influence on such comic artists as Steve Ditko and Frank Miller:
No comic artist has been better known for incorporating Randian themes in his work than Steve Ditko, co-creator, with Stan Lee, of “Spider-Man.” Among Ditko’s comic book heroes, one will find Static, The Creeper, The Blue Beetle, and Mr. A (as in “A is A”), as well as the faceless crime fighter known as The Question, whom Lawrence has characterized as the quintessential Ditko character reflecting “the artist’s Objectivist beliefs.”
Ditko emerged from—and shaped—the “Silver Age” of late ’50s, ’60s, and early ’70s comic book art. His work is in keeping with that era’s use of the comic genre as a “vehicle for consciousness-raising every bit as much as popular films and television shows” [as Aeon Skoble puts it].
Thus, "Ditko’s appearance, like Rand’s, was of a unique historical moment." He expressed in his comics a willingness "to go to the root of social problems. In attacking government corruption, he focused on its roots in philosophic pragmatism. In attacking war, he focused on the illegitimacy of initiating the use of force." And in doing so, "Ditko’s prose is indisputably Randian ..." I provide concrete examples in the essay.
I then turn briefly to the contributions of Frank Miller, who "credits Rand’s Romantic Manifesto as having helped him to define the nature of the literary hero and the legitimacy of heroic fiction." Miller states in his introduction to Martha Washington Goes to War:
We all borrow from the classics from time to time, and my story for this chapter in the life of Martha Washington is no exception. Faced with the questions of how to present Martha’s rite of passage and how to describe the fundamental changes in Martha’s world, I was drawn again and again to the ideas presented by Ayn Rand in her 1957 novel Atlas Shrugged. Eschewing the easy and much-used totalitarian menace made popular by George Orwell, Rand focused instead on issues of competence and incompetence, courage and cowardice, and took the fate of humanity out of the hands of a convenient “Big Brother” and placed it in the hands of individuals with individual strengths and individual choices made for good or evil. I gratefully and humbly acknowledge the creative debt.
It is a "creative debt,” as I say in the article, that "is widely owed by many scholars, writers, and artists."
Concluding Thoughts
Today, on the occasion of the Rand Centenary, when every publication from Reason to the NY Times has something to say about Ayn Rand, I'd like to offer a few concluding thoughts.
As one who focuses on social theory and the prospects for social change, I believe that the most important of Rand's contributions has been her methodological radicalism: her emphasis not only on going to the root—on understanding fundamentals—but also on tracing the fundamental relationships at work within the full context of any given society. As I write in a newly published essay, "Ayn Rand: A Centennial Appreciation," which appears today in The Freeman (it's actually derived from a much more comprehensive essay that will appear in a forthcoming anthology, Atlas Shrugged: Ayn Rand's Philosophical and Literary Masterpiece, edited by Edward W. Younkins):
Rand’s radical legacy, as presented in Atlas Shrugged, led her, in later years, to question the fundamentals at work in virtually every social problem she analyzed. She viewed each problem through multidimensional lenses, rejecting all one-sided resolutions as partial and incomplete. On the occasion of the 100th anniversary of Rand’s birth, it is important to remember that her conception of human freedom depended upon a grand vision of the psychological, moral, and cultural factors necessary to its achievement. Hers was a comprehensive revolution that encompassed all levels of social relations: “Intellectual freedom cannot exist without political freedom; political freedom cannot exist without economic freedom; a free mind and a free market are corollaries.”
To say that this has been Rand's most important contribution, from the perspective of social theory, is not to minimize her other contributions. Among these is Rand's ability to convey radical ideas through a literary medium. Through the years, there have been many passages in Rand's writings that have inspired me. Even in the wake of the tragedy of 9/11, I am still moved by her eerily prophetic words in The Fountainhead. She, who worshiped the skyscrapers of Manhattan as "the will of man made visible," wrote:
Is it beauty and genius people want to see? Do they seek a sense of the sublime? Let them come to New York, stand on the shore of the Hudson, look and kneel. When I see the city from my window ... I feel that if a war came to threaten this, I would like to throw myself into space, over the city, and protect these buildings with my body.
But till this day, there is one passage I always return to—also from The Fountainhead—one passage that summarizes for me the human authenticity and human benevolence that stand at the roots of Rand's vision. It is a vision of integrity, a vision of independence, a vision of social conditions without masters or slaves, fully transformative in its implications.
Howard Roark is on trial for having blown up a public housing project he created because the project's architectural design had been distorted beyond all recognition. As he stands before a jury of his peers, he prepares to defend himself. I'll give Ayn Rand the last word:
He stood by the steps of the witness stand. The audience looked at him. They felt he had no chance. They could drop the nameless resentment, the sense of insecurity which he aroused in most people. And so, for the first time, they could see him as he was: a man totally innocent of fear. The fear of which they thought was not the normal kind, not a response to a tangible danger, but the chronic, unconfessed fear in which they all lived. They remembered the misery of the moments when, in loneliness, a man thinks of the bright words he could have said, but had not found, and hates those who robbed him of his courage. The misery of knowing how strong and able one is in one's own mind, the radiant picture never to be made real. Dreams? Self-delusion? Or a murdered reality, unborn, killed by that corroding emotion without name —fear—need—dependence—hatred? Roark stood before them as each man stands in the innocence of his own mind. But Roark stood like that before a hostile crowd—and they knew suddenly that no hatred was possible to him. For the flash of an instant, they grasped the manner of his consciousness. Each asked himself: do I need anyone's approval? —does it matter? —am I tied? And for that instant, each man was free—free enough to feel benevolence for every other man in the room.
Cross-posted to Not a Blog here.
For an index to all my Ayn Rand Centenary articles, see here.
Monday, January 31, 2005
Reflecting on the Ayn Rand Centenary, Part II
Yesterday, I discussed the growing industry of Ayn Rand scholarship. Between today and tomorrow, I'm posting two articles that make their debut in cyberspace. Published first in The Journal of Ayn Rand Studies, these essays discuss different aspects of Rand's growing cultural influence.
Back in the fall of 2002, I wrote a survey of Rand's impact on certain progressive rock bands, including, especially, Rush. That article, "Rand, Rush, and Rock," inspired a full-fledged symposium in the Fall 2003 issue, which dealt with Rand, progressive rock, and the counterculture. Among the contributors to the symposium were Durrell Bowman, Ed Macan, Bill Martin, and our very own Steven Horwitz, whose piece can be found in PDF here.
I wrote a rejoinder to the seven respondents in my follow-up essay, "Rand, Rock, and Radicalism." The essay can be found in PDF form here.
On L&P, we've been talking quite a bit of late about the need to build bridges to left and right. Some of what I say in the newly posted essay is relevant to this issue, since it deals with a certain ironic affinity between Rand and the 60s "nihilistic" counterculture that she despised:
The basis of that affinity lies in their shared anti-authoritarianism. Even as [musicologist] Ed Macan defends the “countercultural” roots of progressive rock, he argues persuasively that its typical left-wing politics “were never monolithic, or without self-contradictory tendencies.” Indeed, the counterculture’s anti-authoritarian elements transcended traditional left-right categorization. Macan notes that “a strain of libertarianism analogous to Rand’s was probably present in incipient form in the hippie movement,” though “it was not fully evident until after the dissolution of the hippie movement around 1970, that is, after progressive rock had already emerged as a full-blown style.” It is this same “incipient” libertarian streak that led writer Jeff Riggenbach to identify the counterculture as among the “disowned children” of Ayn Rand—disowned by Rand largely because of what she perceived as their nihilism and subjectivism. Of Rand’s renunciation of New Left counterculture, I wrote in Russian Radical:
Rand criticized the student movement for its acceptance of Hegelian and Marxian theoretical constructs; however, Rand recognized that many students ran to the Marxist camp because it was more intellectual and systematized than its social science counterparts. She claimed that if the students had been offered the Wall Street Journal and Southern racism as examples of capitalist politics, they were correct to sense hypocrisy and to move further to the left. But the New Left did not embrace the more reputable Marxist synthesis, which had retained some respect for reason, science, and technology. The New Leftists rejected ideological labels, and proclaimed the supremacy of emotionalism and immediate action. Nourished on a poisonous diet of Kantianism, pragmatism, logical positivism, linguistic analysis, and existentialism, the New Left mounted an anti-ideological assault on a system that was fundamentally anti-ideological as well.
Educated in the halls of Progressive education, the New Leftists thus reflected the bankruptcy of the Establishment they despised; for Rand, they were “the distilled essence of the Establishment’s culture, . . . the embodiment of its soul, . . . the personified ideal of generations of crypto-Dionysians now leaping into the open.”
Interestingly, however, Riggenbach argues, like Macan, that the student movement was not monolithically New Leftist. In fact, Riggenbach finds that “the student political activists of the 1960s were never except briefly and incidentally, fighting for the values and ideals of the Left. The problem was, the values and ideals they were fighting for no longer had any generally agreed-upon name of their own at the time.” For Riggenbach, those ideals were fundamentally libertarian. It is therefore no surprise to discover that Rand herself was “one of the central figures in the youth rebellion of the ’60s." For example, in the 1978 “Woodstock Census” survey of attitudes among people who were students in the 1960s, Rand was ranked number 29 out of 81 individuals named as among those who had most influenced—or who were most admired by—that generation. Among authors, she was tied for sixth place with Germaine Greer, behind Kurt Vonnegut, Kahlil Gibran, Tom Wolfe, Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus (tied for fourth), and Allen Ginsberg. Riggenbach concludes that the survey results make “obvious how little influence the leaders of the New Left actually exercised over their supposed followers."
To what was the counterculture responding in Rand’s works? Riggenbach maintains that Rand’s novels, filled with youthful characters, routinely attacked social authority figures and the “drivel” of contemporary education. Atlas Shrugged, for example, “contains perhaps the most acid-etched portrait of establishment intellectualdom ever published in America” (60). Moreover, says Riggenbach, Rand paints a portrait of a corrupting nexus of government, big business, and a scientific establishment hellbent on “employ[ing] stolen resources in the invention of loathsome weapons of mass destruction” (61)—something against which the counterculture had reacted with great ferocity. And even though Rand had rejected the concept of anarchism in her nonfiction writing, Atlas presented an alternative utopia steeped in human creativity and “without government of any kind” (63). The hippie rebels who were casual readers of Rand’s fiction, says Riggenbach, had applied her anti-authoritarianism to the context of their own lives. They presided over a form of decadence embodied in the decay of authority and the decay of the traditional—a decay to which Rand’s works contributed. It is no coincidence that their countercultural “revolution,” which called for individual autonomy and authenticity, was manifested in a style of music that was a “hybrid genre,” an “eclectic” blend of jazz, classical, and folk, transcending the racial divide of black and white.
I conclude:
So much remains unexplored in the affinities between Rand and the counterculture from which progressive rock was born, affinities that challenge the very distinctions between left and right. It is my hope that this forum will have contributed toward the advancement of this long-overdue exploration. That Rush and other progressive bands have embraced a visionary libertarian lyricism gives expression to Rand’s ultimate hope for the unity of those “homeless refugees” of American political culture: the “non-totalitarian liberals” and the “non-traditional conservatives.” In their shared repudiation of authoritarian social relations, freedom beckons.
Tomorrow, I'll post another recent article of mine detailing Rand's impact on the wider culture.
Sunday, January 30, 2005
Reflecting on the Ayn Rand Centenary, Part I
I've written so many pieces for the Ayn Rand Centenary, for so many publications, that I don't think I'll have much more to say, which might be considered "new" and "original." But, of course, not being one to keep my mouth shut, I'm sure I'll have more to say each day from now till Wednesday, February 2, 2005, when the one hundredth anniversary of Ayn Rand's birth will be celebrated in various forums from the East coast to the West coast.
Today, I came upon a piece in the New York Times Book Review section that just pissed me off. Written by Clay Risen, an assistant editor for The New Republic, "Rebuilding Ground Zero: The Struggle Between Architects and Developers at the World Trade Center" is a review of Philip Nobel's book, Sixteen Acres: Architecture and the Outrageous Struggle for the Future of Ground Zero. I'm less concerned with the politicized process of rebuilding that is the subject of Nobel's book and more concerned with the opening paragraph of Risen's review:
AYN RAND may be long discredited as a philosopher, but her ideas about architecture are still very much alive. Howard Roark, the protagonist of her objectivist fantasia ''The Fountainhead,'' is the archetypal artist-hero, rendering society's soul in concrete and steel. Since the 1940's, his image has shaped our appreciation of everyone from Frank Lloyd Wright to Frank Gehry, defining even the competition to rebuild the World Trade Center site: the struggle between Daniel Libeskind and Larry Silverstein was seen as a veritable ''Fountainhead Redux'' in which a valiant architect armed only with his dreams takes on a mega-developer.
Notice how Risen opens this article: "Ayn Rand may be long discredited as a philosopher..." stated as if it were an observation of fact.
But if Risen had been paying much attention to the academic tide, he'd discover that, after many years of being perceived as an outsider, Rand is finally being considered as a serious thinker worthy of our critical attention. This is not happening across the board and it is not happening in all academic circles but it is clearly a trend that cannot be ignored. As I have written in an article for Philosophical Books (a piece that has been revised for inclusion in a forthcoming anthology edited by Edward W. Younkins, entitled Philosophers of Capitalism):
Since the 1982 death of novelist and philosopher Ayn Rand, there has been ever-growing interest in her thought. In the immediate aftermath of her death, Douglas J. Den Uyl and Douglas Rasmussen’s edited collection, The Philosophic Thought of Ayn Rand, and the first edition of Mimi Reisel Gladstein’s Ayn Rand Companion appeared. ... Together with ... heightened cultural awareness of Rand’s life and thought, academic work has proceeded apace with some fanfare. Both The Chronicle of Higher Education and [the now defunct] Lingua Franca featured major stories on new books and research projects involving philosophy, political theory, literary criticism, and feminism, highlighting how Rand had “finally caught the attention of scholars.” ... These articles note the increase in scholarly sessions devoted to Rand’s work in such organizations as the Modern Language Association and the American Philosophical Association, Eastern Division, which includes an affiliated Ayn Rand Society.
My own Ayn Rand: The Russian Radical, published in 1995, was central to the Chronicle and Lingua Franca studies—as was my 1999 anthology, Feminist Interpretations of Ayn Rand, co-edited with Mimi Reisel Gladstein. The former book rooted Rand’s intellectual development in Silver Age Russian thought and reconstructed her Objectivist philosophy as a radical dialectical project. The latter book is part of the Penn State Press “Re-reading the Canon” series, edited by Nancy Tuana, in which nearly two dozen volumes center on questions of gender and sexuality in the works of thinkers as diverse as Plato, Aristotle, Hegel, Marx, Arendt, Sartre, Levinas, and Foucault. The Rand anthology includes original and reprinted contributions from writers across the globe, including Susan Brownmiller, Camille Paglia, Karen Michalson, and Melissa Jane Hardie.
Another measure of Rand’s growing scholarly presence is the appearance of entries on her in textbooks—in philosophy, political science, and economics—and in reference works, such as Routledge’s Encyclopedia of Philosophy and Encyclopedia of Ethics, Scribner’s American Writers, Gale’s American Philosophers, 1950–2000 (a volume of the Dictionary of Literary Biography), and Lexington’s History of American Thought. A Rand primer, by philosopher Allan Gotthelf, in the Wadsworth Philosophy Series, a volume by philosopher Douglas J. Den Uyl on The Fountainhead, and another by Mimi Reisel Gladstein on Atlas Shrugged, in Twayne’s Masterwork Series, and CliffsNotes monographs on Anthem, The Fountainhead, and Atlas Shrugged, by philosopher Andrew Bernstein, are further evidence of increased attention to Rand by professional scholars. (It should be noted too that one can find an increasing number of master’s and doctoral dissertations devoted to Rand’s thought.) [In addition, a recently published scholarly collection on We the Living will be complemented by forthcoming collections on Anthem and Atlas Shrugged,] as well as an anthology on The Literary Art of Ayn Rand (edited by William Thomas and David Kelley), a Thomas-Kelley authored study, The Logical Structure of Objectivism, and a book on induction and integration, written by Leonard Peikoff, entitled The One in the Many: How to Create It and Why. [And let's not forget monographs by some of our esteemed L&P colleagues, such as Roderick Long, who has published on Rand and Aristotle.]
One final measure of expanding scholarship on Rand is the commencement, in the Fall of 1999, of The Journal of Ayn Rand Studies, co-founded by R. W. Bradford, literature professor Stephen Cox, and me. The journal is a nonpartisan semi-annual interdisciplinary double-blind peer-reviewed scholarly periodical dedicated to an examination of Rand’s work and legacy. In its contents, one will find essays by Objectivist philosophers and those sympathetic to Rand, as well as critics of Objectivism ...
Clearly, the ever-expanding scope of Rand studies suggests that philosophers of various stripes have begun a long overdue reassessment of her thought.
Say what you will about Ayn Rand but it is simply not the case that she has been "discredited as a philosopher." It seems to me that the scholarly community is finally taking notice.
I'll have more to say about this and other related topics in the coming days.
Update: Ironically, I just discovered that, today, Carlin Romano, literary critic for The Philadelphia Inquirer published a piece "Assessing Rand at Centenary." Romano mentions my work and the work of others in the piece, stating: "Even studies in academe—the sector of America most [resistant] to Rand in her lifetime—are increasing."
Friday, January 28, 2005
The Market Shall Set You Free... in the NY Times?
It's just so odd to see NYT Op-Ed pieces with pro-free-market rhetoric; so readers should check out Robert Wright's essay, "The Market Shall Set You Free." Wright has some interesting things to say:
... this Republican president doesn't appreciate free markets. Mr. Bush doesn't see how capitalism helps drive history toward freedom via an algorithm that for all we know is divinely designed and is in any event awesomely elegant. Namely: Capitalism's pre-eminence as a wealth generator means that every tyrant has to either embrace free markets or fall slowly into economic oblivion; but for markets to work, citizens need access to information technology and the freedom to use it - and that means having political power. This link between economic and political liberty has been extolled by conservative thinkers for centuries, but the microelectronic age has strengthened it. ... Given that involvement in the larger capitalist world is time-release poison for tyranny, impeding this involvement is an odd way to aid history's march toward freedom. ... Mr. Bush doesn't grasp the liberating power of capitalism, the lethal effect of luring authoritarian regimes into the modern world of free markets and free minds.
Sounds like an ad for Reason magazine!
Thursday, January 27, 2005
On the Sixtieth Anniversary of the Liberation of Auschwitz
In April of 1946, about a year after the world had discovered the nightmare of Nazi concentration camps across Europe, Ayn Rand wrote a "Foreword" to her novelette, Anthem, that reflected on the collectivist roots of the statist brutality that had made these camps possible. On the sixtieth anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, it is fitting to recall Rand's words:
The greatest guilt today is that of people who accept collectivism by moral default; the people who seek protection from the necessity of taking a stand, by refusing to admit to themselves the nature of that which they are accepting; the people who support plans specifically designed to achieve serfdom, but hide behind the empty assertion that they are lovers of freedom, with no concrete meaning attached to the word; the people who believe that the content of ideas need not be examined, that principles need not be defined, and that facts can be eliminated by keeping one's eyes shut. They expect, when they find themselves in a world of bloody ruins and concentration camps, to escape moral responsibility by wailing: "But I didn't mean this!"
Those who want slavery should have the grace to name it by its proper name. They must face the full meaning of that which they are advocating or condoning; the full, exact, specific meaning of collectivism, of its logical implications, of the principles upon which it is based, and of the ultimate consequences to which these principles will lead.
They must face it, then decide whether this is what they want or not.
Sunday, January 23, 2005
Quote of the Day
Claire Shipman on "This Week with George Stephanopoulos" reflects on the President's Second Inaugural Address, and its intrinsic appeal to current (Democratic) and former (neocon) leftists:
This has to be seen as an attempt to retrofit the war in Iraq with the Grand Foreign Policy Philosophy. ... People talk about this being the core of Bush; this was not his core four years ago when he chided the Clinton administration for "nation-building." ... The President's speech goes so far toward neoconservatism it bumps into Marx.
Friday, January 21, 2005
Sex Bomb
From Queer Teletubby to overly gay-tolerant SpongeBob SquarePants, the homosexual lobby has been poisoning America's youth! Or so we've been told. Fear not! The country has not quite lost its mind just yet. Word now comes that the military—whose "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" policy has led to a number of discharges of Arabic linguists who are gay—has rejected "a 1994 proposal to develop an 'aphrodisiac' to spur homosexual activity among enemy troops." The New York Daily News reports (as does CNN) that Defense Department spokesman Lt. Col. Barry Venable of the Army confirms rejection of the "sex bomb" proposal (with apologies to Tom Jones). "This suggestion arose essentially from a brainstorming session, and it was rejected out of hand," he said. Apparently, the idea was part of a "six-year, $7.5 million request from a laboratory at Wright Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio [oy, Ohio again] for funding of non-lethal chemical weapon[s]" that might adversely affect the "discipline and morale in enemy units."
I can't imagine what kind of lab tests this proposal may have required.
Perhaps the geniuses at the Pentagon were deterred by historical anecdotes about the military ferocity of same-sex affectionate warriors ... if we're to believe those stories concerning Alexander the Great or those ancient Spartans.
Thursday, January 20, 2005
Channeling Woodrow Wilson
Back on November 21, 2004, on ABC News' "This Week with George Stephanopoulos," conservative columnist George Will called President Bush "one of Woodrow Wilson's many, rather dangerous, reverberations." (I too have discussed the Wilsonian legacy in many previous essays; see here, here, here, here (scroll down), and here (scroll down).) And on January 9, 2005, Will observed further that the "Old Right" isolationists were against America's involvement with the rest of the world because they felt America was "too good" for the world. The "New Left isolationists," by contrast, said Will, don't want America to be involved with the rest of the world because they feel the world is too good for America—for racist, imperialist America.
Well, if snippets from the President's Second Inaugural address are any indication of his wider message, one might say that he's trying to create a transcending neo-Wilsonian internationalist answer to these opposed isolationist views. For George W. Bush, America's involvement with the rest of the world is necessary because America is too good; only America can lead the way to a new world of freedom.
"Good Morning America" host Diane Sawyer has an advance copy of the President's speech—and Bush is channeling Woodrow Wilson like never before:
The survival of liberty in our land increasingly depends on the success of liberty in other lands. The best hope for peace in our world is the expansion of freedom in all the world.
In other words, the US is still fighting to make the world safe for liberal democracy. Or so its leaders say.
Given the interconnectedness of global events, it is surely the case that a world of liberty can greatly enrich our domestic experience of it. But if the US plans to be a "nation-building" crusader for the imposition of universal liberal values on foreign cultures—with no appreciation for the specific conditions such cultures face—that "nation-building" enterprise will be DOA. And since foreign policy and domestic policy are inextricably connected, the long-term consequences of such folly on domestic freedom have not been fully calculated by this President or his administration.
Now, it is true that there are potentially lethal consequences for freedom if there is another attack on American soil. Even modern-day liberal New Republic editor Peter Beinart has argued that, given the potential anti-liberal consequences of another strike on US soil, the war against fanatical Islamic fundamentalists is a necessary one. But how that war is fought—what is prudent and what isn't—remains the crucial strategic question. Especially if the answer is Freedom.
Tuesday, January 18, 2005
Building a Civil Society
So much justly negative criticism has been made of the neoconservative "nation-building" project that some kernels of truth about the need for social change in the Middle East might get drowned out by the loud public debate. Katherine Zoepf, writing in The Chronicle of Higher Education, focuses on one aspect of that need in her recent article about Syria, "Building a Civil Society Book by Book." Zoepf focuses on the work of one young publisher, Ammar Abdulhamid, who has set out "to translate the works of Western political philosophy into Arabic."
Abdulhamid is "a 38-year-old American-educated historian and novelist," the founder of "DarEmar, a nonprofit publishing house dedicated to making canonical works of Western philosophy, social science, and literature available in Arabic. His goal, he says, is to print books that will foster 'debate on a broad range of issues pertaining to civil society and democratization.'" Zoepf writes:
In most of the world, it has been a couple of centuries since publishing a new edition of John Locke could be considered risky or incendiary. But this is Syria, a Baathist dictatorship with tightly controlled news media and a stagnant publishing industry. Mr. Abdulhamid knows he must be careful. His tiny publishing venture, which is seeking support from foundations and other Western donors, just released its first books this fall. It is being watched hopefully by intellectuals within Syria, although some observers wonder whether ordinary Syrians will be interested in the sometimes esoteric writings of long-dead Western philosophers.
Abdulhamid studied at the University of Wisconsin at Stevens Point in the early 1990s, and wondered why "so few of the books that are considered cornerstones of the European enlightenment" remain unavailable in Arabic. He mentions such works as The Federalist Papers, as well as the works of Descartes, Hume, Kant, Erasmus, Spinoza, and Locke. Abdulhamid blames "low literacy rates and repressive censorship laws" for keeping "the number of foreign books that find their way into Arabic translation very low." Moroever, there is no "accumulated tradition of Arab scholarship" that is directed outside the Arab world or experience. Abdulhamid argues that this is a major obstacle to the creation in places like Iraq of a Middle Eastern "beacon of freedom": "You're talking about democracy and modernity and bringing all these good things to the Arab world. But we just don't have the basic intellectual foundations," he says.
Zoepf's article focuses on Abdulhamid's efforts to commission "fresh, accessible translations of Western philosophers into Arabic ... making the books available cheaply, accompanied by critical and interpretive essays." But, in Syria, for example, the so-called "Damascus Spring" that flourished briefly after Bashar al-Assad took office in 2000, was ended with the arrest of "pro-democracy" organizers shortly thereafter. And the fact remains that "Syrian newspapers and magazines are monitored by the state, and all books must be vetted by a government panel before publication."
It is no coincidence that "free thought" is having such difficulty getting started in Syria. The Syrian constitution is nationalist-socialist, after all:
The Constitution's economic principles not only set forth a planned socialist economy that should take into account "economic complementarity in the Arab homeland" but also recognize three categories of property. The three kinds are property of the people, including all natural resources, public domains, nationalized enterprises, and establishments created by the state; collective property, such as assets owned by popular and professional organizations; and private property. The Constitution states that the social function of private property shall be subordinated, under law, to the national economy and public interests.
Such subordination effectively destroys the meaning of "private property." Murray Rothbard once pointed out that when government owns or controls printing shops and publishing, there can be no free press. As he writes in For a New Liberty, "since the government must allocate scarce newsprint in some way, the right to a free press of, say, minorities or 'subversive' antisocialists will get short shrift. ... The human right to a free press depends upon the human right of private property in newsprint. ... [T]he human right of a free press is the property right to buy materials and then print leaflets or books and to sell them to those who are willing to buy."
That's why the movement away from authoritarianism in Syria or other such regimes in the Middle East must be simultaneously a movement toward liberalization politically and economically. Striking upon important points of liberal sensibility, my colleague Richard Ebeling has stressed:
In civil society there is no longer a single focal point in the social order, as in the politicized society in which the state designs, directs and imposes an agenda to which all must conform and within which all are confined. Rather, in civil society there are as many focal points as individuals, who all design, shape and direct their own lives, guided by their own interests, ideals and passions.
Mr. Abdulhamid, in his own small way, is attempting just that kind of shift in focal point. Perhaps his published translations of John Locke will be just a beginning; perhaps he might consider translating the works of Ludwig von Mises, F. A. Hayek, Murray Rothbard, and Ayn Rand too.
Monday, January 10, 2005
Election 2004, Ad Nauseam
I have a brief exchange with Bill Bradford in the letters section of the February 2005 issue of Liberty magazine. Readers of L&P will find the discussion familiar; I argue that the evangelical and conservative Catholic vote in Ohio were crucial components of the Bush victory in that state. Bradford continues to argue that the anti-gay marriage ballot initiatives "actually reduced Bush's margin of victory." I still believe that Bradford is not giving enough credit to GOP strategists for getting out the socially conservative vote, and I don't see how Bush wins in Ohio without that group of voters.
As L&P readers know, I've never denied that other issues, especially the war, had an effect in shoring up Bush's winning coalition. But the point is that it takes coalitions to win votes. In my view, the anti-gay marriage ballot initiatives were promoted by GOP strategists to bolster one aspect of the winning Bush coalition.
Coalition-building among interest groups is the modus operandi in American politics. This is a point that our L&P contributing editor makes very clear in his fine Liberty essay, "Politics vs. Ideology: How Elections Are Won." Cox sees validity in the observation that "[t]here are such things as political 'bases,' communal sources of political identification." There are also "political ideas and social movements, and these can have noticeable effects on elections, occasionally dramatic effects." But, for Cox, most American presidential elections are "won by small margins." Cox maintains that Americans "are people of multiple social identifications." Thus, "[t]he task of the American political party is to exploit as many of these personal identifications as possible. This is not science," he argues, "and it cannot be." Indeed. We can argue over whether or not this group or that group, this bloc or that bloc of voters provided the crucial margin of victory. (I, myself, have not argued that social conservatives were the crucial bloc; but I have argued that Bush could not have possibly won without exploiting what Cox is here calling "personal identifications," in this instance, of a religious sort.)
Still, Cox is right: "Voting behavior is like other forms of human action, as explained by such economic theorists as Friedrich Hayek and Ludwig von Mises; it proceeds from individual, variable, nonquantifiable preferences." He continues:
What happens in American elections is that the party that lost the last one looks for a way to win the next one, knowing (if it's smart) that it cannot rely implicitly on any stable bloc of voters. Even the legendary strength of African-Americans' identification with the Democratic Party can easily recede sufficiently to keep most potential voters in that "bloc" away from the polls. The best that each political party can do is to go through its list of possible voters, trying to interest as many as possible, beginning with those most strongly identified with itself (at the moment) and proceeding as far down the list as its funds and energy permit. If the gay vote is sixth on the list, a party that has any possibility of getting it will try to do so, altering its own character and "ideas" when alteration is necessary to optimize its capacity for winning.
Precisely.
Cox argues, however, that
American elections are won not by stable power blocs but by shifts in party identifications among people who used to be in those blocs, until they escaped. Some of the shifts, which go on all the time, in every conceivable direction, coincide with major intellectual or social movements, the kind of movements that change large patterns of intellectual and social history. But electoral politics has its own more intricate, local, and self-adjusting patterns, the patterns of the marginal gains and losses that happen as parties hunt the all-important plurality of votes.
Again: precisely. From my perspective, Karl Rove and other GOP strategists did not take it for granted that socially conservative evangelical voters were a "stable bloc" that would vote for Bush. That's why the anti-gay marriage initiatives were so important to GOP strategy: they were a way of keeping that bloc stable. The GOP also targeted voters at the margins, which would explain how they bolstered the GOP "share" of the traditionally conservative Democratic Catholic and Hispanic-Catholic vote.
We can debate the effectiveness of Rove's strategy in terms of Bush's margin of victory. But I don't think it can be debated that, as Bradford himself puts it, "the Bush campaign followed a strategy that they hoped would exploit the ballot measure and that the ballot measure was quite popular with certain voters."
The major parties work hard to perfect the building and maintaining of winning coalitions of interest groups with which voters personally identify. It offers something to each group. As Cox states: "This is what supporters of minor parties usually do not understand. Almost every minor party is an ideological party, and that explains why such parties either remain minor or cease to exist." They don't learn how to play the game of coalition-building, an expression of what Theodore Lowi once called a system of "interest-group liberalism." "A minor party invariably has a well-disciplined set of ideological positions," Cox writes, "but it lacks the wide array of personal identifications that are necessary to unite a large proportion of American voters over a substantial period of time."
Cox does not believe that this translates into a glowing future for the Libertarian Party, since the major parties are obviously here to stay for the foreseeable future. But he argues that "[t]he libertarian idea really does offer something for rich and poor, black and white, male and female, gay and straight, Christian and atheist." Even if Libertarians can't get elected en masse, "being elected ... isn't the only way to affect the political system."
Amen.
Friday, January 7, 2005
Remembering Murray Rothbard
It was ten years ago today that Murray N. Rothbard passed away. I have long acknowledged Rothbard's impact on my own intellectual development. One of the books of my "Dialectics and Liberty Trilogy," Total Freedom: Toward a Dialectical Libertarianism, devotes nearly 200 pages to an analysis of his thought. Today, the Mises Institute publishes a fine remembrance of "The Unstoppable Rothbard."
Wednesday, January 5, 2005
Moving Toward Democracy?
As we near the long-awaited "democratic elections" in Iraq, amidst growing violence across that country, much more attention is being given to the "nation-building" enterprise. In the current Winter 2004-2005 issue of Political Science Quarterly, Eva Bellin's essay, "The Iraqi Intervention and Democracy in Comparative Historical Perspective," offers some very insightful commentary.
Bellin begins with appropriate questions: "Is military occupation likely to be the midwife of democracy? Can democracy be imposed by force from the outside?" Since this is the "assumption driving America's intervention in Iraq and posited as a potential new pillar of ambition for U.S. foreign policy elsewhere," Bellin thinks the time is ripe for a thorough historical investigation of this strategy as a means to an end.
Many nation-builders point to Germany and Japan, for example. Clearly, "indigenous 'authoritarian' culture ... need not be an insurmountable obstacle to implanting democracy." Bellin understands, however, that "Germany and Japan began with a set of endowments, many of them anticipated by democratic theory, but others peculiar to the cases' unique historical context and time, that favored democratic outcomes." Bellin states unequivocally: "These endowments are not replicated in Iraq ..." Showing an almost Hayekian flair in her understanding of the role of unintended consequences, Bellin writes:
Historical experience suggests that although military occupation may increase the likelihood of democratization, and wise policy choices certainly improve its chances, the outcome is largely shaped by factors, both domestic and international, that cannot be controlled by military engineers operating within the confines of current cultural norms and conventional limits of time and treasure.
Whereas Iraq has never developed into a truly "advanced industrialized country," Germany and Japan were "highly industrialized countries with developed economies" prior to the Second World War, needing a major infusion of financial capital after the war. Democracies rarely endure in poorly developed countries like Iraq, which have also had few "prior experiences" with representative models. Moreover, unlike Iraq, "Japan and Germany were relatively homogeneous ethnically." "Nation building" becomes far more possible in countries where the population has a firmer "national identity" and "social solidarity." To a certain extent, that lack of "national identity" is what enabled Saddam Hussein to divide-and-rule. The Hussein regime, lacking any rule-bound state institutions, learned to exploit the social divide among Shia, Sunni, and Kurdish, in order to retain power in Iraq. "Deliberate state practice of privilege and prejudice meted out along primordial lines fueled suspicion and distrust among the different communities of Iraqi society."
Bellin understands that "the rule of force" in Iraqi society has become endemic to political institutions there. It is part of the political culture as such. "As a consequence, there are few institutional remnants or habits of mind ... to draw upon to help build democracy in Iraq." With no party institutions, except those rooted in "cliques of ethnic or religious elites," and with no genuine leaders of truly "national stature" (such as Emperor Hirohito in Japan) granting their imprimatur, the quest for "vibrant democracy" is severely hampered.
The article is not available free to readers, but can be ordered online here.
Tuesday, December 21, 2004
Invisible Casualties
On a day like today, when 19 American soldiers were killed in a single blast at a military base near Mosul, “the deadliest single strike against US troops since the start of the Iraq war,” we tend to forget that there are casualties in this war that are not as easily quantified. We’ve heard, for example, that there have been in excess of 1,300 US service members killed, and well over 8,000 wounded. But there have been a reported 30,000+ “medical evacuations” from Iraq, and some of these relate to wounds that are not apparent to the naked eye.
On three successive nights last week, Nightline, hosted by Ted Koppel, featured a series entitled “Coming Home: Invisible Casualties.” These are the kinds of casualties that were once characterized as “combat stress” or “battle fatigue” or “shell shock.” But while there is no “shame” in returning to the states with one less limb, the emotional scars are all too often hidden by a military culture that deplores “weakness.” As one soldier puts it: “You don’t want ... the people who work under you to think that you’re weak.” ABC News reporter John McQuethy points out that it is never “easy to confess doubt, let alone depression. ... Even the women soldiers are discouraged from showing emotion.”
Koppel summarizes the startling facts:
It’s still a macho culture. ... And talking about it is not the best way to advance your career. But [according to the New England Journal of Medicine] an estimated 1 out of 6 combat troops returns with Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). 1 out of 6. Here’s the problem. The army takes perfectly ordinary men and women, mostly men, and teaches them how to kill. In peacetime, that’s a purely theoretical exercise. Soldiers are trained how to use their weapons but they never actually have to go out and kill anyone. And except for the occasional accident during a training exercise, none of their buddies is ever killed. ... But in wartime, things are different. ... Two recent medical surveys estimate that of the roughly 140,000 troops now in Iraq, about 23,000 will come home with some sort of depression or generalized anxiety.
This is not the typical portrait that is being painted by an embedded media. As NY Times journalist Chris Hedges argues, the media is too busy peddling “the myth of war ... the myth of heroism, the myth of glory, the myth of honor. The reality of war is so revolting and horrifying that if we actually saw it, we would be disgusted.” Hedges’s book, War is a Force That Gives Us Meaning, is taught regularly at West Point. In it, Hedges discusses the “intoxicating powers of violence and war.” He explains that when he covered his first war, it had all the excitement of a “first sexual experience,” something that could never be duplicated. It had a narcotic effect on him. For Hedges, “war is the most powerful narcotic invented by humankind,” and in many respects, it has a “direct correlation” to the experience of taking drugs. On the battlefield, one feels a “pumped-up” rush of adrenaline, a “combat high,” a sense of being
present in a way that you never were before, when even colors are brighter. You have these grotesque hallucinogenic landscapes where you see things that were unimaginable to you, in terms of ... what happens to human bodies, entire villages in flames. ... The concussions of explosive devices. You never sleep very well. And you can fall into these sort of zombie-like trances, and all of this can happen within a 24-hour period.
But Hedges maintains that none of the battle footage that is broadcast today truly captures the reality of war. Journalists may seek to impose a sense of order and logic on that which they report, but the situations on the battlefield are usually characterized by chaos and destruction:
You never watch somebody with their legs blown off ... bleeding to death for twenty minutes in the sand. ... When we wage war too easily, when—as a nation—we think war is a form of entertainment, that war is somehow like a video game, then perhaps we need a dose of that to understand what war actually is.
Alas, the soldiers returning from Iraq understand it. McQuethy interviewed many of these men and women, who tell us how they are suffering from assorted mental and emotional stresses, where even “loud noises like thunderstorms in the night become a crippling trigger.” Many of the more than 300,000 US troops that have served in Iraq are returning to a very unstable emotional life. Robert Ursano, who is the Director of the Center for Traumatic Stress and Chief Psychiatrist at the military’s “own medical school says Iraq today—with suicide bombers, roadside mines, and the constant threat of attack—poses a unique challenge to the mental health of American troops.” These troops are suffering under the threat of “extreme uncertainty [which] is likely to cause even deeper psychological scars.”
The soldiers operate in an environment where everything is performed under fire or threat of fire. As one soldier puts it: “Everyday, it never changes. Everyday, you’re scared.” That fear of “not really knowing if you’re going to come home. ... It’s just not knowing. That’s the worst part about it.” That, and the fact that soldiers are seeing all forms of unspeakable horror, inspiring intense feelings of fear, disbelief, agitation, and irritability, leading to decreased sleep, changes in appetite, depression, and isolation.
In essence, many of these soldiers have been reduced to a state of metaphysical uncertainty and inefficacy, which is profoundly disabling.
There is a basic human need for efficacy, a need to know that one’s actions will bring about a desired effect. In his book, The Power of Self-Esteem, psychologist Nathaniel Branden stresses that this need for cognitive efficacy
is not the product of a particular cultural “value bias.” There is no society on earth, no society even conceivable, whose members do not face the challenge of fulfilling their needs—who do not face the challenges of appropriate adaptation to nature and to the world of human beings. The idea of efficacy in this fundamental sense ... is not a “Western artifact.” ... We delude ourselves if we imagine there is any culture or society in which we will not have to face the challenge of making ourselves appropriate to life.
In the atmosphere that is Iraq, terrorism is used as a weapon to undermine certainty and efficacy as such. Its aim is to strike in unpredictable and violent ways.
Some soldiers have attempted to deal with these realities by keeping a journal. One man
described seeing an enemy fighter after he had been shot. "The left side of his skull had been blown off and all that was visible was his brain. Yes, that’s right. His brain. I do not know what to do. I have seen so much blood and death. It is enough for a lifetime." He also wrote dark poetry to calm his nerves. As death comes like the shadows creep/ We watch children suffer as parents weep/We came to give a better life/ We leave in the midst of turmoil and strife.
Journal-keeping is not the only method of calming a soldier’s nerves. The military has become proactive in assisting soldiers while they are in Iraq, and in offering additional assistance upon their return home. But there is still “the stigma of getting help for psychological problems,” which is “an enormous barrier.” True, the military has come a long way from that episode immortalized in the film “Patton” when the General, played by George C. Scott, slapped a soldier across the face, calling him a coward for manifesting “battle fatigue.” Today’s military takes the soldiers’ emotional burdens much more seriously. Troops are getting briefings and filling out questionnaires upon their return home. And they receive a second full “mental health” screening three months after their return from combat. But it often takes months for “post-traumatic stress disorder” to become obvious.
Now, I’m not concerned here with the debate over whether PTSD is a real “disease”; see, for example, Thomas Szasz. Nor am I concerned here with the cozy, troubling relationship that has developed between the military and the state-psychiatric nexus: Often what happens is that a soldier’s emotional turmoil is treated with Paxil or Zoloft before he or she is sent out for yet another tour of duty.
All that concerns me here is a simple acknowledgment of the “invisible casualties” that have consumed US troops in the Iraq war. All the more reason to think long and hard about the nature and purpose of their mission.
Sunday, December 12, 2004
Bernie, Rudy ... and George
The other day I chuckled over the "New Alert Levels" suggested (in a political cartoon) by the nomination of ex-NYC top cop Bernie Kerik to head Homeland Security. With a whole lotta stuff circulating that might have sunk the Kerik nomination, GOP strategists are now assessing the impact on the future political career of Rudy Giuliani (who lobbied hard for Kerik).
One GOP strategist (Nelson Warfield) said: "Rudy was either reckless or misinformed, and neither of those are presidential qualifications."
LOL ROFL
Friday, December 10, 2004
Peter Schwartz and the Abandonment of Rand’s Radical Legacy, Part V
In part one, part two, part three, and part four of this series, I examined issues raised by Objectivist Peter Schwartz’s new book, The Foreign Policy of Self-Interest: A Moral Ideal for America. I’ve addressed problems with Schwartz’s analysis of the U.N., foreign aid, Saudi Arabia, and the history of U.S. foreign policy. I now turn to his examination of the current war and his projection of a foreign policy ideal.
The Current War
To some extent, it can be said that Schwartz retains some vestiges of Rand’s “isolationist” predilections. He is careful to emphasize that the freedom philosophy of the U.S. “does not mean we ought to declare war on every tyrant in the world. Before we decide to wage war,” Schwartz explains, “there must exist a serious threat to our freedom. Our government is not the world’s policeman. It is, however, America’s policeman” (15). This is why, Schwartz maintains, foreign policy cannot be “divorced from the moral principle of freedom. If freedom is the basic value being safeguarded, then our foreign policy can give us unambiguous guidelines: we use our power to preserve that value—and only to preserve that value” (65). For Schwartz, then, thankfully, “it is not our business to resolve some distant conflict centering on which sub-tribe should enslave the other.” Indeed, when the proper moral goal is left undefended or undefined, “everything [becomes] our business,” and what results is an unprincipled, “ad hoc foreign policy” (67).
In terms of guiding moral principles, Schwartz’s argument is basically sound.
Moreover, by limiting the role of U.S. military action overseas, Schwartz justifiably leaves open the possibility for military response in the face of legitimate threats to security. Schwartz believes, however, that “Iraq ... was a threat to us—not nearly the threat presented by some other nations, but a threat nonetheless” (44), and on this basis, he supported the invasion of that country.
Alas, he and I disagree on this. In my view, Iraq was most assuredly not a “serious threat to our freedom” and should not have been invaded or occupied by the U.S. military. As I have argued in many essays over the past two years, Hussein could have been contained and deterred from future aggressive actions.
Though Schwartz supports the Iraq war, he maintains that it is Iran that is the “vanguard” for all those Islamic groups that are merely “parts of one whole.” Schwartz’s emphasis here on the “ideology of Islamic totalitarianism” (24)—and kudos to him for not using that tired phrase “Islamofascism,” which distorts the meaning of the word fascism—is important to note:
The promoters of Islamic totalitarianism wish to establish a world in which religion is an omnipresent force, in which everyone is compelled to obey the mullahs, in which the political system inculcates the duty to serve, in which there is no distinction between mosque and state. (25) ... America is a nation rooted in certain principles. It is a culture of reason, of science, of individualism, of freedom. The culture of the Muslim universe is the opposite in every crucial respect. It is a culture steeped in mysticism rather than reason, in superstition rather than science, in tribalism rather than individualism, in authoritarianism rather than freedom. (26)
Though Schwartz gets some crucial things right in this passage, I do think there are certain complexities he does not grasp; for example, it is not at all clear that the problems he cites are strictly the result of Islamic theology or some combination of that doctrine with specifically Arab cultures. (See this discussion with Jonathan Dresner and Gus diZerega on L&P, for example.) Schwartz readily admits too that, “[i]ronically, it was life in the Islamic countries during Europe’s Dark Ages that was further advanced and less oppressive—because the Muslims at the time were under the influence of a more pro-reason philosophy, a philosophy they subsequently abandoned” (27). In this larger ideological war, however, Schwartz argues that the U.S. “should always give moral support to any people who are fighting for freedom against an oppressive government.”
But it is Iran that remains “the pre-eminent source of Islamic totalitarianism today” (30), and it is therefore “the government of Iran that needs to be eliminated,” in Schwartz’s estimation (32). By targeting Iran, “the primary enemy,” “the chief sponsor of terrorism,” all the other “lesser” Muslim states—“Syria, Saudi Arabia, Libya, Sudan—will likely be deterred” (32-33).
I don’t believe it’s that simple. Schwartz tells us that a “principled foreign policy anticipates future consequences” (62). But, given the difficulties of invading and occupying Iraq, and the current drain on U.S. money, military, and munitions, I don’t believe that Schwartz has given much thought to the long-term consequences of invading and occupying Iran, which is nearly 4 times the size of Iraq, and has more than 3 times the population. (And if Schwartz does not envision invasion and occupation, then it is legitimate to ask if he, like some other Objectivists, envisions the decimating of the entire country—see here, for example.) Aside from the fact that a large-scale military option would almost certainly require the reinstatement of the draft and the expenditure of hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars, it would most likely short-circuit the existing and growing liberal tendencies among the vast majority of younger Iranians who yearn to topple the mullahs. It could very seriously destabilize Iraq as well. (See my various archived posts on Iran, here and here.)
It should also be pointed out that “Islamic totalitarianism” is no more of a monolith than Communism was. Just as there were deep divisions in the Communist “bloc” during the Cold War, so too are there deep divisions in the Islamic world. These divisions might be profitably exploited by U.S. policymakers, who must also be careful not to be consumed by them—as in Iraq, where Kurdish, Sunni, and Shi’ite forces might opt for civil war rather than the ballot box.
There are, of course, consequences for a policy of inaction in the face of a real or imminent threat. But those of us who have opposed the Iraq war and any current extension of that war into Iran have not embraced “inaction”; what we have embraced is a strictly delimited strategic vision focused on precise military targets, which seeks to marginalize extremist theocratic forces—and a much broader intellectual vision focused on the realm of ideas. Ultimately, this is an ideological and cultural conflict. And as Rand observed, while a military battle of any scope is like a “political battle”—“merely a skirmish fought with muskets[,] a philosophical battle is a nuclear war”—and only rational ideas will ultimately win it (“‘What Can One Do?’”).
The Folly of Nation-Building
To his great credit, however, Schwartz does recognize the futility of trying to impose liberal-democratic institutions on the Middle East, by empowering “various tribal and political factions” in occupied countries (49). Though he supported the Iraq war, Schwartz argues nonetheless that “[t]he U.S. government does not have a moral obligation to the Iraqis to make them free.” He observes insightfully:
[C]ontrary to the claims of the Bush administration, freedom is not universally desired. It does not automatically come into being once a dictator is overthrown. The history of the world is largely that of one tyranny replacing another. It took millennia before a nation—the United States of America—was founded for the express purpose of safeguarding the freedom of each citizen. Across the globe today, individual liberty is still the exception rather than the rule. Freedom is an idea. It cannot be forced upon a culture that refuses to value it. It cannot be forced upon a society wedded to tribalist, collectivist values. In Afghanistan, for example, the newly drafted constitution contains such laudable provisions as: “Freedom of expression is inviolable.” However, that same constitution mandates that “no law can be contrary to the sacred religion of Islam”—that the government be responsible for “organizing and improving the conditions of mosques, madrasas and religious centers”—that no political parties may function if their views are “contrary to the provision[s] of the sacred religion of Islam”—that the national flag feature the phrase “There is no God but Allah and Mohammad is his prophet.” Is it conceivable that, under such strictures, the individual will be allowed to think freely? Freedom is such an alien principle in that culture of entrenched mysticism that it will take many years of rational education before it is understood, let alone accepted. (50-51)
But Schwartz subverts his own good insights with a dash of myopia:
To lead the Iraqis to freedom, whether in the next year or the next generation, requires that we “impose” our values on them—i.e., that we expose them to the philosophy of a free society. They need to be given the Declaration of Independence to study. Their schools must teach the ideas of Thomas Jefferson and John Locke and Adam Smith. The Governing Council must be instructed to eject the communists and the jihadists. (51)
With all due respect, not even U.S. schools teach Jefferson, Locke, and Smith with any regularity, and if our universities ever ejected communists and other left-wing fellow travelers from the classrooms, the country’s academic population would be decimated. How on earth is the United States going to promote an individualist ideological strategy in Iraq when it doesn’t embrace one within its own national borders?
Yes, of course, I know: It’s all relative. The U.S. may not be a genuinely free society, but it is much freer and more individualist than almost any society on earth. Yes, of course, the Iraqis need to understand the principles of a free society, the social system that is “capitalism, the unknown ideal,” and the institution of private property that it subsumes. But how are Iraqis ever going to appreciate any of these principles when privatization is not on the menu for social change and crony corporatism for favored U.S. companies reconstructing Iraq is the meal of the day?
Schwartz is right to criticize the kinds of “ad hoc” policies that make for “irresolution and ineffectualness” in U.S. military campaigns (61-62). And he is right, and in sync with Rand, that the war we face is, ultimately, “a battle of ideas” (53). But how can the U.S. begin to wage this war when it has surrendered its intellectual ammunition, and routinely sabotages its own individualist political principles?
The Inextricable Connection Between Domestic and Foreign Policy
Rand argued that, to regain those principles, it is necessary to understand the inextricable connection between—and reciprocally reinforcing insidious effects of—government intervention at home and abroad. She insisted that “[f]oreign policy is merely a consequence of domestic policy” (“The Shanghai Gesture, Part III”). This led her to demand a complete “revision of [U.S.] foreign policy, from its basic premises on up,” which would entail a simultaneous repudiation of the welfare state at home and the warfare state abroad, an end to “foreign aid and [to] all forms of international self-immolation.” For Rand,“a radically different foreign policy” required a radically different domestic one (“The Wreckage of the Consensus”).
Schwartz comes close to recognizing, in an abstract way, the connections between domestic and foreign policy; he argues that America’s “philosophic default ... pervades all areas of American politics, domestic as well as foreign.” He recognizes, in one or two sentences here and there, that there is a relationship between foreign policy and “our expanding welfare state” (68). But he leaves unanalyzed all of the actual social and political relations that would make this connection fully transparent. In other words, he leaves unexamined what Rand thought crucial to the analysis.
In the end, Schwartz presents an unrealistic solution:
The challenge we face lies not in physically disarming al Qaeda, but in intellectually arming our politicians. If they truly grasp the meaning of freedom, they will readily undertake the steps to safeguard it. That is, if we can just get them to understand what it means to defend the individual’s right to his life, his liberty and the pursuit of his happiness, we will have little difficulty in getting them to defend us against the ugly threats from abroad. (69)
This won’t happen ... because it can’t happen, as long as America is ruled by a predatory political system. It is not in the narrowly defined “interests” of politicians or the groups they serve to “grasp the meaning of freedom.” As Rand argued so forcefully, the globalization of the predatory state and its neofascist political economy can only engender “parasitism, favoritism, corruption and greed for the unearned”; its power to dispense privilege, Rand emphasizes, “cannot be used honestly” (“The Pull Peddlers”). It will require far more than simply changing the views of a few politicians; it will require a comprehensive, systemic change.
What most strikes me about Schwartz’s book—and I’ve only been able to examine a few aspects of it— is that it tends to deal too abstractly, too rationalistically, with the principles of a “moral” foreign policy. That is, it provides us with good core moral premises and deduces an ostensibly moral foreign policy “ideal” for America, without paying much attention to the concrete context and historical circumstances that have led America so far astray from the celebrated ideal. Rand could also celebrate an “unknown ideal”—but rarely at the expense of a rigorous analysis of the past, and the present, the actual, as a means to evaluate the potential for real change.
I’ll offer one other observation in closing: I’m somewhat uncomfortable with Schwartz’s use of the phrase “self-interest” to describe any government’s foreign policy, especially one that exercises territorial sovereignty not over an ideal capitalist social system, but over a mixed economy, the very kind of “neofascist” or liberal-corporatist social system that Rand regarded as an institutionalized civil war. In such a system, the pursuit of individual self-interest is not even possible without sacrificing somebody else’s interests in the process. How, then, can a mysterious, ineffable government suddenly rise above this “orgy of self-sacrifice” in the realm of foreign policy and pursue the common “self-interests” of its citizenry? Governments are not separable from the groups and the individuals who compose them. “In a non-free society,” Rand stated—even in a society such as we have today, where freedom has been compromised by state intervention—“no pursuit of any interests is possible to anyone; nothing is possible but gradual and general destruction” (“The ‘Conflicts’ of Men’s Interests”).
This is not a prescription for inaction; one cannot expect everything to change before anything can be done to thwart serious attacks on America. But Rand’s insights provide us with a “warning label” for those who think that today’s government, as currently constituted, can act as a panacea for our global woes. If we are to aim for “a moral ideal for America,” then it will take more than a “foreign policy of self-interest.” It will take a veritable philosophic and cultural revolution, one that radically overturns the welfare-warfare state and its sacrificial, collectivist ideological underpinnings: root, tree, and branch.
See also Part I, Part II, Part III, and Part IV.
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Thursday, December 9, 2004
Peter Schwartz and the Abandonment of Rand’s Radical Legacy, Part IV
In part one, part two, and part three of this series, I examined a few topics covered by Objectivist Peter Schwartz in his new book, The Foreign Policy of Self-Interest: A Moral Ideal for America. Having discussed various problems in Schwartz’s analysis of the U.N., foreign aid, and Saudi Arabia, I now turn to his examination of the history of U.S. foreign policy.
The History of U.S. Foreign Policy
Just as Schwartz ignores the history of U.S. relations with Saudi Arabia, so too does he ignore the history of U.S. intervention in the Middle East, especially in his assessment of the current “War on Terror.” Schwartz dismisses completely the view “that America invited attack by its ‘overbearing’ foreign policy,” a view he attributes solely to “Libertarians and hard-core leftists” (33). (Schwartz has always considered “libertarianism” to be the “perversion of liberty.” I deal with his critique—not all of it misguided—in my book, Total Freedom: Toward a Dialectical Libertarianism.) This is rather surprising, considering that even George W. Bush has recognized the role that U.S. foreign policy has played in propping up authoritarian regimes in the Middle East, which have inspired reaction among the oppressed populations of that region. Even Schwartz’s Objectivist colleague, Leonard Peikoff, has recognized this regrettable U.S. history, which forms part of the historical context by which to understand the current war. The U.S. policy of propping up the Shah of Iran, for example, was, indeed, partially responsible for the rise of Islamic fundamentalism as an anti-American political force. It is not enough to say, as Schwartz does, that the Iranians simply revolted against a “Western-style state” (30). That tyrannical, despotic “Western-style state” was viewed as a client of “The Great Satan,” which is why taking American hostages was among the first criminal acts of the Iranian theocracy. Moreover, U.S. support for Iraq in its war against Iran gave implicit sanction to the Hussein regime’s pursuit of chemical and biological weapons. And U.S. support for Afghan mujahideen, so-called “freedom fighters,” in their war against the Soviets, emboldened the very forces that became Al Qaeda and Taliban warriors. As Peikoff observes, this political obscenity “put the U.S. wholesale into the business of creating terrorists. ... Most of them,” says Peikoff, “regarded fighting the Soviets as only the beginning; our turn soon came” (“End States Who Sponsor Terrorism”).
There are no such admissions in Schwartz’s monograph.
It’s not as if Schwartz is ignorant of this history. For example, back in the days leading up to the Gulf War, Schwartz was very clear in his condemnation of U.S. foreign policy insofar as it “helped [Saddam] Hussein [to] launch his aggression in the first place” (“Missing Principles in Iraq,” The Intellectual Activist, October 17, 1990). At that time, Schwartz observed that “[t]he man now likened to Hitler by [Bush Sr.’s] Administration is the same man our government eagerly courted and accommodated for years.” This is the kind of critique that is utterly missing from his current monograph, however.
What is so remarkable is that there is a glorious tradition in the Rand literature of tracing current problems back to a history of previous political intervention. That tradition is hardly recognized by Schwartz. And yet, let us not forget that in her most important foreign policy essay, Rand viewed free trade as “[t]he essence of capitalism’s foreign policy,” and its undermining as one of the “roots of war” (the title of the essay). Though capitalism never existed in its purest form, Rand argued that its historic power was revolutionary: anywhere it flourished, it overturned feudalism, mercantilism, and absolute monarchy. With the rise of collectivist, paternalist, nationalist, and imperialist ideologies, advocated by such “progressive reformers” as Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, and Franklin Delano Roosevelt, free trade was undercut ultimately by government regulation and privilege. This had vast implications both at home and abroad. As I have written in my essay, “Understanding the Global Crisis”:
The twentieth-century history of U.S. foreign policy, according to Rand, was a history of “suicidal” failure and hypocrisy (“‘Extremism,’ Or the Art of Smearing”). Failure—because the U.S. had abdicated the moral high ground, destroying economic and civil liberties from within, and losing any rational sense of the country’s moral significance. Hypocrisy—because the U.S. often fought evil with evil. Rand maintained that Wilson had led the charge “to make the world safe for democracy,” but World War I gave birth to fascism, Nazism, and communism. FDR had led the charge for the “Four Freedoms,” but he only empowered the Soviets in the process (“The Roots of War”).
Like some of her individualist allies (loosely categorized as the “Old Right”), Rand thoroughly condemned the U.S. role on the global stage. One of those allies, a close friend of Rand’s in the 1940s, was Isabel Paterson, who was similarly opposed to U.S. interventionism abroad. Paterson’s perspective on all this is valuable and relevant because she was a mentor to Rand on the subject of politics. As Stephen Cox tells us in his superb biography, The Woman and the Dynamo: Isabel Paterson and the Idea of America (Transaction, 2004), “Paterson’s largest influence [on Rand] ... was unquestionably political” (288). Cox writes about Paterson’s attitudes toward “war and the intellectuals”—attitudes, no doubt, shared by her compatriot (see here):
One of her strongest points of agreement with other intellectuals of her generation was a concern that America would be drawn into a war by its weakness for minding other people’s business. The precedent was the Great War. Like most of the others, [Paterson] took that war as a benchmark of criminal stupidity; like many of them, she became an isolationist, of a certain kind, because she did not want to repeat the experience. (237)
Neither Paterson nor Rand were pacifists; but both were of the belief that the greatest horrors were perpetuated by the war-time attempts to collectivize human beings. “People are very seldom murderous as individuals; they become murderous when they become gullible followers of that monster, the state,” writes Cox of Paterson’s view. Paterson therefore opposed both the fascists and the communists and “advocated intervention against neither Germany nor Russia” (238). Cox quotes Paterson: “Whichever destroys the other, leaves a destroyer the less for the world” (239). Paterson was hardly amazed when Stalin and Hitler signed their “Communazi” 1939 pact, demonstrating their totalitarian commonality. And even as U.S. entry into the war became a foregone conclusion, Paterson was still fighting that “spirit of collectivism” (243), which war inspired. On these grounds, she rejected military conscription, wartime censorship and propaganda, and attacked FDR relentlessly.
Like Paterson, Rand had supported FDR in 1932. Rand actually called Roosevelt the more “libertarian” candidate, for his stance on prohibition (Barbara Branden, The Passion of Ayn Rand, Doubleday, 1986, 158). But by 1940, both Paterson and Rand, so violently opposed to the New Deal, and to FDR’s unprecedented third term desires, supported the Republican candidate Wendell Willkie. Both women became increasingly disillusioned with the Republican Party and with Willkie’s weak campaign, however. In later years, Rand’s disillusionment with the GOP extended even to Ronald Reagan; she repudiated him not only for his stance on abortion and his ties to the religious right, but also because he had “exaggerate[d] the power of the most incompetent nation in the world,” manipulating Americans with “fear” of a Soviet military build-up, something that was “not a patriotic service to the United States” (“The Moral Factor”).
One wonders how Rand would have reacted to those who, today, manipulate the Crayola palette of “Alert Levels” to keep Americans in perpetual fear of terrorist attacks.
Rand and those associated with her Objectivist Newsletter had long argued that the Soviets were parasites on the military technology of the West, and that U.S. foreign policy had stabilized the Communist regime. Again, from my essay, “Understanding the Global Crisis”:
Drawing from John T. Flynn’s book, The Roosevelt Myth, [Rand’s early associate] Barbara Branden stressed that FDR was inspired by Bismarck, Mussolini, and Hitler in establishing a liberal corporatist “New Deal” that further devastated a depressed economy (The Objectivist Newsletter, December 1962). Provoking war in the Pacific, Roosevelt used “national defense” as a pretext for resolving the unemployment problem by drafting American boys to fight and die in foreign wars, while sending $11 billion in Lend-Lease assistance to the Soviets, and developing secret post-war agreements with Stalin to surrender nearly three-quarters of a billion people into communist slavery. (Rand herself believed that this strategy made Russia “the only winner” of World War II [“The Shanghai Gesture, Part I”]. She also questioned the wisdom of entering that war’s European theater on the side of the Soviets—suggesting that a Nazi-Soviet conflict might have severely weakened the victor [e.g., see “Communism and HUAC” in Journals of Ayn Rand].)
As I have maintained, there is a quasi-Hayekian principle at work here that Rand fully acknowledged:
Government intervention in the economy and U.S. intervention abroad mirrored each other in one significant respect: each problem caused by statist intervention led to new interventionist attempts to resolve it. Just as World War I begat World War II, and World War II begat the Cold War, so too did the Cold War beget “hot” wars in Korea and Vietnam, in which more than 100,000 drafted Americans lost their lives. Vietnam especially had laid bare the inner contradictions of U.S. foreign policy. “There is no proper solution for the war in Vietnam,” Rand counseled at the time; “it is a war we should never have entered. We are caught in a trap: it is senseless to continue, and it is now impossible to withdraw” (“From My ‘Future File’”). Rand had opposed U.S. involvement in both Korea and Vietnam, and wondered why the U.S. had “sacrificed thousands of American lives, and billions of dollars, to protect a primitive people who never had freedom, do not seek it, and, apparently, do not want it” (“The Shanghai Gesture, Part III”).
Again, one should hardly wonder what Rand would have thought about the neoconservative crusade to bring “democracy” to the Middle East—this, of course, quite separate from any need to respond in kind to attacks upon the United States, like the devastating tragedy of 9/11. One thing is clear: Whatever Rand’s own inconsistencies (some of which I discuss here), her opposition to virtually all of the major U.S. wars in the twentieth century has been obscured by many of her modern-day exponents. As she wrote in her essay, “Moral Inflation”:
There still are people in this country who lost loved ones in World War I. There are more people who carry the unhealed wounds of World War II, of Korea, of Vietnam. There are the disabled, the crippled, the mangled of those wars’ battlefields. No one has ever told them why they had to fight nor what their sacrifices accomplished; it was certainly not “to make the world safe for democracy”—look at that world now. The American people have borne it all, trusting their leaders, hoping that someone knew the purpose of that ghastly devastation.
The “ghastly devastation” continues in Iraq, where, as of this date, the American people have sacrificed over $150 billion and over 1,200 lives, not to mention 30,000+ casualties requiring “medical evacuation”—all for the privilege of giving “democracy” to a country steeped in tribal, ethnic, and religious warfare.
Rand denounced regularly the pragmatist politicians who had no understanding of the long-term consequences of their amoral “range-of-the-moment” global “manipulations” (“A Last Survey, Part I”). She frequently
invoked the spirit of the Old Right critics of U.S. involvement in World War II, who had been smeared as “America First’ers” (“Britain’s ‘National Socialism’”). She despised those who had coined the “anti-concept” of “isolationism” as a means of denouncing “any patriotic opponent of America’s self-immolation” (“The Lessons of Vietnam”). ... Rand stood firmly against the “altruistic” evil of foreign “interventionism” or “internationalism” that had undermined long-term U.S. interests. She repudiated the claim “that isolationism is selfish, immoral, and impractical in a ‘shrinking’ modern world” (“The Chickens’ Homecoming”).
Rand’s insights ring true as much for our generation as for hers.
Tomorrow, the conclusion: The current war and the quest for a foreign policy ideal.
See also Part I, Part II, Part III, and Part V.
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Wednesday, December 8, 2004
Peter Schwartz and the Abandonment of Rand’s Radical Legacy, Part III
In part one and part two of this series, I outlined a few core points in Objectivist Peter Schwartz’s new book, The Foreign Policy of Self-Interest: A Moral Ideal for America. After discussing inadequacies in Schwartz’s analysis of the U.N. and U.S. foreign aid policy, I now turn to his examination of the problem of Saudi Arabia.
Saudi Arabia
The ever-expanding “neofascist” process that Rand identified in her critique of contemporary politics is further illustrated by the U.S. government’s socialization of corporate risk across the globe, granting corporations access to American taxpayer dollars—and the U.S. military if need be—to protect their foreign investments. Schwartz seems to approve of this. Looking at how Western-developed oil fields have been expropriated by foreign governments, such as Saudi Arabia, Schwartz would have us believe that it is the U.S. government’s duty to “safeguard American lives and property” abroad “by using retaliatory force against the initiators” (15). Hence, for Schwartz,
America could readily take over the oilfields [in Saudi Arabia] militarily (they properly belong to Western companies anyway, which developed them and from which they were expropriated decades ago by the Saudi state). The only explanation is that we have morally acquiesced to the Saudis. We are reluctant to pronounce judgment on them. We don’t believe we are entitled to assert our own standards. We have concluded that we must compromise those standards—i.e., that we have to give up some of our freedom—in order to accommodate the wishes of tyrants. (38)
Well, this is not “the only explanation.” Again, Schwartz misses the underlying dynamic at work in the current political system. That’s because, almost without fail, he focuses on moral issues acontextually; he insists on pronouncing sweeping moral judgments on various global phenomena but frequently brackets out any discussion of the actual history—the actual context—within which these phenomena have evolved. We are left, in the end, with moral generalizations that are disconnected from the concrete circumstances with which Schwartz attempts to grapple.
I’ve long argued that U.S. companies short-sighted enough to enter into contracts with foreign governments like those of the former Soviet Union or Saudi Arabia—which had/have a poor history of upholding private property rights—should not have the right to hold American taxpayers and lives hostage to their stupidity. “We” do not have an obligation to bail out Western oil companies whose property was “expropriated” by the House of Sa’ud. A cursory look at the history of oil development in Saudi Arabia would show us, in any event, that the Western oil industry has been in bed—“embedded” if you will—with their ‘expropriators’ from the beginning. Nothing much has actually changed since the Saudi government ‘took over’ the oil by successively increasing its share of the Arabian-American Oil Company (ARAMCO); U.S. administrators, technicians, and personnel are still firmly in place and U.S. oil companies like Exxon-Mobil remain at the forefront of all new oil exploration in the country.
As I’ve argued here, the formation of the Rockefeller-controlled ARAMCO depended upon a 60-year monopoly concession from the Saudi Arabian government; that government didn’t have the moral right to grant such monopoly concessions to begin with.
Let me emphasize a key point here: This was not homesteading. Western oil companies didn’t simply arrive on the Arabian peninsula so as to “mix their labor” with the land in order to attain Lockean acquisition rights. They were granted monopoly concessions in advance of drilling. Such concessions entail monopolizing all the oil in a vast land area through state force, which bars competing oil producers who might seek out oil in that area. The monopolist, in other words, uses the host government to gain control over a land mass through ownership claims granted by that government, which has no such legitimate authority to grant ownership rights (see Rothbard, The Ethics of Liberty).
ARAMCO, as such, was born of a political relationship. And the U.S. government facilitated this Saudi-Western oil arrangement over time. In the early days, the Rockefeller-influenced U.S. Export-Import Bank even paid $25 million to the Saudis to construct pleasure railroads, while Franklin D. Roosevelt provided $165 million in secret appropriations out of war funds to help in the construction of ARAMCO pipelines across Saudi Arabia. Over the years, the money made by the House of Sa’ud in granting the monopoly concession was pumped into the creation of institutions dedicated to the dissemination of fanatical Wahhabi ideology, which has been exported to the rest of the Arab world—fueling fundamentalism and terrorism throughout the region.
Schwartz himself bemoans this Saudi Arabia-U.S. alliance and the financing of “an array of Wahhabi indoctrination schools, or madrasas, where new crops of Islamic holy-warriors are continually cultivated ...” But instead of focusing on the money that drives the establishment and growth of these schools, Schwartz is simply disgusted by the “utterly perverse” U.S. “readiness to grant [the Saudis] a moral endorsement” (34). That “moral endorsement” goes hand-in-hand with a politico-economic endorsement. And this is why it is a virtual certainty that the Saudi government will never be touched by the U.S. in the current “War on Terror.” As I wrote in my essay, “A Question of Loyalty”:
And throughout this whole “War on Terror,” the poisonous soil from which Bin Laden emerged—Saudi Arabia—remains untouched. While the U.S. is busy fighting in Iraq, it sleeps with the Saudis, continuing a 60+ year-affair that most likely led the Bush administration to blot out 28 pages from a report on the failure of 9/11 intelligence, which might have embarrassed its Saudi “allies.” U.S. corporations engage in joint business ventures with the Saudi government—from petroleum to arms deals—utilizing a whole panoply of statist mechanisms, including the Export-Import Bank. The U.S. is Saudi Arabia’s largest investor and trading partner.
In the history of ARAMCO and the U.S.-Saudi partnership, we find the kind of “pull-peddling” that Rand condemned as “neofascist.” And it is the U.S.-Saudi-Big Oil Unholy Trinity that continues to sustain an autocratic, undemocratic Saudi regime, one of the breeding grounds of Islamic terrorism. Yes, that regime finds itself increasingly at odds with the fanatical elements in its midst. As I argued at length here, “the fundamentalist ideology that the House of Sa'ud has long funded and exported is now undermining its very rule. While the failure of the Saudi state at this point in time would be an utter catastrophe, those who would take power—the fanatical fundamentalists among them—are, to borrow a Randian phrase, 'the distilled essence of the [Saudi] Establishment's culture ... the embodiment of its soul' and its 'personified ideal'." (An interesting article on this subject, "Al Qaeda on the March" by Ehsan Ahrari, was published today.)
None of these complexities are even mentioned by Schwartz in his book.
Tomorrow: The History of U.S. Foreign Policy.
See also Part I, Part II, Part IV and Part V.
Check out Not a Blog.
Tuesday, December 7, 2004
Peter Schwartz and the Abandonment of Rand’s Radical Legacy, Part II
Foreign Aid and the United Nations
In part one of this series, I introduced this discussion of Objectivist Peter Schwartz’s new book, The Foreign Policy of Self-Interest: A Moral Ideal for America. I outlined briefly his core argument and suggested that it was marred by ahistorical and rationalistic elements.
One example of what I’m driving at can be found in Schwartz’s discussion of foreign aid and the United Nations. “Multi-billions in U.S. foreign aid are doled out to countries that excoriate us as corrupt hegemonists,” Schwartz asserts. “America is routinely vilified at the United Nations, while we blandly continue to provide the financial and political support which makes the existence of that dictatorship-laden body possible” (9). Now, I’m certainly sympathetic to Schwartz’s repudiation of “that disgraceful organization” (44), and of any doctrine that compels the U.S. to act only with the U.N.’s “blessing”(49). I’m less inclined, however, to accept his argument that the U.S. financially sustains the U.N. “with a variety of welfare programs” that are steeped in an “altruist” ethos. Schwartz argues, for instance, that “if Africa needs money to deal with a medical crisis, America provides it. If Mexico needs another massive loan—America arranges it. If China needs nuclear technology—America furnishes it” (10)—all on the basis of the irrational principle that America somehow “owes” it to the world. This is, for Schwartz, an internationalization of the domestic redistributive welfare state (18).
That’s true, but not really in the sense that Schwartz means it. What Schwartz doesn’t quite get is that the U.S. typically enters into these arrangements under an ideological veneer—the “altruistic injunction to think of others before ourselves,” as he describes it (10)—while, in truth, it is embracing the other side of a lethal sacrificial coin. Instead of sacrificing itself for the good of other countries, it is actually sacrificing the wealth of its own taxpayers for the benefit of politically connected corporations and foreign “client” governments. This is not simply a left-wing “materialist” assertion; it is actually a claim made by Ayn Rand herself. (And, in this regard, Rand is part of a larger tradition of individualist, classical liberal, and libertarian thinkers who have exposed the biases at work in state interventionism. See especially part two of my book, Total Freedom.)
Schwartz does not focus on this reality because nowhere in his monograph is there any mention of the complex dynamics of American political economy. And make no mistake about it: The “mixed economy” that Rand derides as “neofascist” was most definitely a political economy. Rand had identified the “business-government ‘partnership’” as the “economic essence” of the U.S. politico-economic system, which she characterized as the “New Fascism.” (On the nature of this kind of “fascism,” see here and here.) As I have written in my essay, “Understanding the Global Crisis” (the parenthetical references here are to Rand’s articles):
This was—and is—a de facto, predatory fascism, the result of pragmatic expediency and of ad hoc, incremental policies that had enriched some groups at the expense of others (“The New Fascism: Rule By Consensus”). ... In such a system, [Rand] argued, we are all victims and victimizers; the whole society becomes a “class of beggars” (“Books: Poverty is Where the Money Is”). For once the rule of force begins to predominate, the institutional means for legalized predation expand exponentially. “If this is a society’s system,” writes Rand, “no power on earth can prevent men from ganging up on one another in self-defense—i.e., from forming pressure groups” (“How to Read (and Not to Write)”).
The New Fascism therefore “accelerates the process of juggling debts, switching losses, piling loans on loans, mortgaging the future and the future’s future. As things grow worse, the government protects itself not by contracting this process, but by expanding it” beyond its national borders. Just as pressure groups had slurped at the government trough in seeking domestic privileges, so too did they benefit from a whole global system of foreign aid, involving financial manipulation (through, for example, the Federal Reserve System, the Ex-Im Bank, and the IMF), “credits to foreign consumers to enable them to consume” U.S.-produced goods, “unpaid loans to foreign governments, and subsidies to other welfare states,” to the United Nations, and to the World Bank (“Egalitarianism and Inflation”).
Note here that Rand recognizes these global institutions as constituted parts of U.S. political economy. These constituents express the neofascist “economic essence” of the system, while also perpetuating it and extending it. (A constituent, in this context, is an integrated part of a larger system, an “internally related” part, if you will; it expresses the logic of that system, and, when taken together with other constituents, makes up the system of which it is only a part.)
Rand goes further: “If looting collectivists did not exist, America’s foreign aid policy would create them.” The overwhelming profiteers of this system were those peculiar “products ... of the mixed economy,” those statist businessmen who “seek to grow rich not by means of productive ability, but by means of political pull and of special political privileges.” Rand observes “that there are firms here and there, in various businesses and industries, who are growing prosperous by trading with foreign countries, the specific foreign countries who receive American aid. In other words, there are businessmen who are selling their products to the foreign countries receiving American aid and who are paid by American funds—who are paid by the aid money granted to those countries. In other words, some Americans are draining the money, the tax money, of other Americans, into their own pockets, via a longer tour through every corner of the globe which receives our foreign aid. This tax money is taken from some citizens, handed to foreign governments and pressure groups and then [it] comes back to some of our citizens, through those successful pressure groups who have pull in Washington.” This was a “siphoning” process, in Rand’s view, a “necessary corollary of a mixed economy, or rather the necessary expression of a mixed economy, now being carried to the international scene. It is a civil war gone international; it is pressure groups using foreign countries in order to destroy our own. That is the meaning of our foreign aid policy” (“The Foreign Policy of the Mixed Economy,” tape).
Rand may have viewed this as American self-immolation in the grander scheme of things, but it is most definitely the kind of self-immolation on which parasitic corporations feast. And the iron triangle here has awful implications: the U.S. government enriches certain politically connected corporations along with the host governments that purchase those corporate goods and services. This introduces additional pressures on the U.S. from foreign lobbyists who profit from the political arrangements. Summarizing Rand’s arguments, I write:
Thus, the New Fascism exports “the bloody chaos of tribal warfare” to the rest of the world, creating a whole class of “pull peddlers” among both foreign and domestic lobbyists, who feed on the carcass of the American taxpayer, causing massive global political, social, and economic dislocations (“The Pull Peddlers”). Whereas the Left derided “capitalist imperialism” for this state of affairs, Rand recognized that capitalism, “the unknown ideal,” had taken the blame for the sins of its opposite. She lamented the internationalization of the New Fascism; given “the interdependence of the Western world,” all countries are “leaning on one another as bad risks, bad consuming parasite borrowers.” She recognized how the system’s dynamics propelled such internationalization, but advised: “The [fewer] ties we have with any other countries, the better off we will be.” Suggesting a biological analogy in warning against the spread of neofascism, she quips: “If you have a disease, should you get a more serious form of it, and will that help you?” (“Egalitarianism and Inflation” Q&A tape, 1974). In discussing a section of the 1972 Communique between the U.S. and Red China, Rand suggests a universal principle. “[L]ike charity,” she writes, “courage, consistency, integrity have to begin at home ... [w]hat we are now doing to others ... we began by doing it to ourselves. We are the victims of self-inflicted bacteriological warfare: altruism is the bacteria of amorality. Pragmatism is the bacteria of impotence” (“The Shanghai Gesture,” Part III).
Regrettably, Peter Schwartz captures none of these insidious political processes in his monograph because he doesn’t even bother to ask the relevant questions on which Rand herself focused. And his analytical myopia is not confined to the issue of foreign aid.
Tomorrow: Saudi Arabia.
See also Part I, Part III, Part IV, and Part V.
Check out Not a Blog.
New Terror Alert Levels
I wish I could find this darn cartoon on the web, but at the very least, I did clip it from the NY Times this past Sunday. It was reproduced in the "Week in Review" section from Newsday. The cartoonist Walt Handelsman depicts a guy who sees a newspaper heading: "Bernard Kerik, NYPD Vet." The guy says: "They Hired a New Yorker to Run Homeland Security." On the guy's TV set, the "New Terror Alert Codes" are posted, replacing Tom Ridge's color alerts:
1. Fuhgeddaboudit...
2. How You Doin'?
3. Osama This!
4. You Talkin' to Me?
5. @#*! Me? ... @#*! YOU!!!
Monday, December 6, 2004
Peter Schwartz and the Abandonment of Rand’s Radical Legacy, Part I
Introduction
For several years now, I’ve been engaged in a critique of the foreign policy writings of various Objectivists, who, I believe, have abandoned Ayn Rand’s radical insights on the nature of U.S. politics. For those who are not Ayn Rand fans or who don’t care one iota what Objectivists have to say on U.S. foreign policy, this week’s five-part series (which begins today) might not provide the requisite excitement. But for those readers who are classical liberals and libertarians, and who see, on a daily basis, the erosion of the noninterventionist tradition of liberalism, this series will have some merit. Suffice it to say: In fighting for Rand’s radical legacy, I’m fighting simultaneously for that noninterventionist tradition that stands opposed to the welfare-warfare state, while seeking to comprehend the inextricable relationship between the “welfare” and the “warfare” part of that equation.
In my essay, “Understanding the Global Crisis: Reclaiming Rand’s Radical Legacy,” I argued that too many Objectivist writers in the post-9/11 era were suffering from historical amnesia. It’s as if they have forgotten most of what Rand said on the issue of foreign policy; one will be hard pressed to find any quotes from Rand’s various foreign policy essays and lectures in any of the books, journals, and online periodicals to which Objectivists have contributed.
It’s not fair, of course, to suggest that a lack of references to Rand is a sign of abandonment. Clearly, these writers have been influenced by Rand’s broad ethical and political precepts, especially those concerning egoism and individual rights. But there is a disturbing pattern among Objectivist writers to ignore Rand’s actual foreign policy pronouncements, which continue to have relevance for the modern world. When such writers are writing explicitly on the subject of foreign policy, that ignorance has far-reaching implications for the quality and persuasiveness of their arguments.
This pattern is on display yet again in the newest book by Objectivist writer Peter Schwartz, The Foreign Policy of Self-Interest: A Moral Ideal for America (Ayn Rand Institute Press, 2004)—which has exactly one quote from Rand, and this quote does not derive from any of her work on foreign policy. In his preface to the Schwartz monograph, Ayn Rand Institute Executive Director Yaron Brook tells us that this work is part of a series on “The Moral Foundations of Public Policy.” For Brook, “[f]oreign policy is neither a starting point nor a self-contained field. It is, rather, the product of certain ideas in political and moral philosophy. ... It has failed because of the bankrupt moral philosophy our political leaders have chosen to accept: the philosophy of altruism and self-sacrifice” (5). Schwartz’s work goes a long way toward explaining these ideas, and it succeeds in highlighting some very important issues. (Some of this work derives from a series of articles that Schwartz published back in March and April 1986, “Foreign Policy and the Morality of Self-Interest,” in The Intellectual Activist.) Objectivist Harry Binswanger has gone so far as to say that Schwartz has provided us with “the foreign policy Bible for America and any other free society.”
Ultimately, however, the book fails to recapture Rand’s radical framework of analysis, which, from a political standpoint, seeks to understand and overturn U.S. government policies at home and abroad.
Of course, Rand’s radicalism is not primarily political; it is a methodological radicalism, a radical way of thinking upon which political and social change is built. Karl Marx once said: “To be radical is to grasp things by the root” (“The Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right”). Though Rand repudiated Marx’s communism and its collectivist premises, she championed the notion of the “radical in the proper sense of the word”; as she explained: “‘radical’ means ‘fundamental.’” For Rand, “the fighters for capitalism have to be, not bankrupt ‘conservatives,’ but new radicals, new intellectuals and, above all, new, dedicated moralists” (“Conservatism: An Obituary”).
But the power of Rand’s methodological radicalism went beyond a search for roots. In seeking to understand the system of contemporary statism, Rand shows how various factors often mutually supported one another in sustaining the irrationality and injustice of that system. It was only by clarifying the various relationships at work that we could begin to alter them fundamentally.
Schwartz’s Core Argument
Peter Schwartz certainly hopes to clarify the moral premises at work in U.S. foreign policy. Schwartz states “that self-interest can be successfully defended only if it is embraced as a consistent, moral principle—a principle in keeping with America’s founding values” (12). He continues: “Just as in ethics it is maintaining his own life that should be the individual’s ultimate purpose, in politics it is maintaining its own citizens’ liberty that should be the government’s ultimate purpose” (14). For Schwartz, “[i]n both domestic and foreign policy, the proper role of government is to protect the citizen’s basic political interest: freedom” (19). As such, Schwartz disavows “nationalism [as] a collectivist idea” (19). He rejects “diplomacy” as “the opposite of justice,” because it presumes that “we must maintain cordial relations” with dictatorships and treat all regimes with respect, regardless of their moral legitimacy (20). He renounces appeasement, and the “pragmatist” policy of buying off “allies” with economic aid. In Schwartz’s view, a practical foreign policy identifies liberty as the “central value,” and develops the “basic means” to defend it.
For those who want the “bottom line,” here it is: Schwartz may have correctly defined some key principles here, but his discussion is marred by a rationalistic streak. Such principles make the most sense only in a context where the government is strictly limited; today’s government, however, is not focused on protecting individual rights, but on doling out privileges to those who are most adept at using the political process.
Schwartz is so caught up in his pan-and-scan black-and-white picture of foreign policy that his model fails to comprehend the full widescreen technicolor portrait, which his philosophic mentor grasped with relative ease.
I will begin to explore these topics in greater detail tomorrow, in part two of this five-part series.
See also Part II, Part III, Part IV, and Part V.
Check out Not a Blog.
Tuesday, November 30, 2004
And the Answer Is...
This Jeopardy contestant had 74 consecutive wins, earning $2,520,700, for most money won and most wins recorded on a TV game show. He's the subject of an A&E Biography tomorrow night, and competes against himself in scheduled appearances on Nightline and the Late Show with David Letterman tonight. And he just lost in his 75th appearance on this classic game show.
Question: Who is Ken Jennings?
Congratulations, Ken! What a terrific run!
Update: Jennings' actual winnings totaled $2,522,700. He got that extra $2,000 for coming in second in his losing round. And Nancy Zerg, who beat Jennings on Nov. 30th, lost, and came in third, on Dec. 1st.
Sunday, November 28, 2004
God Hates Fags... But Shepard's Killers Don't
Lots of news is being generated over a 20/20 report that casts doubt on the murder of Matthew Shepard as a "hate crime." I am firmly opposed to legislating "hate crimes" and spoke out against it even in the context of the Shepard murder. And yet, while Elizabeth Vargas, the investigative reporter, uncovers a number of problems with the "gay hate" nature of the Shepard case, I have to say that I'm troubled by the inconsistencies. Vargas seems to support the current claims of Shepard's killers, who say that the murder was motivated not by hatred of gays, but by robbery, and inspired by drug use. Still, I can't see how any of the current pronouncements of these killers would stand up under interrogation.
Some of the acquaintances of convicted murderer Aaron McKinney claim, for example, that McKinney and Shepard knew each other from the drug scene in Laramie, Wyoming. Yet, McKinney denies it to Vargas. Some of McKinney's acquaintances claim that McKinney is bisexual. Yet, McKinney denies it to Vargas, though he says that now he does have gay friends. (Where? In prison? Oy.) Still, if we are to believe that McKinney did have affairs with men, why would that make him any less likely to manifest gay-hate? It would fit the description of the classic self-denying "homophobe" who gets all bent out of shape when a "fag" like Shepard places his hand on the self-denier's leg.
This same Aaron McKinney, whose new pronouncements we are being told are true, once used a "gay panic" defense at his trial, hoping to cash-in on what many perceived to be a sympathetic anti-gay culture in Laramie. Now he wants to retract that defense.
Why should we believe anything these killers say when even now they are manifesting inconsistencies? And who cares? A young man is dead. And McKinney and Russell Henderson were convicted of his murder.
As I said: I am against hate crime laws. But let's not forget that many of the ugly happenings in Laramie—including all the hoopla surrounding the trial, the Fred Phelps "Fags in Hell" protests, the bigotry, the hate—took place because of that trial. Even if there wasn't a smidgeon of "gay hate" in the souls of Shepard's killers, the fact that those killers used "gay panic" as a defense and that the gay-haters came out of the woodwork during that trial is enough to convince me that there are cultural issues of profound importance here, which cannot be denied.
Ironically, just this morning, two Sunday news shows—"This Week with George Stephanopoulos" and "Meet the Press"—examined the cultural divide on issues like homosexuality and same-sex marriage. Together with continuing stories on the religious revival in the United States (see the NY Times here and here, and discussions here at L&P), it is clear that this is an issue that just won't go away.
And how could it? Not when Jerry Falwell—who once blamed perverts for God's wrath on 9/11, only to apologize for it—is once again pointing the finger at pagans, perverts, and a "lethargic church" as the causal factors in the current jihad. Here's what the founder of the new "Faith and Values Coalition" said this morning on "Meet the Press":
I do believe, as Ben Franklin said, that God rules in the affairs of men and nations. I believe that when God blesses a nation as he's blessed America for a lot of reasons, things happen that don't happen other places. I believe that when we defy the Lord, I think we pay a price for it. So I do believe in the sovereignty of God. ... I do believe that, corporately, God deals with a nation.
Falwell added that, if people "turn from their wicked ways," God "promised three things: 1) I will hear from heaven; 2) I will forgive their sins; 3) I will heal their land. And I believe that conversely works, if we don't do that, I believe that God can judge us."
There you have it. Falwell, who praised the election of Bush as the "Christian" choice, is simply packaging his initial 9/11 message with a little less explicit venom. The USA is filled with infidel who are turning from the Lord and that's why such nightmarish tragedies will continue to befall this country. In other words, this country is going to hell, and it's all because of pagans and perverts, people like, well, people like ... Matthew Shepard.
Wednesday, November 24, 2004
Of Locusts, Lincoln, and the Lord
As millions of locusts swarmed through Israel over the weekend, some commentators are already speaking of Biblical symbolism and omens. Even here in the U.S., the debate over religion and moral values continues on an almost daily basis.
So, here comes a report (discussed here) that religious conservatives are angry about accompanying films and books at various national parks. A film depicting historic marches at the Lincoln Memorial, for example, includes images of pro-choice, civil rights, and gay marches, and it is now the target of a Christian conservative group that wants it pulled from the monument. The Rev. Lou Sheldon, chairman of "Traditional Values Coalition," was angered to see this "pro-homosexual, pro-abortion" film on view, and National Park Service personnel are being asked to edit out the offending images at considerable cost to taxpayers. An ABC World News Tonight report tells us that it's all about "who controls the portrayal of history," a drama which "has been playing out in national parks across the country" from the Lincoln Memorial to the Grand Canyon. In a bookstore at the latter site, a book is on sale which states that the Grand Canyon was formed by the Lord at the time of Noah and the Great Flood. Scientists are now protesting the inclusion of this book in a national park service establishment; they believe it is a "slap" against science.
In the meanwhile, Sheldon is gleeful; he tells us that during the Clinton administration, Christian conservatives felt as if they "lived in outer Siberia." With the Bush administration retaining power, "it's like we died and went to heaven."
Verily I say to thee, in my idea of heaven, all property is privatized and the people who own this property can show anything they want as long as their actions don't violate anybody else's rights.
As I said, this is my idea of heaven. Back on earth, however, public property exists and flourishes, and battles over the content on public display in films and books are inevitable.
Tuesday, November 23, 2004
Hurd on Same-Sex Marriage
The gay marriage debate has brought out a lot of venom on both sides of the issue divide. It's also brought out a little humor from Roseanne Barr, who, on "Jimmy Kimmel Live, commented: "First of all, if you are someone who thinks that gay sex is gross and unnatural, then you should be for their right to marry, because that will put an end to all that sex, just like it does for the straight people."
Ah, Barr puts her finger on one of the dysfunctional aspects of marriage, circa 2004. I, myself, would like to see the whole marital debate focused on privatization, though I fully understand why gays and lesbians want a piece of the pie, so-to-speak.
There's an interesting article by the Rand-influenced psychologist and author Michael J. Hurd on "The Institution of Marriage." Hurd opens his provocative essay with this passage:
If a group of people lined up to board the Titanic as it were sinking, you would say they were irrational. If these people were denied admission to the sinking Titanic because of race, creed, or sexual orientation, and then became angry over this discrimination, you would not even know what to say. "Of course," you might say, "it's irrational to deny admission for these reasons. But why would anyone want to embark on a sinking ship in the first place?"
Hurd is right, of course, that not everybody who opposes gay marriage is anti-gay. He's also correct that Bush has voiced support for protecting legal civil unions for same-sex couples, though, clearly, a few of those anti-gay marriage ballot initiatives in Election 2004 were designed to destroy even that possibility. But what is most interesting about Hurd's comments is his attack on the very institution of marriage "as we presently know it." He argues "that romantic love is a profoundly important thing for human beings," and "that voluntarily entered, non-coercive arrangements surrounding long-term love relationships must also be treated with respect by a just government. But one would hope that these legal arrangements can be implemented through much more rational means than the current 'institution of marriage' has so far delivered." Hurd reminds us of a 50% divorce rate, of emotional baggage and obligation, of sacrificial offerings, of irresponsibility, and concludes:
"Institutions" refer to prisons, courthouses and psychiatric hospitals. Love is not a building or an abstract duty to some undefined, unarticulated notion of tradition for tradition's sake, as President Bush seems to view it. Love is the personal and mutual enjoyment of two people. Their sense of commitment flows from this love. Commitment is a consequence, not a cause. Gay couples should be happy to create their own civil unions without the baggage of existing notions of marriage. Heterosexual couples would do well to follow them.
The only problem here is that there is a far more likely possibility of facing political resistance to the destruction of state-sanctioned marriage wholesale than to the notion of same-sex marriage in particular. Either way, the battle is just beginning.
Monday, November 22, 2004
Ryan Sager Rethinks Libertarianism
In "Rethinking Libertarian Minimalism" and on his blog (starting here), Ryan Sager has been lashing out at libertarians because they have, he says, an "inability" to say anything "serious ... regarding foreign policy. Pacifism combined with isolationism, as preached more or less by many at Cato and Reason is neither the popular nor the correct answer to the threat of global terrorism. And hunting Osama bin Laden, as was the Kerry solution, is, frankly, just an idiotic personalization of a phenomenon that ultimately, make no mistake about it, amounts to a historic clash of civilizations," he writes.
One of the problems, of course, "facile" or not, is that there is no such thing as a monolithic libertarian position on foreign policy; we can argue all we want about who is the "true" libertarian in all this, but that debate is fast becoming religious (like who is the true "Christian" among scores of Christian sects). Truth is, there has been an amazingly diverse response from libertarian writers on the subject of the war. Some of us favored the Afghanistan campaign, some stopped short at Iraq, while others supported the Iraq war and would like to move on to Iran and Saudi Arabia. Still others have opposed U.S. government actions anywhere, suggesting Letters of Marque as an alternative. This is evidence, I think, that a serious debate has been taking place for several years now among libertarians about the best course of action.
I can only speak for myself. In this "historic clash of civilizations," one thing is important: If one is not to merely oppose the dark forces in the Middle East, but triumph over them, one must not adopt and practice the very policies that emboldened these forces to begin with. It is not a serious solution to the long-term problem of Islamic terrrorism if libertarians merely mimic the neoconservatives, providing them with an ideological apologia for their "muscular foreign policy" goals.
True enough, Sager understands that "those of us who espouse a philosophy of limited government domestically" have faced difficulties in the post-9/11 era. But that's because most of us who espouse this philosophy understand the intimate relationship between the growth of an interventionist policy abroad and one at home. That doesn't mean that we're "mired in a pre-9/11 mindset"; what it does mean is that we are capable of applying a classical liberal mindset to today's problems in a way that seeks not to duplicate the same policy mistakes, which formed part of the context for the 9/11 catastrophe.
Sager is correct to emphasize various areas requiring deeper discussion, specifically on the question of how to encourage liberalization and democratic-liberal nation-building in deeply illiberal Middle Eastern societies. He asks: "What are the prerequisites of a free society? How can they be fostered? How can we turn over power to the people we've liberated?" I've been asking, and answering, similar questions from the beginning; one of the reasons I opposed the invasion and occupation of Iraq is that I opposed the neocon belief that it is possible to simply institute democracy without certain cultural prerequisites.
One more thing needs to be addressed here. Though Sager is willing to concede that "[p]eople of good will and good judgment disagreed about the Iraq invasion before it happened, and [that] we all have our various assessments of how it has turned out so far," he is urging libertarians to come up with a good way to fix the problem. He seems to suggest, however, that antiwar libertarians are simply "sounding more and more like Michael Moore," not quite able to truly understand the nature of this war as a "clash of civilizations."
Justin Raimondo had something valuable to say about this issue in last week's antiwar.com column, "Why We Fight," where he:
underscore[s] the self-undermining mechanism of the effort to "export democracy," as one neoconservative publicist puts it. The process of spreading a "global democratic revolution" – in the president's words – not only subverts democracy at home, but also discredits and defeats it throughout the Middle East. If "democracy" and even "free markets" are represented by foreign invaders and their local quislings, then sheer pride and instinctual nationalism will give rise to a rebellion of illiberalism. ...
The outright barbarism of the defenders of Fallujah – the beheadings, the kidnappings, the suicide bombings – is the work of a "resistance" that is in no way admirable. The various groups that have arisen in opposition to the American occupation – the Islamists, the neo-Ba'athists, the radical Shi'ites, etc. – are all of them totalitarians of either a religious or secular cast, with the former rapidly gaining the upper hand. No American peace movement worthy of the name can give them any kind of support: they are not the "minutemen" of Michael Moore's imagination, unless one views Patrick Henry as some sort of improbable early American ayatollah – which he was most certainly not. ...
Today, we oppose the occupation of Iraq, without granting the Islamist-Ba'athist resistance a single iota of moral or political legitimacy. ... Yes, it is understandable that an occupied people will fight back: but totalitarians feed on legitimate grievances, and often come to power because they seem to address them. The tragedy and irony of our war of "liberation" in Iraq is that it is empowering the very forces – and, make no mistake about it, they are dark forces – we seek to defeat. ...
Yes, we are at war with radical Islam. However, that struggle does not require the democratic "transformation" of the Middle East, but rather a recognition of the reality that we are fighting an asymmetric war against a worldwide guerrilla insurgency, not a traditional-style battle to conquer and occupy nation-states – a battle that must be won politically, primarily, and conducted militarily only in a precise and strictly limited sense. Our strategy must be to isolate the Islamists, and that requires the renunciation, not the escalation, of the foreign policy that gave birth to the jihadists in the first place.
I have some differences with Raimondo in this excerpt. I don't believe, for example, that U.S. foreign policy gave birth to the jihadists but it certainly emboldened them. Of course, I should add that some kind of cultural transformation in the Middle East will be necessary in the long-run; but, with Raimondo, I believe that it won't be achieved by the forced grafting of "democratic" institutions onto cultures that reject them. In any event, my point here is a simple one: even Justin Raimondo, whom I take to be among the most profoundly opposed to U.S. intervention abroad, is under no illusions about the dangers of radical Islam.
Sager is worried that if libertarians don't get with the prowar program, "we risk utter irrelevancy in a post-9/11 world with a tendency toward increasing state power." Alas, opposing that increase, and fighting the right battle against the forces of oppression at home and abroad, is more relevant than ever. And though relentless military battles will need to be fought, the primary battle remains philosophical and cultural. Armed with an understanding of the nature of freedom, its preconditions and effects, armed also with an understanding of the unintended consequences of political action, most libertarians are well-armed indeed to fight this battle.
Sunday, November 21, 2004
I Told You So (Again)
Just a note here to direct readers to an essay of mine posted to SOLO HQ: "I Told You So." L&P readers will be familiar with my comments there on Election 2004, since the essay is a distillation of the many things I've said here, but the comments section might be worth your attention.
Oh, and on a totally unrelated point: I never post here on my personal list of favorite songs, but today's entry marks the 40th anniversary of the Verrazano-Bridge. Taxpayer support for the project aside, it's one of my great loves in New York City. And you know you're gettin' older when you're older than a bridge.
Saturday, November 20, 2004
The Washington Nationals Are Born!
Well, after months of speculation, including input from baseball fans and sports radio hosts, the Montreal Expos, now relocated from Canada to the U.S. capital, have been renamed: The Washington Nationals. Not quite the Washington Senators of old, but how ... neutral sounding.
I guess that suggestion by one voicer to call the team the "Washington Scandals" was, uh, too descriptive of the town's political reality.
Building an Incredible Revolution
David M. Brown comments on my comments on his comments about "The Incredibles." I had stated that "illustrated media and pop culture are both prime areas for affecting (and reflecting) wider ideological change. Libertarians and individualists need to think more seriously about how to affect that change in entertaining projects that are as widely viewed and praised" as the film in question. In response, Brown makes a very good point here:
Dr. Sciabarra is right. But it's not quite a matter of hatching a plausible cultural-change game plan. Brad Bird and the other folks who made "The Incredibles" tapped a seemingly endless supply of imagination and talent, and comedic timing, and brio, along with whatever other virtues had to be enlisted to produce such swell stuff.
But maybe nurturing our own talents and potential is the ultimate secret ingredient of cultural and ideological change anyway. If we believe in certain things, it's going to show up in our expressive work. But all-important is making sure the work is good, and good as a matter of personal pride and independent vision. And as we see in "The Incredibles," "society" tends to be better off, too, when the individual aspires to admirable heights for his own sake.
There's a reason why this is important. I have been arguing here and elsewhere that politics is not a primary, but an effect of certain extra-political (social and cultural) preconditions. It's one of the reasons I have been profoundly critical of the neoconservative project to bring "democracy" to the Middle East, without those necessary preconditions in place. But that same principle is operative in the United States, where any attempt to change political institutions must proceed on certain social and cultural preconditions. That's why the "Culture War" is so important: because the warriors are arguing over the nature of those preconditions. Are they secular? Are they religious? Are they some mixture thereof? Either or neither, one or both, the point is that the preconditions need to be understood, analyzed, discussed, and debated.
But what must also be emphasized is this: Only the most constructivist among us could possibly believe that cultural change is simply implemented like some Five Year Plan. If we want to change an ideological culture, for example, there will be a delicate exchange among our intended actions (producing books, columns, novels, artworks, etc.) and the unintended consequences of those actions. Ultimately, Brown is right: Each of us needs to nurture our own talents and potentials, not necessarily because we wish to be cultural warriors, but because we have convictions that we wish to express. And if enough of us share those convictions, it will be possible to continue creating and extending a subculture of freedom that can permeate established cultural institutions and forms and the vehicles of popular culture as well. That is how a dominant cultural trend emerges ... not as a top-down edict from Court Intellectuals, not as an enforced Maoist Cultural Revolution, but as a long-term spontaneous development from the efforts of real, concrete individual men and women.
Some on the Left have understood this need to transform culture, spontaneously as it were. And it's the kind of "left-liberal" transformation that has most likely led to the religious reaction we have seen over the last several years. I wrote about this in my book Total Freedom: Toward a Dialectical Libertarianism:
Some socialist theorists recognized the logical contradiction of using the state as a vehicle for human liberation. The Italian Marxist, Antonio Gramsci (1891-1937), distrusted the state's ability to transform society. He thought that the institutions of civil society, which were distinct from the state, could enable people to transcend the coercive character of the state. By augmenting civil institutions, Gramsci argued that coercion would become superfluous as a strategic device. For Gramsci, capitalism would not perish until all spontaneous social forces were fully developed. The hegemony of capitalist institutions could be traced primarily to extra-political power structures, which act in unison to bolster political authority. The "ideological state apparatuses" of religion, education, family, law, communication, culture, political parties and trade unions all helped to maintain the predominance of capitalism. An alternative socialist system could not emerge without attaining a "counter-hegemony" in all these institutions. This "bloc of historical forces" could only develop "within the womb of the old society.”
Gramsci favored the primacy of ideological spheres over economic structures, and of civil society over political society. Hence, a political movement without corresponding cultural change is bound to fail, in Gramsci’s view. Civil society and its self-regulative social relations are the model upon which communism must be based. Rather than violently crush civil society, says Gramsci, the political sphere will be reabsorbed and transformed by civil society.
Some libertarians have learned from Gramsci. Murray Rothbard, for example, much
appreciated Gramsci’s emphasis on the “rich texture of ‘civil society,’ of non-state institutions that are in many ways more influential and determining than the State itself.” Indeed, Gramsci’s counsel that socialists achieve an alternative “cultural hegemony” may have partially influenced Rothbard, in his later years, to embrace the conservatives’ declaration of cultural war against the Left. ... Like Gramsci, Rothbard recognizes the importance of creating "parallel" institutions.
Rothbard argued that, as the systemic crises of the interventionist system developed over time, "a voluntary network of popular revolutionary organs" would be needed to take over the functions of organized struggle. This struggle, he thought, would involve building coalitions with non-libertarians—socialists or conservatives, for example—on various ideological issues. It might also require "civil disobedience or the establishment of a mass-based political party. In all cases, Rothbard insists that the 'tactics to be used' must be 'consistent with the [non-aggression] principles and ultimate goals of a purely free society.'"
So, how on earth did we get to this little discussion from our posts on a little animated movie? Very simply this. As Ayn Rand once said: "Anyone who fights for the future, lives in it today." You want a free society? Fight for its ideals today. Live those ideals. Practice them in your craft in ways that inspire, uplift, and entertain. I say this especially for the benefit of those of us who fashion ourselves as revolutionaries. Changing society, especially against awful odds, can be daunting, discouraging, even grim. But as another revolutionary of a different stripe once said: "If I cannot dance, I want no part in your revolution."
Thursday, November 18, 2004
Rand the Incredible
While we're on the subject of cartoons, David M. Brown at LFB tells us about how various reviewers are seeing the Ayn Rand undercurrents in the animated flick, "The Incredibles." In his post, "The Incredibles' Ayn Rand," Brown writes:
When the animated feature "The Iron Giant" came out in 1999, some libertarians saw a theme of man or robot versus the state, because the movie depicts the government, in the person of a repressive bureaucrat, trying to destroy an innocent and good giant robot. The Pixar production "The Incredibles," directed by "Iron Giant" director Brad Bird, boasts not only more sophisticated animation than "Giant" but perhaps a more sophisticated theme as well. At any rate, more than one reviewer is finding the footprint of Ayn Rand.
I've not seen the film yet, but have heard similar things from other colleagues and friends. If true, of course, it would not be the first time that Rand made it into animation. In my newest essay in The Journal of Ayn Rand Studies, I discuss "The Illustrated Rand," that is, the ways in which Rand and her work have permeated popular culture, giving us a plethora of both positive and negative references. It's a much extended, much more developed piece than its predecessor, "The Cultural Ascendency of Ayn Rand." As I write:
Rand’s presence on television is not restricted to live action dramas or sitcoms. It has also been felt in cartoons. In a “Futurama” episode entitled “Second That Emotion,” the character Bender holds up Atlas Shrugged while commenting that, in the sewer among the mutants, they find “nothing but crumpled porn and Ayn Rand.” In an infamous “South Park” episode called “Chickenlover,” Atlas Shrugged is presented to Officer Barbrady, who has recently learned how to read, and who, upon seeing the massive size of Rand’s novel, laments his achievements in literacy.
I also discuss the more "philosophically astute ... Rand references" that have shown up on “The Simpsons.” In a terrific book (co-edited by our esteemed colleague Aeon Skoble), The Simpsons and Philosophy, authors William Irwin and J. R. Lombardo tell us about that Rand episode:
[I]n “A Streetcar Named Marge,” Maggie is placed in the “Ayn Rand School for Tots” where the proprietor, Mr. Sinclair, reads The Fountainhead Diet. To understand why pacifiers are taken away from Maggie and the other children one has to catch the allusion to the radical libertarian philosophy of Ayn Rand. Recognizing and understanding this allusion yields much more pleasure than would a straightforward explanation that Maggie has been placed in a daycare facility in which tots are trained to fend for themselves, not to depend on others, not even to depend on their pacifiers.
My JARS essay also surveys Rand references in scholarship, film, television shows, music, and comic books, especially the work of Steve Ditko and Frank Miller. Rand herself was no stranger to illustrated media; her Fountainhead was illustrated in a Kings Features serial back in 1945 and Anthem made it into Famous Fantastic Mysteries. With Friedrich Hayek's Road to Serfdom having been illustrated in "cartoon" format in Look, and Ludwig von Mises having being mentioned in Batman comics, and libertarian themes showing up in the comic book character Anarky, I'd say that illustrated media and pop culture are both prime areas for affecting (and reflecting) wider ideological change. Libertarians and individualists need to think more seriously about how to affect that change in entertaining projects that are as widely viewed and praised as The Incredibles.
Wednesday, November 17, 2004
FCC U Soon
As a postscript to my essays on the "Saving Private Ryan" fiasco here and here, there comes this story about the protests of the Family Research Council concerning the ABC broadcast. With protests also over last night's episode of "Monday Night Football Meets Desperate Housewives," this war against "indecency" looks like it's just beginning.
Monday, November 15, 2004
To Be or Not To Be ... Democracy?
I found two very interesting essays in the NY Times this weekend, the second almost a response to the first. In Robert Kagan's essay, "We Broke It, We Bought It," a review of Noah Feldman's book, What We Owe Iraq: War and the Ethics of Nation Building, he writes:
Feldman's most important quality ... may have been his deep belief in the compatibility of Islam and democracy. He belongs to a small but growing movement among scholars of Islam, a group diverse enough to include Gilles Kepel of France and Reuel Marc Gerecht of the United States, that believes the real promise of democracy lies with devout Muslims. In Feldman's first book, ''After Jihad,'' published just before he left for Iraq, he argued that the desire for democracy is widespread among Muslim believers, much more than the desire for violent jihad, and that Islamists should therefore be given a chance to rule. ...
[I]t's not only the Iraqis who have an interest in Iraqi democracy, Feldman says. The United States and Europe have for too long erred both morally and strategically in supporting authoritarian governments in the Arab world. In Egypt, Saudi Arabia and elsewhere, Islamist terrorists ''have long been motivated by their grievances against the authoritarian states in which they live.'' Feldman points out that it was a ''cadre of Egyptian Islamist terrorists, defeated and thus displaced from their traditional battle against the Egyptian state in the 1990's,'' who ''joined forces with Osama bin Laden to create Al Qaeda.'' The answer to the threat of Islamic terrorism, he says, is to engage in nation-building ''aimed at creating democratically legitimate states that would treat their citizens with dignity and respect.''
While many argue that the Iraqis are not ready for democracy, Feldman insists it is the only system that can work. Without exaggerating what elections can accomplish, he makes a practical point often overlooked by skeptics. The diverse complexion of Iraqi society, he observes, means that no single group has the power to impose peace and stability. In order to succeed, an Iraqi government must be accepted as roughly legitimate by a broad cross section of Shiites, Kurds and Sunnis. But how can American officials or any outsiders, or even any Iraqi, know what the people will consider legitimate without asking them? Democracy, Feldman writes, is ''not merely the best political arrangement,'' it is ''the only option other than chaos.'' It helps that Iraq's Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani appears to be the kind of Muslim leader Feldman is counting on: a Shiite cleric who by word and deed has so far proven himself sincerely committed to democracy. One gets the sense that Feldman and Sistani were tacit allies in pushing for an Iraqi state that can be both Islamic and free.
Feldman admits that there have been many "American mistakes," but he's hopeful that democracy will come.
How can such political institutions emerge, however, when we are dealing with what Robert D. Kaplan calls, "Barren Ground for Democracy"? Kaplan proceeds on the premise that "while democracy can take root anywhere, ... it cannot be imposed overnight anywhere." He writes of the U.S. occupation of Iraq:
What we are witnessing is a legacy of history and geography—factors often denied by both liberal and conservative interventionists—catching up with America. Had our political leaders considered such factors, I suspect, they might have avoided some of the disasters of the occupation. These factors should also give President Bush pause as he plans to "spread freedom" in his second term. ... [T]he idea that Western-style democracy could be imposed further east and south, in the Balkans, has proved ... problematic. Beyond the Carpathian mountains one finds a different historical legacy: that of the poorer and more chaotic Ottoman Empire. Before World War II, this was a world of vast peasantries and feeble middle classes, which revealed itself in Communist governments that were for the most part more corrupt and despotic than those of Central Europe. Unsurprisingly, upon Communism's collapse, Romania, Bulgaria and Albania struggled for years on the brink of anarchy, although they at least avoided ethnic bloodshed. Of course, Yugoslavia was not so lucky. Though democracy appears to have a reasonably bright future there thanks to repeated Western intervention, it is wise to recall that for 15 years it has been a touch-and-go proposition.
Undeterred, Wilsonian idealists in the United States next put Iraq on their list for gun-to-the-head democratization. But compared with Iraq, even the Balkans were historically blessed, by far the most culturally and politically advanced part of the old Turkish Empire. Mesopotamia, on the other hand, constituted the most anarchic and tribalistic region of the sultanate. ... Iraq is bordered by Iran and Syria, states with weakly policed borders and prone to radical politics, which themselves have suffered under absolutism for centuries. Western intellectuals on both the left and right underplayed such realities. In the 1990's, those supporting humanitarian intervention in Yugoslavia branded references to difficult history and geography as "determinism" and "essentialism"—academic jargon for fatalism. In the views of liberal internationalists and neoconservatives, group characteristics based on a shared history and geography no longer mattered, for in a post-cold war world of globalization everyone was first and foremost an individual. Thus if Poland, say, was ready overnight for Western-style democracy, then so too were Bosnia, Russia, Iraq—and Liberia, for that matter. ...
By invading Iraq, Republican neoconservatives—the most fervent of Wilsonians—simply took that liberal idealist argument ... to its logical conclusion. Indeed, given that Saddam Hussein was ultimately responsible for the violent deaths of several times more people than the Yugoslav dictator Slobodan Milosevic, how could any liberal in favor of intervention in the Balkans not also favor it in the case of Iraq? And because the human rights abuses in Iraq showed no sign of abatement, much like those in the Balkans, our intervention was justified in order to stop an ongoing rape-and-killing machine.
But rather than a replay of the Balkans in 1995 and 1999, Iraq has turned out like the Indian mutiny against the British in 1857 and 1858, when the attempts of Evangelical and Utilitarian reformers in London to modernize and Christianize India—to make it more like England—were met with a violent revolt against imperial rule. Delhi, Lucknow and other cities were besieged and captured, before being retaken by colonial forces. The bloody debacle did not signal the end of the British Empire, which expanded for another century. But it did signal a transition: away from an ad hoc imperium fired by an intemperate lust to impose domestic values abroad, and toward a calmer, more pragmatic empire built on international trade and technology. ...
I recommend both articles to your attention.
Friday, November 12, 2004
The Force of Morality
While many Kerry-supporting "blues" are blaming evangelicals for Kerry's loss (as if the social-conservatives were the only reason for the Democrat's denouement) and some Bush-supporting "reds" are busy denying that religious-right voters have any real electoral power (I still find it odd calling states backing the party of Joe McCarthy "red") ... it is certainly true that the Culture War is heating up. In this regard, the election was only a symptom, not a cause.
There are many ironies in this culture war. Some conservatives of a pro-war vintage are claiming that the "blues" are fear-mongers for focusing on the evangelicals; they suggest that Bush's war stance is the reason for his victory. Such a writer as Christopher Hitchens, in fact, has so downplayed the dangers of domestic fundamentalism, that he's recrafted Bush's re-election as a "secularist victory." Secularism is relative, I suppose, given that Hitchens does note correctly another irony: that some antiwar advocates, who are incensed over the domestic fundamentalists, are too busy downplaying the dangers of fundamentalism abroad.
Now, granted, the sword-wielding Islamic fundamentalists, who seek to cut off the head of licentious Western civilization, may share something with the domestic fundamentalists. But these jihadists make our domestic variety look like pansies by comparison.
Still, despite the vast differences between them, fundamentalists of all stripes seek to use the power of the state to bolster their own particular vision of morality. Jerry Falwell has already spoken of reconstituting his Moral Majority for the 21st century (yes, that's 2-1, not 1-2). Criticizing some of his conservative compatriots for belittling the fundamentalist electoral achievement, Falwell was elated that "more than 30 million evangelicals 'voted Christian' [on] Nov. 2, when 116 million Americans cast ballots. He predicted the number of evangelical voters will jump to 'at least 40 million' in 2008." And Bob Jones 3rd, president of the college bearing his name, wrote a letter to President Bush saying: "In your reelection, God has graciously granted America—though she doesn't deserve it—a reprieve from the agenda of paganism."
What is being heralded is a "moral revolution" that is attacking American "indecency" and "perversion," the kind of "perversion" that Falwell once said was a critical factor in bringing about the tragedy of 9/11 (something with which the jihadists might agree).
Nevertheless, if this were just a revolution requiring a battle over ideas, we'd all stand a better chance if we debated the issues rationally, while barring all groups from using state power to forge their ideological battles.
One of those battles took place yesterday. Last night, as I reported, "Saving Private Ryan" was to be preempted in various markets because ABC affiliates feared indecency fines from the Federal Communications Commission. Initially, it was reported that 65 ABC stations, in markets as large as Boston, Dallas, and Cleveland, would refuse to air the film. As it turned out, a little more than 20 ABC affiliates declined to show "Ryan." All of this is a long-term consequence of the FCC's war on "vulgarity" in American media, following the Janet Jackson nipple controversy. (At least some people have retained a sense of humor through all this: Dolly Parton, in concert last night at the Theater at Continental Airlines Arena, actually cautioned that she could be a lot more nasty than Miss Jackson: "If I pull a Janet Jackson, I'm gonna take out about four rows.")
Ironically, Brent Bozell, of the Parents Television Council, who mounted the post-Super Bowl protest and who applauds the FCC's fining of the indecent on TV, himself protested against this "Ryan" blackout.
Too bad Bozell! You rubbed the FCC bottle, the genie popped out, and now, you're not likely to stuff it back in. This is now creating a stultifying atmosphere for American media that is far worse than any possible fines the FCC can levy trying to force people to be "decent" and "moral."
But you can't force anybody to be moral. Genuinely moral choices are moral because they are choices, not decisions forced on people at the point of a gun. The precondition of any moral revolution is a simple maxim, one that must serve as a basic minimum for any rational discussion of values: "Leave your guns outside." As Ayn Rand said in For the New Intellectual, even people who disagree over the nature, function, and purpose of moral values must stop equating "the power of physical compulsion with the power of persuasion." That's not likely to happen, however, as long as groups, of whatever value orientation—be they right-wing religious fundamentalists or left-wing "secular" do-gooders—choose to ram their agendas down our throats.
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Thursday, November 11, 2004
Is Something Wrong with this Picture?
Ever since Nipplegate (the fiasco at the Super Bowl when Janet Jackson flashed a breast to a rather large TV audience), the TV networks have been a little apprehensive about violating FCC "decency standards." Well, today of all days, on the occasion of Veteran's Day, comes this report from the NY Daily News. Richard Huff tells us in his article, "Fear over 'Private' Parts," that, tonight, "a handful of ABC affiliates will not air Steven Spielberg's critically acclaimed war film"—"Saving Private Ryan."
The film is one of my favorite war films; fortunately, I live in New York City, where we, apparently, have no decency standards, so I won't have to deal with this censorial travesty. But Raymond Cole, president of ABC's affiliate in Des Moines, Iowa, remarks: "We regret that we are not able to broadcast a patriotic, artistic tribute to our fighting forces like 'Saving Private Ryan.'" Cole
cited concerns that the film would not meet the Federal Communications Commission's decency standards. "Can a movie with an 'M' rating, however prestigious the production or poignant the subject matter, be shown before 10p.m.?" Cole asked. "With the current FCC, we just don't know." ... Station managers are concerned that the FCC, which has stepped up its indecency investigations after Janet Jackson's breast was bared during the Feb. 1 Super Bowl, will go after "Saving Private Ryan," as well.
Since the movie has "many intense battle scenes" (that opening sequence is, in my view, one of the most harrowing battle sequences ever filmed), and much frank language, all the viewer warnings in the world won't quell the anxieties of some of the affiliates in this post-Nipplegate atmosphere. Initially, back in June 2002, the FCC "found no problems" with the film; but that was a different time, even if it had come just a few months after John Ashcroft spent $8,000 in taxpayer funds to cover the breasts of the Statue of Justice.
The Parents Television Council assures us that it won't file a complaint against the "Ryan" telecast, but ABC is still going to double "the number of on-air warnings about the movie's content"—in those markets where the film is actually shown.
I have only one response to all this: FUBAR.
Tuesday, November 9, 2004
The Problem of Iran
Just a note to direct attention to Kenneth Pollack's NY Times Op-Ed piece, "What the Mullahs Learned From Their Neighbors," which deals with the problem of Iran. Readers will remember that Pollack, author of the immensely influential book, The Threatening Storm: The Case for Invading Iraq (Random House, 2002), backtracked from his support for the Iraq war. He has said, in quite a few articles, that he "made a mistake" in his advocacy of that war, based on "faulty intelligence." He also believes, at this time, that an Iran with nuclear weapons is possible, and that we should not assume that the Iranians would deal these weapons to Al Qaeda, a group to which it is vehemently opposed.
In today's essay, Pollack details the ways in which the international community might deal with Iran. Given my own interest in this subject, I found Pollack's essay a good read.
Monday, November 8, 2004
Conservative Crackup, Part Deux
I've written quite a bit about the "Conservative Crack-Up." David D. Kirkpatrick, in yesterday's "Week in Review" section of the NY Times revisits his April 2004 topic, telling us all how "The Antiwar Right Is Ready to Rumble." Kirkpatrick writes:
The euphoria of Mr. Bush's victory postponed the battle, but not for long. Now that Mr. Bush has secured re-election, some conservatives who say they held their tongues through the campaign season are speaking out against the neoconservatives, against the war and in favor of a speedy exit. They argue that the war is a political liability to the Republican Party, but also that it runs counter to traditional conservatives' disdain for altruist interventions to make far-off parts of the world safe for American-style democracy. ... On Thursday, Paul Weyrich, founder of the Heritage Foundation and chairman of the Free Congress Foundation, issued a call to conservatives for a serious debate about the administration's foreign policy. "The consequences of the neocons' adventure in Iraq are now all too clear," he said. "America is stuck in a guerrilla war with no end in sight. Our military is stretched too thin to respond to other threats. And our real enemies, nonstate organizations such as Al Qaeda, are benefiting from the Arab and Islamic backlash against our occupation of an Islamic country." ... "A lot of the antiwar conservatives had to hold their tongue during the campaign because the No. 1 goal was to get Bush re-elected," said Stephen Moore, a senior fellow at the Cato Institute and an important conservative fund-raiser. ...
One wonders why that should have been the No. 1 goal in the first place. I suppose they all thought it was a relative question; Mr. Bush has not been much of a traditional conservative in fiscal or foreign policy matters, but Mr. Kerry offered little hope for a rightward shift.
Ugh. Like I've said before: "A Pox on Both Their Houses."
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"Ben-Hur" Comes to Iraq
Last February, I wrote about The Exorcist Experience in Iraq. "The Exorcist" is one of my favorite horror movies of all time, so the thought that they were giving tours of the site where the movie's opening sequence was filmed was quite fascinating to me.
Well, I've just learned that the troops in Iraq, awaiting orders for the blitz of Fallujah, have needed another Hollywood diversion: running chariot games right out of "Ben-Hur," which just so happens to be my favorite film of all time. "The First Annual 'Ben-Hur' Memorial Chariot Race" has provided the troops with some much-needed entertainment.
I can't wait for the day that the U.S. armed forces re-enact another film: "The Great Escape."
Sunday, November 7, 2004
The Base Secure ... Now Check Its Premises
I would have posted these comments in the various threads to which they relate, but I find myself wanting to address issues raised by a number of our faithful contributors.
First, I'd like to address legitimate points made by Sheldon Richman in his "Ugh" post. Sheldon puts his finger on some very important points that we should not forget. It is surely true that "the left-socialist pundits and cultural elite" have serious problems. I suppose that part of my own revulsion toward some of those on the evangelical right is rooted in the fact that the debate has shifted rightward in American politics, and it is only natural that those of us who normally would be identified as "right-wing" simply because of our support for the free market would spend some time critiquing other "right-wingers." This is not unusual; I have always believed that New Leftists of the revisionist historical variety have been among the most trenchant critics of the liberal-welfare state. Sometimes, those on the "inside" of the old left-right political paradigm are in the best position to critique other insiders.
The main problem, however, is that libertarians essentially transcend the conventional left-right dichotomy.
I agree with Sheldon that "the typical Bush voter" is most likely "not a racist, gay-bashing, theocratic fascist." The typical voter supports the war and the other conservative positions for more "common sense" reasons than those provided by evangelical preachers or neoconservative intellectuals. And I'd venture to say that Sheldon is probably correct that many of these pro-Bush voters "probably generally favor smaller government over bigger government," even if Bush has proven that he's fully a part of the "bigger government" contingent. We do not serve our purpose if we demonize the men and women on the street who are just searching to provide themselves and their loved ones with decent and safe lives. I have argued these points explicitly in my "Caught Up in The Rapture" article:
A few caveats are in order. In this discussion, I have not made any broad claim about religion, per se, as a corrupting social force. Nor have I indicted people’s right to worship or voice their religiously inspired political beliefs as they please. We live in a historical moment when people are searching desperately for guidance in the face of terrorism and war. That there are legitimate secular alternatives to religion, which might provide us with spiritually uplifting answers, does not obscure the fact that religion exists. It is not about to wither away anytime soon; it is not about to be wiped out as "the opiate of the masses." It will continue to provide many individuals with the emotional fuel they require to make sense of life’s tragic circumstances.
Moreover, this discussion is not meant to indict any particular religion or sect. That some pietists have endorsed government intervention does not mean that all pietists are "evil." Even in today’s culture, pietists are not the only religious group wreaking havoc with American politics. And there are many other non- (or anti-)religious ideological groups trying to ram their particular social agendas down the throats of the American people; some of these groups are notably secular and left-wing. That’s just the nature of the society in which we live, a society where government’s raison d’etre is not the protection of individual rights, but the dispensation of privilege. That governmental role has had the effect of multiplying the number of groups engaged in internecine competition for political or social benefits, and these groups will be inspired by any number of religious or secular ideological doctrines.
That our focus here has been on the indecent impact of religion on politics, however, does not mean that religious people are incapable of being decent. The lessons of the Old and New Testaments, with their select stories of human redemption and human dignity, have had a measurable positive impact on many good and moral individuals. That supreme atheist, Ayn Rand, once said that religion had long monopolized "the highest moral concepts of our language," such notions as "exaltation," "worship," "reverence," and the "sacred," all of which speak to legitimate, this-worldly human needs. She readily affirmed the importance of certain religious doctrines to the evolution of the ideas of individualism and freedom, and celebrated individuals such as St. Thomas Aquinas for acting as the Aristotelian progenitor to the Renaissance. ...
[However,] [t]he central issue is that more and more Americans are enraptured by a religious sensibility that is becoming increasingly influential on popular culture and on domestic and foreign policy. Religion is being used by the representatives of government and politically constituted groups as a statist tool for the remaking of the modern world. And therein lies the danger.
The Founding Fathers—most of them deist in their religious orientation—understood the supreme importance of the separation of church and state, even if they sought the entitlements of rights and revolution on the basis of the "laws of nature and of nature’s God." For those of us who understand the equally important separation of economy and state, it is clear that the erosion of these principles has led to the erosion of the very rights for which the Founders fought.
It will take nothing less than an intellectual and cultural revolution to rediscover—and implement—these sacred political principles that stand at the core of the distinctly American imagination.
On this last point, I'll cite Ayn Rand again. Rand was well aware of the fact that many people tacitly accepted certain ideas without really grasping the premises of those ideas. Her whole ethical system can be understood as a means of shifting what Michael Polanyi once called "the tacit coefficient of meaning," that is, making explicit that which is merely implicit in people's economic, political, social, or cultural ideas and/or practices. In the end, she argued that it is only by "checking one's premises" that one could begin to articulate a radical alternative. "Ideas cannot be fought except by means of better ideas," she wrote. "The battle consists not of opposing, but of exposing; not of denouncing, but of disproving; not of evading, but of boldly proclaiming a full, consistent and radical alternative."
My opposition to religious fundamentalism is no less forceful than my opposition to the secular leftists who endorse their own brands of worship. But I do stand by my view that the rising tide of religious fundamentalism in this country played a crucial role in the re-election of George W. Bush, and it is Bush's pietistic ideology, as I have argued, that is particularly troublesome insofar as he is inspired by it to mount the kinds of domestic and foreign policy initiatives that I reject.
Irfan Khawaja remarks, however, that my position that the evangelical vote was necessary to the achievement of Bush's re-election means that if we remove the evangelical vote, Bush would not have been re-elected. (For fans of internal relations, I guess we can say that this implies that the evangelical vote was internal to Bush's victory such that the removal of it would have fundamentally altered the outcome.) I'd tend to agree with that proposition if it were possible to view the situation with the proviso, "other factors being equal." Unfortunately, I do not believe it is a legitimate conclusion in a multi-causal model of voter behavior. For example, I will admit that if it were possible to separate attitudes from within a fundamentalist voter's mind, some of these voters would have still supported Bush on the question of national security quite apart from their religious convictions. But as John Arthur Shaffer suggests in his comments on Arthur Silber's post, "Don't Blame the Victim," it is not that easy to separate out specific positions from the fundamentalist, who, like any other person committed to a set of integrated ideological beliefs, sees those positions as an expression of an essential core.
Yes, people do vote for candidates for a variety of reasons, and I don't think we bolster our case by ignoring those reasons. But we also cannot ignore the core beliefs of a certain sector of the electorate that voted in overwhelming numbers for a specific candidate. It's all about checking the premises of those core beliefs, not singling out the believers as "evil," because those beliefs reflect the stated beliefs of the very man whom the believers supported en masse.
While we're pointing fingers at the liberal-left for denigrating these believers, let's put all of this in perspective. There is irony here in that the left-liberal critics ultimately agree with Karl Rove and the President's key strategists, from whom we heard the constant mantra throughout this election season: "First, secure the base." Rove dreamed of solidifying and extending that base. To a very large extent, those dreams were realized. Recognizing the brilliance of that strategy is a backhanded compliment, if you will, to Karl Rove, coming from those who decry its outcome.
And given the comments of Barry Rosenthal and Tex here, I think a persuasive case can be made that, indeed, the Rove strategy was critical to the particular success in Ohio, a state without whose electoral votes, Bush would have lost. The anti-gay marriage and anti-gay civil union amendment won in that state by a 62% to 38% vote, with a 1.2 million vote differential, as Barry reports. Bush won the state by 136,000+ votes. Exit polls reported that close to 70% of supporters of the Ohio ban voted for Bush. If that ban were not on the ballot, not firing up a certain group of evangelical voters who voted also for Bush, Kerry may have eked out a narrow victory in Ohio. Republican strategists understood this, as Tex suggests, which is why the Bush campaign encouraged the Ohio ban initiative, running advertisements on radio, by phone, and in mass mailings.
Nothing I say here contradicts points made by Irfan and others that many voters, quite apart from that fundamentalist bloc, voted for Bush because they saw in him a steady, self-confident leader in the war on terrorism. That, coupled with a very effective campaign which targeted Kerry's lack of credibility, clarity, and consistency, made for a winning formula. Rove said as much this morning on "Meet the Press." It takes a lot more than a fundamentalist base to deliver Bush the Presidency with a higher percentage of the vote than any Democratic candidate since LBJ's 1964 landslide, as Rove suggested.
But the mantra is still valid: "First secure the base." Rove did. Bush won.
Finally, I agree with Irfan on many of the points he makes about Ronald Reagan, and I agree that Reagan said a lot of awful and outrageous things during his presidency. More importantly, his practical legacy did not match his rhetorical one. Still, my admiration for Reagan remains focused on Reagan at his libertarian rhetorical best, as I express here and here. I just don't find the same libertarian rhetorical streak in George W. Bush. And perhaps, in the long run, that is best. I wouldn't want Bush to be mistakenly identified as a libertarian. Mistaking Reagan for a libertarian had its costs, after all.
Saturday, November 6, 2004
Clarifying the Bush Victory: Understanding a Multi-Pronged Threat
Folks, let's clear up a few misconceptions. Here is what I argued the other day in my first post-election analysis, "I Told You So":
I [had] suggested back then [seven months ago] that Bush's fundamentalist religious base would be fortified and that it would play a crucial role in his victory. The President clearly retained that constituency and strengthened its support.
Let's emphasize that key sentence: "...Bush's fundamentalist religious base would be fortified and that it would play a crucial role in his victory." I did not argue before, and I have not argued since, that religious zealotry is the causal factor in Bush's re-election. It was necessary to his victory, but not sufficient. And, in fact, given the complexities of the electorate, there are, without doubt, many factors that led to Bush's re-election, not the least of which is historical precedent. As I argued in my May 2004 article:
Barring any massive attack on the U.S. home front, or an utterly devastating defeat in Iraq, on a par with, say, a Shi’ite and Sunni uprising that slaughters thousands of American troops, his approval rating will most likely remain stable. Even if the foreign policy arena should collapse for Bush, history shows that, in times of war, few Presidents are turned out of office, since the electorate rarely changes horses in mid-apocalypse. ... Other things being equal, voters are not going to choose Kerry, when they’ve already got in Bush a Republican dedicated to all the conventional Democratic planks: an expanding welfare state, budget deficits, and a war abroad. ...But Kerry himself has enormous credibility problems, which I fully expect the Bush campaign to exploit.
So, why did I quote from Garry Wills, if, as my colleague Irfan Khawaja puts it, I'm merely observing that "religion ... played one significant role among others," rather than the crucial role? Simply: Because it is significant.
As I stated in my May 2004 "Bush Wins!" article, a prelude to my sequel, "Caught Up in The Rapture":
In any event, there are far more significant cultural forces at work here that, I believe, will virtually assure Bush’s victory. The character of those forces, the impact they are having on mass media, popular culture, and American politics, is [significant]. ... [T]he Christian fundamentalist movement ... is a movement whose hero is George W. Bush, and it is Bush who embodies some of its most troubling tendencies. Troubling or not, if the fundamentalists "get out the vote," Bush’s victory is assured.
So, we can argue all we want over the raw statistics, and over the significance of this or that state among the 50 contests. But there is a claim here that is simply irrefutable in my view: Without the support of his core constituency, Bush loses the election. It was necessary to his victory, but certainly not sufficient. I do not know many (any?) people who are putting all their eggs in one basket on this question, and it would be utterly foolish to make any stronger claim.
Let's retrace our steps. In my recent post, "Declaring War Against Zealotry," I stated the following:
I must say that I was a bit annoyed some months ago when I was routinely criticized by those who supported the President despite their reservations about his religious agenda, because I dared to suggest that he was using religion as a political and cultural weapon for the re-making of the modern world. When I wrote my essay about the alarming growth in evangelical Christianity as a mainstream cultural force, I knew that such growth would have vast political implications. These critics kept telling me that I was "overdoing" it. In my view, the election results yesterday are much too clear to ignore.
Here is the reason for my annoyance: When my "Rapture" essay was published, people said I was exaggerating the growth of the evangelical movement. Such criticisms were beyond the pale, in my view, because they simply did not take into account the central claims of my essay on the cultural mainstreaming of fundamentalism in this country. Here's what I said in the "Rapture" piece:
In 2004, estimates of weekly church attendance vary wildly. Some place the figure at 75 million; others believe that it is nearly double that. Either way, once we adjust the numbers for non-Christian denominations, it is clear that tens of millions of people are committed to some kind of religious observance ...
As an aside, the exit polls suggest that those "once-a-week churchgoers" gave 58% of their vote to Bush, while 41% voted for Kerry. So I don't think it a leap of faith to infer that a sizable number of individuals who claimed "moral values" as an important issue meant religious moral values rather than, say, any secular ethical standard celebrating "man's life qua man."
Here are the more important issues raised by my June 2004 study, and I quote from that study at length (deleting footnotes, which can be found in the original piece):
Throughout American cultural history, there have been many so-called spiritual surges, "Great Awakenings," which had huge political implications. Today, another spiritual surge is taking place. As Walter Kirn puts it, that surge is absorbing pop culture: "Christianity doesn’t compete with pop culture," says Kirn. "It is pop culture." In many respects, this new awakening has been a reaction to the secular left’s nihilistic relativism, one that rejects the very possibility of moral certainty. "Just as postmodernism in the arts seemed to be winning acceptance from the masses," Kirn writes, "a recycled premodernism has emerged that rejects ambiguity and ambivalence for the old Sunday-morning certainties." The premodernists—who are now characterized as "fundamentalists," though they are a pietist offshoot—have adopted the "populist, media-savvy" techniques of a thoroughly modern age to get the message out.
These fundamentalists genuinely understand the nature of mass marketing. From the sale of "Jesus is My Homeboy" T-shirts to the creation of alternative churches in coffee bars and warehouses to the publication of slick magazines and updated, modern Bible translations, fundamentalists of various stripes have tapped into pop culture and its new technologies to spread the gospel. They have even attracted niche subcultures with such organizations as the Christian Tattoo Association, which includes over 100 member shops. Some Christian bands now embrace punk and goth styles, while others put the Rap in Rapture: yes, there are even rap artists who underlay Christian-themed poetry with phat hip hop beats. While the rest of the music industry has seen a decline since the events of September 11, the Christian music market has had a 13.5% increaseperhaps a reflection of the very search for meaning that such a horrific tragedy has engendered. "God is everywhere you look in pop culture these days," observes Carolyn Callahan—in holiday cards, board games, toys, and periodicals.
Christian merchandising is a $4.2 billion industry, which includes a $100 million video game business. The Christian book market is particularly lucrative: Evangelist Rick Warren has sold 15 million copies of his book, The Purpose-Driven Life: What on Earth Am I Here For? There are even Christian diet books that sit alongside Atkins and South Beach manuals: The Maker’s Diet helps you to lose weight by eating just like Jesus. From number one best-selling books such as The Da Vinci Code to "Joan of Arcadia" on television and "Bruce Almighty" on the silver screen, God is Hip and Hot.
A blockbuster film such as "The Passion of the Christ"—which was condemned initially as "anti-Semitic" by some critics—has now grossed nearly $400 million. That figure does not include director Mel Gibson’s cross-promotional merchandising effortssales on such items as metal replica crucifixion nails and thorn-adorned necklaces and bracelets. The extremely violent content of the film seems to have inspired some churches to more realistically dramatize the redemption through most precious blood. Some of these dramatizations express forcefully a wrath for the secular "pagan" symbols of the Easter holiday. As the Associated Press reports, in one instance, at an Easter show in Glassport, Pennsylvania, children were traumatized as the actors whipped the Easter bunny and crushed Easter eggs on stage. Performers declared: "There is no Easter Bunny." One 4-year old child cried hysterically, asking his mother "why the bunny was being whipped." "It was very disturbing," said another parent. The youth minister at Glassport Assembly of God said that they were only trying "to convey that Easter is not just about the Easter Bunny. It is about Jesus Christ."
Far more disturbing, however, is the fact that traditionally opposed Protestant pietists and Catholic liturgicals have moved toward a kind of political consolidation. Laurie Goodstein argues that evangelicals and conservative Catholics "have forged an alliance that is reshaping American politics and culture." Both of these groups flocked to see the Gibson film, sensing a common "losing battle against secularism, relativism and a trend that the Christianity Today editorial brands ‘hypermodern individualism.’"
One thing that might prevent full political cooperation between these groups is the fact that many Protestants still view Catholics—who reject the Rapture—as "apostates." Indeed, in the ever-popular Left Behind book series, written by Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins, a Catholic cardinal actually assists the Antichrist.
My article then goes on to discuss the contents of that 12-volume book series, a "pulpy epic" as it has been called, "which has already sold in excess of 60 million copies in the past nine years." (As I remind fans of Ayn Rand in the article, by way of comparison, "Rand’s book sales have been impressive—probably around 20 million total copies of her collected works and all translations over the past sixty years—but this figure pales in comparison to the LaHaye-Jenkins series.")
So, in the end, I do agree with Garry Wills's suggestion that this specific cultural tendency is pre-Enlightenment, nay, anti-Enlightenment. I have argued, however, that Wills "overstates his case," but that does not impugn the fact that this evangelical movement is a threat to American liberty. And while it may not have guaranteed a Bush victory, Bush could never have won without the support of this constituency. Period. "The Architect" Karl Rove understood this, and worked very hard to solidify that evangelical base for Bush. He succeeded. Bush won.
Now, I don't think we should reject as trivial the observation "that religious people like Bush," as Irfan puts it. I also don't believe that we are even talking about "the country as a whole ... devolving into some anti-Enlightenment abyss." But the evidence I present in my article (from which I quoted above) documents a trend that cannot be ignored. This is not a pro-reason, this-worldly cultural movement. It is a growing religious movement that has learned to use savvy modern mass marketing techniques. And it has crucially important political ramifications.
I'd like to make one more, somewhat tangential point, in response to Irfan's claim of "little difference" between Reagan and Bush Jr. I recognize completely that Reagan was among the first to tap into the evangelical movement. But there is a key difference. Reagan tried to build a coalition of evangelicals, fiscal conservatives (so-called "supply-siders"), and "libertarian" conservatives. He was also an inspiring speaker (not a self-confessed "mangler" of the English language for sure) who more often than not used libertarian rhetoric, even if his policies were less-than-libertarian.
As I say in my "Rapture" essay:
George W. Bush, however, has virtually dropped Reagan’s libertarian rhetoric, while embracing a far more pronounced pietistic ideology. ... The Bush administration has thus become a focal point for the constellation of two crucial impulses in American politics that seek to remake the world: pietism and neoconservatism. The neocons, who come from a variety of religious backgrounds, trace their intellectual lineage to social democrats and Trotskyites, those who adopted the "God-builder" belief, prevalent in Russian Marxist and Silver Age millennial thought, that a perfect (socialist) society could be constructed as if from an Archimedean standpoint. The neocons may have repudiated Trotsky’s socialism, but they have simply adopted his constructivism to the project of building democratic nation-states among other groups of warring fundamentalists—in the Middle East.
One last tangential point: I went into the voting booth and voted for every race except for President. I refused to cast a ballot for either Kerry or Bush, and just thought a Libertarian vote was futile in this instance. But I am not at all convinced that Kerry would have done more harm to this country economically than Bush has done already, and there is some historical evidence to suggest that a Democratic President dealing with a Republican Congress would have been institutionally constrained.
All of this is moot. Bush won. As I have been arguing for many months, his victory would be derived from many factors for sure, factors that most assuredly include terrorism and not changing "horses in mid-apocalypse." But among those factors is his crucially important support from an evangelical voting bloc that has gained political leverage and cultural clout. We minimize the extent of that leverage and that clout at our great peril.
I stand opposed to Bush's fiscal irresponsibility. I stand opposed to his social conservatism. I stand opposed to his foreign policy adventures. And I stand opposed to those who see in Bush a Moral Crusader, not because I oppose morality, but because I repudiate the specific nature of that Crusade.
Friday, November 5, 2004
A Pox on Both Their Houses
I must confess that this morning's NY Times has given me a much-needed chuckle. The Op-Ed section has a group of articles written by a bunch of liberal Democrats trying to rally the spirit of the "minority party." Since I now have a little track record for my soothsaying, I'll make another prediction, though this one is a lot easier: The Democrats will never present any radical alternative to the GOP. And those who think it possible are deluding themselves.
In this spirit, Paul Krugman screams: "No Surrender!." He says that
Bush isn't a conservative. He's a radical—the leader of a coalition that deeply dislikes America as it is. Part of that coalition wants to tear down the legacy of Franklin Roosevelt, eviscerating Social Security and, eventually, Medicare.
First, I must take grave exception to calling Bush a "radical." Call him a reactionary if you will, but please don't sully the good name of radicals everywhere. Second ... puhlease! Many of the neoconservatives who now support Bush are former social democrats, full-fledged supporters of the New Deal. Nobody is going to get rid of FDR's "legacy," because it is now part of the American Third Way, one that repudiates both capitalism and socialism, while finding more "efficient" ways to deliver welfare programs. Let's not forget that this President has presided over the most expansive extension of Medicare since the days of Lyndon Baines Johnson. As I said: PUHLEASE.
In fact, Bush has a lot in common with LBJ: As I wrote here, he has endorsed all the "conventional Democratic planks: an expanding welfare state, budget deficits, and a war abroad." And let's not forget that the Democrats, including Senator John Kerry, lined up like ducks on a lake to give this President the authority to go to war in Iraq. Democratic duplicity or, worse, self-delusion, is everywhere.
Democrat Andrei Cherny wonders "Why We Lost":
On Wednesday morning, Democrats across the country awoke to a situation they have not experienced since before the New Deal: We are now, without a doubt, America's minority party. We do not have the presidency. We are outnumbered in the Senate, the House, governorships and legislatures. And the conservative majority on the Supreme Court seems likely to be locked in place for a generation. It is clearly a moment that calls for serious reflection.
Indeed, Mr. Cherny. But let's not forget that this is all partially an outgrowth of the very New Deal that your Democratic Party built, and that the Republicans learned to co-opt after decades of saying "me-too." Gone is fiscal conservatism. Gone is opposition to the welfare state. Gone is any opposition to the warfare state, which was so much a part of the Old Right (like that Grand Old Republican, Robert Taft). The warfare state opposition, in fact, has now been relegated to a small "paleocon" minority led by Patrick Buchanan, who, nevertheless, still endorses the social agenda of the evangelical Christians.
Boy, American politics is God-awful, isn't it?
Getting back to Cherny: In essence, he argues that despite "sensible and right" policies proposed by Democrats, they "don't have" and "sorely need ... what President George H. W. Bush so famously derided as 'the vision thing'—a worldview that makes a thematic argument about where America is headed and where we want to take it." This is in contrast to the old New Deal Democrat, who once "had a bold vision: we would use government programs to make Americans' lives more stable and secure." But Cherny acknowledges that even Bill Clinton declared famously "that 'the era of big government is over.'"
Alas, it's not over. What is over, however, is the illusion of the limited-government Republican. George W. Bush has succeeded, partially, because he is a Big Government Conservative. His administration has merged the techniques of the Trotskyite Left with the goals of both the evangelical and neoconservative Right. Indeed, that neoconservative Right is, itself, an emigree from the Trotskyite Left. And it takes seriously the goals of another Great Democrat, Woodrow Wilson, in its desire to make the world safe for democracy. One might say that the GOP success owes something to the ability of that party to absorb, rather than to repudiate, the legacy of Wilson, FDR, and LBJ.
Another, older, generation of Republicans was largely unsuccessful in toppling the Democrats' monopolizing of the White House from 1932 through 1968. Only a former World War II General was able to stick himself in-between the FDR-Truman years and the JFK-LBJ years. The Republicans were ultimately successful at getting elected because they adopted what Ayn Rand once called "political 'me-too-ism'," thus becoming a part of the mediocrity of the middle. She wrote, back in the early 1960s, that this me-too-ism "abjectly displayed by the 'conservatives' of today toward their brazenly socialistic adversaries, is only the result and the feeble reflection of the ethical 'me-too-ism' displayed by the philosophers of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, by the alleged champions of reason, toward the Witch Doctors of morality." Now, alas, the Witch Doctors of morality are in ascendance. And just as the Republicans had once offered a "me-too" or, better yet, "I'll-get-it-for-you-wholesale" response to their left-leaning Democratic opponents, as Rand said, the Democrats have responded in kind, mostly with a promise to manage government operations more "efficiently." From Michael Dukakis, who stressed "competence" in his bout against Bush Sr. to John Kerry, who said he'd wage a more "efficient" war in his bout against Bush Jr., the Democrats have rarely offered anything substantially different from the Republicans. Their recent successes came only with Bill Clinton, who was as close to a Republican in his "New Democrat" philosophy as any Democrat is liable to get, insofar as he co-opted "Republican" themes like "welfare reform" and "balanced budgets."
These positions start to morph into one another, and nobody, nobody on either side of this divide is repudiating Big Government.
In the end, with both parties having mastered various forms of pragmatic moral appeasement, each remains a full-fledged defender of the activist state. Their constituencies may differ, their rhetorical emphases may shift, but neither party is questioning the fundamental premises upon which this politico-economic system is based. And neither will present the kind of bold, secular alternative upon which freedom might flourish.
Thursday, November 4, 2004
Declaring War Against Zealotry
I must say that I was a bit annoyed some months ago when I was routinely criticized by those who supported the President despite their reservations about his religious agenda, because I dared to suggest that he was using religion as a political and cultural weapon for the re-making of the modern world. When I wrote my essay about the alarming growth in evangelical Christianity as a mainstream cultural force, I knew that such growth would have vast political implications. These critics kept telling me that I was "overdoing" it. In my view, the election results yesterday are much too clear to ignore.
So to all my critics: You voted for this man. Do not be surprised by the long-term political consequences, which, unfortunately, will affect all of us.
Of course, the liberal NY Times has been talking about this rise of religion for a while. It has published essays by Ron Suskind, Russell Shorto, and, today, Garry Wills, all of which speak of an ongoing religious revival.
Ironically, yesterday, in his victory speech, Bush himself thanked the gay-baiting Karl Rove as "the architect" (with apologies to Howard Roark). That fact is not lost on Wills, who writes:
This election confirms the brilliance of Karl Rove as a political strategist. He calculated that the religious conservatives, if they could be turned out, would be the deciding factor. The success of the plan was registered not only in the presidential results but also in all 11 of the state votes to ban same-sex marriage. Mr. Rove understands what surveys have shown, that many more Americans believe in the Virgin Birth than in Darwin's theory of evolution.
This might be called Bryan's revenge for the Scopes trial of 1925, in which William Jennings Bryan's fundamentalist assault on the concept of evolution was discredited. Disillusionment with that decision led many evangelicals to withdraw from direct engagement in politics. But they came roaring back into the arena out of anger at other court decisions - on prayer in school, abortion, protection of the flag and, now, gay marriage. Mr. Rove felt that the appeal to this large bloc was worth getting President Bush to endorse a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage (though he had opposed it earlier).
It's interesting that some commentators think of this Bush victory as the re-emergence of an even purer "Reagan revolution." I find nothing pure in Bush's complete abandonment of Reagan's libertarian rhetoric. Say what you will about the Gipper; at least, he had libertarian rhetoric, even if his legacy was terribly mixed. Wills himself argues, in essence, that however much Reagan might be viewed as the John the Baptist to Bush-as-Jesus, Reagan was "amiably and ecumenically pious. He could address more secular audiences, here and abroad, with real respect."
In the end, Wills asks a legitimate question: "Can a people that believes more fervently in the Virgin Birth than in evolution still be called an Enlightened nation?" I do think he overstates his case, however. Yesterday was not "The Day the Enlightenment Went Out." But it was a warning shot in a much wider cultural war. And it is a cultural war that we are ultimately fighting... not only against the religious zealots at home, but also against the religious zealots abroad, who would bring death and destruction to our shores.
It is now up to those men and women of goodwill, who hold Enlightenment values, to stand tall, and to fight zealotry, of whatever stripe, every step of the way.
Wednesday, November 3, 2004
I Told You So
Bravo to the Winner! I've never been happier! Cheers to Yankee shortstop Derek Jeter, on winning his first Gold Glove.
Oh ... as for that other race. Well, let me just say it: I was right. I told you so. I know, I know, the Electoral College votes are not complete yet. But it's all over.
I do think that my reasoning for predicting Bush the winner over 7 months ago was also correct. I suggested back then that Bush's fundamentalist religious base would be fortified and that it would play a crucial role in his victory. The President clearly retained that constituency and strengthened its support.
Some people were saying that the youth vote would offset that fundamentalist base. But the youth vote was stable at 17%, contrary to predictions that it would usher in Kerry Nation. In the end, though exit poll voters named the economy (20%), terrorism (19%), and Iraq (15%) as important issues, the issue of "Moral Values" (22%) polled the highest. And 80% of those who chose "Moral Values" as the issue of the day, voted for Bush. These are not people with secular humanist moral frameworks. They are overwhelmingly religious voters.
This strategy was decisive for the Bush Electoral victory, the brainchild of Karl Rove, who, surprise, surprise, has a history of running gay-baiting campaigns, going all the way back to Bush's gubernatorial race in Texas. Interestingly, same-sex marriage bans were approved in 11 states. Two of these states (Michigan and Oregon) went to Kerry. But the other nine (Arkansas, Georgia, Kentucky, Mississippi, Montana, North Dakota, Oklahoma, Ohio, and Utah) went to Bush. Such ballot questions brought out the fundamentalist vote. One might say that they were designed to do so.
And in that crucial Ohio race—the state that is still technically in contention, but that will put the President over the top—the anti-gay marriage amendment was the most extreme proposed measure in the country. Not only does the approved amendment bar same-sex marriage; it bars even unions that "approximate marriage." The amendment passed in Ohio; exit polls show that 67% of those who voted to approve this ban also voted for George W. Bush. Those who cared most about the economy, by contrast, voted for Kerry.
The President, with a Republican House, and a firmer Republican majority in the Senate, is on his way. He's won a 51% majority of the votes cast and is in the process of squeaking out an Electoral College victory. He is also a social conservative who has disowned fiscal responsibility, a free-wheeling big spender, who has yet to veto a single bill, and who will extend the welfare state domestically and abroad, as he continues to forge a nation-building crusade to bring "democracy" to the Middle East. At the expense of American taxpayers and American lives. All in the name of a "War on Terror" that has been damaged seriously by his Iraq adventure.
In other words: Everything today is pretty much as it was yesterday.
God help us.
Monday, November 1, 2004
A Vote for Nobody Because It Won't Matter
I have read with great interest the case for Libertarian candidate Badnarik by both Roderick Long (thanks for the plug, too!) and Keith Halderman, and the case for John Kerry by Arthur Silber, and I respect all these perspectives, especially because we are all similarly critical of the current political trends.
For the first time in my life, however, I'm profoundly unenthused and/or fully disgusted by the choices. I have voted for major party candidates in previous elections, and am not opposed to it in principle. And I have also voted for the Libertarian Party candidates, at times, just to register my protest, but the Two-Party system is so entrenched that the prospect of even a symbolic third-party challenge is virtually nil. In any event, after reading Bill Bradford's take on the LP convention and Badnarik, I just get the shivers seeing so many libertarians acting like politicians.
I must confess that my mind shifts among various levels of perversity: A part of me feels that George Bush deserves to be re-elected, only because his administration, more than any other current crop of politicians, ought to stick around and be held fully accountable for the disastrous policies they've instituted, though clearly we will all be paying the price for that. Another part of me feels that if Bush wins (as I predicted back in May 2004), it better be by a slim margin, and not anything approaching a "mandate." Lord help us.
On the other hand, if Kerry wins, I am not at all hopeful. U.S. policies in Iraq have now been institutionalized. Kerry gives no indication that he will change anything fundamentally, except, perhaps, his views, depending on which way the political wind blows. Granted, under these circumstances, it might be better to have somebody who is willing to change in the face of changing circumstances. But Kerry may be in the process of changing into a Neocon Newbie; in the end, he might also be positively Nixonian in his approach to the war, as I have argued.
Still, if current trends continue, Bush might very well lose this race. I've joked about pundits who fall back on soothsaying to predict the winner, but with the Red Sox winning for the first time in 86 years, and with the Redskins losing their last home game before the Election (a Redskins win/loss correlates with an incumbent's win/loss in every Presidential election since 1936), soothsaying is about as accurate at predicting a winner as is informed analysis.
Here in New York, of course, a Blue State by Definition that Kerry will Carry, my vote won't count one way or the other. I will go into the voting booth, vote defensively on a few local races and on various bond issues, and proudly walk out without having cast a single vote for President. As the old adage goes: It only encourages them.
Sunday, October 31, 2004
Election Prediction: Dracula Wins!
Thank goodness I am not a determinist. On this Halloween comes the strange, mysterious information that both George W. Bush and John Kerry (who are ninth cousins twice removed) have genealogical links with Vlad II Dracula of Wallachia. Yes, that Transylvanian Vlad the Impaler who was the model for Bram Stoker's Dracula.
I don't know about you, but I'm taking garlic with me into the Voting Booth on Tuesday.
Thursday, October 28, 2004
New Centenary Issue of The Journal of Ayn Rand Studies
And now for a commercial break.
Volume 6, Number 1 of The Journal of Ayn Rand Studies has just been published. This issue is the first of two symposia celebrating the Ayn Rand Centenary (which is marked, officially, on 2 February 2005). It is entitled "Ayn Rand: Literary and Cultural Impact," and it features articles from such contributors as Erika Holzer, Stephen Cox, Jeff Riggenbach, Matthew Stoloff, Kirsti Minsaas, Cathy Young, Bernice Rosenthal, Alexandra York, and Chris Matthew Sciabarra. Our second Rand Centenary issue will be published in early 2005. It is entitled "Ayn Rand Among the Austrians," and will include contributions from Walter Block, Peter J. Boettke, Steven Horwitz, Roderick T. Long, George Reisman, Larry J. Sechrest, Leland Yeager, Ed Younkins, and others. For information on subscriptions, click here.