The Greatest Threat to Rugged Libertarianism? Bears

Every time I see an article on Libertarianism failing on a grand scale, my Pragmatism radar goes off and I go arunnin' to see what the fuss is.

Shared through Lawyers Guns and Money, there is this report in The New Republic (behind a firewall for some of you, I need to start noting which sites are fee-based) by Patrick Blanchfield reviewing a book by Matthew Hongoltz-Hetling about how Libertarians took over a small town in New Hampshire to build their Utopia:

...This is the so-called Free Town Project, a venture wherein a group of libertarian activists attempted to take over a tiny New Hampshire town, Grafton, and transform it into a haven for libertarian ideals—part social experiment, part beacon to the faithful, Galt’s Gulch meets the New Jerusalem. These people had found one another largely over the internet, posting manifestos and engaging in utopian daydreaming on online message boards. While their various platforms and bugbears were inevitably idiosyncratic, certain beliefs united them: that the radical freedom of markets and the marketplace of ideas was an unalloyed good; that “statism” in the form of government interference (above all, taxes) was irredeemably bad. Left alone, they believed, free individuals would thrive and self-regulate, thanks to the sheer force of “logic,” “reason,” and efficiency. For inspirations, they drew upon precedents from fiction (Ayn Rand loomed large) as well as from real life, most notably a series of micro-nation projects ventured in the Pacific and Caribbean during the 1970s and 1980s...

Particularly important for the story is one John Babiarz, a software designer with a Krusty the Klown laugh, who decamped from Big-Government-Friendly Connecticut in the 1990s to homestead in New Hampshire with his equally freedom-loving wife, Rosalie. Entering a sylvan world that was, Hongoltz-Hetling writes, “almost as if they had driven through a time warp and into New England’s revolutionary days, when freedom outweighed fealty and trees outnumbered taxes,” the two built a new life for themselves, with John eventually coming to head Grafton’s volunteer fire department (which he describes as a “mutual aid” venture) and running for governor on the Libertarian ticket.

Although John’s bids for high office failed, his ambitions remained undimmed, and in 2004 he and Rosalie connected with a small group of libertarian activists. Might not Grafton, with its lack of zoning laws and low levels of civic participation, be the perfect place to create an intentional community based on Logic and Free Market Principles? After all, in a town with fewer than 800 registered voters, and plenty of property for sale, it would not take much for a committed group of transplants to establish a foothold, and then win dominance of municipal governance. And so the Free Town Project began. The libertarians expected to be greeted as liberators, but from the first town meeting, they faced the inconvenient reality that many of Grafton’s presumably freedom-loving citizens saw them as outsiders first, and compatriots second—if at all. Tensions flared further when a little Googling revealed what “freedom” entailed for some of the new colonists. One of the original masterminds of the plan, a certain Larry Pendarvis, had written of his intention to create a space honoring the freedom to “traffic organs, the right to hold duels, and the God-given, underappreciated right to organize so-called bum fights.” He had also bemoaned the persecution of the “victimless crime” that is “consensual cannibalism...”

That Libertarianism has room to accept cannibalism is a problem shared with Far Right Conservatives, but we'll save that discussion for another time. Meanwhile, back in Socialist Hellhole San Francisco Libertarian Heaven Grafton:

While Pendarvis eventually had to take his mail-order Filipina bride business and dreams of municipal takeovers elsewhere (read: Texas), his comrades in the Free Town Project remained undeterred. Soon, they convinced themselves that, evidence and reactions to Pendarvis notwithstanding, the Project must actually enjoy the support of a silent majority of freedom-loving Graftonites. How could it not? This was Freedom, after all. And so the libertarians keep coming, even as Babiarz himself soon came to rue the fact that “the libertarians were operating under vampire rules—the invitation to enter, once offered, could not be rescinded.” The precise numbers are hard to pin down, but ultimately the town’s population of a little more than 1,100 swelled with 200 new residents, overwhelmingly men, with very strong opinions and plenty of guns...

If the Libertarian vision of Freedom can take many shapes and sizes, one thing is bedrock: “Busybodies” and “statists” need to stay out of the way. And so the Free Towners spent years pursuing an aggressive program of governmental takeover and delegitimation, their appetite for litigation matched only by their enthusiasm for cutting public services. They slashed the town’s already tiny yearly budget of $1 million by 30 percent, obliged the town to fight legal test case after test case, and staged absurd, standoffish encounters with the sheriff to rack up YouTube hits. Grafton was a poor town to begin with, but with tax revenue dropping even as its population expanded, things got steadily worse. Potholes multiplied, domestic disputes proliferated, violent crime spiked, and town workers started going without heat. “Despite several promising efforts,” Hongoltz-Hetling dryly notes, “a robust Randian private sector failed to emerge to replace public services.” Instead, Grafton, “a haven for miserable people,” became a town gone “feral.” Enter the bears, stage right...

You hear that, Ed? Bears. Now you're putting the whole station in jeopardy.

Back to Blanchfield:

What was the deal with Grafton’s bears? Hongoltz-Hetling investigates the question at length, probing numerous hypotheses for why the creatures have become so uncharacteristically aggressive, indifferent, intelligent, and unafraid. Is it the lack of zoning, the resulting incursion into bear habitats, and the reluctance of Graftonites to pay for, let alone mandate, bear-proof garbage bins? Might the bears be deranged somehow, perhaps even disinhibited and emboldened by toxoplasmosis infections, picked up from eating trash and pet waste from said unsecured bins? There can be no definitive answer to these questions, but one thing is clear: The libertarian social experiment underway in Grafton was uniquely incapable of dealing with the problem. “Free Towners were finding that the situations that had been so easy to problem-solve in the abstract medium of message boards were difficult to resolve in person.”

Grappling with what to do about the bears, the Graftonites also wrestled with the arguments of certain Libertarians who questioned whether they should do anything at all—especially since several of the town residents had taken to feeding the bears, more or less just because they could. One woman, who prudently chose to remain anonymous save for the sobriquet “Doughnut Lady,” revealed to Hongoltz-Hetling that she had taken to welcoming bears on her property for regular feasts of grain topped with sugared doughnuts. If those same bears showed up on someone else’s lawn expecting similar treatment, that wasn’t her problem. The bears, for their part, were left to navigate the mixed messages sent by humans who alternately threw firecrackers and pastries at them. Such are the paradoxes of Freedom. Some people just “don’t get the responsibility side of being libertarians,” Rosalie Babiarz tells Hongoltz-Hetling, which is certainly one way of framing the problem...

This is where I point out the thing I learned from studying 19th Century Literary Utopias back in college: One of the obvious flaws in any Utopian attempt is how conflict inevitably arises between people arguing over what that Utopia should actually be. The paradox of Libertarianism - the obsession that the Individual is all that matters - becomes self-defeating when those Individuals try to impose their singular world-view upon other Individuals who might not see it the same way, and are following their own agendas. Who is going to stop Doughnut Lady, who is expressing her Libertarian ideal of co-existing with pastry-loving ursines? Someone else's problem after all, isn't it?

Back to Blanchfield:

Pressed by bears from without and internecine conflicts from within, the Free Town Project began to come apart. Caught up in “pitched battles over who was living free, but free in the right way,” the libertarians descended into accusing one another of statism, leaving individuals and groups to do the best (or worst) they could. Some kept feeding the bears, some built traps, others holed up in their homes, and still others went everywhere toting increasingly larger-caliber handguns. After one particularly vicious attack, a shadowy posse formed and shot more than a dozen bears in their dens. This effort, which was thoroughly illegal, merely put a dent in the population; soon enough, the bears were back in force.

Meanwhile, the dreams of numerous libertarians came to ends variously dramatic and quiet. A real estate development venture known as Grafton Gulch, in homage to the dissident enclave in Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged, went belly-up. After losing a last-ditch effort to secure tax exemption, a financially ruined Connell found himself unable to keep the heat on at the Meetinghouse; in the midst of a brutal winter, he waxed apocalyptic and then died in a fire. Franz quit his survivalist commune, which soon walled itself off into a prisonlike compound, the better to enjoy freedom. And John Babiarz, the erstwhile inaugurator of the Project, became the target of relentless vilification by his former ideological cohorts, who did not appreciate his refusal to let them enjoy unsecured blazes on high-wildfire–risk afternoons. When another, higher-profile libertarian social engineering enterprise, the Free State Project, received national attention by promoting a mass influx to New Hampshire in general (as opposed to just Grafton), the Free Town Project’s fate was sealed. Grafton became “just another town in a state with many options,” options that did not have the same problem with bears...

Blanchfield does step back to review the state of the state of New Hampshire itself, where the political conflicts between ideologies have collapsed into a clogged unresponsive mess. Decades of mismanaging and underfunding the agencies that do exist that should handle the bear threat (but can't) has contributed to the current crisis.

A lot of that mismanagement stems from the human urge to follow, the need to live up to, whatever philosophy (our own -Ism) drives us. A lot of the problem with bears isn't the bears, it's us.

The bear just wants to fucking eat donuts. That's the only -Ism the bear knows.

Predicting Character: Bernie As Constant Curmudgeon

Okay, this has taken me a little longer to write than I'd hoped, mostly because I am trying to keep a promise to myself to make this as unbiased and professional a review as possible.

SO CAN YOU BERNIEBROS SHUT UP ABOUT YOUR PRECIOUS FEE-FEES ABOUT NOT GETTING YOUR WAY WITH THE DNC RULES FOR A MINUTE HERE?! Ahem. Sorry. Let's try to keep it cool, okay self? Okay.

Next up on the candidate reviews - based on James David Barber's model of Presidential Character - is a fellow we've have guest-star before, this Senator from Vermont by the name of Bernie Sanders. (Insane amount of cheering from Facebook rises up) For heaven's sake, BernieBros, can I get through this without ANY interruptions?! (boos echo through the blog) Too bad, shaddup, and read on.

This is what I wrote before in 2015 during the build-up to that election cycle:

Positives: Has electoral experience for decades serving as a congressman and then Senator.  Has a political agenda that pushes hard Left after decades that most agendas pushed hard Right (the Age of Reagan), meaning a decent chance to shift the goal-posts of the national dialog back to the center.
Negatives: As much as the Far Far Right candidates like Cruz, Rand Paul, and Huckabee (announcing very soon) are poison to the general voting electorate, Sanders is too Far Far Left.  Half of his platform will reek too much of a Socialist agenda too many Americans still despise.  Comes from a small-population state that will not help as a base of voter support.   There is a question that as an independent (not really in the party) that he may not qualify on enough state ballots to count (his campaign is going to have to work overtime to make those ballots).
Chances: Slim.  He's determined, and has a reason to run this thing as far as possible.  But the Democratic Establishment types would be horrified if he gets the nomination: the Wall Street forces will rally like mad for the pro-business candidates like Hillary and could well swamp Sanders' campaign with too much money/power (which ironically will prove Sanders correct about the corruption of campaign money). And he may not appeal across the individual states - especially the more centrist, Red/Purple states in the South and West - he'll need to win primaries.
Character Chart: Sanders' socialist agenda is aggressively behind using the powers of the federal government to the fullest extent of the law, and that government can be used to improve the economy, improve jobs and wages, and uphold broad civil liberties.  On that, Sanders has the look of an Active-Positive (views government as an effective means of change).  However, Sanders displays many of the Active-Negative traits of being Idealistic and Uncompromising: he will not bend on the issues.  The only thing I can be certain of: he will be an Active President if elected.

Ever since I put up that Character assessment, I got to see more of Bernie in action. Or to be more specific, I got to see more of his followers in action.

This is where my ire and distrust about them kicked in...

Here's the deal, Bernie followers: Hillary's supporters are NOT sheep nor sheeple. A majority of Hillary's followers have solid reasons to side with her this 2016 election, and they have reasons not to share the worldview you've got that make you side with Bernie with such fervor.

In your pursuit of defending your candidate, you're going out of your way to insult fellow Democrats and Left-leaning centrists who are still a vital part of the Democratic party's chances to win big this 2016.

As much as you feel alienated from having a Far Left / progressive agenda get shot down for 40-plus years since the rise of Nixon and the Republican Southern Strategy, you're not helping by alienating the more moderate, pragmatic party members who aren't going to be in the mood for your denunciations and scorn...

Look, you can argue for Bernie Sanders. Argue on the merits, argue about the need to fight income inequality. Get ahead on the issue about the growing crisis in rental and homeowning costs for a majority of Americans. Go loud and strong on dealing with the massive personal debt crisis that got ignored by the Big Banks and Wall Street.

But stop with the insults and dismissal of your fellow Democrats. THEY ARE YOU AND YOU ARE THEY both on the same side of social justice and economic fairness, despite all the stuff about Hillary being in bed with Wall Street. At the end of the day, Hillary is still talking about making things work the way Democrats want things to work...

My ongoing exposure to the Bernie fanbase has been a continuing spectacle of a fervent group who believe THEY are the true voice of Dem voters fighting against an "Establishment" party that's trying to retain enough cohesion to fucking win a Presidential election. Again. Yet it's that failure of purity that's already driving some of the more publicly-known pro-Bernie supporters to say they won't support any other Democratic candidate in 2020. Just like they promised not to for Hillary in 2016. Essentially, they're extorting the Democratic party into accepting Bernie or else suffer low turnout guaranteeing a second trump term.

In other words, the BernieBros are promising to be assholes. Again. (Booing increases from the corners of the Internet where they reside) I'm not WRONG, you jerks. Look at yourselves... Sheesh, anyway...

The current drum-beating from the BernieBro elements are that the other major candidates - Biden, Harris, even Warren - are insufficiently Progressive enough to win them over if they get the nomination. Worse, they're convinced that none of the other candidates can appeal to the coveted "working whites" voting group that went for trump in 2016, as though that voting bloc is ever attainable for Democrats in 2020. Never mind the facts - same as in 2016 - that a Democratic administration if they win would support - and even pass - enough of a Far Left platform to make the United States more secure on key issues for progressives like better wages, repairing the damage of climate change, ending trump's human rights abuses on immigration, and more.

The Bernie voters - like any Idealistic extremist world-view - want their Utopia. To them, "Merely Good" is NOT "Perfect". And only Bernie can deliver "Perfect".

So what the hell IS "Perfect" for a Bernie supporter? In short, a radical redesign of American political and social philosophy, away from Capitalism and fully attuned to Socialism (based on what Bernie calls a Democratic Socialism akin to Scandinavian nations).

I can re-argue the problem of Utopian thinking in detail (Again), but the most obvious argument here is that a majority of Americans - many of them AREN'T as Left-leaning as the Progressives want to believe - are NOT going to support a Bernie agenda that on paper looks to change everything we know about how America works. 

When people vote For or Against anything, the biggest concerns they will always have are What do I gain from this, and What will this cost me? A massive revamp of even healthcare away from the Obamacare system (which supports the current Capitalist view) to a Medicare-For-All system (which forces wholesale changes that even its supporters can't fully explain) will scare enough honest voters (even the ones who would benefit the most) away from supporting that.

This is where Bernie differs from much of the primary field. Even Warren - who is closest to Bernie when it comes to Progressive issues - is more focused on reforming the systems we have instead of massive change. In this regard, Warren is more an FDR New Deal supporter - which kept Capitalism but heavily regulated it - than an outright Henry Wallace-type of Far Left candidate.

And if you know your history, Henry Wallace really did not appeal to most Americans when he had his chance. For all the changes to how Americans view full-out Socialism today (especially among younger voters), there still are a lot of voters who won't accept it. Even among solid Liberal Democratic voters sympathetic to those goals.

This lack of actual support for an openly Socialist agenda is leading into the other problem: Bernie is not doing so great in the primaries this time. Last time, against Hillary and minor candidates, Bernie was the clear alternative to the juggernaut that was the Hillary campaign. But that was then. Today, Sanders is part of a field of 24 - no, wait, it's dropped down to 16 finally thank the Gods - to where there isn't a dominant Establishment figure (Hillary) against whom a single candidate could run (the Not-Hillary). This time, there's one dominant Establishment figure (Biden) against whom there are three viable Not-Bidens (Bernie but also Harris and also Warren) to split the opposition vote. Bernie cannot rely on a solid 40-45 percent of Democratic voters in the primaries, he has to fight for them vs. Warren and Harris.

Just to repeat meself: Bernie's not doing a very good job of winning over that voting base this time. Sanders' Uncompromising behavior is a big reason why (via Peter Hamby at Vanity Fair):

Sanders might be 77 years old and “salty as ever,” as CNN’s Kate Bolduan said on-air Tuesday after his announcement, but he’s still a central figure in the dialectic of the Democratic Party, its most uncompromising ideological figure, and best fund-raiser. Like Trump, Sanders didn’t get there by climbing the ladder in Washington like his fellow senators now in the presidential race; he did it by tapping into common-sense ideas about economic fairness and raising oceans of small-donor cash online in the process. He delivered his message using non-traditional media and waited for the green-room journalism crowd to catch up. A democratic socialist, Sanders might have chosen to run in 2016 as a third-party liberal in the mold of Nader. But instead, he smartly decided to disrupt the Democratic Party from the inside by seeking its presidential nomination, all while never calling himself a Democrat. Sanders became the liberal folk hero of the last campaign, the subject of graffiti murals, hipster endorsements, and D.I.Y. merch, the cool grassroots signifiers that swirled around Nader a decade and a half earlier...

Sanders’s biggest failure in 2016 was not building coalitions. He found it difficult to expand his reach beyond liberals, white workers, and young people, to win over the older women and African-Americans who eventually gave their votes to Clinton. But on CBS, Sanders told Dickerson that unlike in 2016, he can plausibly win the nomination without cobbling together a majority of Democrats. “In some ways it makes it easier,” Sanders said. “When you’re running against one person you know you gotta have 51 percent of the votes. Now who knows what you need? Thirty, thirty-five percent...?”

Sanders seems like he’d rather watch a 10-hour Bachelor marathon, Clockwork Orange–style, than do the same. He is permanently averse to playing the inside political game, gabbing with power brokers on the phone, or charming the media off-the-record. His sequel campaign will test whether those choices matter anymore, whether big speeches, lofty policy ideas, and social media alone can carry the day. This might be a Very Bill Simmons Hot Take, but Sanders is the James Harden of politics. He’ll get you 30 points a night, but it’s hard to see how he wins a championship without getting his teammates involved. Either way, he’ll still be in the conversation...

The short gist: Sanders will lead the Democratic Party but he won't work with it. Compromise is a dirty word to him. If I need to say something positive about this, I could call him an Idealist deeply committed to an alternative world-view of America as a Socialist Utopia. As much as an Idealist Bernie is, we've seen Idealists in action before: Of previous Presidents, Sanders IMHO would follow in the footsteps of Woodrow Wilson, whose ambitions and agendas surely capped the Progressive Era of early 20th Century... only to have everything crash and burn due to his stubborn ideology. And if you've read my blog enough, you know what I think of Utopias...

Add to that this bit from a Jeva Lange article I dug up from The Week back in 2015:

"Bernie's an a--hole, but he's our a--hole," one unnamed Vermont politician explained to Boston Magazine. Sanders' campaign field director put it more gently: "Bernie is a very demanding guy. He has very high expectations, and he expects people to meet them."

Chris Graff, a journalist who has covered Sanders for the past two and a half decades, expressed similar sentiments. "Bernie has no social skills, no sense of humor, and he's quick to boil over," he said. "He's the most unpolitical person in politics I've ever come across." Likewise, following Bernie's threats to walk off the stage when Black Lives Matter protesters interrupted him in Phoenix, Vermont's Seven Days newspaper described the move as "exasperating and classic Bernie... Man of the people treating the people like tiresome children, telling them what the issue is, instead of listening to what their issue, our issue, America's issue is right now."

"Bernie is so certain that what he represents politically is unquestionably correct, therefore everyone should agree," Susan Boardman Russ, the former chief of staff for Vermont Sen. Jim Jeffords, told Boston Magazine. "Not much room for compromise... it was, 'Play in my sandbox, or get out.'"

If you've read this blog enough - especially the Presidential Character stuff - you'll know the second I apply Uncompromising to describe someone I'm labeling that person Active-Negative. It's the key trait for A-Ns - just as Adaptive is for Active-Positive and Congeniality is for Passive-Positive and Duty is for Passive-Negative - where their ambition to achieve their goals outweigh their ability to actually reach those goals. Or if they do reach those goals, they fail to realize the costs - before AND after - those goals require.

If I had to redraw the Character description for 2020, it'd look like this:

Bernie Sanders - Senator, Vermont
Positives: Has electoral experience for decades serving as a congressman and then Senator. An engaging and driven personality. Aggressively pushes for a Left-leaning populist agenda that may appeal to key voting blocs. Has developed a dedicated fanbase that should provide a solid voter base in the primaries.

Negatives: Even in an election cycle where the Democratic candidates are more Progressive than ever (outside of Biden and a handful of other second-tier candidates), Sanders is still too far a Far Left figure. For all his years - since the 1990s! - at the federal level, does not have an extensive success track record with legislation: Very few sponsored bills getting passed or even voted on. Still does not show many signs of playing well with others. .

Chances: Slim. Bernie started off as the marquee name this primary cycle but was eclipsed by Biden the second Joe threw his hat in. Bernie's also been overtaken by Warren whose progressive bona fides - and more positive campaign style - has claimed a lot of the followers he had in 2016. He's determined (as already noted), and has a reason to run this thing as far as possible. But this time he doesn't have the Outsider cachet, he doesn't have the Progressive Warrior banner to himself, and this time he's worn out his welcome.

Character Chart: Before, I had little awareness of Sanders' performance and world-view outside of his stated platform. I couldn't tell then if he were Positive (politically engaged and viewing Presidential power as a means for helping others) or Negative (dedicated - obsessed even - with a particular agenda as a form of personal success). Having seen him in action since 2016, I've gotten a better understanding of how his Uncompromising stances on his Democratic Socialist agenda makes him too Active-Negative a figure to be Adaptive to the challenges any President will face. Sanders wants to be the one to turn the United States away from a Capitalist political-economic society towards a Socialist one. That's one hell of an ambitious agenda, but speaks to a world-view that will chafe against the restrictions of a Federalist system. A Sanders administration - even with a Democratic-controlled Congress - will be a bar brawl every step of the way.

The United States cannot afford four more years of trumpism. It can't even afford one more DAY of Mitch McConnell selling out our Senate to the NRA and Putin. The only way this can get solved is by backing the Democratic Party across all ballots, all elected offices. THAT'S how this nation can recover and rebuild. If the candidate is Biden, so be it, VOTE. If the candidate is Harris, so be it, VOTE. If the candidate is Warren, so be it, VOTE. If the candidate is Bernie, so be it, VOTE. If the candidate is Gabbard... okay, fucking thing's been rigged, WTF Putin even THAT would be too obvious a hack.

But here's the problem: I am not hearing from a lot of Bernie supporters that if the choice ends up being Biden or Harris or Warren they'll still vote Dem. I'm getting the vibe, hearing too much feedback that the pro-Bernie faction will - again - sit out the vote in protest and let trump and those crooks continue destroying our world.

"I will vote FOR the Democratic nominee for President in 2020." That's an easy thing to say and do, Bernie supporters. Recognize and support the Democratic candidate most likely to fulfill an agenda that makes the world close to what you want it to be. It won't be PERFECT, but it'll be better than it is now. Please and thank you.

Next up on the Presidential Character preview for 2020: Oh you better believe there's a plan for that.

The Cooper Union Speech Shows Us the War Is Not Really Over

(NOTE: Had to edit for an accidental grammar error)
As the Shutdown Showdown of 2013 continues unabated - and in fact may get worse - more and more critics of the modern GOP's hardline stance find themselves referring to Abraham Lincoln and the Cooper Union speech he gave before the November 1860 elections (before he even won the nomination for the Republican Party of that age).

Here's a link to the Cooper Union speech as provided by the National Parks Service:

Oops.

Here's another link that might still be up.  Most of the first half of the speech is Lincoln setting up his lawyer's argument about how the Constitution came to be, how the Founders themselves spelled out their opposition to slavery's extension, and how the Republicans of 1860 were adhering to that argument - stopping slavery's spread not slavery itself - against the wild accusations and demands of the Southern Democrats.  The Southern states even by that date were threatening open secession unless they got their way.  Lincoln eventually gets to the meat of the speech to argue against that, the part of the speech everyone's quoting:

But you will break up the Union rather than submit to a denial of your Constitutional rights.

That has a somewhat reckless sound; but it would be palliated, if not fully justified, were we proposing, by the mere force of numbers, to deprive you of some right, plainly written down in the Constitution. But we are proposing no such thing.

When you make these declarations, you have a specific and well-understood allusion to an assumed Constitutional right of yours, to take slaves into the federal territories, and to hold them there as property. But no such right is specifically written in the Constitution. That instrument is literally silent about any such right. We, on the contrary, deny that such a right has any existence in the Constitution, even by implication.

Your purpose, then, plainly stated, is that you will destroy the Government, unless you be allowed to construe and enforce the Constitution as you please, on all points in dispute between you and us. You will rule or ruin in all events.

If the arguments, nay demands, of the 1860 Southern Democrats sound a lot like the rhetoric of the 2013 House Republicans and their Far Right spokespeople in the media, don't be surprised.  A lot of this has to do with the Southern Strategy of the Republican Party under Nixon back in the 1970s.

The South as a voting bloc had been virulently pro-slavery since the 1820s (perhaps even earlier), and when slavery bit the dust post-Civil War and post-13th Amendment the South went virulently anti-Black.  That region of the nation was basically allowed to act that way for roughly 100 years because the North got tired of trying to fix that shit and collectively gave up.  The only reason the United States took the Civil Rights efforts of Black Americans seriously by the 1960s was because of public relations: as a global power pushing for liberty against the wave of Soviet oppression, it was hypocritical of us to deny our own citizens their own freedom and rights under the law.

As the Democratic coalition fractured by 1968 with the Dixiecrats falling in power within their own ranks, the Republicans behind Goldwater and Nixon took notice and realized the South as a voting bloc was surprisingly tight (and growing as business markets shifted southward into Texas and Florida) and could be merged to the economic and religious conservatism of the GOP.  By the time of Reagan in 1980, he was able to put together a cultural/economic/religious voting bloc that led to a dynamic pro-Republican shift in the electoral system.

But now we're seeing the problem of going with the Southern Strategy.  By allowing a platform for the basically racist elements of the southern conservatives, the Republicans unwittingly (or even worse, willingly) allowed that strain of hate to spread to the other conservative elements of the party.  Why we're seeing Republicans from non-Southern places like Iowa and Ohio and California railing against social welfare services like food stamps is from the underlying belief that the primary recipients of social aid are Blacks and other minorities.

Joan Walsh in her Salon article:

Today, the entire government has been taken hostage by leaders elected by this crazed minority, who see in the face of Barack Obama everything they've been taught to fear for 50 years. Start with miscegenation: He’s not just black, he’s the product of a black father and a white mother. (That helps explain an unconscious motive for Birtherism: They can’t get their minds off the circumstances of his conception and birth.) With his Ivy League degrees, they are sure he must be the elitist beneficiary of affirmative action. Steeped in Chicago politics, he’s the representative of corrupt urban machines controlled by Democrats – machines that ironically originated with the Irish and once kept African-Americans down, but which are now synonymous with corrupt black power...

Obama's brought all this hatred out in a big way.  Part of the open hatred the GOP and the Far Right have towards Obama is that he's a Democrat interrupting the Glorious Pax Reaganicus Era of tax cuts, deregulation, and Commie-bashing (even though tax cuts didn't work, deregulation is why we're in our current mess, and Commie-bashing went out when Communism did).  But a lot of that hate is because of who Obama is as a person: they flat out can't accept him as an American at all, which is where the Birther obsession and the Kenyan Socialist obsession and Secret Muslim bomb-thrower obsession all come from.  That's not because he's a Democrat: Clinton never got this level of outrage, at worst he was a philandering pot-smoking hippie to them.

But racism is only part of the problem here.  The Southern Conservative mindset is obsessed with "their" rights above the rights of everyone else.  To them, they've got a right to abide their own laws, they've got a right to ignore laws they don't like.  The old strain of Nullification, the belief in State Rights that under the 10th Amendment they can do anything at the state level and to hell with anything federal law or Supreme Court interpretations of federalism - say, the court's approval of the Health Care Reform law (aka Obamacare) - have to say about it.

The Southern Conservative - the template of the modern Far Right wingnut - has no true love for the Federal Government, especially not a Federal government that insists on civil rights or regulatory practices.  The Republican outrage towards a 14th Amendment that both applies due process to all states and recognizes equal citizenship to all Americans is as much a target of their anger as Obama himself.

And all that anger, all that frustration has led them to this shore.  To a point where they don't mind - hell, they WANT to do this - shutting down the federal government the Far Right wingnuts view as The Enemy.

The Civil War is not over.  Not as long as there are wingnuts out there convinced of their radicalism - as Sully notes, this hasn't been true conservatism in ages - against the very concept of a United States of America.  No matter how much they try to wrap themselves up in the Stars And Stripes, they've made it abundantly clear they are the banner carriers of the Stars And Bars.  The Far Right Wingnuts want to Nullify laws they don't like.  They want to punish - if not banish - political leaders they don't like.

The Far Right Wingnuts want to rule or ruin.  We've seen them rule and it wasn't pretty.  Now they want to ruin.  At all costs.  And the way the situation is now, they're ruining us no matter what the rest of the nation wants.

For the LOVE OF GOD, stop voting Republican.

You Know, I Thought This Redshirts Guy Was Familiar...

There was this article I read a few years back - I think TBogg over on Firedoglake website highlighted it or something, or maybe on Balloon Juice - about the three primary types of political ideology in the United States.  Liberal, Conservative, and Libertarian.  And how the blog writer despised all three.

It was titled "I Hate Your Politics."

It was hilarious.  It oversimplified the political traits of all three, true, but sarcasm or satire work best when it's correct on the details.  I could copy/paste some of the article quotes from there to here, but that wouldn't be fair to you.  You HAVE TO READ THE WHOLE THING.  Click that link above.  Read it.  Learn it.  Live it.  You'll laugh, you'll cry, it'll become a part of you.  Then come back here because I crave your attention and still have a few more things to say.

(insert chamber music here).

Okay, you back?  ...oh okay... quick bathroom break, see you in three minutes...

(awkward wait)

Anyway, so here I was about a month ago reading up on the Hugo Award winners - as both a librarian and a sci-fi / comic book geek, I have an interest - and I see the winning novel this year was Redshirts, a meta-fictional delving into the lives of the ill-fated crew members who tend to die on science fiction space opera shows.  And the author's name is John Scalzi.

And I think to myself Wait, I know this guy.

I admit I don't read as much science fiction lit as I should in order to keep my geek cred fresh - partly because my collection management duties focus more on non-fiction - so I hadn't really noticed that Scalzi has been penning a few good novels here and there (I'd been reading more Iain M. Banks and Terry Pratchett lately, so that's my excuse).  I merely recognized the name as someone who'd written a blog entry about politics that I recalled was twisted and funny.

So, yeah, I go diving back in and find that I've got the Whatever article still saved as a bookmark on my browser.  And yeah, it's him.

And so now, a lot of things about what Scalzi wrote about libertarians makes a whole shitload of sense.

Here, I will copy and paste this part:

Never got over the fact they weren't the illegitimate children of Robert Heinlein and Ayn Rand; currently punishing the rest of us for it. Unusually smug for a political philosophy that’s never gotten anyone elected for anything above the local water board...  Blissfully clueless that Libertarianism is just great as long as it doesn't actually involve real live humans... Libertarians blog with a frequency that makes one wonder if they’re actually employed somewhere or if they have loved ones who miss them... Socially slow — will assume other people actually want to talk about legalizing hemp and the benefits of a polyamorous ethos when all these other folks really want is to drink beer and play Grand Theft Auto 3. Libertarianism the official political system of science fiction authors, which explains why science fiction is in such a rut these days... 

Back when I first read it (about 2007, maybe earlier), I wasn't entirely sure why Scalzi was chewing out libertarians for screwing up modern sci-fi literature (unless he was tuned out by John Ringo's stuff).  I hadn't noticed Scalzi was getting his works being published when I first read this (he's updated / upgraded the blog site since last I visited, back then I didn't see the About The Writer or a link to his books).  But now I'm looking at his career and I see why he's pissed.

Scalzi's been involved in publishing and editing for more than a decade, some of it in traditional markets and a few years working with science fiction pubs.  As such, he's probably been exposed to more horrifically bad science fiction story submissions than the average Human,Vulcan, Klingon, Minbari, Silurian, or small furry creature from Alpha Centauri.

This is part of the Sturgeon's Law: that 90 percent of everything is shit.  Since Sturgeon was an acclaimed sci-fi writer, he came up with what he called the revelation when he got tired of defending science fiction as a genre when the critics kept using the worst of sci-fi - the bad aliens, the bland ideologies, the squicky sex - to belittle it.  And in a way, Sturgeon is right about 90 percent of the stuff out there is bad, regardless of genre or format: 90 percent movies, 90 percent music, 90 percent art, 90 percent fashion, some of that shit is bad shit.  It's just that the worst of that 90 percent, well it rankles on you if you're a fervent lover of that music/fashion/art/film/literature genre.  You live for the 10 percent that wows and enjoys and delights, but if you get nothing but shit most of the time it's gonna make you jaded at best.

So in a way I see where Scalzi's coming from when he dumped on libertarianism like that in his article.  He's probably seen one too many sci-fi fantasy stories of a Randian-inspired utopia filled with bland archetypes and bad sex.  And he's pretty much right about it dominating and ruining a lot of current sci-fi: a lot of libertarians love to write speculative fiction / alternate world stories where their ideology can flourish (since, as I've noted meself, utopias don't flourish in the real world), which gets it shoved into the science fiction shelves at your local ebook retailer.

I hope this means I grok Scalzi's political stance.  Probably not, there may be nuances to his ideology that drives his world-view.  But I'm damn certain I know why he hates libertarians: it's all that self-indulgent terrible writing (and it's getting worse now that there's cheap self-publishing and no editorial control).  Damn you, libertarians: why can't you write more Harlequin romance novels and leave us geeks alone...

I Take It These People Never Studied 19th Century Utopias In College

I got a one-two punch here:

Over on Salon.com, they got an article about Glenn Beck wanting to start an Ayn Rand inspired Utopia community.

Over on Balloon Juice, they got an article about the gun-worshiper crowd offering up a map of the proposed Citadel, a walled community of Second Amendment acolytes defending themselves from the imminent global apocalypse brought on by godless fascist commie libruls.  See below:

This looks like a beginner-level Dungeons & Dragons module from 1982.

(The quality of such a walled-in community is best left to the military experts.  But having just one route in or out through two gates is a major design flaw.  And a serious campaign using siege engines like trebuchets would make quick work of the walls and housing without even risking troop incursions... and we're talking using weaponry from the Middle Ages, peoples.  Like Patton said, fixed fortifications are monuments to the stupidity of man.)

And for any of you regular readers, you kinda already know how I feel about Utopian thought: the absolute expression of an -ism ideology brought to the real world... where Utopias quickly fall apart from internal strife and mismanagement.

It does amaze me that there are yet another round of generations eager and willing to buy into this kind of Utopia business pitch (and there is money involved here.  Why not?  Libertarianism is all about the free market).  Part of it may well be that most of my fellow Americans pursuing these libertarian communities simply don't remember their American history, or that our schoolbooks no longer devote a chapter to the attempts like New Harmony and Oneida and Fruitlands to build a "model community".

It doesn't amaze me that there seem to be enough Americans willing to buy into these communities out of what looks like cultural fear.  There's been that fear brewing for ages, brought to the fore with having Obama in the White House, and it's gotten to the point where such communities are openly promoted on the national stage.  From where I stand, this is an unfounded fear: there is no Apocalypse or Armageddon approaching, there are no invading hordes charging across the oceans. 

Look, a lot of the anger stirred up against Obama are from partisan media hacks paid to stir up trouble.  Always talking about the current President as ZOMG WORST PREZ EVER.  Which is what they've been saying since the days of George Washington for God's sake (yes, even he got demonized by the masses during his two terms).  A lot of this anger from the Far Right?  I heard a lot of this sh-t back during Bill Clinton's tenure.  Guess what?  Nation's still here.  There was a lot of wailing and pulling of hair from the Far Left (and then the centrist Left, and then about 60 percent of the nation) during Bush the Lesser's tenure about him being the WORST EVER.  Guess what?  Nation's still here.  Every President - even James Monroe, the only other guy than Washington to run unopposed - gets demonized by the opposition: it all depends on how accurate they truly are.  Do you think ANY of these wingnutters are going to feel sheepish about how they've been behaving these years when Obama finishes out his term and exits in 2016 with the United States of America still here?  I doubt it...

Back to the planned Citadel and GlennBeckistan communities.  If you're seriously intent on throwing in your money on these communities, just remember: they've tried this already with something called Future Cities Development and they filed for bankruptcy in 2012.  There's a list of attempts on the Economist's website as well, and none of them ended with smiles and sunshine.  Caveat emptor, people (it's Latin for "suckers").

A Follow-Up About Utopianism (Apparently That Is a Word Now)

I wrote awhile back about my disdain for libertarianism - and isms in general - due to my studies of utopian literature my freshman college year.

Now here I see in Salon.com that contributor Michael Lind shares the same disdain for utopian thought, and how he sees the current Far Right as unhinged as the Far Left of the 60s-70s were:

In that environment, what attracted me in my college years to conservatism was its hostility to utopianism, to the attempt to remake society according to some abstract theory. This was a theme shared by the older generation of “vital center” liberals like Arthur Schlesinger and Daniel Patrick Moynihan, as well as conservatives like Bill Buckley. Their distrust of doctrinaires using power to achieve utopia on earth was inspired not just by thinkers like Edmund Burke but even more by the examples of Hitler’s genocidal racist utopia and the mass murders and famines that accompanied Stalin’s and Mao’s attempts to use terror to remake society. The vital-center liberals (some of whom became early neoconservatives) disagreed with those further to the right, the “paleoconservatives,” over whether Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal and Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society were examples of sensible reform to save the system, as the paleoliberals/ neoconservatives believed, or mild versions of collectivist utopian madness, the view of many traditional conservatives...
By the 1990s, the communist movement had collapsed as a global secular religion, even though a few relic communist tyrannies survived in China, Vietnam, North Korea and Cuba. The few remaining Marxist radicals in the Western world were mostly English professors hunting for classism and imperialism in the novels of Jane Austen. Nature abhors a vacuum, and as utopianism died out on the left, it found a new home to the right of center. The last generation in the U.S. has seen three forms of demented right-wing utopianism: religious, military and economic.
The religious utopianism was that of the Protestant religious right, which grew in influence in the 1980s and peaked in the 1990s... The religious right faded as a force by the early 21st century, largely because of the growing secularization of younger Americans. The next wave of utopianism was military. The older generation of neoconservatives had been New Deal liberals who had grown cautious and skeptical about the ability of public policy to remake American society. In contrast, the younger generation of neoconservatives — some of them literal heirs of the older generation, such as Irving Kristol’s son William Kristol — were wildly optimistic about the ability of the American military to remake foreign societies. Their utopian project of a “new American century” and a “global democratic revolution” exported by force of arms collided with reality in Iraq and Afghanistan in the first decade of the century... As the neoconservative utopia faded, it was followed in turn by the libertarian utopia... Ron Paul went from being a marginal figure to a folk hero for young people in search of gurus, and the works of mid-20th-century prophets of the free market like Ayn Rand and Friedrich von Hayek enjoyed a revival. The libertarian utopia peaked in 2010, around the same time as the Tea Party movement, which helped the Republicans to regain the House of Representatives. To judge by the elections of 2012, in which more Americans cast votes for Democrats for the gerrymandered House as well as in Senate and presidential elections, the public has turned against free market utopians like Paul Ryan...

It's rare for me to double-post in a day, but see Lind's article reminded me of what I wrote, and I enjoy the justification of a shared viewpoint.  ;-)

What I Hate About Libertarianism (If I Haven't Touched On This Already)

Yup.  That was my older brother commenting on my political blog a few entries back.

I need to mention this to you, bro: posting as Anonymous puts you down amongst the spammer heathens.  Put your name to your comments or not at all.

And so, in honor of my older brother finding my political blog, this one goes out to you.

What I Hate About Libertarianism.  (NOTE: This was edited the following day for some misspells and grammar, and for additional points to be made.  Carry on.).

Primarily: it's an -Ism.  With that, I'm on the side of Ferris Bueller:

Isms in my opinion are not good. A person should not believe in an ism, he should believe in himself. I quote John Lennon: "I don't believe in Beatles, I just believe in me." Good point there. After all, he was the Walrus. I could be the Walrus. I'd still have to bum rides off of people.

The point being, any -Ism is at face value a risky thing.  It's a creed or ideology that requires you to accept its tenets wholeheartedly as absolutes, and views any variation or deviation from those tenets as heresy.  And the problem with thinking in absolutes is that not everything fits those absolutes: there are always exceptions, anomalies, people or events that don't fit easily into the hypotheses, axioms and theories that make up an Ism.

There are a slew of Isms in the political ideology spectrum.  Liberalism and Conservatism, obviously.  Socialism and Communism and Capitalism covering the economic aspects.  Variations of religious theocracy.  Hell, there's a whole list of Isms in philosophy.

So why does libertarianism get special mention as an Ism I hate?

Because somehow in this nation, there's this whole fetish in the mainstream media of viewing libertarianism as a viable alternative to the existing dominant Isms of conservatism and liberalism.  Even though libertarianism hasn't really been fully tested and proven to work - and that the elements of libertarianism (applied by conservatives who simply love the anti-government tenets that underscore libertarianism... and ignore the rest) that have been tried haven't exactly impressed.

Other issues I have with libertarianism is that its obsession with personal liberty and reduction of government bureaucracy end up with the same equation of getting rid of government regulations and laws that were put in place to protect individuals and families in the first place.  David Frum, writing about why he figured out that maybe just maybe a welfare state had its reasons for existing, quoted G.K. Chesterton (some snippage for flow of reading):

G.K. Chesterton once wrote that we should never tear down a fence until we knew why it had been built. In the calamity after 2008, we rediscovered why the fences of the old social insurance state had been built... Speaking only personally, I cannot take seriously the idea that the worst thing that has happened in the past three years is that government got bigger. Or that money was borrowed. Or that the number of people on food stamps and unemployment insurance and Medicaid increased. The worst thing was that tens of millions of Americans – and not only Americans – were plunged into unemployment, foreclosure, poverty. If food stamps and unemployment insurance, and Medicaid mitigated those disasters, then two cheers for food stamps, unemployment insurance, and Medicaid... Which does not mean that I have become suddenly indifferent to the growth of government. Not at all... Yet that same conservative sensibility is also properly distrustful of the fantasy that society can be remade according to a preconceived plan... 

Frum writes earlier in that essay about how he viewed his once-hardline stance on what he thought was his conservative-libertarianism: that there would be trade-offs between liberty and social safety, and that the people making the decisions would have some honor in what they did:

Some of the terms of that trade were honored. From 1983 through 2008, the US enjoyed a quarter-century of economic expansion, punctuated by only two relatively mild recessions. In the late 1980s, the country was hit by the savings & loan crisis, the worst financial crisis to that point since the 1930s – and although the S&L crisis did deliver a blow, the country rapidly recovered and came up smiling. New industries were born, new jobs created on an epic scale, incomes did improve, and the urban poor were drawn into the working economy... But of course, other terms of the trade were not honored... Especially after 2000, incomes did not much improve for middle-class Americans. The promise of macroeconomic stability proved a mirage: America and the world were hit in 2008 by the sharpest and widest financial crisis since the 1930s. Conservatives do not like to hear it, but the crisis originated in the malfunctioning of an under-regulated financial sector, not in government overspending or government over-generosity to less affluent homebuyers. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were bad actors, yes, but they could not have capsized the world economy by themselves. It took Goldman Sachs, Merrill Lynch, AIG, and — maybe above all — Standard & Poor’s and Moody’s to do that.

Frum's article, and other articles he'd written over the past few years, highlight a person who's spent long hours thinking and writing his political beliefs into a coherent philosophy... only to find that the absolutes he counted on fell apart once the complexities and harshness of the real world intervened.

Earlier I wrote about how libertarianism's focus on gutting regulations and laws was a reason I'm not a fan of this Ism.  That's because as a student of history I can recall eras of human history where we didn't have many rules or regulations that protected workers and consumers and other individuals from harm. Has no one read The Jungle by Upton Sinclair?  Anyone ever read up the reasons why Teddy Roosevelt went after the trusts?  Can I just point out that this is the 100th anniversary of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire?

Regulations exist for a reason: TO PROTECT PEOPLE.  To make sure that the innocent are not harmed or made sick or forced to work to death or driven into poverty because of other people's greed and mismanagement of our markets.  There's a reason these fences were built, and libertarians don't seem to notice or care.  Because their Ism insists that personal freedom supersedes the community's need for safety and common service.

Without government regulations we'd have airplanes crashing every other week instead of every other year.  Without government regulations we'd have salmonella in all the food, just not from a peanut corporation with a horrible health record.  Without OSHA we'd have more workplace accidents and deaths.

For all the hassles and complaints about the costs of regulations and the costs of fines and the costs of this and that, they pale in comparison to the costs of businesses destroying themselves by poisoning their customers or burning down their buildings and killing their workers.  People seem to forget that 100 years ago your can of meat had a 50/50 chance of killing you, either because the meat was toxic or the label wrapping the can was toxic.  Or that the can itself would probably explode.  We live in a safer world today... and people forget that it's due to those regulations put in place before we were born.  (EDIT: I'd like to add how the libertarian free-market crowd believes that Regulation can be replaced by "Enlightened Self-Interest".  I'd also like to highlight that Enlightened Self-Interest means nothing compared to Greed when most of our economic overlords had a choice between either).

I think my rant started at one point, and dove toward another, but both of them cover the same issue at hand: Why I Hate Libertarianism.  And I'd like to get back to my earlier argument about how the Ism aspect of libertarianism is that it's an ideology that deals in absolutes.  Because my final argument against libertarianism is how it insists that its vision of the world could create a better cleaner happier loving world.  In short, libertarians are what I call Utopians (Utopianists is apparently not a word).

I studied literary utopias in my freshman year at University of Florida back in 1988.  It was a bit of an eye-opener.  Not only covering More's Utopia (the Trope Namer as it were), the class also covered Butler's Erewhon, Bellamy's Looking Backward (a forgotten text today but a major bestseller in the 19th Century: it was so prevalent that its critics wrote "sequels" denouncing the original's themes), and one other that I can't recall (although Bacon's New Atlantis seems familiar).  And the one thing I took from the class was: Utopias don't work.

Each Utopia I read about highlighted the writer's already-established biases about human behavior and what could be changed or fixed to make humanity "improve".  But as the professor noted with all the "response" books that sprung up after each Utopian novel, each of those Utopian writers would either ignore a human trait - Greed, Arrogance, Ignorance, Ineptitude, Fear, Lust, Wrath, etc. - or underplay how damaging those traits could derail a society.  Usually on the hand-wave premise that "well, it will work because people will WANT it to work."  Even the "response" books to Looking Backward tried to create their own visions of utopia to counter Bellamy's vision... and those critics created flawed worlds as well.

And it wasn't just novels: the class also examined real-life attempts at creating Utopian communities here in the United States.  Places like New Harmony.  There was Oneida (yes, the silverware guys). You might have heard of Fruitlands: it's the one founded (and failed) under the leadership of Louisa May Alcott's father.  It's why Alcott wrote and published Little Women and its sequels, to regain the family's finances.  A lot of these Utopian communities failed because their founders believed they could overcome certain human traits... and couldn't.  The attempts at real-life Utopias either fell apart because of the fatal flaw their founders overlooked and wouldn't confront... or because they changed their rules - like the Mormons, for the most part - in order to continue existing.

And so every time I look at Libertarianism - and as much as I see in Communism and Socialism and Liberalism and Conservatism and a ton of other Isms - I see a Utopian ideology, one that's obsessed with its Absolute view of perfecting society that can't really ever be perfected, refusing to compromise on either the big issues or the little details... and expecting to receive adulation and acceptance all because of its' purity of vision.

Even Pragmatism has its flaws.  Yeah.  Dude.  I went there.  Deal with it.


I expect a retort from my brother whenever he finds the time.  And this time, bro, put your name to it.