Home // Archive by category "Culture"

Some Thoughts on #MeToo, Sex, and Consent

November 28, 2017 3 comments
Ride 'em, cowgirl!

Image: C. M.Russell, public domain

Many years ago, I woke up in the middle of the night to discover that I was having sex. After a happy and sweaty evening together, the woman in question and I had fallen asleep next to one another. Some time later, she apparently had a hankering for seconds. Not wanting to waste time, she climbed on board. My body saw no reason to check with my brain and immediately got with the program. The first thing I knew, I was playing the role of bronco to an enthusiastic cowgirl–not that I minded a damned bit.

I mention this not just because I like reliving pleasant memories–although I do–but because of the current public “conversation” over sexual conduct by high-profile people in media, business, and the government. A good number of the allegations are about outright rape–forcible sexual assault without consent, or in the face of explicit protests. That’s always wrong, inherently despicable, and should be prosecuted and punished–or publicized and held against those who committed such acts but were able to escape consequences through power and intimidation.

But some accusations are more complicated, involving exchanges of sex for favors that are now regretted, or unwelcome advances that were rebuffed, or socially awkward behavior that’s cringe-inducing but not an actual violation of anybody’s rights…

Take my example above. Technically, I never gave consent. By some modern standards, I was raped. I would never raise such an accusation, because I was more than willing and would cackle hysterically at anybody who suggested such an interpretation (seriously, I’m capable of cackling). But that’s a possible way of framing that scenario. From her and my perspective, though, she had every reason to believe that her advances would be welcome and that some sort of implied consent was inherent in my naked, snoring post-coital (and ultimately pre-coital) presence in her bed.

Romantic and sexual interactions are complicated. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t draw bright lines–explicit coercion is entirely beyond the pale. It should be harshly punished. That’s because the use of force to overcome somebody’s unwillingness is clear in a good many situations. But unwelcome advances? Clumsy seduction? Social cluelessness? If you can walk away, or reduce somebody to embarrassment by saying “you did not just do that,” it’s probably not coercion. And nobody knows it’s unwelcome until they try.

Does it help to contextualize things if I explain that I ended up in that woman’s bed because I was lying drunk on her sofa, she walked by, and I reached out to put my arm around her and missed. So she walked by again. Slowly. So I couldn’t screw it up.

Complicated.

On a related note, here’s found footage of an actual date, not too far in the future…

Frankly, I Prefer the Snakebite

March 19, 2017 2 comments
Forget about me. You folks are scary.

Forget about me. You folks are scary. Photo: Paul Venter

At the close of the 19th century, Ewart S. Grogan and Arthur H. Sharp, two Cambridge undergraduates, took advantage of a vacation from classes to successfully attempt the first walking traverse along the length of Africa, south to north, in part to impress a girl’s father. They did some shooting along the way.

That’s a succinct description that sucks all the juice from one of the more impressive real-life adventures ever, accomplished by two college students who may well have subsequently inspired every P. G. Wodehouse and Monty Python parody of simultaneously insufferable and seemingly superhuman British imperialists to come. They wrote up their journey in From the Cape to Cairo, published in 1900, a reprint of which I’m reading now.

Following is a representative excerpt. Note, even for the time Grogan and Sharp were almost comically (not so funny if you were on the receiving end) racist. The racial epithet appears in the original.

During lunch, a native rushed in, saying that he had been bitten by a night adder, one of the most deadly snakes in Africa. I promptly collared him by the arm, stopped the circulation with some string, slit his finger cross-wise with my pocket-knife, exploded some gunpowder in the cut, while Dodson administered repeated subcutaneous injections of permanganate of potash. Meanwhile, the arm, chest, and left side swelled to the most appalling proportions. Cavendish then appeared on the scene with a bottle of whisky, three parts of which we poured down his throat; then we told off three strong men to run him round the camp till he subsided like a log into a drunken stupor. The following morning he was still alive, but the swelling was enormous, and the coloring of his nails indicated incipient gangrene. Not knowing what else to do, we put a pot on the fire, and made a very strong solution of the permanganate which we kept gently simmering, while six stalwart niggers forced the unfortunate’s hand in and out. His yells were fearful, but the cure was complete; the swelling rapidly subsided, the nails resumed their normal colour, and the following morning, with the exception of the loss of the skin of his hand, he was comparatively well.

I’ll note here that night adders are dangerous, but not usually fatal to adults, and that potassium permanganate is an antiseptic not known for antivenin properties (although it was commonly used as one at the time). I’m truly impressed as much by the patient’s physical endurance as by the treatment. And I’ll bet that was an epic hangover.

Best fraternity initiation, ever!

It’s a Changing World, and It’s Probably Changing Into the 1930s

January 4, 2017 Reply

In the aftermath of a presidential election, the outcome of which some people predicted, but I’m not one of them, Dave Barry points to the ever-morphing nature of “serious” politicians’ political beliefs.

In Washington, Democrats who believed in a strong president wielding power via executive orders instantly exchange these deeply held convictions with Republicans who until Election Day at roughly 10 p.m. Eastern time believed fervently in filibusters and limited government.

That’s a point that happens to be both clever and true–politicians do seem to take to heart Groucho Marx’s maxim, “Those are my principles, and if you don’t like them… well, I have others.”

But, as Matt Welch writes over at Reason, those “others” are sounding awfully familiar. With nationalism and populism rising across America, Europe, and beyond, the ideological center of gravity is shifting in a familiar–and frightening direction.

In the post-neoliberal era, parties of the left are going hard democrat-socialist (think Bernie Sanders and Jeremy Corbyn), while parties of the right increasingly adopt the welfare-state nationalism of Donald Trump, Viktor Orban, and France’s ever-advancing Le Pen family. The areas around the center are as dead as the political careers of, well, Hillary Clinton and Jeb Bush.

Shades of the 1930s! Everything old is new again, indeed–especially withdrawing inward, and looking for a strongman to reclaim imagined past glory by force of will. And by force of arms, if need be.

Not that the lost center was much of anything to mourn, but as elitist and warlike as it was, people from America to France to the Philippines seem to be rejecting it in favor of a rawer, more grassroots authoritarianism.

There may be an opening here for people favoring liberty and autonomy. But I suspect that most libertarian relief for the near future will be achieved outside of and despite government policy, not through the political system.

In the meantime, break out your copy of The Road to Serfdom. The insights in there, put on paper in reaction to another moment when faith in individualism and freedom was waning, seem strikingly current.

Why Arrest Your Opponents When You Can Ban Their Fun?

October 3, 2016 4 comments
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.

Trump (and Sanders) Damage Not Just America, But the Liberal Democracy Brand

March 17, 2016 Reply
Lee Kuan Yew

Lee Kuan Yew / Photo by U.S. Department of Defense

A few days ago, the editorial page of China’s Global Times basically pointed at America’s political system and laughed. Look at what the nagging democrats coughed up!

Big-mouthed, anti-traditional, abusively forthright, [Trump] is a perfect populist that could easily provoke the public. Despite candidates’ promises, Americans know elections cannot really change their lives. Then, why not support Trump and vent their spleen?

The rise of a racist in the US political arena worries the whole world. Usually, the tempo of the evolution of US politics can be predicted, while Trump’s ascent indicates all possibilities and unpredictability. He has even been called another Benito Mussolini or Adolf Hitler by some Western media.

Mussolini and Hitler came to power through elections, a heavy lesson for Western democracy. Now, most analysts believe the US election system will stop Trump from being president eventually. The process will be scary but not dangerous.

Even if Trump is simply a false alarm, the impact has already left a dent. The US faces the prospect of an institutional failure, which might be triggered by a growing mass of real-life problems.

Pundits immediately (and rightly) jumped on this, pointing out the flaws that the paper was ignoring in China’s own authoritarian system of government, which not only excludes public input but also suppresses dissent. “Of course, there are a couple of glaring lacunae in that argument,” noted the Washington Post‘s Simon Denyer. “The most obvious being the tyranny and mass insanity unleashed by Mao Zedong, who killed tens of millions of his own people, (as indeed Stalin did in the Soviet Union). But hey, that bit of history is officially glossed over here.”

And no matter the populist lunacy into which democracies descend, they’re pretty good at peaceful shifts in political leadership. Dictatorships are a bit clumsy at that whole transition of power thing.

But Denyer and other commenters missed the fact that the Global Times editorial wasn’t a one-off. It’s part of a much larger reconsideration of the principles of government by much of the world that hasn’t fully (or at all) adopted liberal democratic values.A lot of that “reconsideration” is self-serving twaddle by autocrats looking to retain power while granting their subjects sufficient access to prosperity that they don’t revolt. But there’s enough truth to the analysis of the West’s flaws and the growing political crisis in supposedly stable, established systems that editorials criticizing democracy can gain traction among educated people who are deciding on their own future path.

Similar criticism could also be directed at Bernie Sanders–a surging politician who would and should be the year’s astonishment if Americans weren’t flocking in even greater numbers to support an orange authoritarian narcissist. The Vermont socialist’s promises to loot prosperous Americans to support a ludicrous grab-bag of unaffordable goodies are excellent examples of a prevailing problem with western democracies that dominated attention before the emergence of an open thug on the U.S. scene.

In 2014’s The Fourth Revolution: The Global Race to Reinvent the State, John Micklethwait, then editor-in-chief of The Economist, and Adrian Woolridge, management editor of the same magazine, sketched the “revolution” in government through the nation state, the liberal state, and the welfare state. Published just two years ago, the book seems almost quaint as it discusses the crisis in which the modern welfare state finds itself–before the political eruptions of the last year which drove a populist thug to prominence in the Republican Party, an economically illiterate socialist to draw crowds of young Americans, a crazy Trotskyite to gain the leadership of Britain’s Labour Party, the surge of nationalist-populists in Germany, France… But though overshadowed since, the authors’ points about the crisis of the modern western political system remains valid. Describing the condition of Britain in the 1970s, they write, “Ever-bigger government meant ever-greater social dysfunction. Vested interests competed ever more viciously for their share of the pie.”

More importantly, those flaws have been picked up by those seeking an alternative–an alternative to western democracy, and also an alternative to loosening their own grip on power.

“When you have popular democracy, to win votes you have to give more. And to beat your opponents in the next election, you have to promise to give more away. So it is a never-ending process of auctions–and the cost, the debt being paid for by the next generation,” they quote Singapore’s Lee Kuan Yew as commenting. Lee, who died last year, famously created an economically free and socially authoritarian city state that has limited  democratic input–and stiff penalties for too vigorously criticizing the powers-that-be.

Lee was listened to and is eagerly studied, partly because he tells many people what they want to hear, but also because even when his tightly controlled system suffers an economic setback, it still seems to be doing better than the much freer democracies of the West.

And his example has been adopted and touted elsewhere. At the China Executive Leadership Academy in Pudong (CELAP) which trains the country’s future government apparatchiks and considers models to take the massive country into the future “there are better places to look than gridlocked America–most notably Singapore.”

The Singapore model is also admired, write Micklethwait and Woolridge, in places including Russia, Dubai, and Rwanda.

So the Global Times editorial fits into the ongoing erosion and disparagement of the western model of liberal democracy–often on a very calculated and deliberate basis–by people considering what system of governance should take them into the future. Many of those people obviously want an authoritarian model that maintains their clout and privileges. But to the extent the established western democracies keep shitting the bed, the Lee Kuan Yews of the world will find an increasingly receptive audience among those who need a system that effectively allows them to get rich while protecting lives and property. Civil liberty…well, if it leads to Trump, maybe they’ll pass.

While critical of libertarianism–at least in quasi-anarchist form–Micklethwait and Woolridge call for a revival of classical liberal solutions which most people would recognize as libertarian. They want to see the state restrained and reduced in size, power devolved, and rights protected. They see that–convincingly I think–as reinvigorating liberal democracy and securing its continued existence where it is already established, as well as its status as a model for the rest of the world.

“It is time to put the ‘liberal’ back into ‘liberal democracy’: to persuade both voters and governments to accept restraints on the state’s natural tendency to overindulge itself.”

Yes, I think that’s convincing. But how to accomplish that is the trick. How do you convince people to rein it in when they’re reveling in the use of the state as a bludgeon (Trump voters) or a mugger-for-hire (Sanders supporters)? Because if they don’t limit themselves, the system will fall apart–and then the Lee Kuan Yews of the world will happily do the limiting for them.

How Arizona’s land-use debates make my novel so damned relevant

February 22, 2012 2 comments

A major conceit of my novel, High Desert Barbecue, (now available as a DRM-free ebook from the Google ebookstore that’s readable on your Nook, Kobo, iPad and pretty much anything but a Kindle or an Etch-a-Sketch) is the desire of a cabal of radical environmentalists to drive humans off of western lands so that they can return to some natural and, presumably, idyllic state. What some readers may not understand is that I really didn’t stretch the truth much. Tug on it a bit? Sure. But not a lot of stretching.

Last week, the current and former sheriffs in Coconino County (where Flagstaff is located) came out, a day late and a dollar short, against a federal plan, driven by groups like the Tucson-based Center for Biological Diversity, that “eliminates 66 percent of areas where car campers and travel trailers could spend the night, reducing it from a majority of the forest to an area a little more than double the size of the Kachina Peaks Wilderness area,” in the words of the Arizona Daily Sun. The scheme also closes many forest roads to vehicular use at any time.

The Center for Biological Diversity says on its Website:

[W]e believe the highest and best use of public lands is to provide safe harbor for species by protecting the ecological systems upon which they and we ultimately depend. To this end, our advocacy directly confronts land uses that harm species and ecosystems — from off-road vehicle use and livestock grazing to industrial logging and uranium and fossil fuel extraction — while advancing precedent-setting litigation, policies, and strategic collaborations to usher in a hopeful new era of biodiversity conservation for our public lands system. We work toward a future in which species and ecosystems are finally afforded primacy among public lands priorities.

No, the Center is not led by by a fellow named Rupert Greenfield. Well, not officially.

Yes, some of the sandals-and-patchouli set really do want to see human presence swept out of their wind-swept shrine. And they are able to play on cultural divisions to get their way.

In the West, outdoor use is largely divided between motors and sweat. You have your ATV riders, campers and shooters relying on vehicles to get where they want to go in the forests and deserts, and you have your trail runners, backpackers and mountain bikers depending more on their own muscles. Some people like to cast this as a moral or spiritual divide, but it really is cultural. The sweat set is largely urban/suburban and white collar, and sees machines as something to escape, and the motorheads are primarily small-town/rural and blue-collar, and see machines as things that turn back-breaking labor into mere hard work. Both sides tend to ignore the considerable overlap between their constituents while sneering at each other. The motorheads are hit hard by road closures, while the sweat set see themselves as unaffected — or even benefited — by harder access to the outdoors.

Never mind that some of the sweat set are going to be mighty unhappy when they discover some of their favorite climbable rock-faces and unofficial trails are now effectively of-limits — they’re still either indifferent to the road-closures or actively supporting them.

For the record, I’m a backpacker, trail-runner and mountain-biker — well-ensconced in the sweat-set — but I really don’t like being pushed out of the forests and deserts by a bunch of … well … tree-fuckers (read my book if you don’t get that reference!).

Maybe the New Deal was a class war after all

July 7, 2011 2 comments

In the piece of Arizona in which I live, there’s a distinct social divide between locally sourced business people and professionals, and those from elsewhere. While everybody mixes at community events and in the professional setting, on their own time, the locals go one way and the imports go another.

It’s not an economic divide — asset-wise, one tribe or the other may have the advantage, but that’s clearly not where the border lies. In fact, there’s a range of incomes on either side; the real common denominator — and source of the division — is culture. In broad terms, one group spends its cash on ATVs, steak and beer, and the other on mountain bikes, hummus and wine. Things are a bit fuzzier than that, of course, but it’s enough to make for two largely detached social networks.

This is on my mind because I’m currently reading Paul Fussell’s much-referenced and very biting Class: A guide through the American status system. Published originally in the early 1980s, the book may be dated a bit in some specific details, but it recalls to me (shudder) my high school years in WASPy Greenwich, Connecticut, and reminds me that economic divides and social divides are not the same thing. One of the great glories of the United States is that wealth really is within the reach of just about anybody with brains and drive — but social barriers are a hell of a lot harder to overcome. Despite his billions, Bill Gates will always be an upper middle-class guy — never mind that he could buy and sell whatever is left of the Roosevelts.

Of course, if sufficiently secure in his own skin, he need not give a shit about that social divide either — which is freedom in itself.

But, speaking of the Roosevelts, this long and somewhat strange introduction is my labored way of working around to an observation that occurred to me some time ago while I was reading Amity Shlaes’s Forgotten Man, about the Great Depression. It’s often remarked that Franklin Delano Roosevelt was a “traitor to his class” — that his authoritarianism, corporatist economics and populist bloviating separated him from his natural allies and championed the little guy.

Except … That’s not true, is it?

FDR was fond of bashing “money changers” and plutocrats, and of challenging major figures in business and industry — which is indicative, since he himself was engaged in … nothing. Nothing, that is, aside from politics. Really, his official White House biography speaks of college, law school and political office. Other biographies refer to a brief legal clerkship. But really, his family had lived off of inherited money for generations, and he didn’t have to work at anything that didn’t interest him. The man was a landed aristocrat.

And what about his opponents?

Many of FDR’s opponents may have been wealthier than him, but they also worked at it in ways that the idle social elite have traditionally considered vulgar. Take Andrew Mellon, for example. Widely derided as a shadowy and powerful figure — “three presidents served under him” — Mellon was the son of a Scots-Irish immigrant who started off working in lumber and coal and later went into banking. Yes, he grew immensely rich and powerful, but he worked. By Roosevelt’s standards, Mellon was a social inferior.

In fact, the same could be said about all of those “plutocrats” whose businesses were affected, to one extent or another, by the New Deal. The simple fact that they engaged in commerce beyond managing an ancient estate would have made them a bit … icky … to the likes of FDR and the old elite.

As Fussell writes in Class, “[A]s a class indicator, the amount of money is less significant than the source. The main thing distinguishing the top three classes from each other is the amount of money inherited in relation to the amount currently earned. The top out-of-sight-class … lives on inherited capital entirely.”

By the standard set by Fussell (a liberal Democrat, by the way, who contrasts Ronald Reagan’s “Midwestern small-town meanness” with “Roosevelt’s politics of aristocratic magnanimity”), the likes of Mellon and Henry Ford (another son of an immigrant), who actually worked for the majority of their wealth, would have been one or two social classes below FDR, despite their vast assets.

It’s interesting … Transfer the same cast of characters to, say, fifteenth-century Flanders (not that I’m an expert) and grad students would be cranking out papers about the exploitation of the peasantry as a weapon by the landed aristocracy against the newly empowered merchant class, but clear judgment goes out the window when the scion of a long-established elite New York family takes advantage of an economic down-turn to stir up struggling Americans against newly risen business owners who are overshadowing his social set in the United States of the 1930s.

I’ve long since come to realize that I rarely have original ideas, so I’ll assume that this insight has been covered, to much greater depth, elsewhere. Please feel free to drop me a note telling me what I’ve overlooked, since the subject intrigues me.

‘Last Call’ delves into Prohibition — and the long hangover it left behind

December 28, 2010 Reply

I’m reading Last Call by Daniel Okrent, an interesting history of the rise of the prohibitionist movement in the 19th century, its culmination in the 18th Amendment and the Volstead Act, and the inevitable (and gratifying) failure of the once-popular effort to ban the manufacture and sale of alcoholic beverages. The book is of special interest to me not only because of my strong thirst for bourbon, red wine, microbrews, port, gin and, in a pinch, Sterno squeezed through a handkerchief, but also because I’ve long believed that, with all due respect to the folks obsessed by the Civil War/War Between the States/War to Fuel All Overwrought Historical Novels, Prohibition was the defining moment in terms of a shift in the relationship between individuals and the state in this country.

Among the interesting details supplied by Okrent’s book is the degree to which prohibitionism intermingled with, energized, and was powered by connections with other “reform” movements. Specifically, the early “temperance” movement overlapped with abolitionism, then developed major ties to the women’s suffrage movement — to the point that it’s credited with making early feminism politically viable. Religious fundamentalism, unsurprisingly, played a huge role along the way — prohibitionism was overtly a Protestant-Christian eruption, with the Anti-Saloon League calling itself “the church in action against the saloon.” Nativism, of course, figured in the movement against alcohol, with reaction to hard-drinking Catholic and Jewish immigrants (the myth possibly not out-stripping the reality) fueling much of the desire to ban saloons, beer, booze and fun; Frances Willard, long-time leader of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union, favored immigration restrictions on “the scum of the Old World.”

What is new to me (though it makes sense) was the degree to which then-new brands of ideological collectivism played a role. Willard, who often referred (approvingly) to her followers as “Protestant nuns,” was not by any means the only prohibitionist to identify as a “Christian socialist.” The WCTU and the Prohibition Party endorsed a grab-bag of statist policies, including nationalization of major industries.

Prohibitionists, by and large, didn’t seem to be huge fans of sex, either. No surprise, really.

Basically, aside from women’s suffrage (abolitionists may have often been anti-alcohol, but they prevailed on their on merits), prohibitionism was a major player up in a mutually reinforcing whirlwind of statism and intolerance that has done vast damage to the cause of personal freedom and limited government in the United States. Several seemingly unrelated political/cultural tendencies gained energy from one another and went on to transform the country in very important ways.

I haven’t finished Last Call, but it’s already worthy of recommendation. And it will, almost certainly, drive you to drink.

Election horror! I’m moving to (fill in the blank)

November 3, 2010 2 comments

Why is is that, after every disappointing election, libertarians generally just grin and bear it (and tunnel a little deeper into the underground economy and counter-culture), conservatives vow to try harder next time (and win back their country for Jeezis), but lefties are forever vowing to toss their Patagonia gear into their hybrid put-puts and flee to Canada or France or some other mythical social-democratic paradise? My Facebook feed is currently speckled with progressive chums contemplating the good life in Toronto, Paris or Lilliput, about all of which they seem equally well mis-informed. This isn’t the first time, either.

Gawker captured the situation nicely with a round-up of five potential cities to which refugees from the recent dastardly Tea Party coup could consider fleeing. Kudos to Gawker for mentioning the uncomfortable truth that much of the world is a tad less lollipops-and-unicorns social-democraticky than progressives might like — less so than the U.S. in many cases. As Gawker points out of our neighbor to the north, “Well, it’s not that liberal. Prime Minister Stephen Harper is a conservative leader, after all,” and even “[t]ax-heavy, expensive Sweden is also moving into a more American style of limited-ish federal government, privatizing many formerly state-owned business to stave off economic woes.”

In fact, deprived of the huge line of credit possessed by the United States, many countries to which trendy lefties might flee have long-since started slashing state spending, freeing their economies (a bit, anyway) and turning toward Tea Party-ish smaller-government solutions.

Canada, for instance, is no longer so much the big-government contrast to the United States. Canadian federal spending topped out at over 50% of GDP back in the ’90s, after which somebody went to tap the piggy bank yet again and found nothing but moths and good wishes. Out of necessity, the old Liberal government began cutting spending well before the Conservatives came to power.

Likewise, Britain is only one of the European countries that have explicitly rejected the Obama administration’s hoary Keynesianism in favor of some sort of fiscal discipline. Sweden really is deregulating and privatizing its economy — to the point that the Christian Science Monitor says, “some believe it should be held up as a bastion of market capitalism.”

On a less-encouraging note, the French have their own problems with nativism and immigration fights. There’s no escaping the border warriors in Paris.

I’m not entirely sure what sort of Erewhon the folks on the losing side of the latest election think they’re going to find once they disembark in the imagined promised land, but it’s probably going to leave them a bit disappointed.

It’s not that the latest crop of elected officials won’t be as bad as everybody fears; the last few batches have certainly lived down to expectations, and why should things change now? But, if progressives insist on fleeing the latest electoral catastrophe (after the previous one, which they themselves brought on us) they might trouble themselves to do a little research to make sure that they won’t be greeted in their new homes by poutine-munching, Gauloises-puffing clones of the scary villains they left behind.

Just how hermetically sealed is New York’s insular political culture?

September 17, 2010 1 comment

In the September 20 issue of New York magazine, there’s a brief piece by Dan Amira called “Tea House 2011.” Touted in the table of contents as a look at “lesser-known lunatics of the tea party,” the article is supposed to be a peek at the beyond-the-pale madmen who “are operating out of the national spotlight this campaign season.” These aspiring members of Congress get a tiny photo, a brief bio, and a few words on the unquestionable insanity they espouse, to which we’ll all supposedly be subject should the Tea Party get its way come November. Their craziness is taken as so obvious that no analysis is required once their opinions are stated.

And sure enough, of the exactly six would-be congresscritters profiled in this article, there’s an honest-to-God … well … apparent birther in the mix. He’s running for Colorado’s Fourth District. Cory Gardner is also the least outsidery of the bunch, considering that he’s already a state legislator.

But two of the “lesser-known lunatics” are on the list because they (drumroll please) question Social Security and Medicare. Todd Young, running for Indiana’s Ninth District, “[r]eferred to Social Security as a ‘Ponzi scheme.'” And Jesse Kelly, running in Arizona’s Eighth District, “said he ‘would love to eliminate’ Social Security and eventually end Medicare.” He’s also opposed to the minimum wage.

Uh huh. So of the six crazier-than-crazy Tea Party candidates profiled by New York for their “lunacy,” two of them are in there for positions that are widely held by professional economists. Wikipedia’s entry on the minimum wage summarizes surveys finding that as many as “90 percent of the economists surveyed agreed that the minimum wage increases unemployment among low-skilled workers” and “46.8% wanted it completely eliminated.” Similar surveys of economists find that they consider Social security a mess — 85.3 percent agree that “the gap between Social Security funds and expenditures will become unsustainably large within the next fifty years if current policies remain unchanged.” And Hell, even Michael Kinsley agrees it’s a Ponzi scheme (although he thinks that’s OK). And it’s hard to defend Medicare when the program is widely used as an example of a government scheme run amok.

But, in polite New York circles, criticizing Social Security, Medicare and minimum wage laws is just not done — to the point that anybody who ventures in that direction is considered laughable

From time to time, I miss the sophistication of my old digs. But whenever I get to hankering for exotic restaurants, creative theater and innovative arts in my home town, all I need for a cure is a reminder of the … well … lunatics who run the show there.