05.25.08
Farewell LP
The bad news: Barr beats Ruwart for the LP nomination. (No word on a running mate yet.)
The good news: at least it was damn close.
Agorist Demerit Count: 3
The Web Journal of Roderick T. Long
The bad news: Barr beats Ruwart for the LP nomination. (No word on a running mate yet.)
The good news: at least it was damn close.
Agorist Demerit Count: 3
Rorshak (1313) said,
May 25, 2008 at 7:17 pm
I couldn’t believe this. “Party of principle” my a**.
Robert Hutchinson said,
May 25, 2008 at 8:01 pm
I can completely believe it. It’s the inevitable outcome of the choruses of “sticking to principles won’t win us any voooootes!” that have been building for years. I’m so glad that I got the hell away from the LP after 2000, and from believing that it could move anything larger than a molehill without falling apart.
Now, onward to Bob Barr’s stunning capture of 2% of the vote on his platform of “we could cut some taxes, maybe???”
Jeremy said,
May 25, 2008 at 8:19 pm
I think Brad Spangler got his wish: the LP is through. It’s GOP Lite from now on, baby.
Rad Geek said,
May 25, 2008 at 8:38 pm
Roderick:
Oh, don’t worry. It gets worse.
gyakusetsu said,
May 25, 2008 at 8:55 pm
I’ll probably write my own post on this, but Root’s “bang” loss speech/endorsement speech was a tragic moment. The conservatives have taken over the party of classical liberalism.
Aster said,
May 25, 2008 at 10:04 pm
(apologies for use of others’ words)
I’m walkin’ down that long, lonesome road, babe
Where I’m bound, I can’t tell
But goodbye’s too good a word, gal
So I’ll just say fare thee well
I ain’t sayin’ you treated me unkind
You could have done better but I don’t mind
You just kinda wasted my precious time
But don’t think twice, it’s all right
…..
Oh, but you who philosophise disgrace
and criticize all fears,
Bury the rag deep in your face
For now’s the time for your tears.
I know I’ve said more savage words against libertarianism and the Libertarian Party than anyone. But writing this, I am crying.
Natasha said,
May 25, 2008 at 10:15 pm
I take it there is no political party of liberty left in America today.
What is our approach to electoral self-defense now? Vote for the Green Party or the most libertarian of the Democratic candidates?
This is an important issue that friends of liberty should discuss
Robert Hutchinson said,
May 25, 2008 at 10:42 pm
Natasha:
My approach is not to bother. I don’t begrudge anyone throwing mud at an oncoming tank, but neither do I have any illusion that it’s going to make a difference. To me, Barr/Root just means that the mud has turned to sand. Better to work on running laterally, digging a hole, etc. (if I may stretch my analogy completely out of shape).
Michael J. Palmer said,
May 26, 2008 at 12:21 am
What’s worse, Root kept talking about his “16-year plan” to become the nominee in the elections after this one.
Brad Spangler said,
May 26, 2008 at 12:56 am
You all ought to buck up and quit whining. You made yourselves vulnerable to this disappointment by refusing to listen to those who tried to tell you electoral politics was the wrong approach. So now you want to whine and moan because you lost a game you insisted on playing? Even though you should have known it was expensive entertainment, indeed? You’re a bunch of fools.
No, Spangler didn’t get his wish. In order for me to convince you of the error of your electoral ways, you would have first had to get your way (a Ruwart nomination) and then watched it fail. Now you insufferable idiots are talking about the Boston Tea Party, the Constitution Party and assorted other ballot-related abominations.
PhysicistDave said,
May 26, 2008 at 4:21 am
Isn’t the gloom-and-doom here a result of focusing on words instead of reality?
If, thirty-seven years ago, the founders of the LP had chosen to name their party the “Progressive Conservative Party” (a more accurate name, for sure!) would any of us be upset that the PC Party had nominated Bob Barr?
Isn’t the problem that the LP calls itself “Libertarian” and we too call ourselves “libertarian” and we feel that they are somehow betraying the “true” meaning of the word?
With all due respect, the word “libertarian” was never going to save us.
The overwhelming majority of our neighbors and countrymen happen not to support natural rights and happen not to believe that an individual is fully responsible for his or her actions, even if he hides behind words like “army” or “government” to justify his crimes. This is true even of most who call themselves “libertarians.”
I had a chance to chat with Ed Clark for a few minutes among a small group during his 1980 Presidential run. I tried to find out what his real position on Social Security was. He talked vaguely about the need for transitional programs, of some indefinite duration. He was not willing to simply say that to force anyone to pay for “Social Security” was a violation of that person’s natural rights.
Ed has generally been considered among the relatively hard-core libertarians in the LP.
No, the real issue is not saving the word “libertarian” or pretending that the LP has truly supported views it has never consistently supported. The real issue is how to change people’s hearts and minds so that they come to see a crime as a crime whether it is carried out by a ghetto black, a middle-class white, a US government soldier, or the President of the United States.
When there is a “Memorial Day” in the US when it is considered at least a matter open to serious debate if someone points out that none of our “honored dead” died to “protect our freedom,” then we will know we are actually making progress.
I think there may also be some unconscious nationalism here.
America (and therefore any US political party, including the LP) just does not matter that much. Sure, most of us live here, and anyone would like to see improvements in his or her own neighborhood. And, for the time being, America is both the greatest military power on earth and also the world’s most dangerous rogue state.
But, America has passed its peak of influence. The US is less than five percent of the world’s population, seven percent or so of its land area. The future of the world is being determined elsewhere, most likely in Asia.
Forget the LP. If you want to influence the history of the human race, figure out how to spread the message of natural-rights anarchism among the Indians and the Chinese.
Dave Miller in Sacramento
Here lies LP *1971 +2008 Requiescant in Pacem « Rusz Sumieniem! said,
May 26, 2008 at 7:15 am
[…] poniedziałek, 26 maj 2008 at 13:15 (Uncategorized) Hej, mogło być gorzej, mogło być Root/Barr zamiast Barr/Root. Przynajmniej można się pocieszyć, że Ruwart prawie wygrała. […]
Mike said,
May 26, 2008 at 9:14 am
Mock teh Vote! http://www.nostate.com/71/libertarians-for-statism/
Rad Geek People’s Daily 2008-05-26 – Goodbye’s too good a word, babe said,
May 26, 2008 at 12:10 pm
[…] In light ofthe late unpleasantness in Denver, the pair of ridiculous small-government conservative tools nominated, and the Partyarchs running the convention, who saw fit to so transparently stage-manage the process of choosing a contemptible conservative drug prohibitionist and a contemptible conservative warhawk as their party’s mouthpieces, I think that congratulations and thanks are due to Aster for pointing out the perfect reply—and all that really needs to be said, at this point. […]
Administrator said,
May 26, 2008 at 12:39 pm
Ed has generally been considered among the relatively hard-core libertarians in the LP.
That’s news to me. Surely among the LP presidential candidates he’s one of the least hardcore.
Administrator said,
May 26, 2008 at 12:40 pm
you would have first had to get your way (a Ruwart nomination) and then watched it fail
Depends what you mean by fail, Brad. The purpose of the Ruwart campaign was not to get Ruwart elected as president.
PhysicistDave said,
May 26, 2008 at 3:47 pm
Rod,
Well… Ed certainly was not a hard-core libertarian in fact!
But was Bergland or Hospers or MacBride or Marrou or…?
Does anyone recall any of those guys saying that, rather than phasing out Social Security, no one should ever be forced to pay for it at all, starting immediately? (I use this as a simple example where “transitionism” seems to be very appealing to those who view natural rights as a “long-term goal” rather than as an ethical principle.)
There’s a story (I think I heard it from Rothbard) that back during the ’60 campaign some libertarian got to have a private talk with Tricky Dick and came away afterwards announcing that Nixon was really, in his heart, one of us libertarians.
And maybe he was, just like, deep, deep in his heart, Greenspan is really one of us.
But of course, it does not matter. In practice, Greenspan was an inflationist statist who helped prop up the state (and Nixon was worse – though he at least performed the service of partially discrediting the imperial Presidency for a few years).
I know that deep in their hearts Harry Browne and Ron Paul were libertarians, and perhaps their Presidential campaigns were more libertarian than Clark’s, Bergland’s, et al.
But I myself was involved in the LP for many years, and I frankly did not see much tolerance there for core libertarian principles as I laid them out above: i.e., consistent support for natural rights and for the idea that violating natural rights was just as wrong if done by the President of the United States as by a two-bit criminal. I knew a few LPers who held those views, but not many.
In my experience, from the late ‘70s to the mid-90s, the LP was basically a bunch of guys who disliked high taxes and wanted to be free to smoke pot.
I still remember back in ’92 one high-ranking Cal state LP official patiently explaining to me that libertarianism had nothing to do with anarchism. He clearly was not simply explaining his personal views, but thought he was expressing the view held by all LP members. Of course, he was mistaken, but it did seem to be the majority view.
From what I saw personally in the LP, the Barr nomination is not much of a step down. View the LP as it really was, and it really has not changed that much.
Those of us who wanted to use the LP to educate its own members and the general public about the idea of consistently respecting natural rights always seemed to be a small and not very happily tolerated minority in the LP, at least in my own experience.
Dave
Administrator said,
May 26, 2008 at 6:20 pm
I still remember back in ’92 one high-ranking Cal state LP official patiently explaining to me that libertarianism had nothing to do with anarchism.
When I was in North Carolina in the 90s the local LP was pretty thoroughgoingly radical-libertarian and much of the leadership was anarchist; so this does seem to be something that varies from locality to locality.
PhysicistDave said,
May 26, 2008 at 6:54 pm
Rod wrote:
>When I was in North Carolina in the 90s the local LP was pretty thoroughgoingly radical-libertarian and much of the leadership was anarchist; so this does seem to be something that varies from locality to locality.
Yeah, when I was a grad student at Stanford, our student group (not officially affiliated with the LP) was basically pretty hard-core Rothbardian anarchist. In fact, one of the leading LPers in the area considered me the “moderate” among the Stanford students because, while I did generally agree with Rothbard, I did not just blindly follow him (I’m not sure the others did either, but she thought they did).
On the other hand, I knew a number of the top figures in the California LP, which was obviously the largest state party in the nation by far. I think it is fair to say that they were generally not “libertarians” in the sense I defined the word above (I’m not trying to argue over the “true” definition, but merely give a sense of where those folks stood).
My main point is just that the LP has always been very, very much a mixed bag, and it has very little impact or influence anyway. It has always consisted, to a substantial degree, of a bunch of would-be politicians. Just think of it as the “Progressive Conservative Party” as I suggested above, and, well, Barr probably is not as bad as McCain or Barack. I may even vote for Barr myself: I rather enjoy playing the electoral game, even though I expect little out of it: it does give one an excuse to talk to other people about politics and express some genuinely libertarian views.
Of course, if I vote for Barr, my Republican friends will claim I am “really” voting for Obama and my Democratic friends will claim I am “really” voting for McCain: I’ve already gotten this over the last few months when I have vaguely mentioned that I might vote third-party.
Electoral politics does bring out the zany side of people!
Dave
a14 said,
May 26, 2008 at 8:36 pm
“It’s the inevitable outcome of the choruses of “sticking to principles won’t win us any voooootes!” that have been building for years.”
If you stick to principles, you’re not seeking votes : >
Aster said,
May 26, 2008 at 10:07 pm
The reason this is a disaster is not because the Libertarian Party was ever the perfect embodiment of libertarian ideas, but because the treason of the ‘party of Principle’ is symbolic of everything wrong with libertarianism, which itself has a great deal to do with everything which has become wrong with America.
I.
Look from Bob Barr to Ron Paul to Lew Rockwell- the spokescreatures for the libertarian movement are everywhere conservative monstrosities. This is not a question of a Party/non-party split, extreme/moderate split, or minarchist/anarchist split. Some of the libertarians most alienated from the LP are among the worst (and some of the individualists remaining within the movement are Party members, minarchists, and political moderates),
The problem is with libertarianism, the idea and the concept- with an idea of liberty with has come to coalesce not around individualism and the completion of the Enlightenment project but around an anti-contextual hatred of the modern nation-state which simply begs for cooptation by reaction and obscurantism. Those calling themselves libertarians today do not foremost cry out for the human spirit to be able to think for itself and create its own life; they have united instead on a negative, *against* one recent and narrow form of tyranny and allied themselves with those who seek a return of earlier and more awful forms. Libertarianism as an ideology no longer works on balance as a force for liberation of the individual mind and spirit in today’s world- partially, it never did. This should have been expected given that ‘libertarianism’ as *anti-statism* rather that a positive affirmation of the cultural institutions of individualism is not much more of a coherent philosophy than ‘anti-Communism’ or anti-fascism, and similarly utterly vulnerable to use by vicious people for horrific purposes.
Ditching the Party is not enough. What has happened to the Party is the symptom. The Party did not betray libertarianism; the Party and libertarianism have both betrayed the Enlightenment, and both were set up without any structural safeguards which could prevent such a betrayal. The word ‘libertarianism’ does not mean freedom for living, breathing individuals if the mind and spirit of individual liberty becomes absent, and there was never anything in libertarianism to ensure that it was present.
II.
The trouble is that libertarianism was always the Archamerican Philosophy, and the corruption of libertarianism has a great deal to do with the changes which have come to America in the last thirty years. From 1776 to the counterculture, America once really did, despite its faults, at least to some relative degree embody the ideals of Enlightenment and individualism of which libertarianism was supposed to be an expression. But America is being thoroughly taken over by the other heritage which distinquished in from the Old Country- its violence, miltarism, bigotry, provincial ignorance, anti-intellectualism. and religious fanaticism. In an almost perfect morality play, America’s original sin of slavery has indeed at last destroyed it, for as Kevin Phillips’s _American Theocracy_ well observes, it is the Southern cultural patterns orginally produced by a slave society (and the worst and oldest of Cavalier British classism, before that) which have now spread to a working plurality if not simple majority of America. When the ideals of modernity started unvoidably hitting everyday culture in the 60s and 70s, a good part of America decided the deal wasn’t worth it, and what Leanprd Peikoff called the ‘nation of the Enlightenment’ is the headquarters of the most dangerous court of church and altar and (badly) storied pomp in the West. In 1929, *any* party which considered itself the embodiment of the German spirit would be in deep trouble, even if the German spirit it originally held in mind was that of Lessing, Schiller, and Beethoven.
Libertarianism has always been both explicitly and implicitly tied to a specifically American social system, culture, and mentality. If America fails, libertarianism will either have to recreate itself according to the grammar and rhythms of different traditions or perish ignomiously, tied in what remains of educated world opinion to a derided and discredited system which by all evidence is going to crash brutally with immense harm to all sorts of innocent (and less-than-innocent) bystanders. In New Zealand, the Libertarianz and ACT parties are far less devoted to liberty than to Americanism and are for all practical purposes aligned with more mainstream forces which, if successful, will see what is happening to America (and the UK and elsewhere) also come here. As for those mainstream forces, the same Kiwis who have expressed to be they would like New Zealand to imitate America simulatenously believe in ‘modernising’ in the manner of Singapore and China- for that is what America means to the world; wealth and efficiency by any means necessary (torture, for instance. Meanwhile those who practise liberty (along with many who don’t) rightly see America as the most *relevant* symbol of threatening authoritarism.
Libertarianism would have to de-Americanise itself to survive. but I doubt it can; libertarian theory is so caught up in unconscious American parochialism that it has little appeal outside the United States for both fairly good and pretty lousy reasons (just as ‘anti-Americanism’ has always been both a rational if preoccupied judgement *and* a resentful bigotry of ignorant and cynical premodernists). Even if libertarianism did fully de-Americanise, the perception that libertarianism=capitalism=America is going to make life difficult for libertarians in much the way as the existence of the Soviet Union once made life very difficult for anti-authoritarians who still held to pre-Soviet notions of communism.
Personally, I think it is more likely that many wonderful things- things like individualism, the market economy. high standards of living, the counterculture, modernity itself- will, as with 1929, be unjustly blamed for a failure which resulted precisely from their betrayal. I think the eclipse of America will do immense and very possibly fatal damage to libertarianism and to far, far more than libertarianism. The real battle today is not to save the Enlightenment in America. It is not even to save Enlightenment *from* America. It is to make sure that the destruction of the nation created by the Declaration of Independence does not bring down that declaration along with it. Every illiberal force in the entire world will work to make that happen- to convince the world that Imperial America rose and fell *because* of the Statue of Liberty- and sociobiology and 10,000 years of patriarchal tyranny will make it very easy for a world full of ignorant and brutalised people to believe them.
* * *
I put my money with the European Union, statist and badly flawed as it is. If the individualist way of life has any future it is there. India, I don’t know much of. But China? A world whose future lies with the most brutal and extensive dictatorship on the planet? Get me a drink. Get me six drinks and a glass of blue acid to wash it down with. I’ll be considerate, but probably not kind, and wash the glass.
Wonderful job we’ve done with this world of ours. If there are gods, they probably long ago disowned the human race in disgust.
Micha Ghertner said,
May 27, 2008 at 12:51 am
But Aster, tell us how you really feel!
Sergio Méndez said,
May 27, 2008 at 5:23 am
Aster:
Well, thanks for your comments about libertarianism. Althought they were not meant to me, they ask a question I asked you in Charles Blog. I think you say things that are very true, specially the need of libertarianism to beyond being an “american philosophy”. I only disagree with your views on the european union. Here xenophobia, racism and re-barbarization are in their zenit. The left is divided between old time comunists that are becoming more and more irrelevant, social democrat parties that are becoming essentialy center right parties. Anarchism is not what it used to be. Meanwhile, is no casuality that goverments with a proto fascistic stripe (see Berlusconi in Italy) or even with neocon look (Sarkozy in France, Merkel in Germany) are on the rise.
Aster said,
May 27, 2008 at 6:52 am
Sergio-
Actually, you beat me to writing to you! Much of what I wrote was everything I previously couldn’t put into articulate order in order to answer your questions. So *thank you* for encouraging me to get my mind working.
Your words on the European Union may be more informed than mine. My impressions on the matter largely derive from interrogating every European traveler who I’ve come across for the last 9 months (to be honest, I don’t trust much media these days, maintream *or* independent), and are certainly flavoured by my particular cultural concerns as a post-transgender girl, (ex-?)sex-worker, (ex-?)Pagan, etc. But I admit that my impression of the European country of which I’m most aware (France; not counting the UK) are not very good at all. I agree with you about that rat-bastard Sarkozy; I have a French-American sex worker friend who doesn’t wish to return to France because she doesn’t see all that much difference between them. On the other hand, I’ve met lots of Germans and Scandinavians who are as free-spirited as any people I’ve met except San Franciscans and urban Kiwis.
History and political philosophy says to me Europe is likely to go the way of America, because the basic problems are ultimately the same. If that is the case, then may God help us all.
Can you suggest any good (i.e., readable and philosophically informed) books about current political trends in Europe? This request is earnest, and I will read what I can acquire on this issue.
Less Antman said,
May 27, 2008 at 4:29 pm
There has never been a hardcore LP presidential campaign in the history of the party: Ruwart’s would have been the first, and after 6 ballots 45% of the delegates still wanted an openly anarchist candidate who’d been branded a supporter of child pornography and sex between 5- and 50-year olds, and had not performed well in the critical debate the night before (the one that won obscure Michael Badnarik the nomination in 2004), which had the entire Ruwart staff depressed afterwards (including Mary herself).
Brad is right: what happened this weekend won’t cause us anarcho-partyarchs to concede the lack of usefulness of the LP as an educational tool (and, frankly, there are so many long-time non-party libertarians whose first knowledge of the philosophy was the result of the LP that I do wish some of them would concede that it has been a useful feeder organization for the movement for all its faults).
If Barr-Root is a bust, that 45% who were ready to nominate a market anarchist (and who put Ruwart on the Libertarian National Committee the very next day, even though she refused to endorse the winning ticket) will have the majority next time. Then we’ll have the Spangler test.
I have deep respect for those following the agorist strategy, but we need both agorism and education, and so long as there is a party with the name libertarian in it, what it does impacts the education side. Frankly, it wouldn’t have taken many non-party anarchists showing up in Denver to have a Ruwart-Kubby ticket right now.
For my part, I’ll be starting a web site shortly called Libertarian Persuasion that will be a depository for sound bites, brochure words, and position papers to defend each of the libertarian positions in public policy. Although the starting point will be the LP platform (which still acknowledges the right of secession by anyone from the government), I’m expecting to add pseudo-planks supporting libertarian positions not addressed in that platform, and I hope some of you will be willing to occasionally use your writing skills to provide your best ideas on how to briefly explain hardcore libertarian positions. All contributions will be public domain with an invitation to steal and the site will have no affiliation with the LP (I’m paying the bills and plan to moderate it to exclude spam and rudeness).
The only way the anarchists leave before 2012 is if Barr-Root draws enough conservatives into the party to in 2010 to marginalize both the anarchists and our radical minarchist allies (who in large part are just anarchists unable to admit that a government that doesn’t aggress, doesn’t tax,and allows secession isn’t a government as most market anarchists define it). Given the high probability that they will fail to meet expectations (the idea that socially tolerant Ron Paul youth are going to become activists for this ticket is daffy, and he has raised a pathetically small amount of money for a supposedly breakthrough campaign for the LP), the radicals will be back in charge for the next presidential election cycle. Frankly, I wouldn’t be at all surprised if the 2012 LP nominee turns out to be Ruwart, who clearly has no intention of leaving the LP right now and will still be writing and speaking actively over the next 4 years (including an update of her infamous Short Answers to the Tough Questions).
Brad Spangler said,
May 27, 2008 at 11:17 pm
@Less — Before I even consider attempting to compose a longer reply addressing the many points you raise; I just need to say that I would expect that you, of all people, would know that education is part of agorism. You appear to be mistakenly equating “agorism” with “counter-economics” and while that’s good in one sense it’s irritating as all heck in another.
Agorism is the ideology; counter-economics is the revolutionary praxis of that ideology. Like any other ideological movement, education is also essential.
One of the reasons this gets on my nerves so much is that confusing agorism with counter-economics plays right into the hands of the sort of political con-artists who would like to convince the gullible that political campaigns are a *necessity* for the carrying on of libertarian educational work. I don’t think that’s quite what you’re saying, though, is it?
PhysicistDave said,
May 28, 2008 at 1:55 am
Aster,
It’s interesting that you and I both agree that the libertarian movement is too centered on the USA, yet you hold up the tottering old social democracies of Europe as the wave of the future!
Are you aware that, from the perspective of most human beings on this planet, the USA, as well as Canada, simply are European countries, that due to various historical accidents are on the farther side of the Atlantic (a similar point is true of the Aussies and the Kiwis)?
You wrote:
>But China? A world whose future lies with the most brutal and extensive dictatorship on the planet? Get me a drink.
Aster, do you actually know anything about China or Chinese culture?
I married into a family of Chinese immigrants. My wife’s cousins travel back and forth across the Pacific a great deal, and I have a chance to hear their eyewitness reports on developments in China.
From what they say, and from what I also see in the independent media, China may now be a more free country economically (e.g., in terms of starting a business) than the US. Yes, it is a “dictatorship” – “dictatorship” being the term that democratic dictatorships use to distinguish themselves from all the non-democratic dictatorships.
China is, sadly, controlled by a government, human rights are therefore not secure, and that is a shame. But, again, from what I hear from both my in-laws and from news sources, if you refrain from playing political games in China, life, liberty, and property are reasonably secure compared to much of the planet. Let’s remember that here in the US, hundreds of children can be seized from their parents without any proof of reasonable cause, and that, in the Europe you so love, people have recently been sent to jail for “Holocaust denial” (yes, I know the Holocaust happened).
Sadly, Europe, China, and the US are all oppressed by their respective governments.
At least China is not sending hundreds of thousands of its troops half-way around the world to conquer countries that pose no threat at all to itself! If some country is to be accused of being the greatest and most extensive threat to world peace and security on the planet, it would seem to be the USA, not China.
For you to single China out as “the most brutal and extensive dictatorship on the planet” seems, well, eccentric.
You also wrote:
> The real battle today is not to save the Enlightenment in America. It is not even to save Enlightenment *from* America. It is to make sure that the destruction of the nation created by the Declaration of Independence does not bring down that declaration along with it.
Again, I fear this smacks of the American megalomania that sees the whole course of human history as hinging on the United States!
I am a theoretical physicist (Ph.D. from Stanford). I know that modern science and mathematics originated in the European nations. But, because I know that science and math are of universal validity, I know that they transcend Europeans and European culture.
If Europe and the US cease to exist, I am quite certain that Asians can and will continue to maintain science and mathematics. Indeed, wander through any first-rate university physics, math, or engineering area and you may conclude that the transfer of Western science to Asians is already nearly complete.
If the principles of the Enlightenment and, specifically, of the Declaration are indeed true for all human beings, as the men of the Enlightenment maintained, why worry that the collapse of the US will drag the Enlightenment down with it, any more than science or math?
Frankly, the Asians I know are much more committed to the Enlightenment than most Americans I know – this is stunningly so not only in science but also music and other areas.
Yes, the future of the US is dim. But America is small potatoes historically – a flash in the pan that is now fading. The future of the human race is in Asia, and that future is bright.
My kids and I are studying Chinese.
Dave Miller in Sacramento
PhysicistDave said,
May 28, 2008 at 5:24 am
Less Antman wrote:
> there are so many long-time non-party libertarians whose first knowledge of the philosophy was the result of the LP that I do wish some of them would concede that it has been a useful feeder organization for the movement for all its faults
Really? That has not been my experience.
The LP did help make me aware of the word “libertarian.” But I actually had learned about the philosophy several years earlier (indeed before the LP itself was formed) from the writings of Rothbard and Rand. (And I later found out that I had a pamphlet a friend of our family had given me even earlier with an explanation of the conservative/libertarian distinction written, I think, by Karl Hess. I had forgotten about the pamphlet, but perhaps the ideas stuck.)
My own observation has been that people who are brought into the movement by the LP tend to be eternally stuck either at the “winning elections is the goal” stage or, even worse, at the “lower taxes/legalize drugs” stage.
I can’t think of anyone I’ve known personally who was brought into the movement by the LP and who eventually acquired a decent understanding of “libertarianism” in the sense I outlined in my earlier post (i.e., natural rights, and only individuals being truly responsible for their own actions, not abstractions like “the government,” the army etc.).
No doubt I missed someone somewhere who contradicts my observations, but I was involved in the LP for many years and knew many people. (My LP experience was solely in the California LP; other parts of the country may be different.)
Less also wrote:
> I have deep respect for those following the agorist strategy, but we need both agorism and education, and so long as there is a party with the name libertarian in it, what it does impacts the education side.
Does the LP help with education? Open discussion of the anarchist perspective has, as many have noted, been rather strongly suppressed within the LP for decades. I saw a great deal of reluctance in the LP to even come out and say that all taxation was wrong.
During all the years I was in the LP, the public message (even to LP members) tended to be: we’ll reduce the size of government significantly and that will make your lives happier, the strategy Rothbard derided as the “more bathtubs” strategy.
It certainly would have been interesting to see Ruwart run a truly “libertarian” (in my and your sense) campaign. But the “hook” by which third-party candidates get media and voter attention is the pretense that they might really be elected and that they are proposing policies that they would really follow if elected.
A true libertarian cannot convincingly play that game. After all, if I were elected President, I’d pardon almost everyone in federal prisons, discharge all the members of the armed forces, and it would only take a day or two after that for the Congress to impeach me and remove me from office.
Sadly, by the rules which the media and the voters play by, this does not make a very credible campaign speech.
But, if any true libertarian is nominated, Ruwart or anyone else, that is the real truth of what their Presidency would mean.
I can’t see the LP ever nominating anyone who openly runs on the platform I just suggested.
I therefore think we libertarians can never be in control of the LP.
Less, I think we have a problem.
Dave
Administrator said,
May 28, 2008 at 10:27 am
Brad, Less isn’t saying that electoral politics is indispensable to education. What he’s saying is that so long as there is a self-pronouced libertarian party, whatever it says or does is going to have an impact on people’s perception of libertarianism, so it would be better for educational purposes to have a radical candidate like Ruwart than a conservative candidate like Barr.
(Of course that desideratum has to be balanced against the agorist argument that radicals should spurn the LP because we should try to disassociate our education from electoral politics. Fair enough, but that’s a different point. Let me address it in my next post.)
Micha Ghertner said,
May 28, 2008 at 12:01 pm
Dave,
My own observation has been that people who are brought into the movement by the LP tend to be eternally stuck either at the “winning elections is the goal” stage or, even worse, at the “lower taxes/legalize drugs” stage.
For what it’s worth, I’m an anecdotal exception to the rule. I first discovered libertarianism through the LP, by way of the right-wing talk radio show host Neal Boortz. It did take a lot of time and effort to get past those initial stages to anarchism, though.
Roderick,
[S]o long as there is a self-pronouced libertarian party, whatever it says or does is going to have an impact on people’s perception of libertarianism, so it would be better for educational purposes to have a radical candidate like Ruwart than a conservative candidate like Barr.
On the other hand, one could argue that having a more moderate candidate like Barr gets more people through the door, who then can be convinced of more radical libertarianism once inside. I think it’s an open question which strategy returns better results.
PhysicistDave said,
May 28, 2008 at 4:36 pm
Micha,
I’m sure there are also other exceptions to my observations besides yourself. What bothers me more than the fairly small number of exceptions is the fact that this seems to be an inherent problem with the LP: i.e., given that the LP is a “political party” that at least pretends to be in the game for electoral purposes (if they openly admitted that they have zero chance of winning the Presidency, who in the media or the public would take them seriously?), the LP tends naturally to attract either pragmatists who want a “practical program” that can “attract voters” or deluded fools who seriously believe that the LP is on the verge of winning the Presidency – just a couple more elections, and we’ll win, you know!
I knew a huge number of both types in the LP, myself.
The US government as we know it will fall eventually, but, based on history, I’d bet on one of the following three scenarios:
1) External forces destroy the US state as happened to the Nazi state
2) Things fall apart and the populace simply abandons the state as happened in the old Soviet Union in ’91.
3) The populace gradually moves in a libertarian election and the old parties adopt libertarian positions to maintain their market position.
I’ve ranked them in order of my guess as to likelihood: i.e., I doubt the gradualist approach will work. Note that none of these involves the LP actually winning.
When I was an LP activist, I would from time to time make such points; the result was almost always that I would be denounced for some sort of party disloyalty.
On Rod’s and Less’s advice, I have started reading Mary’s book “Healing Our World.”
Her policy positions do seem to be fairly hard-core, probably consistent with anarchism.
But, her tone in the book does seem to be the “more bathtubs,” pragmatic approach. For example, the US government is now the overwhelmingly greatest threat to world peace on the planet. It has bombed, attacked, or invaded far more countries in the last half-century than any other state on this planet by a long shot. The US elite, both the neo-con mavericks and the traditional foreign-policy elite, are bent on establishing and preserving a US hegemony in which the US dominates the world and plays by a different rule set than other countries are forced to play by.
When Ruwart discusses this topic, her focus seems to be, well, mistakes were made, there’s been unfortunate “blowback” from those mistakes, US foreign policy is not really serving our interests abroad, foreign aid aimed at helping the poor actually lines the pockets of the dictators, etc.
That really misses the point: it needs to be pointed out explicitly that US foreign policy serves the purposes of the power elite rather nicely, but that the US power elite is the enemy both of the American people and of the human race outside the US.
The US government is the enemy of the human race.
But, of course, to make that point clearly and forcefully, a point Rothbard, for example, was happy to make, does not to fit nicely into a book with the title “Healing Our World.”
Rod had a question a while back as to why many of us paleos were a bit uncomfortable with Mary. I think this may be part of the answer. Rothbard once declared that the fundamental political question is “Do you hate the state?” That caused a big uproar with the “nice” libertarians denouncing Murray for being so “negative.”
Well, American political campaigns certainly do discourage people who are “negative.” But if one is dealing with malignant cancer or an out-of-control fire, one should aim ruthlessly to cut out the cancer or extinguish the fire. The state is a cancer. It needs to be killed.
Mary seems to be unwilling to openly say that (and of course most LP candidates are indeed worse than her).
Dave Miller in Sacramento
Aster said,
May 28, 2008 at 10:27 pm
Dave-
Yes, I do know a few things about Chinese culture. My mother pursued an Asian studies program at university and managed an Asian art shop in Washington D.C.; she was incidentally born in Tokyo, as her father worked in the State Department during the occupation. Half of my grandmother’s and mother’s friends (in the latter case, while patriarchy permitted her to have any) were Chinese-Americans, and things Chinese were one of the few interesting subjects of family dinner table conversation. It is possible that some of these conversations influenced me in ways which my parents had not intended.
I personally find a great deal to admire in Chinese civilisation (especially in its aesthetic sense, celebrate of worldly happiness, and respect for the intellect), and an equal amount which I deeply do *not* admire (its heirarchy, familialism and collectivism, for instance). I certainly have no love for the current dynasty, which manages to synthesise the worst of Chinese collectivism with some of the worst barbarisms to ever come out of Europe.
I recently read about a case in which a woman had an affair with a man who worked in the same factory in China; the boss found out, and as a result she was internally deported to work at another factory halfway across the country. I think of what it would do to me to live in such a society, and I come to the conclusion that I would not wish to live within it. Now perhaps you believe that the right to love and express yourself freely is less essential to the flourishing of the human spirit than the liberty to pursue socioeconomic advancement through commerce. If so, then we simply disagree. I have noticed that my values and priorities on these issues seem to be hopelessly out of sync with most members of the human race and certainly with bourgeois libertarians, and this has a great deal to do with the fact that I feel a stronger emotional affinity for (left-)anarchism and social democracy than for libertarianism, which has proven that it furthers neither my ideals nor my interests.
I gladly confess to ‘eccentricity’; as an individualist I consider the term ‘eccentric’ to be a *compliment*. However, if the notion that China’s fascist dictatorship is hideously oppressive is now ‘eccentric’, then I shall gladly share my social exile with the world’s saving remnant of sanity. It is precisely the fact that libertarians, with their obsession with tht mere existence of governments, cannot seem to see the difference between open and closed societies which makes them largely irrelevant to my sense of what freedom means at heart.
I agree with you immensely that the principles of the Enlightenment transcend European culture. I would in fact argue that *all* cultures are essentially prisons, and that the Enlightenment is not essentially a European phenomenon but rather a partially successful emergence of the human race away from a cultural prison which in this case happened to be European. I think the equivalence of individualist society with the European ancient tribalism which it fought bloodily against for centuries is disastrous and implies an atavistic failure to understand the meaning of individualism and reason. I greatly welcome the liberation of the human race from other caves and see no reason why rational people should fetishise one set of arbitrary set of cultural conventions over another. No one would be more happy than I to see an individualistic way of life flourish in contemporary Asia, and I do not think that Asian traditional culture is any less suited to Enlightenment than traditional European culture- primarily because *both* tribalisms are at heart deeply hostile to people who think, feel, and live by their own perceprions and passions. And to the degree that premodern patterns can serve as material and inspiration for people that think for themselves, I would encourage everyone to learn from Asian cultures.
And, as I explained, the reason I believe that the collapse of America could very well result in the collapse of the Enlightenment is *not* because I believe that Enlightenment is peculiar to any particular continent. The trouble is that *all* societies carry a legacy of thousands of years of tribal collectivisms and are very easily scared back into them, and that the collapse of a what was once the flagship liberal democratic society will give immense rhetorical aid and comfort to all the illiberal power-structures, ideologies, and religions which are always waiting. Enlightenment is not uniquely American (which today is very much *not* modernity’s flagship), but everyone who hates individualism and the free life will try to get us to believe so, in order to discredit individualism. A great deal of anti-Americanism has always been simply cover for people who hate individualism and don’t see anything wrong with collectivist socieites which choke off oxygen for anyone who doesn’t think and feel like the herd surrounding them (which doesn’t mean that anyone should excuse the American government’s atrocities, nor the cultural brutalities specific to the American herd).
I don’t hold up the ‘tottering social democracies’ of Europe as ‘the wave of the future’. I don’t really think in terms of ‘the wave of the future’, and I’m not at all sure that there *is* likely to be much of a future worth contemplating. My observation (and it could be wrong) is merely that those of us who wish to live as individuals and free-spirits, contemporary Europe seems to be the most trustworthy centre of cultural influence (I’m not counting the UK as part of Europe in this context, incidentally).
I certainly do not regard laws against Holocaust denial to be signs of a hopelessly authoritarian society, and I’m rather cold to libertarians who seem to fear these unjust but peripheral laws far more than the mentality behind Holocaust denial itself. As for child protective services, I agree many in the United States are horrible. But the destruction of the individual spirit by abusive and authoritarian parents is far more severe, pervasive, and socially accepted than any crimes by CPS. And my first trouble with American CPS is that they usually do little against real abuse but a great deal to persecute parents who are nontraditional or simply poor. But genuine protection of the individual rights of children from the otherwise near-absolute power of their parents (whether by minarchist or anarchist means) is a good thing, and I enthusiastically approve of New Zealand’s recent ‘anti-smacking’ legislation. State protection of small people against genetically related larger people is a perfectly proper function of government, if there is to be such a thing.
I must regretfully conclude that my sense of what constitutes tyranny has little in common with yours. That said, I’m impressed with your intellectual ambition to learn Chinese, and with the free choice of your children to do the same. I am always in favour of learning to read and write.
Administrator said,
May 29, 2008 at 1:56 am
Dave Miller,
That really misses the point: it needs to be pointed out explicitly that US foreign policy serves the purposes of the power elite rather nicely, but that the US power elite is the enemy both of the American people and of the human race outside the US.
Yes, but that’s precisely what Ruwart says. See, for example, p. 314.
PhysicistDave said,
May 29, 2008 at 5:40 am
Rod,
What I see on p.314 of Mary’s book is a quote from Smedley Butler and a claim, by Mary, that the policy of “eternal war” benefits certain privileged interests (specifically, that the Iraq mess serves certain oil interests).
That general claim is hardly controversial: who would doubt that some companies benefit from war? Every time a war starts or threatens to start, the “stock-pickers’ try to figure out which stocks will gain. It’s Econ 1.
And, indeed the MSM have covered rather nicely some of the hideous ways in which Cheney’s old firm has benefited from the war.
Making that point, which after all no one seriously doubts, is a far cry from my statement:
> The US government is the enemy of the human race.
Rothbard was happy to make that point quite explicitly, again and again. Neither the overall tone of Mary’s book, nor any explicit statement that I have yet seen, seems to make that crucial point.
And it really is the central point. Until people not only come to see the US government as a criminal gang that carries out in broad daylight actions that most criminals would only dare carry out surreptitiously but also come to face the fact that the US government is the greatest and most dangerous rogue nation in history, they are unlikely to do what is necessary to abolish that government.
I suspect that most Americans, if they read through Mary’s book, would view it as a set of well-intentioned prescriptions for making the world a bit better.
But the book does not seem to project the deep moral outrage and disgust that will motivate people to turn away from the “civl religion” that causes them, for example, on Memorial Day to really believe the nonsense about Americ’a dead soldiers having died to “keep us free.”
Most Americans believe in this sort of “Americanism” much more deeply than in any nominal religion.
Mary’s book does not seem to me to forthrightly challenge that.
I’m not accusing Mary of being an evil person, and, for all I know, she may personally feel that outrage towards the American regime herself. But, if so, it does not appear to me that it comes thorough in the book.
As I’ve said before, we are debating here an issue of strategy and tactics, and perhaps I am wrong and Mary’s approach will work. But, from what I’ve seen of fanatical religious behavior (and I’ve seen more than I’d like!), I think that this is what American nationalism essentially is, that it is nearly universal among the American people, and that Mary’s approach will not suffice to deal with it.
The problem is deeper than that.
Dave
PhysicistDave said,
May 29, 2008 at 8:03 pm
Aster,
I responded to your bizarrely vicious statement:
>But China? A world whose future lies with the most brutal and extensive dictatorship on the planet? Get me a drink
In my response, I pointed out that even the oh-so-wonderful Western democracies routinely do some pretty nasty things – the US conquest of Iraq, the Europeans’ jailing of the poor deluded “Holocaust deniers,” etc.
And the best response you could come up with to prove that China is “the most brutal and extensive dictatorship on the planet” is:
> I recently read about a case in which a woman had an affair with a man who worked in the same factory in China; the boss found out, and as a result she was internally deported to work at another factory halfway across the country.
I assume that this was a government factory? I doubt that a private employer would care, and, indeed, it is hard to see how a private employer could have her “internally deported.” If, as you claim, you actually know much about China, you know there is a good deal of internal migration: why doesn’t the woman just quit her job and move to another city?
Your story sounds fishy: perhaps if you can provide us with the URL we can find out if you just made it up.
I’d guess, from what you’ve said, that the woman worked for the government, and, to keep her government job, let herself be sent to another town. There are now many private employers in China: why doesn’t she just quit her government job and become an honest woman by getting a job in the private sector?
Frankly, since no one has a right to a government (or any other) job, I’m not convinced that there is any violation of rights here at all, at least not until you tell us your source and we can see the details.
What I find especially bizarre about your response is that it would be so easy to find, as I pointed out in my previous post, examples in which the Chinese government really is oppressive: a recent example is the suppression of the Tibetan independence movement.
I already agreed that of course the Chinese government is oppressive, just like the US, German, Canadian, etc. governments are.
Unfortunately, while I am happy to condemn Chinese government oppression, you seem rather lukewarm about condemning oppression by Western governments. For example, you wrote:
> I’m rather cold to libertarians who seem to fear these unjust but peripheral laws far more than the mentality behind Holocaust denial itself.
Excellent point. I’m indeed one of those libertarians. I do not fear the Holocaust deniers at all. They’re insignificant, intellectually sloppy, senile old nobodies who will never have any power at all. But the sorts of laws being used against them can and have been used against others, as some cases in Canada have recently shown.
Indeed, it seems to me that your own anti-Chinese remarks may count as crimes under European anti-hate laws: the laws are rather broad, you know. Would you mind if I contact some European prosecutors and see if they will consider taking action against you for this? Or would you prefer to have a higher standard applied to you than to Holocaust deniers?
Let me try this one more time. Germany recently jailed some homeschooling fathers for the horrific crime of educating their children at home – seems there is a Hitler-era law that the Germans still have on the books that makes it clear that children belong to the state. Here ( http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/english/doc/2005-08/11/content_467993.htm ) is a story from ’05 which seems to show that China is much more tolerant of homeshoolers.
I’m a homeschooling dad myself. If I lived in Germany, they’d put me in jail.
I don’t claim China is utopia, or even that it is better than Germany or the USA on balance.
But can you still claim with a straight face that China is the “the most brutal and extensive dictatorship on the planet”?
Come on!
You also wrote:
> I’m impressed with your intellectual ambition to learn Chinese, and with the free choice of your children to do the same.
Oh, c’mon, Aster, young chap! I’m pretty sure you’ve already figured out that our family does not work that way.
My wife and I have a deal with the kids: we provide food, clothes, shelter, and a bunch of other goods and services, and, in exchange, the kids do the schoolwork we tell them to do.
Think of me and my wife as the evil capitalists and our kids as wage slaves.
So far, the kids seem to have decided that they have pretty good working conditions and are not seeking an alternative source of income.
Now, of course, from your perspective, my wife and I are evil, authoritarian, coercive parents. Frankly, given the obvious divergence between your and my values, if you approved of our parenting approach, I would be very worried indeed!
You spoke derisively of “bourgeois libertarians” and of the Chinese “familial” orientation and of the Chinese repressive attitude towards sexuality.
Well, to be quite open, some of the reasons I don’t much like the mainstream libertarian movement in the US is that it is not bourgeois enough for me, that it is not sufficiently familially oriented for my tastes, and that it share the general American obsession with sexuality.
You and I agree that the libertarian movement is too American-centric. But, as you seem to understand, at least in the case of China, most of the world holds more to “bourgeois morality,” to a “familial” orientation, and to a less over-sexualized approach to human life than the US and Western Europe.
These are some of the reasons I am rather fond of several non-Western cultures: they’re so bourgeois, familial, and non-sexualized (okay, there’s also the food).
You wrote:
> I have noticed that my values and priorities on these issues seem to be hopelessly out of sync with most members of the human race…
I think your attitudes are more typical of Americans than you realize, Aster. But, yep, Americans are out of sync with most of the human race. That’s why I’m a paleo-multicultural-internationalist libertarian.
Asia über alles!
I’m really looking forward to the new Asian-centric future (not to mention the food). But, Aster, I don’t think you, and indeed most American libertarians, are going to like it at all.
Not at all.
Dave
Aster said,
May 29, 2008 at 10:25 pm
Dave-
I am not a chap, and would appreciate if you would apologise for words which, to a transsexual woman, come across as a very serious and I assume wholly unintentional personal insult.
Otherwise, it should be considered bad form to gloat over the potential oppression and marginalisation of others. I would have once said: especially if one calls oneself a libertarian.
I consider laws against homeschooling to be horrible, of course.
-Aster
JOR said,
May 30, 2008 at 6:16 am
As powers become imperial when and where they can, the asian-centric future will be at least as bloody and horrifying as the 20th Century.
Less Antman said,
May 30, 2008 at 8:00 am
I’m trying to catch up with life after the Denver convention, and apologize for any delay in responding.
Sorry, Brad: I do know better. SEK3 and I were very friendly with each other back in the early 1980s when I lived in Orange County, California. But agorists regularly deny the educational value of the LP (see Physicist Dave above).
Last week, we came within 60 votes of having a hardcore anarchist as the LP presidential candidate. There were 400 open delegate slots, and far more than 60 anarchists who could have gone to Denver but didn’t. I think it would have been a great opportunity to spread the message of liberty, if only by increasing the sales of Mary Ruwart’s books, including the most popular left-libertarian primer yet written, Healing Our World In An Age Of Aggression. I think we lost a major educational opportunity. But we were 45%: that isn’t a hopeless cause.
I don’t think the LP is necessary: I would prefer a world in which the Molinari Institute was the largest libertarian organization in the country. But it isn’t, and as long as there is an LP, I want it to promote a platform as libertarian as possible. Let me add that I don’t think counter-economics is necessary, and I see no correlation between black markets and liberty.
In my view, changing people’s ideas, their preferences, in the direction of the non-aggression principle is all that is needed. All institutional changes will then automatically take place, “as if guided by an invisible hand.”
Physicist Dave - I am one of those who came into the movement because of the LP, but I’m afraid you probably don’t count me as a true libertarian. I don’t hate the state any more than I hate unicorns. There are only people: government is a word people use to legitimize aggression, and if we remove the legitimacy from acts of aggression, our job is basically done. The rest is crime control.
And if the world adopts the non-aggression principle because the Dalai Lama has convinced everyone it is more skillful means, we will have a free society without people being filled with hate or believing in natural rights (or the existence of the self, for that matter). I think Rothbard was wrong that we need hate. Hate is the Health of the State, too.
So come on, let’s all hold hands and … well, maybe not.
PhysicistDave said,
May 30, 2008 at 4:10 pm
Aster wrote to me:
>I am not a chap, and would appreciate if you would apologise for words which, to a transsexual woman, come across as a very serious and I assume wholly unintentional personal insult.
Aster, young chap, in my vocabulary, “chap,” like “guy,” is gender neutral. Since I am not sure whether I would consider you male or female, this seems appropriate. I’m not sure, for example, whether by “transsexual woman” you mean someone who was born biologically female and now passes for male or the other way around. And, even if you choose to fill us in on that, I’m still not sure which I would consider you to be. Frankly, I don’t really care, which is why I use terms that I consider gender neutral: as I said, one of the things I like about Chinese culture is that it is not quite as over-sexualized and obsessed with gender as American culture. Even Chinese spoken personal pronouns are gender neutral, and I know a lot of Chinese who are unable to master the stupid English “he vs. she” grammatical distinction.
And, since you still seem unwilling to retract your bizarrely false statement:
>But China? A world whose future lies with the most brutal and extensive dictatorship on the planet? Get me a drink
it does appear to me that you are also a racist. I can think of no other reason why you single out the Chinese for such a libelously malicious attack.
Now, could you provide us with a link to this story about the Chinese woman who was, you claim, internally deported, or did you just make this up like your general accusation against China?
Dave
PhysicistDave said,
May 30, 2008 at 4:37 pm
Less wrote of me:
> But agorists regularly deny the educational value of the LP (see Physicist Dave above).
Less, I don’t think I count as an agorist: for example, I supported and voted for Ron Paul in the GOP primary (and have spoken out in his behalf on the Web here and elsewhere), which, I think, is “un-agorist.”
I did not mean to deny that the LP might occasionally have educational value, but, in my experience in the LP, that net value seemed to be negative. For example, as we’ve all discussed, the LP has often actually served to cement in the minds of some libertarians the idea that libertarianism is inconsistent with anarchism. At least from what I saw of the LP during the years I was involved, the LP seemed to project a “low-tax liberalism”/”pot-smokers for lower taxes” image to the public, which I think actually makes it harder for the public to grasp the idea of principled libertarianism.
I think these problems are structurally inherent to the LP: third parties tend to collect slightly (!) kooky adherents, the game third parties play to get media attention is to pretend that they might really win and that they have “practical” and “responsible” policy proposals, etc.
Ron Paul avoided some of these problems as a GOP candidate: I doubt that anyone views Ron as a pot-smoker for low taxes, for example! And, I think he did a better job of projecting sensible middle-class anger and disgust at the state than most LP candidates do.
On the other hand, he did still have the problem of hiding radical libertarian views under “responsible” policy proposals.
Less wrote to me:
> Physicist Dave - I am one of those who came into the movement because of the LP, but I’m afraid you probably don’t count me as a true libertarian. I don’t hate the state any more than I hate unicorns. There are only people: government is a word people use to legitimize aggression, and if we remove the legitimacy from acts of aggression, our job is basically done. The rest is crime control.
Well stated. If I had been more precise, I would have said not “hate the state” but rather something like “hate the inculcation of the delusionary idea of the state and the use of this delusion to confuse people so as to continue criminal activities.”
Less also wrote:
> In my view, changing people’s ideas, their preferences, in the direction of the non-aggression principle is all that is needed. All institutional changes will then automatically take place, “as if guided by an invisible hand.”
Right on! How to do that is the question. I am inclined to think that activities such as Rod’s blog, the Rockwell blog, and even the Paul candidacy in the GOP are likely to do this better than the LP. But I might be wrong.
I don’t think you or Mary Ruwart or Ron Paul (or Rod or RadGeek or Brad) are evil or duplicitous people. I view our debate simply as a matter of which tactics are likely to work. As you know, I actually admire your efforts over the years in the LP to inject some seriousness and concern with principle (as when you edited Caliber so many years ago). I tried this for several years myself (not as long or energetically as you!), but I finally decided it was fruitless.
I wish you well. I just do not think, based on what I saw of the LP over many years and of my understanding of the dynamics of third parties, that you are likely to succeed.
But you may well prove me wrong. Good luck.
All the best,
Dave
Black Bloke said,
May 30, 2008 at 7:17 pm
“Let me add that I don’t think counter-economics is necessary, and I see no correlation between black markets and liberty.”
Some time ago I would’ve just engaged in a merciless mocking of you and your ideas after reading something that I disagree (and I do disagree with the above), but I’ve come to prefer a tack of understanding instead. So let me ask, in the spirit of understanding:
Do you see any correlation between markets (not specifically black) and liberty?
If you do, what is it about black markets that changes things? As you and I are libertarians I’m going to assume it’s not the absence of state interference that’s the cause.
If you don’t see any correlation between markets and liberty then… are you sure you’re in the right place?
Aster said,
May 30, 2008 at 9:50 pm
Dave-
I don’t reply to spurious and ridiculous accusations. Anyone can read my comments and see that I was criticising the current totalitarian Chinese government, not Chinese people or even Chinese culture (which, as i said, in some respect I highly admire). In the same sense, I loathe the American government.(which still isn’t as bad as China’s), but do not believe in making clueless collective judgements against people who happen to be or to have once been Americans.
As for citations, I don’t recall where I read that article- and it doesn’t matter, given that anyone with even a passing knowledge of world events is aware of the extremely brutal record of fascist (’Communist’) China. I don’t exchange words with patronising bigots if I can possibly avoid it in any case. I am here merely very much disappointed to find that Roderick apparently has no objections to your ignorant, patriarchal, and deliberately cruel behaviour.
Anyone who wishes to believe you is welcome to. If libertarians today can’t see what is wrong with the planet’s largest dictatorship, and don’t care if one of their own gleefully looks forward to a time of growing collectivist repression of the human spirit (or simply salivates at the thought of human pain), then they are hopeless in any case. Like, whatever. Nothing I hear a libertarian say will surprise me any more.
Less Antman said,
May 30, 2008 at 11:06 pm
PhysicistDave:
I absolutely know that the comments by you, Rod, Brad, Rad, etc. are all part of a healthy discussion on what we can best do for liberty (which will, of course, not be the same activities for all of us, any more than all of us need to choose the same profession). I come here because of the generally high level of rational discussion among people who are able to disagree without being disagreeable. This site and Liberty & Power are my two favorites in this regard, with somewhat different though overlapping participants as the explanation.
I’m actually of a similar mind as Rod in that I view my participation in the LP (which is almost exclusively in a writing capacity) as representing my assessment of where I personally can provide the greatest marginal utility, rather than as an endorsement of the collective decision to form and maintain the LP. I had a debate with George Smith back in the good old days of Caliber in 1982 at the LPC Convention, and really annoyed LP Founder David Nolan (who was attending the debate) when I said that I wouldn’t have formed the LP if it had been up to me, but given that it exists, it is essentially a sunk cost, and now the question for each of us is whether we can do more for liberty by working within it or not. I’m pretty sure I scored some points against George, a worthy opponent, since a walkout from the party didn’t follow, and SEK3 came up afterwards and said, “Less, you’re dangerous.” And Nolan forgave me, and was delighted to see me in Denver this past week.
I certainly don’t claim the LP is necessary nor the best choice for anyone else. Over the years, though, I think I have helped make it more radical in the late 1970s early 1980s than it would have been without my participation (and think it slipped when I was gone, in part because I was gone, if you can believe my insufferable ego). I know my writings helped educate many LP members to more fully accept the philosophy and be better persuaders for it, and I think this was a good thing. At the moment, it once again feels like the most useful activity for me. For me.
And I will do my best to prove you wrong.
I’m too heartened by the 45% vote for Mary Ruwart to give it up.
Less Antman said,
May 30, 2008 at 11:22 pm
Black Bloke:
Yes, of course, I believe there is a correlation between markets and liberty (approximately 100%). I do not think black markets change the minds of people toward the benefits of markets particularly well, in part because they are crippled in their ability to create wealth and in part because they are more limited in their ability to communicate with those people whose minds need changing. I also think the evidence is that the countries that are closest to liberty have the lowest levels of black market activity. I certainly see no evidence that the percentage of black market activity has a positive correlation with liberty. Do you?
As I suggested, I believe the entire task is changing people’s ideas in the direction of the non-aggression principle. I weigh strategies against the metric of how effectively they change people’s minds. If we expand the agorist strategy to include all educational efforts, I’m an agorist, but if we explicitly exclude educational efforts in connection with political campaigns, I’m not. Those who deny that Ron Paul has advanced the cause of liberty have not persuaded me.
I know many people get into the discussion of whether getting people elected to dismantle power, civil disobedience, or creating alternative institutions will be the principal method of moving to a totally free society, but I see all of that as secondary to finding the best methods of persuasion and changing people’s minds. After that, I trust the market to find the method.
Less Antman said,
May 30, 2008 at 11:25 pm
By the way, I hope it is clear that I consider black markets and civil disobedience to be entirely legitimate, and condemn the idea that we should obey government laws except to the extent we are already obligated not to aggress or to the extent we are making reasonable decisions not to fight a criminal because of the harm to us or our loved ones that will result.
Jim Davidson said,
May 31, 2008 at 2:45 am
I think the most interesting thing that could happen is: what if Barr and Root win, say, 7 million votes? That would be a much higher total than ever before. Lots of Republicans won’t vote for McCain, but might well vote for Barr (scratch and sniff test, he smells Republican).
What does that mean? It means that the reform caucus will shout from the rooftops that the LP is only successful when it runs a candidate so much like the Republicrats and Demopublicans that he is indistinguishable as a “libertarian” of any sort. Which, quite frankly, proves the point of the agorists.
But, it has other consequences. We’ll see a huge number of people who really are radical anarcho-capitalist agorist sorts leave the LP (good) and many others won’t go there to start because they’ll no it is no place for them at all. That second bit is bad, folks, because we’ll have to go find them.
Yes, the LP has been my hunting grounds, and I’m proud to say that I have found fully fledged buck agorists in the field there and dragged them to the door into freedom. Some have even opened the door, imagine that. A few walked through, praise freedom.
So, here we are, at the end of the first decade of the third millennium, and we’re about to see our favorite hunting grounds turned into a fookin’ sheep pasture. Spit.
But, Tom Knapp, seeing this coming at us in 2006, like a freight train it was, jumped on the obvious solution. He formed the Boston Tea Party. Bit of work, hard fought battles on principle, and maybe some artful ballot access nudge-nudge, we’re back in bidness.
Less Antman said,
May 31, 2008 at 3:35 am
And if they win the presidency, the reform caucus will REALLY be in charge.
I don’t think there’s much chance of a multi-million vote total: they haven’t even raised $70,000 since the convention. I agree that any major success will result in the LP abandoning radicalism forever. Whether that results in a jump to the Boston Tea Party or out of politics entirely is a matter on which I won’t speculate. I do think that’s your best chance, although I don’t see how your platform is going to attract more radicals than the LP. But I know you’re committed to your strategy for now.
My guess is that the ticket will disappoint all expectations among reformers, and that the 45% I keep mentioning will become the majority, the 2012 election campaign will be the most consistent libertarian campaign in the history of the LP, and it will either prove the worth of the party or be the death of both the LP and the BTP. Then we all go to work for Brad Spangler.
Third Party Watch » Blog Archive » Roundup of Calls For LP Unity (and Divorce) said,
May 31, 2008 at 9:13 am
[…] Brad Spangler wants the LP to switch its branding from “libertarian” to Cato-style “market liberal”. Roderick Long explains that it’s good for radicals to leave the LP, but it’s also good to have radicals to remain in the LP and fight for it. This was prompted by a long but interesting discussion from which some Less Antman comments are required reading. He says perceptively that “radical minarchists” (like David Nolan?) are “just anarchists unable to admit that a government that doesn’t aggress, doesn’t tax,and allows secession isn’t a government as most market anarchists define it”. He also says: “I don’t hate the state any more than I hate unicorns. There are only people: government is a word people use to legitimize aggression, and if we remove the legitimacy from acts of aggression, our job is basically done. The rest is crime control.” […]
Black Bloke said,
May 31, 2008 at 12:03 pm
Less:
I’m glad to have read the “By the way…” add-on before I replied. Your acknowledgement that it is the state that is really illegitimate and not the black market or the black marketers that are, is reassuring. You said before that you don’t think that counter-economics is necessary, but I believe the opposite. I believe that counter-economics is the most natural response to an aggressive economic entity like the state, as it literally means spurning that aggressive entity and choosing liberty from it. It seems like it has in fact been the only way people have ever moved from rule by one state to rule by another state, I’m certainly hoping that it will be the way for people to move from rule by a state to statelessness. Ordinarily I see an act of counter-economics in the real world as a person rejecting an old regime for a new one, and that is the representative switching of loyalties.
Communication, and mind-changing, and education, are very well and good (and necessary) but I’m afraid that those methods only work with people who are willing to communicate, willing to have their minds changed, and willing to be educated. Perhaps I’m jaded, but I see less and less of that the longer I live, and looking back on it I’m not sure I found much of it years ago. What it seems most people respond to is something tangible. Some good or service that they can grasp with their senses and not with their reason, seems to be a fantastic tool for convincing people. They are usually willing to listen from that point on. Building up a theoretical world of freely acting individuals, and making the attempt to illustrate to people how things would work simply seems (from experience) to be inferior to just showing them.
No positive correlation between the percentage of black market activity and liberty is different from your original statement (the one which I originally replied to). If what we mean by liberty is the absence of aggression and the freedom for an individual to do as he wills (within the confines of logic), and the black market as liberty applied to markets, then I see a 100% correlation between the level of black market activity and liberty. Almost every action that I take everyday when freely interacting with other people I consider a black market activity. The liberty as seen in the western world today seems to me to be more like the freedom to do as the state says, or to do what the state has said it will permit. So the countries that are closest to liberty in my opinion have the highest amount of black market activity. Any kind of taxation, any kind of regulation, any kind of restriction, or control is a negation of liberty for me, and the “free” countries of the world seem to be steeped in those things. Perhaps you disagree with that assessment. Perhaps when you hear the phrase “black markets” you only think in terms of the transports of necessities like food, water, and arms (a lot of folks I talk to seem to only have in mind Eastern Europe or the Middle East when they think of black markets). I think you just have to widen your vision of black markets beyond what is called black market activity by the evening news.
Of course I also think that the Agorist method will be the only viable method for finally eliminating the state. I’m not sure where I read it now, but I read it recently: if the state were abolished tomorrow, people would the next day go about setting it back up again. The reason is because people associate certain services with the state, and think that they can only be provided by the state. Convincing them that this isn’t the case is the end of the state. Now you may interject at this point and exclaim, “That’s what I’m talking about! Educating people that the state is unnecessary!” And that’s correct to an extent. You’re work in educating people will definitely be necessary and helpful in spreading understanding, but I think showing people an already functioning non-state alternative will be even more effective. The Agorists’ work will be in establishing those non-state institutions. You already know the rest from here on out about how every hour we spend in electioneering, is an hour taken away from building those alternative institutions, so I won’t repeat the whole spiel.
Less Antman said,
May 31, 2008 at 4:43 pm
If counter-economic institutions include the American Arbitration Association, ADR (alternative dispute resolution) attorneys, private security firms, doormen, and neighborhood watches that provide alternatives to what are comically referred to as “essential government services” then I am in complete agreement that they are necessary to educate people on the benefits of liberty and, therefore, necessary to the achievement of a free society. I DO use what I think is the conventional definition of a black market when I refer to business activities that are illegal under current government law. I consider such black markets to be entirely moral and, in some especially repressive societies, essential to survival,, but do think I have a point about the difficulty in accumulating wealth and the limitations on one’s ability to communicate their benefits to people while remaining free of government retaliation.
I don’t believe there are many human beings who, in the final analysis, are better off in the present society than in a free one, including the majority of people serving as government employees and the majority of people working for or owning shares in businesses that have cozied up to the government, so I don’t think there would be sufficient power on the other side to oppose the move toward a non-aggressive society if everyone who would be better off in one realized it.
This is why my metric is educational value, and why I think taking the opportunity political elections offer to reach people who normally don’t think of politics is useful, and why I think creating alternative institutions that can operate openly without the threat of statist aggression is far more useful for the causes of liberty than those that have to operate out of sight and out of mind of most people..
I’m not as discouraged as you might be about the possibility of direct persuasion working. Part of it is that I’ve had a decent amount of personal success, but mostly its because I’ve watched how most libertarians persuade, and their problem is not radicalism but rudeness. In that sense, I think the most useful organization in the movement is Advocates for Self Government, which focuses on making libertarians better salespeople for liberty, and which actually reaches a pretty good number of people (their newsletter goes out to more than 70,000, and their world’s smallest libertarian quiz, while flawed, has been taken by over 10 million people).
So long as black markets, or counter-economic institutions, if you prefer, include all non-aggressive institutions, I’m obviously in no substantive disagreement. But in the name of clarity, I do think it is more straightforward to say that I believe our fundamental task is simple: DELEGITIMIZE COERCION. The market can be trusted to make all appropriate institutional changes as that occurs, and the value of all strategies should be weighed primarily against the measure of how effectively they change people’s minds in that direction. Power comes from legitimacy, not guns, and I don’t see success as a class struggle because I don’t think there are many people on the other side objectively (in the sense of being net beneficiaries of coercion). I do think the rejection of class analysis put me on the opposite side of the analysis provided by most people I know who refer to themselves as agorists.
But another clarification is in order: SEK3 and I were very friendly with each other, and I know our respect was mutual, from some things he said to me and about me. He was a hero of libertarianism, and his advocacy was one thing that kept the LP from straying as far as it might have done as fast as it might have done. I think non-LP critics of the LP do a great service to the extent they criticize any advocacy of aggression by LP candidates and activists (although I disagree with those who believe that its very existence is an act of aggression). I also think critics who remain friendly (Roderick Long being the prototype) do the most good.
Soviet Onion said,
June 1, 2008 at 7:52 pm
Less,
Education and counter-economics certainly aren’t mutually exclusive. They’re both aspects of agorism, and mutually supportive. You need education and advocacy to instill a sense of solidarity among practitioners, discourage red market aggression and imbue it with a pro-revolutionary consciousness. Likewise, as Black Bloke noted, it helps to be able to point to a tangible and immediate microcosm of our ideas, and not just just some big and distant “political” ideal. There’s a reason most people have no use for politics.
I dispute the assertion that underground economies are hindered in their production of wealth. If anything, that would have more to do with a lack of development and impediments to open operation, which are both remedied by further development and by advocacy (education!) to acheive a cultural climate in which non-violent illegality can operate more openly without fear that your fellow human beings will narc on it. In San Francisco, pot is almost de facto legal because its use is so socially accepted that police can do little to enforce their law (while tolerated medical marijuana clubs legalise much of the existing pot possesion). Even here in Chicago, a friend tells me that he’s gets more dirty looks smoking a cigarette on the street than he does smoking a joint. In this one area, cops have largely lost the organic street-level legitimacy that makes enforcement effective.
Even granting that black markets are inhibited in wealth creation on a macro-level, they still benefit practioners on an individual level. Every excise tax, sales tax, regulation and prohibition increase the profit incentive to people that bear the risk in evading those laws. That’s precisely why so many people do those things spontaneously, without any ideological motivation. Libertarian advocacy here is easy, because the numbers practically do the job for us.
It can be risky to push for revolution while breaking the law, but less risky than you think. First of all, you don’t necessarily have to reveal to your own activities while doing it. If you want to use example, you can use someone elses’s without naming the person, or just discuss a certain business model in general (gypsy cabs, for example).
And of course, none of this precludes the existence of independent advocacy groups operating completely aboveground. It’s important that we convince ordinary people of the legitimacy, or at least the unimportance, of so-called “criminal activity”, with the usual set of op-eds, buttons, bumperstickers and debates. There’s also legal education and defense funds; there’s nonviolent civil disobedience; there are “grey market” activities that provide arguably or completely legal services that nevertheless help black market operators evade detection; and any number of other things.
You’re correct in recognizing that as long as the Party exists it effects public opinion of libertarianism, and that we should be care about that. The difference is that I think of this more as damage control rather than positive advocacy. Political parties, because of the games they need to play, and because of the built-in incentives to conform to the existing system, inevitably end up being coopted for purposes contrary to their stated ideals. Anarchists end up pulling damage control by futilely trying to resist that; as you yourself said, it was mainly criticism from anti-political anarchists that kept the LP from straying faster and further off course than it has.
Less Antman said,
June 2, 2008 at 3:29 am
Soviet Onion:
While reading your comments, it occurred to me that counter-economics was critical to the mid-1980s immigration amnesty bill, and is constantly used in politics to explain why an illegal immigrant crackdown is inconceivable today. Of course, counter-economics in drugs has, so far, led to enormous pain and suffering, with legalization still not in the cards and only marijuana tolerated and only that in some places (plus, there are too many people in prison for pot and too many who have been victimized by asset forfeiture laws to say it is a de facto legalization). But I don’t want to exclude any strategy.
I think open defense of illegal activities is easier for someone not personally engaging in them. I know that my own advocacy of relegalizing drugs is more persuasive (and safer) because I’m such a teetotaler: I went to college at Berkeley and never even experimented once with marijuana. When my 1982 senate campaign in Orange County, California issued a position paper, The Case For Legalizing Heroin, I frequently thought of the fact that it would have been a riskier campaign topic if I had ever used or dealt it.
I said the criticism of anti-political libertarians (and SEK3 specifically) was ONE thing that kept it from straying as quickly as it might. I think people within the LP who have tried to keep it honest deserve credit as well, and if we’re allocating it, more credit than outside critics. And I can’t get out of my mind the frustrating knowledge that it would have taken less than 60 radical libertarians in Denver to make Mary Ruwart the current nominee, which I think would have been the finest moment for the party and the movement imaginable. Se la vie.
I’ll confess that I occasionally get ornery when people deny that the LP is part of the movement, and I may be guilty of some retaliatory farce in this thread: I believe that anyone who lives a non-aggressive life is part of the solution, advocate or not, legal or not, and I do believe that anyone providing goods or services in the voluntary sector advances the cause of liberty. I also think that political libertarians should speak up in defense of people engaged in non-aggressive but illegal activities. If I’m too conventional and law-abiding in my life, I do think it sometimes makes me more persuasive in defending those who are not.
In any event, to the extent I implied counter-economics isn’t part of the strategy, I retract and apologize. I do stand by the belief that, when it comes down to it, changing people’s minds so that they reject the legitimacy of all coercion is game, set, and match for the cause, and that all activity should be weighed against its contribution to that goal. And I believe that the LP, on balance, has been a positive contributor.
Natasha said,
June 3, 2008 at 3:51 pm
I find the desire for “libertarianism” to be equated with family centric collectivism to be absurd. I know a young rebel against Southern Baptism right who whose father cut off financial aid to her, because she is living with her b/f at age 20.
Absent the freedom from her family she enjoys by having her own job in a city of some kind of distance from them, she would be stuck with her bigoted patriarchal father.
As someone who feels little profound connection to most of my biological family, I strongly resent the notion that “freedom” has something to do with staying tied down to your biological family, because they are your biological family.
“Paleolibertarianism” should go join the GOP.
PhysicistDave said,
June 4, 2008 at 4:30 pm
Natasha wrote, obviously to me:
> I know a young rebel against Southern Baptism right who whose father cut off financial aid to her, because she is living with her b/f at age 20.
Well… as it happens, I was raised in a Southern Baptist family myself, and I adamantly refused to ever be baptized, to join the church, to “accept Jesus as Lord and Savior,” etc., so I can have some sympathy with your friend.
On the other hand, I generally found Southern Baptist moral views to be admirable, even while I never found their theological views very convincing.
But, most importantly, if your friend considers herself mature enough that she thinks she can decide for herself to live with her boyfriend, why should she be financially dependent on her daddy anymore?
I notice that far too many “libertarians” mean by “liberty” that someone should be free to do whatever she wants and that someone else should be obligated to pick up the bill!
When your friend’s daddy is financially supporting her, it is quite fair that in exchange he gets to set some ground rules. Your friend was quite unreasonable if she expected the parental support to continue with no strings attached.
Natasha also wrote:
> I strongly resent the notion that “freedom” has something to do with staying tied down to your biological family, because they are your biological family.
I doubt that you can find anyone who claimed that. All libertarians I know (and all non-libertarians I know, for that matter) of course recognize that freedom does include the right to sever relations with one’s biological family, and that, in some unfortunate situations, this may be the wise thing to do.
The discussion of this point did not begin with me or anyone else claiming that freedom meant you were stuck with your family. It started with Aster attacking China as totalitarian, partly because of the well-known Chinese “familialism.”
That’s the real issue, and it is a significant one: should libertarians condemn a culture as antithetical to human liberty if it has a strong familial orientation.
I think that for libertarians to do so, as Aster does, is absolutely bizarre, and, indeed, inimical to human well-being, and, ultimately, human life.
Human children desperately need parenting. In some exceptional situations, that parenting can come from non-biological families. In most cases, it will inevitably come from their biological families, for obvious reasons. To condemn a society for its familial orientation, as Aster does, is to deny the basic framework that makes human childhood livable.
Furthermore, a society that rejects family ties as the basis of society, as Western societies increasingly have, is unlikely to be libertarian. If people cannot rely on their family in difficult times, they are likely to expect the government to step in as a substitute. It is no coincidence that unmarried mothers, for example, tend to be supporters of big government.
Finally, as a strategic approach for the libertarian movement, condemnation of a familial orientation is simply disastrous. Even in Western countries that have weakened family ties, most people are, or expect to become, parents. In non-Western countries, familial orientation remains quite strong.
If it is a systematic part of libertarianism to condemn, as Aster does, “familialism,” then most human beings will, quite rightly, reject libertarianism.
Families are the one natural, primordial human institution: most human beings, if forced to choose between a political ideology and their family will — thank Heavens! — choose their family.
Natasha also wrote:
> “Paleolibertarianism” should go join the GOP.
Right on, Natasha! As I said, I voted for (and sent a few bucks to) Ron Paul. One of the main reasons why I support Ron, and why I left the LP, is precisely what we are discussing. Aster expressed his strong disdain for, as he put it, “bourgeois libertarians,” for “familialism,” and for those of us who would like a society with much less over-emphasis on sexuality.
I found those attitudes that he expressed to be dominant within the LP. They are not dominant in the GOP, and, indeed, while these attitudes are much more widespread than I would like in the US, they are still not dominant in the country at large.
I agree with you and Aster. The central split among libertarians is not anarchists vs. minarchists, or plumb-liners vs. compromisers. The central split is: do you or do you not hate “familialism,” “bourgeois values,” etc.
Mainstream libertarians hate such things, and they belong in the LP. They will never reach out successfully to most Americans, much less most of the human race.
Those of us who admire a familial orientation, bourgeois values, etc. – i.e., “paleolibertarians,” “Paulistas,” etc. – do not belong in the LP.
Of course, in the final analysis, it is all moot, because Asia still generally adheres to traditional human values, and Asia will triumph, as much as that pains Aster.
Dave
Rad Geek said,
June 5, 2008 at 3:26 am
PhysicistDave:
Dave,
Who the fuck cares whether you would deign to consider Aster male or female? I can’t see how it’s any business of yours to say one way or the other. What does it matter to you?
What does matter, on the other hand, is what Aster considers herself–at least, that is, if you want to try to have a conversation with her according to basic norms of civilized politeness.
You used some language which, whatever your intent may have been, inadvertently caused her grief; she earnestly and straightforwardly explained the reasons why, and now, rather than doing something as simple and decent as apologizing for your inadvertent fuck-up, you’ve decided to get defensive about it, and back up the defensiveness with being a dick to her about it, first by repeating the same term you used earlier, and then by adding your wildly irrelevant and pointlessly presumptuous speculations on whether or not you personally would consider her female (as if anyone asked you; as if anyone other than you cares what you think about it). You could not possibly have been more rude if you were to address a black 16 year old as “boy,” and, when he asked you to choose another way to address him, you called him “boy” again and then went on to ramble about how you wouldn’t know whether to consider a 16 year old a “boy” or a “young man” or something else again.
This kind of callous rudeness is completely unacceptable and I think you ought to apologize to Aster for it.
You know, I see no reason to think that Aster’s comments about the “familialism” of mainstream Chinese culture were directed against a position that countenanced the right to sever relations with one’s biological family. As far as I can tell, there is good reason to believe that failing to countenance that right is part of what she was complaining about, and part of what Natasha was complaining about after her. Has it occurred to you that when she criticized “familialism,” she was criticizing something that she identifies with that word, not necessarily what you identify with that word?
If you want to change the subject to something else — like, say, the position that custody of children ought to default to biological parents in the absence of some compelling reason for a different arrangement (which I doubt Aster or Natasha disagrees with) or perhaps the position that, although children have a right to sever ties with their parents for whatever reason, morally speaking, they owe a (non-enforceable) duty of filial obedience and morally ought to sever ties only under extreme and unusual conditions (which I know that Aster and Natasha disagree with, but which is a distinct position from the one that began this conversation), then you should feel free to discuss that, instead. But you do owe it to your readers to make clear that you are changing the subject, and not to pretend as if you are responding to Aster’s original comments.
If people cannot rely on their family in difficult times, then they are likely to rely on somebody other than their family. That need not be the government, and historically, there have been many institutions developed that provide mutual aid and support outside of family ties. (For example, the many workers’ societies and ethnic mutual aid societies that have always flourished in working-class immigrant communities, where, as a matter of necessity, working folks couldn’t count on support from their mostly overseas families.)
If you want to ask why it is in this country, today, that there is so much less of a mutual aid infrastructure in place than there has been in times place, and why there is so little institutionalized support for, say, single mothers, outside of the government welfare and education bureaucracies, well, that’s an interesting question to ask. But once you start asking it, you may find that it complicates your picture of the real dynamics here, and it becomes a lot harder to scapegoat single mothers for welfare statism.
This is either vacuous or counterhistorical nonsense, depending on what you mean by “families.” If “families” means “nuclear families,” then it’s certainly not true that human societies are “naturally,” or always, arranged around those. If “families” means “extended family,” the claim is vacuous; ties of kinship are extremely variable across human societies, in terms of who counts as family, how important distant family relationships are (as well as how comparatively important ties of kinship by blood and by marriage are, etc.), and there is no fixed cross-cultural definition of just what the hell an extended family is. In late 18th century America it was extremely common for young children and adolescents to be packed off for years to live with very distant relations or family friends, in ways that would be unthinkable in contemporary American “nuclear families.” Who counts as family, how much certain kinds of family ties matter, etc. are all culturally variable phenomena which change a lot over time and space, and the particular form of family ties that are now common in bourgeois American families are a very late development, which has nothing in particular to do with nature and everything to do with American culture and American standards of living.
I have no idea what logical point all this guff is supposed to establish. Even if you’re right, the popularity or the material success of an ideology has no bearing on its truth or falsity.
I mean, look, I’m already throwing in for an ideology that proclaims a universal and unconditional right to shoot up heroin and bid for private surface-to-air missiles on eBay, while you engage in consensual sodomy, for (tax-free) money, with an undocumented immigrant while you the two of you cross back and forth over the U.S.-Mexico border. Do you seriously think someone who goes in for that sort of thing ought to be swayed by complaints that their beliefs about family ties might not go over well at the next Homeowners’ Association meeting?
a;jfklg;hgsjl;af said,
June 6, 2008 at 4:01 pm
Hi. I suppose I am addressing Dave primarily. I am the person Natasha was talking about and just wanted to clear up the misunderstanding.
I never once made a peep of complaint about the withdrawal of financial assistance. I find it rather odd that of all the complex web of minor family related concerns I have discussed with Natasha this was what came up. The only financial assistance I have been accepting from my parents for some time now was 1/4 of my college tuition. The withdrawal of this help is truly of little significance to my life. The only awkward part of the situation is that my parents are being rather insistent that I do in fact need their financial assistance and therefore I must do as they say.
I would not consider myself to be rebelling against anything. I enjoy a very secure relationship with my entire family. There are, I will admit, minor frustrations which I have with my father’s attitudes toward a female’s role in society/family. Natasha happens to be a good listening ear when I feel the need to whine around about these minor frustrations. That is all.
I do find it interesting that I was quite the inverse of you growing up. I found the base theological concepts behind their belief system to be comprehensible. On the other hand I had a very difficult time stomaching their specific moralities. I realize these specifics vary from family to family, so it is truly no surprise, I just found it interesting.
Oh, and you really needn’t bother with a personal assault on me as I am rarely on the internet and even more rarely on web forums.
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