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Why Arrest Your Opponents When You Can Ban Their Fun?

Amanda Furrer

Is this the embodiment of evil? / Photo by Amanda Furrer

Maryland officials have suddenly discovered a crying need to ban spear hunting and restrict air guns (cuz you’ll shoot your eye out, I guess, or poke it). A former head of the Heritage Foundation wants to double down on drug prohibition (you can’t have enough stupid). And the federal government is severely curtailing the popular pastime of off-roading. Color me cynical, but I think this all has more to do with political point-scoring than well-considered policy preferences.

Let me elaborate.

In the midst of one of the more hideous political contests the American democratic system has coughed up in the last century or so, pundits trying to explain the horror show are rightly rediscovering Bill Bishop’s excellent book, The Big Sort. In his 2008 work, Bishop described how strongly correlated lifestyle and ideology have become in modern America, and how highly mobile Americans are leaving behind communities where they feel like outsiders in terms of both beliefs and hobbies to relocate among the like-minded. The result, he said, was that Americans are decreasingly challenged by opposing views, and increasingly likely to embrace radicalized versions of themselves.

That is, Americans who think alike are also likely to live alike, and are becoming increasingly different across the board from the broadly defined opposing camp. Bishop wasn’t alone in his conclusion. “It takes only a very small ‘nudge,’ whether from ‘within’ or ‘above,’ to tip a large population into a self-reinforcing dynamic that can carve deep cultural fissures into the demographic landscape,” Daniel DellaPosta, Yongren Shi, and Michael Macy of Cornell University wrote in “Why Do Liberals Drink Lattes?” a paper published last year in the American Journal of Sociology. “When cultural tastes in turn have a reciprocal effect on personal networks, such divisions are likely to be even further exaggerated, leading to a starkly divided world of latte-sipping liberals and bird-hunting conservatives.”

The polls seem to bear this out. In Virginia, “More than half the people who support one of the two major-party candidates say they do not have any close friends or family voting for the other,” the Washington Post reported last month.Tellingly, the Post added, “The poll also found cultural differences between Clinton voters and Trump voters, reflected in their ties to guns, gays and even hybrid vehicles.”

Those supporters are also more ideologically consistent than in the past (even if their chosen candidates are ideologically incoherent). “Looking at 10 political values questions tracked since 1994, more Democrats now give uniformly liberal responses, and more Republicans give uniformly conservative responses than at any point in the last 20 years,” Pew Research noted in 2014.

Unsurprisingly, groups of Americans who increasingly think and live differently from one another are also mutually alienated from one another. “For the first time in surveys dating to 1992, majorities in both parties express not just unfavorable but very unfavorable views of the other party,” Pew found this summer. “And today, sizable shares of both Democrats and Republicans say the other party stirs feelings of not just frustration, but fear and anger.”

Some commentators find fodder in this national divide for sermons about the importance of valuing diversity of ideas. That’s great. But there’s no easy way to make people separated by geography, recreational choices, culinary preferences, housing styles, and ideology to find common ground. Many Americans are drawing further away from one another in terms of all-encompassing tribal identity, and that leaves diminishing reference points in common. People who don’t understand each other and rarely encounter one another aren’t going to start reenacting My Dinner With Andre (which only half of them have any interest in seeing to begin with).

Even more disturbing, though, is that the broad cultural preferences so closely intermingled with ideological identities create an opening for the victors in political contests to punish their enemies without openly targeting partisan affiliation. Yes, overt political retribution occurs too–see the scandal over IRS mistreatment of conservative organizations–and I wouldn’t be surprised to see it become more common as the partisan divide widens. But in what’s left of our liberal democratic system, it’s still relatively risky to openly penalize people for believing the “wrong things.” Restricting or banning lifestyle practices almost exclusively favored by people who believe those things, however, is another matter.

You know. Like with hunting, and marijuana, and off-road vehicles.

How much easier it is to slap high tariffs on trendy foreign cars, or tighten restrictions on those nasty guns, than to explain why you’re thumping on some guy’s kidneys because he voted for your opponent. You can still make him and his friends suffer with legal penalties and taxes that won’t really affect your supporters, and your crew will get your nudge-and-wink and approve of slams against political/cultural enemies.

Or is THIS the embodiment of evil? /Autoviva

Or is THIS the embodiment of evil? / Photo by Autoviva

Fuck those Prius-drivers/bitter-clingers. They’re getting what they deserve. Right?

You may even propose to “make the environment here so unwelcoming that some will choose not to come, and some may actually leave,” in the words of a former New Hampshire Democratic state representative who opposed the libertarian Free State Project. She added, “One way is to pass measures that will restrict the ‘freedoms’ that they think they will find here.”

That’s a pretty explicit scheme to use the law to punish political opponents by targeting culture and lifestyle preferences associated with their viewpoint.

I’d suggest that most gun control efforts of recent years are more about punishing “right-wingers” than about serious attempts to reduce crime. Similarly, I suspect that much remaining resistance to marijuana and the weirdly persistent state-level attempts to prevent Tesla from opening car dealerships are intended to inconvenience people on the left. In both cases, the target is a cultural marker strongly identified with (though not exclusive to) an identifiable political-cultural faction of the American public.

So the next time one of your hobbies is targeted for an overtly unjustified and seemingly ill-considered restriction, give it some thought. There may have been more intellectual effort expended on the law or regulation than you’ve allowed for–but it was more in the form of malice toward your “tribe” than any real concern about the activity in question.

Dear Trumpkins and Clintonistas, Your Candidates Are Evil

Choose the form of your destructor!

Corrupt-ilicious or tyrant-tastic?

As I write these words, the FBI is reportedly investigating, after an aborted earlier attempt, Hillary Clinton’s use of the Clinton Foundation to, essentially, peddle access and government positions to generous donors. The revelations are actually just the culmination of a long-festering pattern of behavior that has seen suspicious favors done for individuals and companies including UBS, Uranium One, and the Saudi government.

Her Republican opponent, Donald Trump, is busy trying to shrug off reports that his campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, pocketed millions of illegal dollars in payments from a pro-Russian Ukrainian political party. Trump, famously, has a man-crush on the thuggish Russian strongman and has even gone so far as to deny Russian military designs on Ukraine after Putin seized Crimea. Or maybe the money is unrelated–after all, he praised North Korea’s ruthless dictator, Kim Jong Un and the Chinese government’s brutal suppression of protests at Tiananmen Square without obvious compensation. This is independent of Trump’s attack just yesterday on freedom of the press.

Oh, and both Trump and Clinton have very serious problems with free speech in general.

Let’s face it: These are two of the shittiest creatures to ever to crawl out from under a rock and scurry into American politics, which is saying something, considering that it’s not an industry that brings out the best in people. But even compared to the control freaks, Klansmen, and grifters who have long made their livings by seeking government office, Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton bring an unprecedented degree of overt grasping corruption and explicit contempt for the rest of the human race to their quests for the vast powers of the U.S. presidency. It’s no stretch to say that they embody evil in a way that we rarely have so openly rubbed in our faces.

Choose the form of the destructor, indeed.

To their credit, a good many Americans have glanced at what the Republican and Democratic parties left on the carpet and immediately gagged at what they’d stepped in. Clinton and Trump have consistently scored record high unfavorable ratings with voters. But they went on to win the nominations of their respective political parties anyway, testifying to the sad shape of these two senile and creaky organizations. Since then, “a full 13 percent of Americans would rather have a meteor hit Earth than vote for either Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton,” according to pollsters.

And yet…I’m still hearing people say that we have to choose between the psychopath and the sociopath. We must choose the form of the destructor, because it’s irresponsible to vote third party/refuse to vote. They insist that Gary Johnson and Jill Stein can’t win the election (because you shouldn’t vote for them, I guess) and not voting makes you responsible for the the destructor who ultimately triumphs. We must embrace evil, or else the other evil will win.

I think Julian Assange of Wikileaks had it right when he said, “You’re asking me, do I prefer cholera or gonorrhea?” Neither for me, please.

Look, you can talk the inevitability of the two-party system all you like, but that doesn’t mean it has to be these two parties. In healthy democracies, political parties rise and fall. In recent years, Canada’s Reform Party competed with and then supplanted the Progressive Conservative Party before changing its name to “Conservative.” Before that, Britain’s Labour Party bumped the Liberal Party out of the ranks of the two dominant parties (though the displaced entity, now known as Liberal Democrats, hung on and is part of the current government as a junior partner to the Conservative Party). Even in the U.S. the Republican Party croaked the Whig Party in the 1850s and took its place. Political parties are private organizations. They live only so long as people see a need for them, and can be replaced when they do awful things like nominating evil people as their candidates for president.

Did I mention that both Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump are both horrible human beings and that to pick between them is to choose different brands of malevolence?

Look, if you really just can’t get enough of corrupt-ilicious Hillary or find the Donald just tyrant-tastic, knock yourself out with your chosen destructor. Just don’t act astonished when the rest of us back away with a frozen look of horror on our faces.

Because we’re better than that. And we’re still trying to scrape your candidate off our shoes.

1-in-4 Americans See Government as the Enemy. Hold on For a Wild Ride.

Polling firms have established a decades-long tradition of asking Americans about their fading trust in government and then recording the pathetically low scores. There’s a strongly partisan element to the results: Republicans trust government when their guy is in the White House, and Democrats love them some D.C. when they control the Oval office. But the downward trend has been steady for decades, with the latest Pew poll finding that “just 19% say they can trust the government always or most of the time.” And part of the tradition is the regular rending of garments by media pundits agonized over Americans’ lack of faith in our governing institutions.

It’s all good entertainment, but nobody has really been sure of where it’s going.

Federal government as enemyHowever, the latest Pew poll reveals that much of the public has gone far beyond distrust, now that “27% of registered voters say they think of government as an enemy.” That’s up from 19% in 1996, when we were going through what commentators at the time described as a surge in anti-government sentiment. We’re at the point now where more than a third of Republicans and Independents (but only 12% of Democrats) wouldn’t piss on the government to put it out if it caught on fire.

“Enemy” expresses a stronger feeling than “distrust,” by far. It’s evidence of a segment of the population that views the government as an alien thing–almost an occupying power in hostile hands. Simultaneously, the political camps have become hardened in their positions with regard to the role of government, the activities that should be permitted or banned, and consequently antagonistic toward one another over those differences. It’s not just a polite disagreement on election day, it’s more like an ideological holy war. “Liberals and conservatives disagree over where they want to live, the kind of people they want to live around and even whom they would welcome into their families,” Pew revealed last year.

How we got here is the topic of many articles, research reports, and books. My personal favorite is the Washington State University study that insists that political polarization is the result of TV news deregulation. If only government controlled more of the information we receive, we’d all just get along. Cool story, bro…

More plausibly, the Washington Post‘s Dan Balz wrote that “The bonds that once helped produce political consensus have gradually eroded, replaced by competing camps that live in parallel universes, have sharply divergent world views and express more distrust of opponents than they did decades ago.”

I’ll add that this is very likely the outcome of a government that has taken on an ever-growing role in people’s lives, and centralized policy-making in Washington, D.C. It’s not just the federal government disdained in the abstract–the federal employees who actually barge into people’s lives to enforce policy are also disliked. “More than one-third of survey respondents — 35 percent — voiced ‘little or no confidence’ in federal workers,” according to George Washington University’s Trachtenberg School of Public Policy and Public Administration. Researchers linked that growing dislike to public missteps such as NSA spying and politicized IRS enforcement.

Political polarization

With the stakes in political decisions increasing, the battles over who gets to make those decisions become more intense. In a mobile and Internet-driven world, this motivates people to choose teams and seek support in the world around them and the communities they find in real life and online. Even on social media, such as Facebook, people tend to associate with like-minded people and share stories that reflect their points of view. Americans also are physically clustering in communities of politically and culturally similar people, as revealed in Bill Bishop’s The Big Sort, published in 2008. Presumably, they feel more able to live lives in the way that they prefer when they have relatively few neighbors who want to strictly regulate or even ban favorite pastimes, or otherwise govern in unwelcome ways.

But that understandable process of sorting and associating with the like-minded tends to reinforce views and harden differences. That’s probably inevitable in a world of high-stakes political contests, since most people don’t want to live their lives as political missionaries. It’s also led to a flirtation–not serious, as of yet–with the idea of breaking the country up into more cohesive units. Reuters found last year that a quarter of the U.S. population wants their states to secede from the union. It’s actually 34% of southwesterners. That’s not going to happen anytime soon, but it’s an interesting further sign that many people are done with the federal government, and with unwelcome rules imposed on them by “others” with very different ideas about the proper way to run a country.

Where does this take us?

I see no end in sight to vicious political battles, since I see no end in sight to efforts to centralize policy-making in D.C. and to insert government deeper into people’s lives. There’s no reason to expect feelings to simmer down when the consequences of political losses are so high. Triumphalist celebration of victories will alternate with despair over defeats. In consequence, I expect the perception of government as an enemy to continue to grow, and partisan bad feelings to increase as policy struggles are won and lost and one side or another suffers consequences as a result.

The real-world consequences will probably include declining tax compliance and a growing underground economy–to escape government intrusion, and as a result of a loss of legitimacy by the state. We’ll also likely see mass noncompliance with intrusive and controversial laws, such as we’ve already seen in New York over the “assault weapon” registration law. In some ways, this will mark the transformation of the United States into a more “European”-style country–a goal long sought by people who don’t realize that official policy isn’t necessarily reflected in popular conduct in countries where the government is held in low regard.

There’s evidence that polarization harms the economy and reduces prosperity, so an escalation may well make the battles even more bitter as the damage gets worse.

More speculatively, we may also see an uptick in low-level political unrest–not civil war, but more like Spain where the central government’s authority has limited sway in parts of the country, and where active sabotage of official efforts is not uncommon. That’s especially likely if clustering continues, so that people continue to concentrate in geographically distinct camps where they can live alongside friendly faces and even ignore despised laws. We’ve already seen this in the ranks of rural sheriffs vowing defiance of state and federal gun laws, as well as in the sanctuary city movement.

It’s likely to be a wild ride.

In Defense of ‘Seditious Traitors’

The Constitution should be up and running again in no time

The Siege (1998)

Not long ago, a poll by the British outfit YouGov purported to demonstrate that roughly a third of Americans could imagine a scenario under which they would support a military coup against the U.S. government. I say “purported” because any question that asks respondents if they “can imagine” a scenario is dependent for its results on whatever alien invasion scenarios or political fever dreams people might cook up. Still, YouGov did come up with some interesting data:

The proportion of the country that would support a military takeover increases when people are asked whether they would hypothetically support the military stepping in to take control from a civilian government which is beginning to violate the constitution. 43% of Americans would support the military stepping in while 29% would be opposed.

And we have headlines! Or at least a press release to send around — which YouGov did.

An acquaintance promptly sent around an article about the poll, prompting this odd response by an old college classmate: “Interesting. Nearly 1/3 of Americans are seditious traitors? I find that surprising and alarming.”

I suggested that the problem might be a government that alienates huge swathes of the population, and that throwing names at the ticked off recipients to a survey wasn’t helpful.

Calling them seditious traitors is the literal truth. They support overthrowing the government, which would make them traitors, and since they’re ‘supporting’ it, I presume that means encouraging it, which is sedition. No hyperbole there.

I wasn’t getting anywhere. So I transitioned to explaining the legal requirements for treason and sedition charges under U.S. law, and that he might have a hard time making charges stick.

So we never got around to an important point: Even if he’d been right that “nearly 1/3 of Americans are seditious traitors,” would that have been the damning condemnation that he intended? Or just a description?

What is “sedition“?  It’s “overt conduct, such as speech and organization, that tends toward insurrection against the established order.” Likewise, “treason” is a more extreme point along the same continuum: “‘…[a]…citizen’s actions to help a foreign government overthrow, make war against, or seriously injure the [parent nation].’ In many nations, it is also often considered treason to attempt or conspire to overthrow the government, even if no foreign country is aiding or involved by such an endeavor.’

In both cases, you can definitely see why governments would dislike sedition and treason, but they’re not like murder and rape, which are inherently wrong. The moral content of an act of sedition or treason is entirely dependent on the quality of its target. If a government is good, working to overthrow it is morally wrong; if it’s evil, committing sedition and treason against it might constitute your righteous deed for the decade.

Presumably, people contemplating seditious treason against the government have lost respect for the institution and think it might need to be tossed out. Pointing out their seditious, treasonous ways isn’t a criticism; it’s just a description. They’re potential revolutionaries intending to replace a government they dislike with one they think will be better.

You know, like George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and company.

This poses a problem for people like, I’ve come to realize, my old classmate, who personally identify with the state. They believe, like Bernie Sanders, that “The government, in a democratic society, is the people” and that if you resent intrusive officials in any way “You’re assuming that the government is some kind of foreign entity.” To them, to challenge the state is to challenge their sense of selves. That strikes me as freaky to the point of pathology, but it explains responding to the YouGov poll with charges of “treason” rather than a more reasonable, “I’m having trouble imaging a committee of colonels as a better alternative to anything.”

But much of the population does see government as an “other.” When it offends us, we no longer want to be subject to its abuses. That doesn’t mean that every “solution” somebody answering a survey might imagine is an improvement. But it does mean that contemplating something other than the political status quo is not a bad thing.

Genetics may make political arguments unwinnable

If you and I entertain such inherently different preferences about the sort of society in which we want to live that common ground is limited, can expansive, top-down policy-making ever be anything more than an in-your-face power play? If political arguments are doomed to be unpersuasive to much of the opposition, no matter how well-stated, because of vast and largely unmovable differences in values and assumptions, isn’t keeping state interference in people’s lives to a minimum a matter not just of political preference, but the only course for avoiding a permanent state of low-level civil war?

I’ve written before about Social psychologist Jonathan Haidt‘s interesting research into the moral foundations of ideology and the different values and assumptions that separate liberals, conservatives and libertarians. These differences hold strong implications for the likely outcome of policy debates, since they make it clear that various factions often speak past each other, since they’re working from varying moral emphases and different concepts of good and bad when it comes to both means and ends — even the language they use can be confusing, since meanings of words vary among the factions.

Now Haidt comes forward with new information suggesting that conversation among ideological opponents can be even more difficult than previously thought. In an article (not yet online), “Born This Way?”, in the latest issue of Reason, Haidt writes of evidence that our ideology is, partially, determined by genetic factors that govern our risk aversion and our openness to new experiences. These innate traits then nudge us along paths in life that tend to reinforce our inherent inclinations.

Haidt is careful to emphasize that we’re not hard-wired into our political beliefs. He’s talking about a nudge that is likely to be self-reinforcing rather than genetically predetermined belief systems.

Genetics explains between one-third and one-half of the variability among people in their political attitudes. Being raised in a liberal or conservative household accounts for much less.

Our genetic traits lead us to respond to situations, pick careers, choose neighborhoods and associate with people in ways that reinforce our tendencies. Haidt points out that society has changed in recent years in ways that make it increasingly easy to surround ourselves with the familiar and like-minded and disassociate from people and situations that would pull us in a different direction.

Technology and changing residential patterns have allowed each of us to isolate ourselves within cocoons of likeminded individuals. In 1976, only 27 percent of Americans lived in “landslide” counties — counties that voted either Democratic or Republican by a margin of 20 percentage points or more. But the number has risen steadily; in 2008, 48 percent of Americans lived in a landslide county.

This same point about Americans self-sorting ourselves along ideological lines was made several years in The Big Sort by Bill Bishop and Robert G. Cushing. Now, Haidt tells us that we’re actually reinforcing genetic traits.

I don’t see anything in this research that’s guaranteed to make liberals, conservatives and libertarians like each other more, or find each other more sympathetic. But I do see lessons here regarding the limits of debate and the wisdom of letting people live their own lives with minimal interference. If we don’t just choose to embrace vastly different beliefs, but we entertain beliefs toward which we’re nudged by our internal source codes, it strikes me as both arrogant and cruel to impose policies on one another that must always be perceived by our opponents as alien and incomprehensible.

Democracy doesn’t change this dynamic, since democratic outcomes may just represent differences in genetic distributions across various populations, with the same impossibility of converting opponents to the majority’s way of thinking.

Yes, we need to be better about trying to understand each other, but I think it’s even more important to make allowances for each other’s preferences. The emphasis should be less on winning overall policy battles than on making as much space as possible for people to live according to their own beliefs — beliefs, it seems, that have their roots at the genetic level.

Civil liberties are too precious to waste on enemies

Among the things that make rights — in particular, that basket of rights commonly referred to as “civil liberties” — actual rights as opposed to privileges, is that they are inviolable and universal. That is, even people you don’t like enjoy these rights, and are entitled to the protection of the same. And even people you do like have to respect these rights, or suffer the consequences for violating them.

Which brings us to the media reaction to the hassle Sen. Rand Paul went through with the TSA goons at the Nashville, Tennessee, airport. From an OpEd Paul wrote about the incident for the Washington Times:

Today, while en route to Washington to speak to hundreds of thousands of people at the March for Life, I was detained by the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) for not agreeing to a patdown after an irregularity was found in my full body scan. Despite removing my belt, glasses, wallet and shoes, the scanner and TSA also wanted my dignity. I refused.

I showed them the potentially offending part of my body, my leg. They were not interested. They wanted to touch me and to pat me down. I requested to be rescanned. They refused and detained me in a 10-foot-by-10-foot area reserved for potential terrorists.

The OpEd goes on to describe the TSA and its procedures as a “blatant violation of the Fourth Amendment,” though it ends on a weak — even impotent — note calling for nothing more than “legislation that will allow for adults to be rescreened if they so choose” so they don’t have to submit to pat-downs.

Anger at the TSA is nothing new, and it’s hardly partisan. People screamed about TSA intrusions under Bush, and they scream about them under Obama. Oddly, at least so far as bureaucrats are concerned, many people seem to object to being groped, electronically stripped, herded, told to shut up and otherwise abused just so they can make an early-morning  business meeting or drag the kiddies through the purgatory that is a Disney theme park.

But the Paul incident raises problems for some pundits — specifically, because the victim was a (presumptively evil) libertarian-ish conservative Republican, and the perpetrators were (presumptively angelic) unionized government workers. The result, at least at Gawker, was an odd rant about white, educated libertarians (author Max Read doesn’t seem too well-endowed with melanin himself, though I know nothing of his educational bona fides), followed by a bizarre tantrum about the supposed low stakes and “inconsequential” violations inherent in TSA procedures, so that libertarians should just shut up already about travel restrictions and pay more attention to the war on drugs.

Because … libertarians have been sadly overlooking the drug prohibition issue for lo, these many years, I guess.

Read then concludes by taking a labor-meathead route to a neo-conservative, law-and-order conclusion:

[T]he act of refusing a pat down, and calling it a “detention,” comes across as an unbelievably petty dramatic fit instead of the imagined noble stand against an oppressive government. Couple that with the fact that TSA agents are union workers, often minorities, just trying to do their jobs, and it’s really difficult to feel like this is a “stand” worth taking at all. Just let them pat you down, guy. Stop holding up the line.

Wow, Max. It must be embarrassing to be you. But it’s worse for your mom, I’ll bet.

Esquire‘s Charles P. Pierce didn’t even try for coherent, simply smirking about the incident and speculating that Rand Paul would have had no objections to a grope conducted by Tennessee authorities because — ha! ha! — ummm …

I guess because Paul necessarily supports civil liberties protections only against federal authorities? Pierce really needs to add a footnote there. Just to clarify.

Jessica Pieklo of Care2 suggests that the universe has a sense of humor, because Rand Paul was on his way to an anti-abortion rally when he was detained, and only people who share her overall views are entitled to have any of their rights protected.

That’s also Steve Benen’s position, at the Washington Monthly.

And Library Grape reads from the same script.

Oh, c’mon. I’m pro-choice, too, but do we really want to go to the position of “if you don’t agree with me, then this is just an exercise in irony and you get what you deserve”? That path seems a little … messy. I guarantee you that few, if any of these bloggers will satisfy even each others’ civil liberties purity tests (and certainly not mine), which is likely to leave us all grabbing our ankles, unprotected because of our ideological imperfections.

Which, I guess, is OK, so long as the violators are good, unionized, blue-collar types. Right?

Power brokers must love the street theater

Sigh.

If nothing else, the Occupy Wall Street protests provide (yet another) reminder that the political “Left” can be just as incoherent, unrealistic and authoritarian as the political “Right.” Compare all of the snickering over tricorner hats and overheated verbiage at Tea Party gatherings to wacky signs and this prominent (unofficial) list of demands at the Occupy Wall Street website.

I think both groups have legitimate grievances — overgrown government on the one hand and corporatist cronyism on the other — but the fact is that grassroots political movements are messy. And, in reality, real people on the streets don’t always know what the fuck they’re talking about, even when expressing heart-felt outrage.

So you end up with movements that, at their fringes, compare elected officials to genocidal totalitarian dictators, and demand the destruction of industrial civilization.

Unfortunately, the net beneficiaries of grassroots lunacy are the powers-that-be, who can simply sit back, point at the street theater, and say: “Would you really prefer to put the crazies in charge?”

The real answer, of course, is that we shouldn’t want anybody “in charge”. Because, so long as somebody is in charge, they’ll inevitably accumulate ever-more power on behalf of themselves and their cronies — the root complaints of both the Tea Partiers and the Occupiers.

Out of Left Field

I know what you were thinking. You were saying to yourself, “Hmm, self, it’s been a while since any of my progressive friends have proposed anything insanely totalitarian. They’ve maybe been a little nanny-ish, but I haven’t heard a hint of secret police or absolute control in a while. I wonder if they’ve lost the faith and loosened up?”

Oh no, dear readers. Fear not. There’s no reason to suspect a loss of faith. Or loosening. Absolutely no loosening.

Actual Facebook wall posts below, initiated by an acquaintance of recent eastern-European extraction whose employment in American academia may be exacerbating her nostalgia for pre-Glasnost days.

Natasha (not her real name): People, stop working! Your productivity is killing the planet.

[Skipped reply]

Natasha (not her real name): What I meant was that “productivity” leads to production of useless products and services (and sometimes absolutely no products and services), that in a long run cost us more than the monetary reward we get. The problem is that nobody deals with that qualitative output of the economy. It’s all about transactions.

Academic with a cat as his profile photo (not his real name): If there were one-fourth the number of people on the planet as currently exist, we’d have a hell of a lot more leeway on every major problem, as well as time to figure out reasonable paths forward. But the human population shot past the carrying capacity of the biosphere years ago. By way of comparison, pretty much everything else is just rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic.

“Productivity” is not a problem, but a symptom of a deeper and more serious societal rot.

[Skipped reply, followed by a post by an American sociology professor at a different university]

Distaff Mao (not her real name): Here’s something for BOTH [cat person] & [other guy]: Every person gets a 0.5-share Reproduction Credit that they may choose to use or trade on the Reproduction Market. Good for the environment, good for the marketeers!

Distaff Mao (not her real name): And then a 35-hour-max work week. Nothing creates jobs like decreasing absolute surplus value!

Yeah, yeah, yeah. It’s just a couple of off-the-cuff comments cribbed from a social-networking site. But these were folks talking among friends, so it really is a peek at what they believe.

I mean, honestly, when was the last time you heard anybody seriously proposing legally enforceable limits on reproduction?

Oh .. and it’s a long story as to how I ended up connected to so many Stalinists on Facebook. I’ll try to balance this out with some loony theocratic posts, but I’m not really tapped in to that crew. Do they even use computers?

Is post-partisanship just amoral or outright sociopathic?

There’s a certain hankering in American political culture for governing stripped of arguments and ideology, and dedicated to just getting things done. Of course, that overlooks important questions about what should get done and how it should be accomplished.

The current issue of Esquire contains what initially comes off as a journalistic blow-job titled, “Michael Bloomberg Will Save Us From Ourselves If Only We Let Him.” The piece starts off in the tone of just the latest eruption of can’t-we-just-get-along pining for a world in which people just let the government get on with the business of getting into our business without arguing over the propriety of the micro-controlling fever-dreams of the the sort of technocratic dominants who make the compulsively submissive journalists at national publications cream themselves.

But John H. Richardson’s Esquire piece is much more interesting, and much more revelatory, than that. In an article that continually portrays a politician who has absolute faith in his own rectitude, Richardson hints not just at the core of Bloomberg, but at the problem of non-ideological politics itself: “Bloomberg is the ultimate independent, the calm modern technocrat rooted in metrics and cleansed of ideology, come to drain the swamps of government with his amazing modern business-management techniques … unless he’s actually just an old-fashioned autocrat looking down on us from above and tinkering with our lives like a science experiment, stripping our noisy polis of all its native poetry.”

As Richardson suggests, the problem with pragmatism, technocracy and post-partisanship is that they breeze right by the important truth that all of our messy political arguments are rooted in real debates. These debates aren’t (or shouldn’t be) just cheerleading for Team Red or Team Blue — they’re about the wisdom and propriety of government programs that can massively affect the lives of millions of people. Stripped of fripperies, ideology is, at its core, morality as applied to the use of coercive government power. That means political debates are, or should be, arguments over the morality of political programs. Viewed in those terms, post-partisanship is arguably amoral, if not outright sociopathic.

I think most people understand this point. It’s not enough to put a technocrat in charge of getting that new facility down the road open on time and running efficiently if you haven’t yet had a full discussion over the fact that it’s a concentration camp and that forcing people into it may just be fundamentally evil.

So pining for non-ideological, pragmatic, post-partisan politics isn’t just missing the point, it’s an exercise in discarding what may well be the most important factor in the process.

Recently, the importance of ideological debates have been emphasized by research that shows that people with different political views possess very different moral foundations. So we’re not just arguing over the details, but over fundamentals. Social psychologist Jonathan Haidt, of the University of Virginia, has profiled the moral thinking of liberals, conservatives and libertarians. Of interest to me is that, in a recent paper, Understanding Libertarian Morality: The Psychological Roots of an Individualist Ideology he and his co-authors write that libertarians like yours truly place great emphasis on liberty as a value — scoring higher on economic liberty than conservatives and higher on social liberty than liberals. “[T]hey endorse a world in which people are left alone to enjoy the fruits of their own labor, and in which nations are not tied down by obligations to other nations. They also exceed both liberals and conservatives (but are closer to liberals) in endorsing personal or
lifestyle liberty.” By contrast, liberals tend to emphasize worries about harm, benevolence, and altruism, while conservatives are concerned with conformity, loyalty, and tradition. There’s overlap among all three groups, of course, but you can’t disregard not just the important differences in values among these three groups, but the likelihood that those values will come into conflict. As the paper states, “Libertarians may fear that the
moral concerns typically endorsed by liberals or conservatives (as measured by the MFQ) are claims that can be used to trample upon individual rights.” Liberals and conservatives may correspondingly see threats in the values held dear by others.

So political debate becomes ever-more clearly rooted in disagreements over the rightness or wrongness of using the power of the state in any given situation. It isn’t just squabbling over who should be in charge, but whether both the ends and means of proposed and existing policies are good, bad, or ambivalent.

Once we see how deep the moral fissures go, Bloomberg’s “pragmatism” becomes, if there was ever any doubt, an intolerance for points of view other than his own. He wants to use government power without entertaining discussions about right and wrong. That’s not non-ideological, it’s authoritarian.

And so it is with other calls for politics stripped of partisanship.

Incidentally, Haidt sees the Tea Party movement as driven more by a passion for “karma” than a desire for liberty. You can participate in his research here.

How can you bridge deep divisions over the role of the state?

Recovering from both a wedding and the stomach flue while awaiting an overdue flight at San Francisco International Airport (and if you’re ever stuck in Terminal 1 at SFO, allow me to recommend Go Bistro’s Asian-fusion-whatever. It doesn’t suck.), I came across USA Today‘s front-page story on Gallup Poll results measuring Americans’ deep differences of opinions over the size and scope of government. Based on the polling data, the article divides our countrymen into five distinct groups that, while still broad, are rather more helpful than the usual red/blue bullshit that is spoken of all-too-often.

• Keep it small: This cohesive group wants government to stay away from regulating the free market or morality. They trust private enterprise over public institutions and overwhelmingly oppose Obama and the Democratic Party. Many support the Tea Party movement.

They are the wealthiest, the most conservative and the most predominantly white and male of any of the groups.

• Morality first: This group also is decidedly Republican, and they don’t endorse a large federal role in addressing income disparities. But they are solidly in favor of the federal government acting to uphold moral standards and promote traditional values.

A Republican governing coalition that includes both the first and second groups could risk fracture when the issues turned from a more limited government on the economic front to questions such as whether to oppose same-sex marriage or restrict abortion.

• The mushy middle: This pragmatic group avoids the extremes. Those in this category split more evenly on attitudes toward the GOP, the Democratic Party and Obama than others.

Ninety-five percent of them end up somewhere in the middle when asked to place themselves on a five-point scale on the proper role of government — “1” meaning the government should provide only the most basic functions and “5” meaning the government should take active steps in every area it could.

• Obama liberals: This group wants the government to take a big role in addressing economic disparities but a small one in upholding moral standards. It is the most suspicious of business: Six in 10 say business will harm society unless regulated by the government.

They are the youngest group and the group with the highest percentage of liberals, Democrats and Obama supporters.

• The bigger the better: The members of this group are the most likely of any to trust government and to endorse its involvement in areas from upholding morality to addressing income inequality.

What’s interesting to me is that the first group, which “wants government to stay away from regulating the free market or morality” — what we could generally call libertarians — makes up 22% of the population. That grouping is directly opposed by the 20% that is “most likely of any to trust government and to endorse its involvement in areas from upholding morality to addressing income inequality.”

So two segments broken out in the poll, making up 42% of the population, hold completely incompatible views about the relationship of the individual to the state. You can’t satisfy one without offending the other.

But the other groups include traditional conservatives who “don’t endorse a large federal role in addressing income disparities. But they are solidly in favor of the federal government acting to uphold moral standards and promote traditional values” and traditional liberals who “wan[t] the government to take a big role in addressing economic disparities but a small one in upholding moral standards.” Their different visions of a more expansive state than that favored by the libertarians are also incompatible.

This leaves us stuck, right? I mean, completely stuck. Americans really want entirely irreconcilable political structures.

I wonder, though …

It’s one thing to want, in abstract terms, the government to do something, and it’s entirely different to deal with a real program with an entrenched bureaucracy — especially if it engages in activity you find excessive or offensive. That is, I wonder if a relatively inactive government doesn’t, over the long term, engender a stronger positive, or at least neutral, response than a relatively active government which might breed the likes of the Tea Party movement. Given the nearly even division in preferences demonstrated in the Gallup Poll, that may suggest a tendency towards somewhat limited government in the United States. Limited government — not minimal government — but limited nevertheless.

Of course, that runs up against the obvious example of the steady growth in the state over past decades, but that may be because we hadn’t hit the (admittedly generous and probably shifting) limit set by the country’s political divisions. And some serious incursions into economic freedom (think trucking and airline prices) as well as civil liberties (think gay rights and the rights of racial minorities) have, in fact, been rolled back.

Or maybe that damned stomach bug just has my mind wandering in strange directions.