Shawn Gude

If you were hoping for Ron Paul’s swift exit from the spotlight, you’re out of luck.

With strong showings in the Iowa caucus and the New Hampshire primary, the libertarian-leaning congressman will linger for the time being. More importantly for anti-interventionist, anti-drug war, pro-civil liberties lefties, his views will continue to circulate in the mainstream media.

I have mixed feelings about Ron Paul. He dabbles in conspiracy theories, and his ties to racists are, of course, repellent. His calls for severe government retrenchment are unpalatable, as are his positions on immigration, abortion rights, and monetary policy. A Paul presidency, combined with the political class’s ravenous appetite for “entitlement reform,” could mean the evisceration of vital programs like Medicare and Medicaid. That’s difficult stuff to reverse. But there’s also a strong argument to be made that the things Paul is good on—the war on terror, the war on drugs, civil liberties—are, felicitously enough, the areas in which the president has considerable power.

To be sure, though, this is all kind of intellectually gratuitous. Paul won’t be elected president, nor will he be the GOP’s nominee. If liberals and leftists are sympathetic to his candidacy, it’s because his presence leavens the debate, not because they expect Paul to directly reverse the odious policies he lampoons. Realistically, he won’t get the chance to do so. Yet it still matters if his electoral success continues.

First, it would demonstrate that candidates who hold heterodox views on the national security state are electorally viable. More important in the short term, though, it would mean Paul’s positions would continue to receive otherwise-unlikely exposure. The horse-race-happy mainstream media covers the “top tier” of candidates almost exclusively, and last week’s choice of the week is quickly interred. Consequently, a nosedive in the polls or a string of disappointing primary finishes would likely mean voters wouldn’t hear about the evils of the drug war for the remainder of the election cycle. We certainly haven’t reached that saturation point.

None of this is to say Paul’s prominence will occasion a quick paradigm shift. Indeed, several weeks back Elias questioned whether the electorate’s affinity for interventionism would attenuate with more exposure to anti-interventionist views:

What’s more, the US’s self-mythology as humanity’s redeemer, Freedom’s guardian, God’s favorite — this is all the kind of stuff that makes it especially difficult to convince Americans that a humble, mature foreign policy is best. A foreign policy that values life above glory, and doesn’t try to smother its existential fear (consciously or not) by constructing meaning through bloody struggle; despite what Americans may say now, after nearly 10 years of anti-climax and failure, it leaves many voters rather cold.

He is filling a void in the conversation, however. The bowdlerized political discussions in the mainstream media give little indication, for instance, that a huge chunk of the country supports legalizing marijuana, or that the drug war is calamitous, particularly for poor communities of color. Actualizing a humbler, less militaristic foreign policy may be a tougher sell than altering drug policy, as Elias argues. But it certainly won’t change with a constricted conversation. (There is one big caveat to all of this: The implicit assumption of Paul’s left-wing sympathizers is that his beneficent message won’t be encumbered by his odious past–i.e., profiting off racist newsletters–that opposition to neo-imperialism won’t henceforth be associated with anachronistic monetary policy prescriptions or bigotry. I tend to think any exposure is good exposure, but who knows?)

There’s no shortage of left-wing blogosphere voices decrying the expansion of the national security state or the immorality of Obama’s foreign policy, of course. But the Democratic Party is bereft of prominent, unapologetic defenders of civil liberties and non-intervention.

That’s part of what’s the matter, Corey Robin writes:

Our problem—and again by “our” I mean a left that’s social democratic (or welfare state liberal or economically progressive or whatever the hell you want to call it) and anti-imperial—is that we don’t really have a vigorous national spokesperson for the issues of war and peace, an end to empire, a challenge to Israel, and so forth, that Paul has in fact been articulating.  The source of Paul’s positions on these issues are not the same as ours (again more reason not to give him our support).  But he is talking about these issues, often in surprisingly blunt and challenging terms.

As far as I can tell this dearth of voices is nothing new.

Even after the exodus of Southern racists, the Democratic Party’s politicians have, when push came to shove, embraced Scoop Jackson liberalism over George McGovern liberalism. They’re inveterate interventionists, once Cold War hawks and now War on Terror hawks. The most visible Democratic politician in the 10-year interregnum between the fall of the Soviet Union and 9/11? Bill Clinton, a consummate centrist. The prominent aberrant figures—Eugene McCarthy, Robert Kennedy, Jesse Jackson—have been just that, fleeting anomalies. More often than not, the party’s been populated by supine politicos rather than principled true-tellers.

Yet many liberals, perpetually cowed by McGovern’s landslide loss in 1972, still resist efforts to shift the party to the left. Look at Ralph Nader’s run for president in 2000. The country’s coffers were relatively flush. There was no threat of rollbacks in vital government programs. The specter of austerity couldn’t be plausibly raised. In short, an electoral challenge from the left was most opportune. And still Democratic apparatchiks unleashed vitriolic attacks on Nader, faulting him for Bush’s victory instead of Gore’s insipid campaign.

This is the state of American liberalism, at least as manifested in electoral politics. It’s really no wonder scores of liberals have latched onto an anti-militarist alternative, goldbug paleocon or not.

{ 26 comments }

I’m tired of liberals getting duped.

Most conservative politicians don’t unswervingly support the free market, even if they profess as much. They’re pro-business capitalists more than free-market champions. The typical Republican will back bailing out large financial institutions then resist attempts to end “too big to fail,” that anti-competitive monstrosity. (The same is true, of course, of center-left Democrats like Obama.)

As Dean Baker contends in his latest book, The End of Loser Liberalism, rhetorical paeans don’t equal political records:

“[Progressives] accept the notions that the right is devoted to the unfettered workings of the market and, by contrast, that liberals and progressives are the ones who want the government to intervene to protect the interests of the poor and disadvantaged. But this view is utterly wrong as a description of the economy and competing policy approaches… In reality, the vast majority of the right does not give a damn about free markets; it just wants to redistribute income upward. Progressives have been useful to the right in helping it to conceal this agenda. Progressives help to ratify the actions of conservatives by accusing them of allegiance to a free-market ideology instead of attacking them for pushing the agenda of the rich.”

We see a similarly aggravating framing in progressives’ telling of the so-called Gilded Age of the late 1800s. Here’s the standard narrative: Laissez-faire economic policies, buttressed by pervasive Social Darwinism, precipitated a vast economic expansion—but at the expense of workers. Robber barons bought statehouses, and magnates bought garish mansions. Sans state intervention, the average American was out of luck. The Progressive Era changed all of that, with increased regulation on businesses, workplace safety laws, and the implementation of a progressive income tax. (For his part, historian Gabriel Kolko argues much of the intervention was still done at powerful interests’ behest.)

In short, progressives decry the Gilded Age as an ignominious epoch of unfettered markets and the Progressive Era as the humane, regulatory response to unbridled capitalism. But this is overly simplistic. There was considerable state intervention during the Gilded Age. The problem was, it almost always increased the power of capital relative to labor. The government gave away huge expanses of land to railroad companies, for instance, then violently repressed labor uprisings. [click to continue…]

{ Comments on this entry are closed }

Manichean rhetoric is employed, nuance is jettisoned, and catchy sloganeering reigns supreme.

To believers in the primacy of intellectual honesty, the cacophony of protest can be disconcerting, the participants obstreperous. Will Wilkinson and Julian Sanchez certainly seem to think so. In recent posts, the two libertarians urge occupiers to stop occupying and start engaging with the political system.

Sanchez had the opening salvo:

“A small group of people self-selected for their commitment to some set of shared goals and values may be able to pick a set of slogans to chant in unison, or resolve their limited disagreements by consensus process.  But real democracy in a pluralist society involves deep and often ineradicable disagreement—and not just on the optimal uses of public parks and other commons. It’s true, of course, that concentrated and wealthy interests routinely capture the apparatus of government, and use it to serve ends inimical to the general good. But a frame that sets up an opposition between “the 99%” and “the 1%” —or, if you prefer, between “Washington/media elites” and “Real America”—suggests a vain hope that profound political differences are, at least in some spheres, an illusion manufactured by some small minority.”

Wilkinson, similarly rankled by protesters’ antipathy toward pluralism, also decried their ideological presumptuousness: Why can’t the protesters accept that a huge chunk of “the 99%” doesn’t agree with them without questioning the naysayers’ lucidity? (It’s a funny gripe for a guy whose brand of liberal-libertarian fusionism has been implicitly based on the idea that liberals just need to adopt libertarian policies to achieve their desired ends.) At bottom, Wilkinson and Sanchez have two principal beefs with the occupiers: their rhetorical reductionism and puerile conception of democracy.

The two correctly characterize the 99-1 dichotomy as simplistic. But Wilkinson and Sanchez are missing the point of a catchy slogan—or any protest chant, for that matter: They’re succinct, and thus, require some explication if one is seeking nuance. (The “1″ arrayed against the “99″ simply means that the wealthy and powerful have a criminally large influence in our political economy, and they use that influence to perpetuate an unjust system). Parliamentary bargaining and cerebral discussions have their place—indeed, I wouldn’t blog at the League if I thought otherwise. But agitation outside the ballot box or the walls of Congress is a necessary antecedent to social change. As Howard Zinn felicitously phrased it, it’s “that healthy commotion that has always attended the growth of justice.” That might upset Wilkinson, Sanchez, and other populist critics, but dispassionate policy papers don’t catalyze social change. Visceral exhortations must supplement cerebral appeals.

On the question of expunging pluralism from the American polity, Wilkinson is right: Too often people blame ideological differences on obfuscation or ignorance. But the pluralistic give-and-take that Sanchez and Wilkinson invoke is, at present, illusory. Even Sanchez acknowledges “that concentrated and wealthy interests routinely capture the apparatus of government, and use it to serve ends inimical to the general good.” The 1 percent isn’t monolithic, nor is it a moustache-twirling, scheming phalanx of elites arrayed against a homogeneous 99 percent. The truth is less conspiratorial, less coordinated, and comparably banal. But pernicious it remains. In addition, there’s a good case to be made that institutional factors impede the passage of more egalitarian policies.

Look, I share the two libertarians’ (abstract) devotion to pluralism. But what about the pluralism of democratic expression?

When Sanchez writes things like, “To imagine protest not as prologue to politics, but as a substitute for it, suggests a denial of the reality of pluralism, and an unwillingness to find out what democracy actually looks like [italics mine],” he’s offering up an overly constricted vision of democracy. Wilkinson is also a defeatist. To him, our debauched democracy “does about as well as democracy can be realistically be expected to do, given the size and diversity of this country.” (I suspect Wilkinson’s cynicism about our process’s prospects is also tied to his affinity for public choice theory.)

To democratic minimalists like Sanchez and Wilkinson, democracy is electoral politics. Citizen participation means voting, if one is so inclined. Enhancing citizen power is gratuitous. But this is exactly the kind of narrow, elite-enhancing conception of democracy that the Occupy movement so clearly eschews. What many occupiers do seek is a more vibrant democracy in which corrupt influences don’t dictate policy and average citizens can meaningfully influence the forces and decisions that shape their lives.

This desire for democratization is comparable to the radical agrarian movement of the late 1800s, as Lawrence Goodwyn describes in his masterful work Democratic Promise: “To the extent that the reformers were able to develop new modes of political expression, they were engaging in an attempt at cultural redefinition of what constituted genuine democracy. The extent to which they succeeded in enlarging prevailing frames of reference measured the meaning of Populism.” The Occupy movement is similarly concerned with reshaping popular conceptions of democracy and citizen participation.

That includes some good old rabble-rousing. Zinn again:

“Democracy is not just a counting up of votes; it is a counting up of actions. Without those on the bottom acting out their desires for justice, as the government acts out its needs, and those with power and privilege act out theirs, the scales of democracy will be off. That is why civil disobedience is not just to be tolerated; if we are to have a truly democratic society, it is a necessity. By its nature, it reflects the intensity of feeling about important issues, as well as the extent of feeling. This fills a vital need in a political system accustomed to counting heads, but needing also to measure passions.”

After facilitating at a general assembly several weeks back, one of my best friends received a message from a participant thanking him for the empowering experience. Even in the “world’s greatest democracy,” she had never felt as engaged in the democratic process. At a recent Occupy DSM statement of principles working group meeting, one member said he never dreamed of trying to solve the world’s problems. He said it partly in jest, but these anecdotes get to the heart of what I think the Occupy movement is all about: augmenting agency and correcting deep societal power imbalances.

In the face of this reality, the most democratic, discourse-shifting left-wing protest movement in years is now being implored to funnel all its aspirations into a moribund, perverted political process.

Uh, I think we’ll pass.

{ Comments on this entry are closed }

The European debt crisis is still threatening to engulf the world. But have no fear, the technocrats are here!

From yesterday’s New York Times:

The question now, in both Italy and Greece, is whether the technocrats can succeed where elected leaders failed — whether pressure from the European Union backed by the whip of the financial markets will be enough to dislodge the entrenched cultures of political patronage that experts largely blame for the slow growth and financial crises that plague both countries.

Some said there was cause for optimism. “First, the mere fact that they have been asked in such difficult circumstances means that they have a mandate,” said Iain Begg, an expert on the European monetary union at the London School of Economics. “Granted, it’s not a democratic one, but it flows from disaffection with the bickering political class.”

The elites recognize their means are inimical to democracy. They simply don’t care. This whole mess is quintessential neoliberalism. Take Greece. Here you have a cadre of unaccountable, unelected technocrats and other distant European leaders dictating the fiscal policies of a sovereign nation. The people of that nation have repeatedly risen up in opposition, to little avail. A large chunk of the electorate has registered its opposition to austerity in opinion polls. The embattled prime minister cynically proposes a public referendum, and international leaders and financial markets blanch. His (realpolitik) ends satisfied—the opposition has assented to the debt deal—the prime minister then agrees to step aside for an elite technocrat ostensibly “above politics.”

Whatever the European Union’s economic merits, the debt crisis should disabuse anyone of the notion that most supporters are committed to democracy. Part of this, to be sure, is inherent in a system with a unified monetary policy and disparate fiscal policy. If once latent or covert, though, the antidemocratic proclivities of the European elite have now been catapulted to the fore. The tension at the heart of democratic capitalism has also been laid bare, as Wolfgang Steeck noted in a flawed but insightful essay:

As we now read almost every day in the papers, ‘the markets’ have begun to dictate in unprecedented ways what presumably sovereign and democratic states may still do for their citizens and what they must refuse them. The same Manhattan-based ratings agencies that were instrumental in bringing about the disaster of the global money industry are now threatening to downgrade the bonds of states that accepted a previously unimaginable level of new debt to rescue that industry and the capitalist economy as a whole… In countries like Greece and Ireland, anything resembling democracy will be effectively suspended for many years; in order to behave ‘responsibly’, as defined by international markets and institutions, national governments will have to impose strict austerity, at the price of becoming increasingly unresponsive to their citizens.

Simultaneously admonished by financial markets and elites to get in line or have their democratic authority circumvented, citizen agency is increasingly an anachronism, an obsolesence present in a previous world dominated by nation states—not the new, flat world of multinational corporations and their elite enablers. Those in the developing world have been at the receiving end of this cudgel for years, of course. Structural adjustment was the euphemism, authoritarian imposition the means: Sell off state assets, cut the social safety net, and slash subsidies to the poor.

All of this relates to our recent discussions on democracy, in which most League denizens expressed a “pragmatic” commitment to democracy (if that): Popular rule is desirable insofar as it legitimates the coercion necessary in a modern, heterogeneous society. Romanticizing democracy is dangerous because it blinds one to its many pitfalls. Democracy isn’t an end in itself.

These misgivings are legitimate— democracy isn’t always a leavening force. Unchecked by institutional rules or a pervasive “constitutional conscience,” democracy can be used to eviscerate individual rights and, ultimately, itself. Opponents of popular rule overstate their case, though. The current threat to freedom isn’t democratic overreach, but elite hubris. Average Greeks have little control over their country’s fiscal and economic future. The forces and decisions that shape their lives are elusive and unaccountable.

There is freedom in delegation. But not on the wholesale scale the Greeks and others are experiencing.

{ Comments on this entry are closed }

I recently compared the Occupy Movement to the New Left, but it’s truly striking how different the former’s relationship is with organized labor.

The New Left assailed societal bureaucratization and powerful elites, including potentates in organized labor. Union members beat up antiwar protesters. Forty-plus years later, unions have gotten squarely behind Occupy Wall Street and its innumerable offshoots. AFL-CIO president Richard Trumka, who C. Wright Mills and company may have derided in years past, castigated authorities this week for cracking down on peaceful protesters. The Transport Workers Union of Greater New York, incensed that police dragooned bus drivers into transporting arrested protesters, filed an (ultimately unsuccessful) lawsuit. Last night, union members and occupiers turned out en masse to protest Scott Walker’s fundraising visit to Des Moines.

Why the temporal change?

Constant rearguard attacks and mass deunionization have surely play a part. Labor is beleaguered—not an ossified, establishment force.  And the cultural chasm between the labor rank-and-file and leftists seems to have shrunk; organized labor has moved to the left in recent decades, and the left has moved to the right (no more antiwar sentiment transmogrifying into anti-soldier enmity). I just can’t imagine anything comparable to the Hard Hat Riot happening now.

UPDATE: The inimitable Ned Resnikoff was kind enough to respond to my post. Check it out.

{ Comments on this entry are closed }

The Occupy Wall Street movement is metastasizing, or salubriously spreading, depending on your perspective.

Over the weekend protests occurred across the globe, with occupiers taking over Times Square, resisting removal in Chicago, and mobilizing in Madrid. Monday marked the month anniversary of Occupy Wall Street. And its coffers are swelling. These are heady times for a young leftist, to be sure, and there’s much about the occupations to be analyzed and scrutinized. Peter Frase’s recent disquisition was arguably the best of sundry movement pieces; Freddie deBoer‘s stuff has been similarly astute. I’ve written precious little about the movement thus far, partly because of my involvement in it. Allow me to end that silence.

The beauty of this rebellion lies in its decentralized, democratic character; the absence of top-down control has precipitated a participatory, pluralistic movement. Different local contexts should prompt different iterations. And that’s exactly what has happened. Broadly speaking, of course, this is a left-of-center movement. But some cities have a sizable anti-capitalist (predominately anarchist or socialist) contingent. Others? Not so much. Tactics are similarly divergent. Here in Des Moines, protesters—myself included—were willing to get arrested by state troopers to establish an occupation site. But when the city offered us an alternate space late last week, the general assembly accepted (save for a few stalwart dissenting voices). More militant occupations might regard our decision as debauching the movement; we opted to establish an encampment and fight large financial institutions rather than state troopers.

What we’re also witnessing is a movement that’s the most participatory, democratic movement in decades. (Let’s bracket, for now, the larger discussion of whether this more robust form of democracy is normatively desirable. Just briefly, I’d argue a just society requires that people have substantial control over the decisions and forces that shape their lives and circumstances—in short, self-determination. The occupation’s general assemblies, for all their faults, represent a radical counterpoise to Schumpeter-style democracy.) The occupations’ conscious attention to procedure—not just grievances or demands— is redolent of the New Left. There’s genuine risk in this: Undue emphasis on procedure can encumber effective political action, as Jodi Dean has argued:

Once the New Left delegitimized the old one, it made political will into an offense, a crime with all sorts of different elements:

–taking the place or speaking for another (the crime of representation);

–obscuring other crimes and harms (the crime of exclusion);

–judging, condemning, and failing to acknowledge the large terrain of complicating factors necessarily disrupting simple notions of agency (the crime of dogmatism);

–employing dangerous totalizing fantasies that posit an end of history and lead to genocidal adventurism (the crime of utopianism or, as Mark Fisher so persuasively demonstrates, of adopting a fundamentally irrational and unrealistic stance, of failing to concede to the reality of  capitalism).

Now, Dean is obviously less sympathetic to the New Left than myself. (The chief failing of Hayden et al. was their inability to leave a lasting mark on electoral politics, something we occupiers need to remember as the movement progresses.) There’s a nugget of truth in Dean’s critique, though. If the movement focuses too much on building community and involving everyone in the decision-making process, it could provide all the benefits of “public, counter-establishment communal space[s]“ and still render itself politically inert. That said, these are not insignificant benefits. Marc Stears argues in his superlative book Demanding Democracy: American Radicals in Search of a New Politics that the ”SDS and the New Left… further emphasized the possibility that the struggle for democratic reform could transform the immediate lives of those who were involved in it, even if the ultimate democratic prize was always expected to elude them.” There’s the potential for a comparable effect here. If occupied spaces are wellsprings of hope and empowerment amidst stagnating wages, rigid hierarchies, and atomization, that’s nothing to pooh-pooh.

Another valid critique is of the “We Are The 99 Percent” mantra. Here’s Will Wilkinson:

But isn’t it true that the Occupy Wall Street movement and the “We are the 99%” message are creations of the left and embraced predominantly by the left? When Mr Hayes says that the 99% message is brilliant and true, what does he have in mind? I suppose it is that our political economy is rigged, especially with regard to financial economy, to benefit a relatively small number of powerful people at the top of the income distribution. I think this belief is indeed “widely shared by folks who aren’t liberals”. For example, I believe it, and I’m not a liberal in the sense Mr Hayes intends… If “we” really are the 99%, why have we failed to use our overwhelming democratic heft to set in place reforms that would unrig the system and put the 1% in their place? The obvious answer there is a great deal of ideological disagreement within the lower 99% of the income distribution, and even if a large majority agrees that Wall Street is ripping off the nation, there is no consensus about what should be done about it.

It’s exceedingly difficult to argue our political economy isn’t inordinately tilted toward capital or that the 99 percent haven’t received a surfeit of wealth over the past 30 years. But, as Wilkinson notes, the question is where that analysis leads you. Would breaking up the big banks ameliorate endemic corporatism? How about a financial transactions tax? What role should finance have in our economy? These are all important questions. But their answers are informed by one’s ideological proclivities, not merely whether one is among “the 99 percent.“ The “99 percent” rhetoric is accurate as a critique of a system that, largely due to cronyism and corporate capture of our political institutions, doesn’t work for a huge chunk of the population. But when used to efface legitimate ideological disagreements, the analysis runs aground. A movement backed by the full 99 percent would be a watered down, anodyne one. We’re looking for systemic changes—not a broad-based occupation that, say, opposes breast cancer.

Legitimate criticisms notwithstanding, the movement’s possibilities are invigorating. Just a month in, Occupy Wall Street has already shifted the conversation. And the denouement doesn’t appear near. I can’t wait to be a part of—and help shape—what comes next.

{ Comments on this entry are closed }

It remains to be seen how effective the Occupy Wall Street folks will be. (We should see some more specific demands out of the occupiers in the coming weeks and months.) I tend to think some of the criticism from the left has been valid. But for all the flak they’ve received, it’s still spread to the heartland (thereby putting participation within my geographical reach).

As Ned Resnikoff has written, the occupiers should be hailed for creating a “public, counter-establishment communal space.” They’re doing more than that, though. They’re also instantiating a radical conception of democracy that is antithetical to the prevailing minimalist conception. Schumpeter would be pissed.

Here’s hoping the occupations become more diffuse—and stronger.

{ Comments on this entry are closed }

More capable legal minds have already written adroitly about the civil liberties nightmare that this due-process-less killing was. Consequently, I won’t delve too deeply into the legal (or moral) ramifications of granting the president the power to unilaterally authorize the killing of an American citizen. Suffice to say that the al-Awlaki precedent—and I have no doubt that, absent significant push-back, it will become precedent—is absolutely abhorrent and an affront to liberal democracy. Instead, on the heels of my latest post on left-libertarian coalitions, I’d like to emphasize the urgency of these partnerships.

One of the first reactions my post elicited was, unsurprisingly, skepticism: Ralph Nader isn’t proposing anything new—libertarians and denizens of the left have had similar stances on a handful of issues for years. These obvious overlaps shouldn’t be sold as constituting “today’s most exciting new political dynamic.” Why should we expect libertarians and progressives to cohere when they haven’t in the past? It’s a fair point.

I’d argue, however, that while the number of issues the two groups have long agreed upon hasn’t skyrocketed, the significance of the issues has. As much as I disagreed with his prescription, Brink Lindsey basically had the correct diagnosis in his original “Liberaltarians” essay: The fusionist alliance between libertarians and the GOP and conservatives has become unworkable. That’s not to say libertarians can never join forces with conservatives on specific issues. But, as the Bush era crystallized so well, the political bond the two camps have is now anachronistic. Prior to Bush, Republican presidents had conducted covert wars and trampled on individual rights. Never before, however, had they launched a preemptive war or so zealously eroded civil liberties, all while increasing the size of government.

At the same time the conservative movement was advancing an agenda inimical to libertarians, the left retained its longstanding commitment to civil liberties and anti-interventionism. Some of this, to be sure, was pure partisanship. Democrats who looked askance at Bush’s warmongering now cheer Obama as he makes the Dems look “tough on terror.” Still, something had changed—chalk it up to the transformative power of 9/11. Issues of war and peace and individual rights were always important, but they began to take on a new significance when the country became enmeshed in overseas occupations and citizens’ library records were suddenly fair game. When Obama took office, the exigency of confronting these issues hadn’t abated. Because of the two-party system, widespread bipartisan agreement—or bipartisan executive agreement—effectively means policy x will continue or agency y will be disbanded. Thus, Obama’s next move was crucial.

And he blew it, as Friday’s killing demonstrated once again.

So how do we go about forestalling the impending bipartisan calcification? If Obama has seemingly cribbed his civil liberties policy from the Bush administration, what’s a civil libertarian to do? Libertarians (Gary Johnson and Ron Paul, most prominently) and left-liberals share stances on this and other vital issues—why not join forces and try our damnedest to shift the post-9/11 paradigm?

More specifically, here’s what I offered in a comment on my own post:

As far as I can tell, there are two strategic categories when it comes to left-libertarian coalitions: elite and non-elite. Under the first, I’d include electoral politics (caucusing for Gary Johnson) and legislative politics (Barney Frank and Ron Paul joining forces on a bill). The second category is non-elite bridge-building—essentially, opening a dialogue between libertarians and the left and beginning to form political relationships with one another.

I guess I don’t expect these alliances to radically realign the partisan makeup of the country. The role I see for said alliances is pressuring politicians and changing the elite conversation on these issues.

Partisanship will inevitably get in the way, as reactions to al-Awlaki death again highlighted. But we’re forced to work within our political milieu, imperfect as it may be. Some political-science research at least suggests that there is a tipping point at which citizens, when continuously confronted by incongruous information, dispense with “motivated reasoning” and adjust their views accordingly. Partisanship, then, isn’t an incorrigible scourge.

As for Erik’s recent ruminations on democracy and libertarianism, they were excellent (as were the rejoinders). But I’m not sure how pertinent they were to the alliance I’ve been proposing. I actually do believe that robust democracy and unalloyed libertarianism are incompatible—it’s one of the many reasons I’m not a libertarian. If I thought that short-term alliances with libertarians would undermine the development of a more vibrant democratic society, I wouldn’t sign on. But that’s not what lefties should be looking for out of the partnership.

And as for the skeptics, what’s your viable alternative?

{ Comments on this entry are closed }

Michael Tracy has an article up at The American Conservative on Ralph Nader’s quest to get progressives to align with libertarians like Ron Paul. For those with a longstanding interest in left-libertarian coalition-building, there’s not a ton of new information in the piece. As he’s argued in other venues, Nader sees felicitous convergence between libertarians and progressives on a range of important issues, including civil liberties, the war on drugs, and corporate welfare. One thing I do want to flag, though, is this passage:

Nader had caught me off guard when he identified an emergent left-libertarian alliance as “today’s most exciting new political dynamic.” It was easy to foresee objections that the left might raise: if progressives are in favor of expanding the welfare state, how well can they really get along with folks who go around quoting the likes of Hayek and Rothbard?

“That’s strategic sabotage,” Nader responds, sharply. “It’s an intellectual indulgence. … If they’re on your side, and you don’t compromise your positions, what do you care who they quote?

Nader is completely right. Libertarians can cite Hayek all they want (and they should—he had some vital insights), as long as they continue to share short-term common ground with lefties. As I’ve previously argued, an issued-based coalition—not a philosophical one—is the way to go. It’s a relief that Nader has ditched the Only the Super-Rich Can Save Us shtick.

It’s also worth noting that while I admire Ron Paul for his unwavering convictions, his libertarianism is grafted onto some pretty noxious paleoconservativism. He’s bad on immigration, for instance, and sometimes seems more interested in safeguarding state’s rights than individual rights. He’s no untrammeled libertarian like Gary Johnson. (I can’t stomach Paul’s anti-abortion rights record either.) For the purposes of left-libertarian electoral alliances, I get the electability argument: Paul’s polling numbers easily dwarf Johnson’s, he’s more well-known, and he has an exuberant following. He is, for better or worse, the avatar of libertarianism. So I can’t fault anti-war liberals for backing Paul.

But me? I’m still caucusing for Johnson come February.

{ Comments on this entry are closed }