Responding to Wolf's Head

 

A smart libertarian who signs himself Wolf's Head trolls my posts on WatWatch, and though I don't generally respond to his provocations (why's such a conservative dude like you attached like a pilot fish to this bleeding-heart liberal blog?), I do pay attention to him. Wolf's Head is educated, writes like he respects the language, and he's a flatout intellectual. He has a vision of the world and can articulate it. I think he deserves a conversation. (As to his/her/their gender, I say he for convenience. I don't know Wolf's gender and don't care. I use the gendered pronoun for convenience. Sue me.)

Recently down column I wrote that accepting election-denying Trumpists like Ted Budd would be the end of our democracy. Wolf's Head jumped on that: "We don't have a democracy; we have a Republic." Well, yeah, I get that, but I know where you're headed, to that strawhorse target, "pure democracies mean mob control," and who knows but the mob will want to eat you?

 

Wolf's Head rests his case against democracy by mentioning when Black people took over and oppressed white people: "Representative democracy? Like the Democratic Republic of the Congo? No thank you" -- bringing up a notorious case when suddenly freed Black people began lording it over whites and killing them. I'll leave the Google research to you about the reality and the hype of "the Congo Crisis," 1960-62, and just acknowledge that Wolf has made his white superiority breath-takingly obvious in other blog threads.

 

But he doesn't even respect representative democracy. Man, that's extreme.

 

He then explained himself in a long post:

 

Democracy means Might Makes Right.

Majority gets their way, Irregardless of what it does to the minority. As with most liberals I meet, you think such a system would only be done altruistically. Conservatives and libertarians beg to differ.

What I have seen in my life is this: Democracy is wanted by altruistic, caring, well-intentioned but ultimately self-righteous people who think everyone would believe what they do if only the opposition knew how wrong they were.

But, it is also desired by those who think they can manipulate those feelings of altruism and caring into giving themselves more power by getting more votes. 

THAT is the great danger.

People use your emotions, your desire to make things better, into power over others.

That is what democracy is all about, power over those less powerful, or less numerous, then you.

So, if someone is brilliant, capable and works hard to support themselves, their families, their employees and community, the majority might be jealous of that. It's a recurring liberal theme and they want to tax or regulate his wealth because the majority isn't capable of achieving what this individual has, and therefore thinks it's 'NOT FAIR!!!'

This happens every effing day.

So, it's easier to vote with the majority to take from someone else, than to achieve it on your own.

Democrats will call the achiever 'greedy' or 'selfish' for creating and keeping his wealth.

But really, who is greedier. the man who works for his achievements or the majority who want to take it for their own benefit?

 

He doesn't mention "tax and regulation" until late, but I get the subtext: Wolf devoutly believes taxation is theft and that government regulation is mainly harassment aimed at prosperous people because of liberal jealousy about conservative wealth. Clearly, Wolf's Head is a guy who does not believe in the "social contract." (The social contract, which should and can and does produce civic virtue, establishes the legitimacy of the authority of the state over the individual for the good of the community.) 

 

Social contract? I do believe in it, which is the basis for my belief in democracy. I grew up with it, the cohesion of a community of equals (farmers who knew how to do everything almost but needed help in crisis times, who got help when they needed it from their neighbors, and depended on Roosevelt socialism that brought the "shelter belts" of trees to break up the winds that were lifting the topsoil and taking it to Arkansas. It was more socialism that electrified the countryside. Locally, and before my time, democratic impulses wanted to see every child enlightened and potentially ennobled, so those early, capable, tough white Europeans who settled the Panhandle of Texas decided to tax themselves and build schools -- including many one-room satellite schools in far-flung sections where poor farm kids who had no way to get to town could learn to read and grow up to write a blog, maybe. "We'll solve that with school buses," which I rode through every grade into high school. Everybody got taxed for all of that, for the good that full and free education brings. And they elected a school board who ran it and county commissioners who worked for free and made sure the muddy roads that became rutted canyonlands got smoothed out. Yes, some probably groused, especially about the school tax: "I don't even have kids in school! Why should I pay?" But simple, good-hearted, civic-minded democratic consensus won out. Later, after government began paving more and more dirt roads (the wonderful socialism that helped farmers get their capitalist goods from farm to store), and at some point some other democrats in Austin decided that "vocational agriculture" should be a thing in rural schools (I took it!), proving that legitimate government could help farmers keep their investments intact by educating their children in the arts of rural survival.

I was a poor kid, but you couldn't tell the poor kids from the rich ones. We all wore the same farming-country dungarees with worn knees. I wore shirts made from cotton sacks. My father owned no land. He worked another man's wheat stubble, and we lived in that owner's houses -- two different ones over a couple of decades. The good will of men (and women) I didn't even know, who weren't kin to me, enabled me to get educated, and then Christian socialist aid got me further to a college we could afford (a Baptist one, which was even in the '50s already fully integrated, where the religion didn't take for me but the world of history and philosophy and literature did). That's why I'm a democrat and also a Democrat.

Yes, I try to win elections. I try to convince people of my truth. It's the social contract if they agree and elect my guys and also if they don't agree and reject my guys and elect theirs. The social contract demands I accept the will of the people in either case. If their guys go wrong in office, I'll try to eject them, and if I can convince others to change course, we will.

 

The part of Wolf's dissertation that wounded me most:

 

People [politicians] use your emotions, your desire to make things better, into power over others.

That is what democracy is all about, power over those less powerful, or less numerous, then you.

 

If I understand his point here, and I believe I do because I understand English -- the very impulse toward altruism -- seeing a need and urging government to do something about it -- that impulse is itself the problem. Dude, that's a dark place. That's a world libertarians seem to live in, and welcome to it. Wolf's gospel that altruism itself -- charity, government help, socialism -- is really only about getting power over people in order to control them -- that's a version of reality that belongs not to the world I know and have known and still actually believe in.

Can These Notorious Libertarians Buy Themselves a Senate Seat in Ohio?

Peter Thiel

Politicos perked up when Peter Thiel, the billionaire venture capitalist and PayPal co-founder, donated $10 million last month to a super PAC seeking to recruit author J.D. Vance to run for the Republican Senate nomination in Ohio, for the seat that Rob Portman is giving up. Peter Thiel has a big, actually abusive Libertarian reputation, and really so does J.D. Vance, the author of the best-seller Hillbilly Elegy, who hasn't even said definitely that he's running.

Why would Thiel be so enthusiastic about Vance? The super PAC that's trying to recruit Vance calls itself "Protect Ohio Values," a phrase out of sync with the ambitions of a man like Thiel, for whom nothing seems sacred and who clearly thinks of other people as a problem to be solved -- or evaded. He's built himself a sprawling luxury compound in New Zealand as a refuge for himself and other like-minded Libertarians when there's a collapse of civilization in the United States. (I can recommend Mark O'Connell's "Notes From the Apocolypse," which includes a chapter on Thiel.) Thiel also helped found the spy world's ideal Big Eye, the Palantir company, which hacks "big data analytics," bigger and better than Cambridge Analytics of Steve Bannon fame. But Ohio values?

So the name of that super PAC backing a Senate candidacy for J.D. Vance is camouflage for something else, something not at all sinister, I'm sure.

Vance himself wrote his best seller about growing up poor and white in Appalachia and getting all the way to Yale Law School as an up-by-the-bootstraps saga of personal triumph against great odds. He sold the book to the movies, and now Glenn Close is nominated for an Academy Award. The movie was loudly panned as stereotype-strangled claptrap. David Sims called it "the worst movie of the year" in The Atlantic.

J.D. Vance

The book the preceded it, however, made Vance the go-to oracle not only of modern Appalachia but also of the rural, white, economically struggling "Trump voter." Vance was in the media multiple times explaining, for example, why/how Trump had won Pennsylvania and Michigan. White resentment, what historian Bob Hutton called "sado-nationalism," got fully flowered because of decades of the liberal welfare system, hatred for which the Trump presidency provided full justification. Vance himself was an enthusiastic Trump supporter (as was Thiel, at least in 2016), both attracted to the norm-shattering populism of an otherwise ignorant and cunning con-man.

Despite its best-sellerdom and the wide respect Vance earned as a writer of words, Hillbilly Elegy was the most hated book of 2016 among the regional activists and scholars I know and pay attention to. An entire book of Vance denunciation, "Appalachian Reckoning: A Region Responds to Hillbilly Elegy," was published by West Virginia University Press in 2019. The essays, one and all, found Vance to be not only "clueless" about the diversity of life in Appalachia but dangerously clueless, peddling “a media-constructed mythological realm, backward and homogenous,” "full of Scots-Irish hillbilly welfare queens and kings too lazy to work who spend most of their time drinking moonshine and getting high on opioids" (1st quote, Dwight Billings, filtered through the reviewer James Branscome in the 2nd quote).

I have little doubt that Vance will be running for that Senate seat and that Thiel knows it. Vance will have a primary -- already, two other Republicans, both avid Trumpists vying for an endorsement from he who was formerly known as Twitterman, have announced their candidacies. I'll get around to profiling all those candidates, and the Democrats, eventually. But right now I just want to marvel at what our broken political finance system and the continuing evil of Citizens United can potentially do to our Republic.

The Pope's Bare Knuckles

Pope Francis is finding his groove. In a new "apostolic exhortation" (Evangelii Gaudium, for all you Latin geeks), specially "Chapter Two" of that exhortation, the Pope weighs libertarianism in the balance and finds it wanting.

Libertarianism ... the philosophy that puts "market-forces" over all else, the mind-set that has defined the Tea Party from the get-go, the politics of "let them eat grass."

This is what Pope Francis said (in part -- his exhorting goes on for many thousands of words):

Today everything comes under the laws of competition and the survival of the fittest, where the powerful feed upon the powerless. As a consequence, masses of people find themselves excluded and marginalized: without work, without possibilities, without any means of escape .... In this context, some people continue to defend trickle-down theories which assume that economic growth, encouraged by a free market, will inevitably succeed in bringing about greater justice and inclusiveness in the world. This opinion, which has never been confirmed by the facts, expresses a crude and naïve trust in the goodness of those wielding economic power and in the sacralized workings of the prevailing economic system .... While the earnings of a minority are growing exponentially, so too is the gap separating the majority from the prosperity enjoyed by those happy few. This imbalance is the result of ideologies which defend the absolute autonomy of the marketplace and financial speculation. Consequently, they reject the right of states, charged with vigilance for the common good, to exercise any form of control. A new tyranny is thus born, invisible and often virtual, which unilaterally and relentlessly imposes its own laws and rules .... In this system, which tends to devour everything which stands in the way of increased profits, whatever is fragile, like the environment, is defenseless before the interests of a deified market, which become the only rule....

Beware the "deified market," saith the Pope, and I do believe His Holiness just endorsed the Dodd-Frank "Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act."

So we reckon that Sarah Palin was right: the new Pope's a liberal. I'll light a candle to that! Hell, I'll light two.

Allison Takes Over the Cato Institute for the Koches

John Allison

John Allison, the CEO of BB&T in Winston-Salem, served as a member of Appalachian State University's Board of Trustees for two four-year terms, from 1997 to 2005. He was -- and still is, believe us! -- a strict devotee of Ayn Rand's "objectivist" philosophy that greed is good, the weak are expendable, and everything has a price.

During his tenure on the ASU Board of Trustees, he dangled several hundred thousand dollars in front of the chancellor in an attempt to buy a chunk of the curriculum, which is to say, Allison would see that ASU got the money if ASU guaranteed that its students would be forced to read and study Rand's "Atlas Shrugged." That plan came to grief when the faculty got wind that their intellectual freedoms were up for sale.

Allison subsequently subverted scholarly freedom at a number of colleges, including Guildford College and Western Carolina University in North Carolina, proving indeed that everything does have a price, at least some of the time.

To find him now allied with the Koch bros. and taking over the Cato Institute is not altogether surprising.

Rand Paul, Call Your Office

Ah yes! Unfettered free market capitalism will solve all our problems! No government regs needed:

"A series of internal investigations over the past decade warned senior BP managers that the company repeatedly disregarded safety and environmental rules and risked a serious accident if it did not change its ways...."

Put your libertarianism where the sun don't shine (which is approximately the same place from whence BP oil is gushing into the Gulf).

Rand Paul Scares Dick Cheney

That was the headline this a.m. in the NYDailyNews, as people everywhere try to figger out what the Kentucky tea party hath wrought in its brand new Republican nominee for the U.S. Senate.

Rand Paul is maybe even scarier than his dad, his eye in a fine frenzy rolling.

The Republican establishment in Kentucky was behind a website -- now completely disappeared -- RandPaulStrangeIdeas.com, though the echoes remain. The website has been scrubbed out of existence, and Mitch McConnell is now pretending that he really supported Rand Paul all along. "Some of my best friends want to put terrorists back on American streets!"

People got a pretty good peek at what Paul's libertarianism actually means last night on the Rachel Maddow show. Let the education begin!

Pauleroids Live!

Intercepted e-mail, from the Ron Paul remnant on the ASU Campus (and all hail, student action!):

From: appliberty
Date: Sun, Mar 22, 2009 at 7:48 PM
Subject: Action Item

Hello members of political action clubs,

This is an announcement of an event taking place on April 15th, 2009 (Tax Day). Various people with differing opinions have at least one thing in common: they don't like the direction our country is going in. Whether it is the bailouts, the ballooning national debt, the dollar crisis, the encroachment of the federal government on individual liberties, the failure to hold the Bush and Obama administrations accountable, increasing taxes, the deployment of troops on American soil, or the failure of our government to represent the people's interests, we can all agree that there are huge problems with our nation's current trajectory.

So "We the People" have an option to legally and effectively make our voices heard. We will do this by striking at the real power structure of the current system, economic dominance by fiat money, financiers, and the wage system.

Here is the plan. On April 15th, all participants will do at least one (hopefully all) of the following:

1) Refuse to go to work.

2) Refuse to go to class.

3) Do not buy anything.

4) Withdraw all your money from the bank and keep it withdrawn for a couple of days.

5) Send a tea bag to your representatives in government, from the highest to the lowest. They will get the message.

6) Wear a white armband or wristband on you right arm to show that you are participating.

Two thousand years ago, a Roman Senator suggested that all slaves wear white armbands to better identify them. "No," said a wiser Senator, "if they see how many of them there are, they may revolt."

Members of our club will be participating, and it would be great to see people from all different political and social backgrounds coming together, despite their differences, to bring the message to the government that "We the People" are not happy and that the ultimate power over the course of our nation belongs to us.

--The ASU Campaign for Liberty

COMMENTARY
I'm down with taking it to the streets. If we can agree on who's responsible for this fine kettle of fish. The ASU Campaign for Liberty uses a curious choice of words to describe "the enemy" in the memo above -- "fiat money, financiers, and the wage system." Well now, I'm totally ready to burn those guys at the stake!

Fiat money. I don't think they're talking about a certain Italian automobile company, but who they mean, we dunno.

Whoever they mean by "fiat money" specficially, they're talking against Obama generally, because he's not Ron Paul, and therefore he's the proximate cause of everything that's just wrong. Sorry, but I can't go there. The ASU Campaign for Liberty doesn't like the president, and I do, although I care a good deal less for the Wall Street dudes the president's hired to advise him. Getting him unstuck from those particular men-in-suits may be difficult, though protests like this might help. Who knows? Might not, too. Because this particular call to arms seems a trifle ... blunt-edged, if you know what I mean. "Burn the whole place down" has never much appealed to me as a tactic, even back in the 1960s when, indeed, they were burning the whole place down. Didn't much work then, either.

The line that might give the ASU Young Republicans some pause, prior to buying in to this protest against Obama: "the failure to hold the Bush and Obama administrations accountable." "Bush and Obama"? That's a lopsided formulation if there ever was one, since Bush had eight years to be held accountable for, and Obama, a few weeks, but the ASU Liberty Fighters have balanced the two presidents as pure equals in evil in that particular sentence. And that's a problem, dudes, if you're really looking for bipartisan involvement in your protest.

First you slap a Republican ("prosecute Bush"), and then you hug a Republican with that mention of sending a tea bag to our public officials. That tea bag gesture is a pure piece of grand larceny from the conservative Republican playbook. The only federal Rep. we have is Virginia Foxx, and she's not going to like getting a bunch of tea bags.

There's just one other phrase in the call to action that has me a little concerned: "the deployment of troops on American soil." Uh, where? Are we talking Green Beret assault on the Ron Paul compound in Texas, or just some National Guard action in the flood zone in South Dakota? That's a phrase that can't just be allowed to slip by unquestioned.

Whatever. Have a productive Tax Day, and we hope your employers are liberals.

Palin: Libertarian on Everything But Women's Rights

If John McCain is elected president on November 4, Sarah Palin could become president in precisely four and a half months. When's the last time you remember a presumptive president being kept in seclusion because any question about her record, her preparation, her competence is considered "sexist"? Because the news media is not allowed to question her, it falls to ordinary citizens.

While advocating the power of the State to force women to give birth, Palin is very supportive of the consumption of alcohol. While mayor of Wasilla in 1996, Palin opposed a city ordinance that would have required bars and liquor stores to close at 2:30 a.m. on weekdays (3:00 a.m. on weekends) and stay closed until 8:00 a.m. At that time – and still? – Alaska state law allowed bars and liquor stores to stay open until 5:00 a.m. (Wasilla Frontiersman, 28 Aug. 1996).

(She took her stand on open bars shortly before receiving campaign contributions from local bar owners: "Within two weeks of her vote, the Mug-Shot contributed $200 and Wasilla Bar $500 to Palin's campaign for mayor" – Wasilla Frontiersman, 13 Dec. 1996.)

In 2001, when a law was introduced in the Alaska state legislature to limit the open hours of bars and liquor stores, Palin signed a resolution opposing it (Wasilla City Council resolution 01-07, 26 Feb. 2001).

Because the chief of police in Wasilla supported restricting bar hours as a way to combat alcohol-related traffic accidents, and because he opposed Palin's administrative policy allowing citizens to carry firearms in city hall and the library, the chief of police supported Palin's opponent in her reelection campaign for mayor of Wasilla. After Palin won, she fired the police chief. She eventually hired as his replacement a new chief who boasted that he had no interest in limiting bar hours, because "I don't think the answer to crime is restricting people's freedom more and more" (Anchorage Daily News, 28 March 1997; Frontiersman, 4 July 1997).

And by the way: Palin admitted in 2006 in she had smoked pot: "Palin said she has smoked marijuana – remember, it was legal under state law, she said, even if illegal under U.S. law – but says she didn't like it and doesn't smoke it now. 'I can't claim a Bill Clinton and say that I never inhaled' " (Anchorage Daily News, 6 Aug. 2006).

Sources: The Book on Sarah Palin

Analysis of What Went Wrong with Conservatism

Conservatives have been "cocooning," that's what. Encasing themselves in their own aromas of righteousness and letting nary a stray thought intrude into their crystalline palace.

Well, we got a glimpse of what was gestating inside that cocoon, and it wasn't a thousand years of Republican rule, charted by Karl Rove. Instead, out stepped something supposedly blessed by Saint Ronnie but looking a lot like Wilfred Brimley and sounding suspiciously like Jerry Falwell come again. Despite what happens in November, there's likely a revolution coming among conservatives, despite what the remnants of the Republican Party decide to do.

That's some of the insight offered by this profile piece and by Ed Cone's interview with Jon Henke, one of the founding bloggers of "The Next Right."

Common to both pieces is the largely unrecognized arrival on the cusp of power of the new libertarians, the younger "conservatives" who have no particular use for the old face of conservativism, the anti-abortion and anti-gay crusaders (nor do they have all that much tolerance for marijuana laws) and who particularly abhor the expansionist militarism of the neo-con wing of Republicanism.

More power to 'em.

Now if they can just figure out where to bury all the victims of laissez-faire economics, without drawing undue attention, they'll be on their way!