“In The Name Of Freedom”: How To Spot A Paranoid Libertarian
In a recent essay in the New Republic, Princeton University historian Sean Wilentz contends that Edward Snowden, Glenn Greenwald and Julian Assange reflect a political impulse he calls “paranoid libertarianism.” Wilentz claims that far from being “truth-telling comrades intent on protecting the state and the Constitution from authoritarian malefactors,” they “despise the modern liberal state, and they want to wound it.”
Wilentz gives credit to Richard Hofstadter for the term “paranoid libertarianism,” but he is being generous. Although Hofstadter wrote an influential essay called “The Paranoid Style in American Politics,” he didn’t call special attention to its libertarian manifestation. Wilentz has performed an important public service in doing exactly that.
Most of Wilentz’s essay focuses on Snowden, Greenwald and Assange, and he offers a lot of details in an effort to support his conclusions about each of them. But let’s put the particular individuals to one side. Although Wilentz doesn’t say much about paranoid libertarianism as such, the general category is worth some investigation.
It can be found on the political right, in familiar objections to gun control, progressive taxation, environmental protection and health care reform. It can also be found on the left, in familiar objections to religious displays at public institutions and to efforts to reduce the risk of terrorism. Whether on the right or the left, paranoid libertarianism (which should of course be distinguished from libertarianism as such) is marked by five defining characteristics.
The first is a wildly exaggerated sense of risks — a belief that if government is engaging in certain action (such as surveillance or gun control), it will inevitably use its authority so as to jeopardize civil liberties and perhaps democracy itself. In practice, of course, the risk might be real. But paranoid libertarians are convinced of its reality whether or not they have good reason for their conviction.
The second characteristic is a presumption of bad faith on the part of government officials — a belief that their motivations must be distrusted. If, for example, officials at a state university sponsor a Christian prayer at a graduation ceremony, the problem is that they don’t believe in religious liberty at all (and thus seek to eliminate it). If officials are seeking to impose new restrictions on those who seek to purchase guns, the “real” reason is that they seek to ban gun ownership (and thus to disarm the citizenry).
The third characteristic is a sense of past, present or future victimization. Paranoid libertarians tend to believe that as individuals or as members of specified groups, they are being targeted by the government, or will be targeted imminently, or will be targeted as soon as officials have the opportunity to target them. Any evidence of victimization, however speculative or remote, is taken as vindication, and is sometimes even welcome. (Of course, some people, such as Snowden, are being targeted, because they appear to have committed crimes.)
The fourth characteristic is an indifference to tradeoffs — a belief that liberty, as paranoid libertarians understand it, is the overriding if not the only value, and that it is unreasonable and weak to see relevant considerations on both sides. Wilentz emphasizes what he regards as the national- security benefits of some forms of surveillance; paranoid libertarians tend to see such arguments as a sham. Similarly, paranoid libertarians tend to dismiss the benefits of other measures that they despise, including gun control and environmental regulation.
The fifth and final characteristic is passionate enthusiasm for slippery-slope arguments. The fear is that if government is allowed to take an apparently modest step today, it will take far less modest steps tomorrow, and on the next day, freedom itself will be in terrible trouble. Modest and apparently reasonable steps must be resisted as if they were the incarnation of tyranny itself.
In some times and places, the threats are real, and paranoid libertarians turn out to be right. As Joseph Heller wrote in Catch-22, “Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they aren’t after you.”
Societies can benefit a lot from paranoid libertarians. Even if their apocalyptic warnings are wildly overstated, they might draw attention to genuine risks, or at least improve public discussion. But as a general rule, paranoia isn’t a good foundation for public policy, even if it operates in freedom’s name.
By: Cass Sunstein, The National Memo, January 30, 2014
“All Right, There Are Two Republican Parties”: From The Comically Rote To The Grimm Series
Republican pundits have been arguing recently that immigration reform could splinter the party ahead of the 2014 elections. They shouldn’t be worrying about immigration. The Republicans’ response to President Obama’s State of the Union showed that the G.O.P. is actually two parties, or perhaps even more.
There were three organized responses — one official, one Tea Party, one libertarian — and one impromptu response involving the buffoonish behavior of a Congressman from Staten Island. (More about that in a minute.)
The Stepford Response: The official rebuttal, delivered by Representative Cathy McMorris Rodgers of Washington, was comically rote and devoid of real content.
Ms. Rodgers started with the obligatory summation of her humble beginnings — a “nation where a girl who worked at the McDonald’s Drive Thru to help pay for college can be with you from the United States Capitol.” These tired stories — which Mr. Obama also tossed into his speech — are nearly as old as the republic.
She then went on to say: “The most important moments right now aren’t happening here. They’re not in the Oval Office or in the House chamber. They’re in your homes. Kissing your kids goodnight. Figuring out how to pay bills. Getting ready for tomorrow’s doctor visit. Waiting to hear from those you love serving in Afghanistan, or searching for that big job interview.”
Everyone with a heart values those moments. They happen to be exactly the same kind of moments that Mr. Obama evoked in his State of the Union. The difference is that the president offered a series of proposals about how to improve the lives of Americans and address the fundamental inequality in the country. Ms. Rodger offered none, just the usual misty-eyed evocations of the “real America” that are meant to imply that the rest of us do not belong.
The Storm the Castle Response: Representative Mike Lee of Utah delivered a spirited Tea Party rebuttal. He launched an attack on “ever-growing government” and celebrated the way that the original Boston patriots, who held the Original Tea Party, did not just stop there.
“It took them 14 long years to get from Boston to Philadelphia, where they created, with our Constitution, the kind of government they did want,” Mr. Lee said, glossing over what happened during those years — a full-blown, bloody revolution. I guess he’s not preaching that for now.
Mr. Lee talked a lot about inequality, which he blamed entirely on Washington, and mostly on Democrats, as if the kind of de-regulation that he presumably favors did not produce an out-of-control financial industry whose irresponsibility and excesses almost destroyed the economy.
The Non-Threatening Insurgent: Senator Rand Paul, the self-appointed leader of libertarians, delivered an extremely amiable speech.
He started, of course, with what seems to be his all-time favorite quote, Ronald Reagan saying that “government is not the answer to the problem, government is the problem.” And he salted his speech with folksy sayings. We should not “reshuffle the deck chairs on the Titanic,” he said, although I wasn’t entirely sure what he was talking about. Listening to Mr. Paul is entertaining. “It’s not that government is inherently stupid,” he said, “although it’s a debatable point.”
But he has an odd sense of cause and effect. He said the recession, mass unemployment and the stock crash of 2008 were “caused by the Federal Reserve,” because it encouraged banks to give money to people who could not pay it back. But he left out the fact that it was the lifting of financial regulations on the banks that actually spurred them to do dangerous things, like offer risky loans. So when Mr. Paul talked about nixing other “burdensome, job killing regulations,” I got worried.
The most interesting thing about his comments was how much milder they were than last year, when he said that the true bipartisanship of Washington was the failure of both of the main political parties in pretty much every area. Is he running for president?
The Class Clown Response: Although not an official or even unofficial rebuttal, Rep. Michael Grimm of Staten Island’s comments after the State of the Union seem to say…something…about the Republican Party.
In a post-address interview, Michael Scotto of NY1 dared to stray from the topic at hand, asking Mr. Grimm about a federal investigation into his campaign fund-raising.
Mr. Grimm grew so irritated that he threatened to throw Mr. Scott off the balcony, or alternatively to “break you in half. Like a boy.” He tossed in at least one profanity and informed Mr. Scotto that “you’re not man enough, you’re not man enough.” It’s not clear what for.
Mr. Grimm at first tried to explain his behavior by saying that it wasn’t fair to add questions about the criminal case to an interview on the State of the Union. After several hours of everyone pointing out how ridiculous that was, NY1 said Mr. Grimm finally apologized.
By: Andrew Rosenthal, Opinion Pages, The New York Times, January 29, 2014
“It’s About The Guy In The White House”: The GOP Hypocrisy On Privacy And The Pill
I’m sure you chuckled at this weekend development as much as I did: At its winter meeting, the Republican National Committee, , passed a resolution condemning the NSA’s data-mining policy. The language about “unwarranted” government surveillance being an “intrusion on basic human rights” passed by voice vote, with only a few dissenters.
This is being read in the media as evidence for the party’s continuing turn away from war-mongery, Ari Fleischer-style, “watch what you say and do” Big Brotherism and toward a Pauline (as in Rand) libertarianism. And I wouldn’t deny that there’s something to that. The libertarian streak is very in vogue on the right, and neocons can’t seem to get Americans agitated about anything.
But let’s not kid ourselves. The passage of this resolution is mostly about the guy in the White House. If you want to try to tell me this was an act of principle by the RNC, then put Mitt Romney in the White House for a moment. Do you think the RNC would have considered such a resolution? Please. Reince Priebus would have had a stroke. He’d have quashed it in minutes. But with Barack Obama in the White House, the rules are different. The RNC passed this resolution to kick a little extra sand in Obama’s face.
This isn’t new of course, this rancid hypocritical sand-kicking, but it keeps getting worse, more comically transparent and more brazen. You may have read last week, for example, after Mike Huckabee’s birth-control throw down, that back in 2005 when he was Arkansas governor, Huckabee approved legislation requiring health-insurance plans in the state to cover contraceptive pills and devices. In fact, according to The Arkansas Times, Huckabee’s exemption for religious employers and organizations was narrower than the exemption in Obamacare.
So how did this policy go from being something a Southern Baptist fundamentalist could endorse to something that’s fodder for the next front in the culture war? What’s changed? Well, let’s see. It’s not that government is forcing insurers to pay for contraception. That’s what Huckabee approved in 2005. It’s not that contraception is different. True, we’ve had controversies in the past year about the age at which girls could have legal access to emergency contraceptive pills (ECPs), but that has nothing to do with “Uncle Sugar” providing women with birth control, which was the crux of Huckabee’s lament. And besides that, it’s not as if ECPs [what does that stand for?] themselves are new—they’ve been legal for 15 years. It was George W. Bush’s FDA that changed ECPs from prescription-only to over-the-counter (for adult women), back in 2006.
No, those things aren’t very different. What’s different is who’s in the White House. What’s an acknowledgement of modern reality when a Republican is president becomes, with Obama as president, another manifestation of how he’s taking America straight to hell. If you believe the president is the Manchurian Candidate, acts that were once benign or ignorable take on a new and more sinister coloration.
Do liberals do this too in reverse? Sure, to some extent. But on the topic of the NSA and data mining, you certainly can’t say that liberals and Democrats have been silent. Many have been fierce critics of the administration, far more so than conservatives and Republicans, in fact. To the extent that Obama is changing his policies in these realms, it’s because of pressure from the left, not the right.
But now the GOP wants a piece of this action. I’m sure that to some extent the sentiment among the RNC members—national committee-people from across the country, many of them local politicos, few or none of them members of the Beltway foreign-policy establishment—is genuine. Most people don’t like the idea that the government has a log of their phone calls. It’s not exactly hard to get a bunch of conservative activists to cast a voice-vote against the government and against anything Obama is doing.
But proof of libertarian dominance in the GOP? Don’t buy it. If the Republicans nominate Rand Paul, then sure, they’ll keep sallying forth down the libertarian alley. But if they nominate a more conventional Republican who has ties to the neoconservative establishment, the delegates stand up at the 2016 convention and cheer their heads off every time that nominee talks about the homeland. And should that person become president, and do the same things Obama has done and worse…well, I wouldn’t be looking for any censorious RNC resolutions if I were you.
In the meantime, the thing to keep looking for is Republicans having no memory of LB09—Life Before 2009. It makes no difference what position the party or any individual Republican took before January 20 of that year. All that matters from their way of seeing things is that on January 20 of that year, everything changed. That’s the governing emotional reality of the GOP opposition, and it will remain so until the day the black guy leaves the White House.
By: Michael Tomasky, The Daily Beast, January 27, 2014
“A Pope’s Pointed Message”: Our Sacred Responsibility Is To One Another
“Some people continue to defend trickle-down theories, which assume that economic growth, encouraged by a free market, will inevitably succeed in bringing about greater justice and inclusiveness in the world. This opinion, which has never been confirmed by the facts, expresses a crude and naive trust in the goodness of those wielding economic power and in the sacralized workings of the prevailing economic system. Meanwhile, the excluded are still waiting.”
That passage is not from some Occupy Wall Street manifesto. It was written by Pope Francis in a stunning new treatise on the Catholic Church’s role in society — and it is a powerful reminder that, however tiresome the political trench warfare in Washington may be, we have a duty to fight on.
The full implementation of Obamacare matters. Raising the minimum wage matters. Reforming a financial system that, as Francis noted, “rules rather than serves” matters. Hearing the anguished voices of those left hopeless by poverty matters; answering their pleas with education, health care and employment matters even more.
Francis, the first Jesuit and first non-European in the modern era to be named pope, clearly intends to make a real difference in the world — too much of a difference, it appears, for some conservatives: Sarah Palin, a born-again Christian who attends a nondenominational church, said recently that Francis’s open-arms attitude on social issues “has taken me aback.” Would that a few more words might take her all the way aback to the obscurity from which she came.
Francis’s remarks on economics and poverty came in a 50,000-word Apostolic Exhortation, released Tuesday, that gives the clearest vision to date of how he sees the church and how he intends to reshape it. In its boldness, the statement suggests that, just as Pope John Paul II played a political role in the fall of communism, so might Francis try to help shape events by obliging the faithful to recognize, and resist, a growing pattern of inequality throughout the world.
“To sustain a lifestyle which excludes others, or to sustain enthusiasm for that selfish ideal, a globalization of indifference has developed,” Francis wrote. “Almost without being aware of it, we end up being incapable of feeling compassion at the outcry of the poor, weeping for other people’s pain, and feeling a need to help them, as though all this were someone else’s responsibility and not our own. The culture of prosperity deadens us; we are thrilled if the market offers us something new to purchase; and in the meantime all those lives stunted for lack of opportunity seem a mere spectacle; they fail to move us.”
Francis explicitly calls for “financial reform,” though he wisely does not lay out a policy agenda. But in a passage likely to make libertarians want to hide amid the dense thickets of Ayn Rand’s prose, where no light can penetrate, Francis wrote that “the private ownership of goods is justified by the need to protect and increase them, so that they can better serve the common good; for this reason, solidarity must be lived as the decision to restore to the poor what belongs to them.”
The basic positions Francis takes on economic and social justice are not new; all recent popes have expressed a similar critique of modern capitalist society, including John Paul II, whose views on poverty and the need for community are often conveniently overlooked by those who would paint him as Ronald Reagan in robes.
But no recent pope has been so forceful in denouncing the “idolatry of money” and making the inexorable rise of inequality one of the church’s central concerns. Francis intends his message to be heard. I hope leaders everywhere, and especially in Washington, are listening.
Jesus commanded his apostles to give to the poor. Yet many elected officials who claim to follow Jesus’s teachings are determined to keep the poor from receiving health care, food assistance, housing subsidies and a host of other benefits. Inequality is celebrated as a virtue. Life, we are told with a shrug, is sometimes unfair.
But for Christians, Francis reminds us, life is supposed to be as fair and compassionate as we can make it. Money is a false idol, a golden calf. Our sacred responsibility is to one another.
Amen, Your Holiness. Amen.
By: Eugene Robinson, Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, November 28, 2013
“The Eugenics Forum”: If This Is What 2016 Is Going To Look Like, The GOP Is In Big Trouble
“In your lifetime, much of your potential — or lack thereof — can be known simply by swabbing the inside of your cheek,” Senator Rand Paul (R-KY) said at Liberty University on Monday, during a rally for the Virginia GOP’s nominee for governor, Ken Cuccinelli. “Are we prepared to select out the imperfect among us?”
The senator was making an argument against abortion rights by conjuring eugenics, a pseudo-science of genetic improvement that resulted in sterilization laws across America in the 20th century. And he was possibly plagiarizing from Wikipedia to do it.
If Cuccinelli were leading in polls — even his own poll — appealing to the far right with abstruse arguments that have almost no appeal to swing voters probably wouldn’t be a very good idea with only eight days until the election.
But Paul — a Tea Party favorite — was in Virginia to shore up Cuccinelli’s support among libertarians currently trending to the Libertarian Party nominee Robert Sarvis, who refuses to identify as anti-abortion.
Until the government shutdown and polls that show him losing by as much as 17 percent, Cuccinelli had veered away from social issues, attempting to avoid pointing out that he opposes same-sex sex even as a majority of America accepts same-sex marriage. But at this point the Republican nominee is just trying to hold on to his base, hoping the electorate resembles 2010 much more than 2012.
Meanwhile, Bill Clinton is crisscrossing the state with his old friend, Democratic nominee for governor Terry McAuliffe. And as he did when he barnstormed for President Obama in the final days before the last presidential election, Clinton was aiming right down the center.
“If we become ideological, then we’re blind to evidence,” the former president said on Sunday. “We can only hear people who already agree with us. We think we know everything right now, and we have nothing to learn from anybody.”
McAuliffe is definitely running a far more liberal campaign than his fellow Democrats, Senators Mark Warner (D-VA) and Tim Kaine (D-VA), who have recently won statewide elections in Virginia.
“Like the president, McAuliffe has endorsed gay marriage; universal background checks for gun purchases; an assault-weapons ban; a pathway to citizenship for immigrants here illegally; a mandate on employers offering health insurance to include free contraception coverage; and limits on carbon emissions from new coal-fired power plants,” The National Journal‘s Ron Brownstein reports, in a story examining how McAuliffe is winning as a “liberal Democrat” in purple Virginia. “He would also reverse the tight restrictions on abortion clinics championed by state Republicans led by Cuccinelli and outgoing Gov. Bob McDonnell.”
The combination of these ideas moving into the mainstream along with the contrast to Cuccinelli’s fundamentalism has given the Democrat a chance to still position himself as a centrist.
While his tone can be harsh, Cuccinelli’s policies are generally in the mainstream of the GOP’s base, represented by 2016 frontrunners Paul, Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX), Senator Marco Rubio (R-FL) and former senator Rick Santorum.
Even Governors Scott Walker (R-WI) and Chris Christie (R-NJ) have defunded Planned Parenthood in their states. Still, Christie’s willingness to literally embrace President Obama has positioned him as a “moderate” in the party. If he or former governor Jeb Bush were to win their party’s nomination in 2016, presenting the GOP with its third “moderate” candidate in a row, it’s not hard to imagine the Tea Party wing of the party losing patience and finding its own nominee that would draw voters away from the Republican nominee, as Sarvis seems to be siphoning from Cuccinelli. (Perhaps that third-party nominee could even be Senator Paul, who begins his first run for president by inheriting a grassroots network built up during his father’s two presidential campaigns.)
The next president of the United States will likely have to win in Virginia. And that person is not likely to be the person discussing eugenics a week before the election.
By: Jason Sattler, Featured Post, The National Memo, October 28, 2013
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