Libertarianism, Fascism, and a Goat

Welcome friends!

I’m aways amused by any story involving so-called libertarians, those supremely confused and quite possibly deranged extreme economic conservatives who argue all our complicated social and ethical issues can be resolved by an appeal to liberty but who are insufficiently loony tunes to embrace anarchism.  Hey, we all like liberty.  But you know that only gets one so far, right?  One issue of course is what is freedom anyway and how does one get it?  Imagine an anarchy like I don’t know, let’s say Somalia.  Are the people free?  You mean from the rule of law?  Sure.  How about free to walk down the street without their neighbors shooting them in the head with an AK-47?  Probably not.  So are they free or aren’t they?  I don’t know.  Depends what you mean.  Another issue is that in the context of the liberal ethos one’s personal freedom is a perfectly acceptable moral reference when one is talking about behavior that does not impinge in any serious way on anyone else but in situations in which one’s behavior does impinge on other people freedom just isn’t a very helpful concept because both parties have a claim to freedom but only one of them will end up having his or her way.  So how do libertarians convince themselves they can solve everything with an appeal to liberty?  If that’s what they really do I suppose the most likely explanation is they accept certain laws and political institutions and social arrangements and conventions so fully and so unquestioningly they fade into the background and appear to libertarians to disappear altogether so that freedom in a general sense and freedom in the context of a particular legal, economic, and political framework seem to run together.  When libertarians talk about liberty what they’re really talking about is not having to deal with criticisms and potential revisions of the institutions they so adore and would like to remove from the table altogether.  Why not just say something like I accept our current labor market and various other means of distributing economic power and the market system for distributing goods and services based on that economic power and whatever assorted other legal and political institutions one cares to throw in?  What’s liberty got to do with it?  Why the smokescreen?  I don’t know.  I know many conservatives love rhetoric and take a rather pragmatic approach to democracy so it’s tempting to suppose we’re dealing with a sort of bait and switch situation in which they would like to suggest we’re talking about endorsing freedom, which surely most people including especially liberals would wholeheartedly support in the proper context, when we’re really talking about the complicated and potentially dubious ethical proposition that whatever happens under our free marketish economic and legal system is ethical gold.  But who knows?  They might be sincere.  They might just have psychological blinders.  Some of them might think they’re talking about anarchism.  Some of them might be mentally challenged and not thinking clearly.  Hey, I’m just throwing out some possibilities.

Anyway, knowing how I feel about libertarianism in general I’m sure you can appreciate the hearty laugh I got when I read about the Libertarian Party candidate for the US Senate for the great southern swamp we call Florida, a 32-year old lawyer (it figures) named Augustus Sol Invictus (that would be Majestic Unconquered Sun in plain old English, in case you were wondering), who admitted recently that a couple of years ago he killed a goat in some sort of pagan ritual and drank the poor creature’s blood as a way to “give thanks” to the “god of the wilderness.”

Now the bit about sacrificing a goat and drinking its blood is noteworthy enough but the thing that really got my attention was what Adrian Wyllie, the Libertarian Party chairperson for the state of Florida, said when he resigned in opposition to Mr. Invictus’s candidacy, which was that Mr. Invictus is a self-proclaimed fascist who promotes starting a “second civil war.”  Mr. Invictus denied it and claimed he is the victim of a smear campaign orchestrated by Mr. Wyllie, although he did admit white supremacists did indeed support his candidacy.  And when we say white supremacists we are of course referring to Neo-Nazis, Ku Klux Klan members, and people like that.  So there is some point of connection going on there somewhere.

Now assuming Mr. Wyllie is correct and Mr. Invictus does indeed consort with what passes for fascists in this country (not serious Old World political fascists by any stretch of the imagination; in a contemporary American context we’re talking about ignorant rednecks with guns who would like to victimize minorities if only the repressive American police state would get off their backs) one has to wonder what sort of mental gymnastics might lead one to combine liberty and fascism.  Talk about strange bed fellows.  I suppose you know the authentic old time fascists associated an excessive interest in one’s personal liberty with the sort of corrupt and effete scoundrel they imagined would prefer to live in a liberal democracy and they would have wasted no time at all pounding Mr. Invictus to a bloody pulp for even mentioning it.  Ah but there’s the rub!  Like the institutions that make up the “free market” for an economic conservative, if one is a violent bigot and agrees with what one imagines a fascist state might want to do as far as minority relations are concerned then the whole repressive apparatus of the fascist state may well fade into the background leaving only the perception of one’s liberty to finally do what one would have liked to do in the first place.  You know what I mean.  “I’ve wanted to kill that awful minority kid for some time but I can’t because of all those oppressive laws against murder.  My precious personal liberty is being violated.  But under a fascist state I imagine I’ll be able to murder people right and left.  My liberty will be restored!  Oh glorious day.  I’m going to join the Union of Libertarian Fascists right away!”

Maybe I’m just imagining things.  I don’t really know that Mr. Invictus thinks highly of both fascism and libertarianism.  I was only going by what the former chairperson of the Libertarian Party for the state of Florida said and of course he might be making it all up.  Seems a little odd he would but then again pretty much everything having to do with libertarianism seems a little odd to me.  Maybe I’m thinking too much.  It’s not like libertarianism is some sort of serious political philosophy.  Just a bit of fun for people too stupid for the Stupid Party.  Heck, I can’t even make heads or tails of the massive conservative support for that guy with the funny hair and he’s the leading Republican candidate to be President of the US.  That’s mainstream Republicanism right there.  Why in the world would I imagine I could ever make sense of the crackpot libertarian wing of the conservative movement?  Probably best to just have a good laugh and move on to something a little more sensible.

References

Senate candidate in Florida admits drinking goat blood.  BBC.  October 5, 2015.  http://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-34450057.

A View of Mount Snowden: The Biggest Ego in North America

Welcome friends!

Well, looks like we have yet another case where I feel I must interrupt my normally scheduled programming to respond to the news of the day.  I really don’t like doing it but you know sometimes I just can’t keep my big mouth shut.  So this week I’ve decided to join the fray and provide some commentary on the Edward Snowden issue.  To avoid any undue mental tension let me just state at the outset that I’m in the camp that views Mr. Snowden more as a traitor than a hero.  (Yes, I realize that puts me on the same side of the aisle as arch-Republican House Speaker John Boehner on this one.  I know, the world is a funny place sometimes, isn’t it?)  On the other hand, I wouldn’t exactly call Mr. Snowden a traitor of epic proportions.  More like traitor light.  Or maybe I just don’t know how serious it really was.  I know Mr. Boehner and others are convinced that he put other Americans at risk and maybe they know something I don’t, but I’m just going by what’s obvious to me.  Anyway, I think the more interesting aspect of the whole issue is really the light Mr. Snowden’s actions shed on some rather troubling underlying trends in American society that to me are much more significant than any single breach of security... Sorry but only selected archived (previous year) posts are currently available full text on this website.  All posts including this one are available in my annual anthology ebook series available at the Amazon Kindle Bookstore for a nominal fee.  Hey, we all need to make a buck somehow, right?  If you find my timeless jewels of wisdom amusing or perhaps even amusingly irritating throw me a bone now and then.  Thank you my friends!

Conservative Libertarianism: A Study in Confusion

Welcome friends!

I was recently thinking a bit more about how conservatives attempt to use the concept of personal liberty in contexts like political libertarianism (in the case of economic conservatives) and arguing for the right to express one’s religion in any situation one sees fit (in the case of social conservatives).  I’ve said it before, but I’ll say it again: in my opinion these people just don’t really know what they’re talking about, or maybe they know what they’re talking about but are being purposefully misleading.  The words are there but they just don’t fit in very well together.  Let me explain.

Now as I’ve already said in many previous posts, the concept of personal liberty is very, very important for the liberal and humanist viewpoint as I understand it.  However, there is a realm in which it makes sense to talk about personal liberty and there is a realm in which it does not and distinguishing those two realms is where I think conservatives typically fall down.  The realm in which it makes sense to focus on personal liberty is when your actions don’t have a significant impact on other people.  The realm in which it doesn’t make sense is when your actions do.  Now don’t get me wrong.  It’s not that the idea of personal liberty suddenly becomes philosophically suspect in the latter case, it’s just that you’re dealing with two people and the concept of personal liberty applies equally to both, so if they don’t see eye to eye, if one person is doing something that significantly affects the other person, then the idea of personal liberty just isn’t going to do much to resolve that situation.

So libertarians, I think, get it partially correct when they (ostensibly) reject government involvement in situations in which one’s behavior does not have a significant impact on other people.  Nothing wrong with that; seems like a perfectly legitimate application of personal liberty to me.  I say “ostensibly” because as I’ve suggested before I think political expediency often leads libertarians to jump in bed with social conservative elements in the Republican Party who are only too happy to get the government involved in exactly those types of situations if it furthers their religious objectives.  However, nobody’s perfect, so I can understand libertarians sometimes not living up to their stated ideals.  No, the bigger problem I have with libertarians is that they then go on to attempt to apply the idea of personal liberty in contexts in which it seems to me we are plainly talking about people having a significant impact on other people, such as distributional issues, for example.  I’m sorry, but if you have two people and they both think they have some type of moral or ethical claim to some resource or whatever and you decide whose claim should take precedence, then you cannot be deciding who is getting what on the basis of personal liberty.  That’s logically impossible.  You’re deciding on the basis that you think one person’s claim in more justified than the other person’s claim, which is a rather different issue philosophically speaking.  So in the context of an economic system, if you think government should not redistribute resources or whatever, then that’s fine: you support the distribution that results from current market arrangements.  However, you’re not talking about personal liberty; you’re talking about whatever values you’re applying to your assessment of our current market arrangements.  And it’s not a matter of government being involved or not involved.  It’s involved right now in the form of defending property rights.  Indeed, government power expressed in our justice system is what lies behind and enforces our current market arrangements.  One either likes the job the government is doing and wants to leave it at that, or one doesn’t like it for some reason and wants to change something.  So again, you’re not talking about people becoming free of government in some abstract sense; you’re talking about government doing one thing rather than another, supporting the interests of one group of people rather than another group, expressing one type of social and moral philosophy as opposed to some other, etc.  As I may have mentioned before, as a liberal I don’t really see eye to eye with conservatives’ assessment of the ethical standing of the results of our current market arrangements but that’s not even what I’m talking about here.  We need to go back to the step even before that.  I’m just trying to clarify what we’re talking about, and what we’re talking about is manifestly not personal liberty.

Then we have the social conservatives.  Now the funny thing about social conservatives to me as far as personal liberty goes is that they are very concerned about their right to express their religious beliefs in any and every context they see fit, but they seem entirely blind to the right of people to go about their business without having to continually deal with other people’s religious beliefs.  Maybe a facetious example would help to illustrate what I’m talking about.  Suppose my religion requires me to hit anyone who fails to pray properly on the head with a rock.  Now, what does the concept of personal liberty suggest we do?  Does it suggest I should be allowed to hit other people on the head with a rock?  The answer of course is it doesn’t say anything.  The issue is not about personal liberty.  You’re talking about two people, the hitter and the hitee, and they both have a claim to personal liberty.  Now take it down a notch and suppose you’re a kid in a science class about evolution.  Suppose your religious beliefs preclude you from accepting the theory of evolution.  You want to explain your views to the class but the teacher and the rest of the class are focused on learning about the theory of evolution.  So what does personal liberty suggest we do in this case?  Again, it doesn’t really say anything.  You have two people with conflicting goals: one person wants to discuss his or her religious objections to the idea of evolution, and the other person is trying to lean about the scientific theory of evolution.  It’s not a matter of supporting or not supporting personal liberty.  OK, having gotten the red herring of personal liberty out of the way, we can then proceed to discuss how to resolve the issue.  Personally, I think it makes a lot of sense to say we’ll talk about some things in some contexts and other things in other contexts.  So I’m fine with the idea that a school limits discussions in a science class to scientific issues in the same way a church limits Sunday sermon discussions to whatever the pastor or priest or whoever has to say.  I think if we have some kind of rule in which anyone can hijack any discussion in any context to whatever purpose they like then we’re mostly going to end up with a lot of frustrated, angry, and ultimately ignorant people.  But again, my point right now is not to resolve these kinds of conflicts, it’s just to clarify what we’re talking about and again we’re clearly not talking about personal liberty.

So just to summarize.  As a liberal and humanist I strongly support applying the concept of personal liberty wherever it makes sense, and to the extent people of other political persuasions agree then that’s great, we’re on the same page on that one.  But I cannot support pretending to apply it to situations where it logically cannot apply.  All you’re doing in that context is engaging in what I think might fairly be called political posturing, in particular, substituting an attractive concept you think people might rally behind, even though it’s completely irrelevant, for the more difficult concepts you would need to really address the issue at hand, in the process making it more difficult to recognize and discuss the real issues that divide us.  So having libertarianism as one’s stated social philosophy doesn’t do much for me except to show me one either doesn’t know what the real issues are or one knows what the real issues are but would prefer not to discuss them.  The sooner we get the false image of libertarianism as a complete and coherent social philosophy out of our heads the sooner we can get back to discussing the fundamental issues that we really need to discuss.

Occupy My Blog

Welcome friends!

I read a rather interesting account of the Occupy Wall Street movement in a recent issue of the New Yorker magazine the other day, so I thought I might do a post on that.  However, I must admit that what stood out to me as particularly interesting was not the main gist of the story but some of the ancillary issues it raised in my mind about the anarchist fringe element that may or may not be involved.  Before I turn to that though, let me just say that in general I wholeheartedly support Occupy Wall Street and other similar movements around the world.  I mean, what’s not to like?  I certainly think it’s a healthy counterweight to the noxious confluence of big money and politics that one usually finds, particularly (but not uniquely) on the conservative side of the aisle.  And I think their policy suggestions so far sound eminently reasonable and practical such as, for example, a small tax on certain investment transactions.  I mean, if you think that type of thing is radical you should check out what they’ve been up to recently on the other side.

Anyway, let’s move on to this whole issue of the anarchist fringe element... Sorry but only selected archived (previous year) posts are currently available full text on this website.  All posts including this one are available in my annual anthology ebook series available at the Amazon Kindle Bookstore for a nominal fee.  Hey, we all need to make a buck somehow, right?  If you find my timeless jewels of wisdom amusing or perhaps even amusingly irritating throw me a bone now and then.  Thank you my friends!