The Nolan Chart of cynicism

I used to think that I had a cynical attitude towards major American institutions --primarily the government and big business. I even remember a survey that placed me into a "disenfranchised" group (or something like that) -- basically identifying me as a lower income white guy (which is not quite accurate). Occasionally I would run into other libertarians who were more cynical, but outside of that bubble, my impression was that most people were pretty satisfied with how our country operates. But these days, I feel like I've been outflanked, and am running into lots of people from across the political spectrum who are even more cynical than me -- even people of greater socio-economic status than me.

So, I need to rethink the political spectrum.

I used to think mainly in terms of the Nolan Chart, and derivatives of it. Basically you have the "left" (defined by Dems as the center-left) and "right" (defined by Repubs as the center-right), with a second libertarian/authoritarian axis. On such charts, I typically landed as left-libertarian, which seemed correct to me. However, these charts are very much tuned for a pro-establishment polity. They define things in term of the policy disagreements between the two big parties. How would you capture the fact that people would happily abandon those parties?

So, I imagine a coordinate system based on cynicism. One axis is cynicism towards major institutions, the other is cynicism towards regular people. The four extremes would be:
1. Authoritarian. Trusting institutions; distrusting people.
2. Anarchist. Distrusting institutions; trusting people
3. Anti-social. Trusting nobody.
4. Pangloss. Everyone is as good as can be expected.

Of course, this is a gross simplification -- trust in institutions could be broken down between trust in the state and trust in big business (to give the conventional left/right divide among liberals). Similarly, "trust in people" often means trust is a specific subset of the American population -- whether just trusting one's own race, one's own religion, or one's own political coalition.



But still, I think there's something to this. On this scale, I think I'd be in the center-Anarchist region (perhaps with public figures like Glenn Greenwald). Establishment politicians tend produce propaganda in the Pangloss corner, spouting platitudes towards the American people and the benevolence of govenment and business (at least when they are in charge). I think in reality, they are a bit more authoritarian than that, and that faith in the state is often built of distrust of regular people. A lot of libertarian propagandists are near the anarchist corner, but I think most real libertarians are a bit more suspicious of some of their neighbors (at least suspecting that their neighbors are authoritarians), so would shift up towards anti-social. I'm not sure where to put the Trumpists -- before the election, a lot of them were probably in the anti-social corner, trusting only a small portion of the American population. With Trump in office, there's the risk that they'd drift towards authoritarianism... or maybe they just supported Trump the wrecker, and don't care for Trump the Leader.

Anyway, this puts some of my recent thoughts in perspective. A few years back, I said that the the big contribution of left-libertarianism is to expose the elitism of the state (thereby creating more cynicism towards institutions), however, with the rise of the Trump movement, it seems that the problem may be that there is not enough trust among the people, and it's time to put more effort into building a cohesive civic culture for our country -- and world.

p.s. I think this all has something to do with conspiracy theories too -- with trump being the biggest proponent right now.

Right-libertarianism and left-libertarianism

After reading another sloppy take-down of libertarianism from a progressive (which of course emphasizes the "right-wing" currents in libertarianism), I was thinking of a concise way to distinguish left-libertarianism from right-libertarianism. Here's what I came up with:

• Right-libertarians believe that the goverment is democratic.
• Left-libertarians believe that the government is elitist.

This phrasing makes the distinction quite stark when you think about the implications of being "anti-government", and actually implies that there is substantial conflict between the two wings of the movement. Luckily, I think mainstream libertarianism is pretty "centrist" by this standard, believing that the USA's government has both democratic/populist and elitist aspects, both of which cause problems.

While there is also a "right/left" divide among libertarian cultural issues, these don't have a substantial impact on policy preferences (except abortion), so the divide I'm focusing on above is more about theories of power relationships (e.g. economics and social status). I see Ayn Rand as the quintessential right-libertarian. My impression is that these libertarians think that a free market would largely be organized around the same principles as today's economy -- the main difference being greater productivity as populist parasites are shed. In contrast, left-libertarians typically expect a radical restructuring of the economy as the existing large-scale organizations collapse without state support and are replaced by bottom-up organizations that give workers much more influence over the economy.

Hindsight is the playground of propaganda

I have previously been critical of manned space exploration as being nothing more than extremely expensive political propaganda. A new history book recounts what Americans thought of the Apollo program and shows how it has taken decades for the propaganda to really saturate our culture, to the point that every American knows the name of the first man on the moon, and politicians speak of space exploration as though it were the obvious measure of a society's greatness. Thank Ford for state-run schools!

Many people see space exploration as part of a culture war. According to a review in the Economist, NASA's chief saw it as the flag-bearer for "Squareland", in its contest with "Potland". According to an editorial in Space Review, the contest was between rationalism and neo-romanticism. Unfortunately, space exploration never represented true rationality, but instead of the religion of rationalism, where the achievements of science are used to induce a mystical awe among the rabble and legitimize power relationships both within and between nations, as illustrated by both the USSR and post-war USA.

Voter ID and the futility of mass democracy

Republicans and Democrats are once again squabbling over the rules of the election -- each side making principled claims to hide what is surely nothing more than partisan opportunism. Despite their many disagreements, the two sides in this debate agree on one thing: that there is an ideal electoral system that would produce a legitimate government.

However, each side does a pretty good job poking holes in the other's arguments. They make it clear that we can't really know anything about our mass elections -- who the voters are, if there is any fraud, and ultimately, who is the legitimate government.

We never had this problem in my college fraternity, because each of us knew each of the others by sight. Yet the "democratic" state hopes that it can create a community among essentially anonymous individuals. Weird.

Failure of government: election tampering

One of the interesting things about democracy is that we all want it, but we don't agree on what it is. This isn't simply a matter of disagreeing about the ideal election system while acknowledging that all of the variants are essentially democratic. Instead, the most common disputes over the conduct of elections turn out to be power plays as various factions try to change the rules in their own favor. Today it's the manufactured hysteria over voter-fraud, yesterday it was a battle over gerrymandered districts, and then there's the incessant jiggering of the rules over payments for political communications.

It's bad enough that politicians are constantly campaigning for re-election, but it seems that even when they are passing legislation, they're just thinking of how they can retain power. When do they find the time to actually do the people's business? My impression is that they don't.

Gun control: the failure of government

With the recent movie-theater massacre in Aurora, Colorado, we are once again hearing discussion about America's gun control laws, along with a bunch of hand-wringing by pragmatists about the failure of government to establish "sensible" gun laws. They point their fingers at the NRA, but overlook the more fundamental problem: how can a fairly small group of single-issue fanatics completely dominate this aspect of our political discourse.

The answer is that all aspects of government are dominated by small groups with a strong interest in establishing a specific (often extreme) policy. Government is incapable of achieving any middle ground, or securing the general welfare. In the gun control battle, "sensible" policies never have a chance. Instead, policy oscillates between being fully pro-gun and fully anti-gun; either guns are prohibited or everyone is packing heat.

Both sides of this argument (at least, those with any motivation) are driven more by symbolism than by rational policy design. They are seeking a victory in the culture war, not seeking to build safe public spaces. This has nothing to do with the influence of libertarianism or any anti-government sentiment-- pro-gun conservatives are fully pro-government.

So before signing up with the anti-gun crowd and wasting our efforts on a massive ideological and electoral battle over guns, those of us who want safe communities should step back and consider this: maybe government isn't the solution.

Global Warming libertarians

Peter Gleick, a prominent climate researcher and scientific popularizer, was recently disgraced due to his use of a false pretense to acquire internal Heartland Institute documents. This whole story (starting with the publication of the Heartland documents) is reviving the idea that there is something "libertarian" about denying the science of global warming. For instance, if you look at the story that I linked to, you'll see Heartland described as a "libertarian" think thank.

I cringe at that association, but I regretfully cannot argue that Heartland is just a tag-along in the libertarian movement -- their roots go back to the origins of the "think-tank" component of the libertarian movement.

Since I cannot disown them from the libertarian movement, I can only discredit their approach to climate change, and point out how they discredit the libertarian movement by politicizing science.

With that, I suggest the following blog articles, the first being by Kevin Carson at the Center for a Stateless Society, and the rest being my own thoughts as published at the (defunct) Freedom Democrats blog:

• Libertarians for Junk Science (by Kevin Carson)
• Politicization of Climate Sciences
• The risk of Climate Change, and its implications 
• Activism: looking in, looking out (libs and climate science)
• Science denialism
• America's Climate Choices

Unfortunately, these writings do not address all relevant issues, but should make the point that global warming denial is not a libertarian position. We all need to come to grips with the fact that human activity can change the climate, and this will only become more true in the future as our technologies advance. Libertarianism can handle this reality as well as any other ideology can.

Activism: looking in, looking out (libertarians and climate science)

Originally published at Freedom Democrats in 2009

The main goal of ideological advocacy is expand the influence of a particular ideology among the general public. I define an ideological movement as a group of advocates for an overlapping set of ideologies, who recognize their shared interests. These advocates will frequently look to each other for intellectual and material resources, which aid them in their primary task of expanding the influence of their ideologies. While most of their attention will focus on contrasting their own ideology against others that influence the general public, some of their attention will be focused inwards--evaluating disagreements within the movement.

While there are definitely benefits to some degree of introspection within the movement, I've noticed a tendency for people to go overboard and focus on internal squabbles to the detriment of the original goal of advocacy. There are probably many reasons for such navel-gazing, ranging form a concern with one's own social circle to finding more satisfaction to debating with others who share at least a few common assumptions, but I don't want to get too deep into that speculation. What I want to focus on here is an example of productive introspection, and how a lot of people seemed to miss the point.

Over at the Center for a Stateless Society, Kevin Carson wrote an essay called "Libertarians for Junk Science". I thought it was a very well focused and relevant essay. He starts with the premise that there is a scientifically valid risk of man-made climate change, that will cause major harm in at least a few ways. This has long been the mainstream opinion among scientists, and it has finally become the mainstream opinion among the public. Carson takes a faction of libertarians to task for obsessively denying the science here, accusing them of providing a disservice both to science and libertarianism.

Carson's essay is primarily focused inwards, but it can also provide an outsider with greater respect for libertarianism. Carson asserts that climate-change denialism is driven by the fear that the reality of man-made climate change would invalidate libertarianism, then argues that there is no reason for this fear. This point is of immense importance because if the public believes that climate change invalidates libertarianism, then libertarianism is dead. Even if the greenhouse gas effect turns out to be benign, our ability to modify the climate will only increase in the future and we will eventually have to deal with these sorts of issues. Carson provides an explanation for non-libertarians, and asks libertarians to stop framing the issue in a way that discredits liberty.

Unfortunately, his audience (as represented by the comments) seemed to miss the point. One commenter (Schulman) immediately turns to navel-gazing, debating whether Carson is a real libertarian. Another (Kinsella) ignores Carson's critical introspection, apparently interpreting it as an attack on libertarianism and insisting that statists are much more prone to ideology driven pseudoscience than libertarians are. While this is an interesting issue, it is beyond tangential and it wasn't clear that the commenter recognized it.

A final note on the comment thread, is that it was full of standard denialist rhetoric (I've become familiar with it from the evolution/creation debates). The core of this rhetoric was misrepresentation of scientific opinion. Understandably, it is hard for a layman to get a good grasp of the issues, since they don't have the time that a professional has and they are often getting their information second-hand from reporters and activists who don't have a great understanding themselves. One consequence of this misunderstanding is the "magic bullet" refutation -- acting as though one inconsistency is sufficient to demolish a body of theory that has been built by hundreds if not thousands of research projects (and often, that apparent inconsistency has already been addressed). I also got the impression that some commentators have spent more time reading fringe opinions (both for and against climate change legislation) than they have spent reading the opinions of mainstream scientists or policymakers.  They seem unable to distinguish between the ideas of opposing ideological advocates, such as radical environmentalists, and those of the mainstream scientists and technocrats whose ideas form the solid foundation of public debate.

The 99% are to blame

This past week saw two "riots" on college campuses. There was a bit of a scuffle with cops as the Occupy Cal group (i.e. the "99%-ers) tried to establish a campsite on campus. Across the country at Penn State, a spontaneous riot broke out following the announcement of Joe Paterno's dismissal for his failure to adequately respond to news that one of his assistant coaches was raping 10-year olds in the team showers.

Each of these confrontations is worthy of much discussion, but what I find most interesting at the moment is how the events at Penn State undermine the narrative being presented by the Occupy crowd.

Joe Parterno is the 1%. Even by the standards of University faculty, sports coaches have extremely high pay. Paterno was bringing in around a million dollars a year, while several other head-coaches bring in multimillion dollars salaries. University payscales are a perfect microcosm of the more widespread inequalities that the Occupy movement decries.

My view is that "gods are not allowed to make mistakes"-- when someone of Paterno's stature and power is this neglectful of his duties, he deserves to be thrown out on his ass. However, consider the reaction of the great masses in the Penn State community -- they defended Paterno, with massive public protest. They embraced the idea that a person like Paterno is above the law; he is so great that he can do no wrong. Even more telling, there was no Karl Rove manipulating public opinion behind the scenes. This was totally spontaneous.

I have read innumerable essays by concerned leftists pondering why the lower classes repeatedly vote against their own interests. These overly partisan egalitarians find the obvious answer -- it's the other party! (i.e. the Republicans). If they would open their eyes, this riot (which is just part of a long-standing phenomenon) would put their partisan theories to lie. There is no need for sophisticated propaganda to create massive inequality. A college education does not cause people to open up their eyes to what really matters. The truth is that most people are morons. Most people are willing slaves who fantasize about having a king. They dream of a benevelent lord who will provide them with bread and circus, absolving them of any responsibility for their own lives.

A half-century of middle class unionism and public universities has done nothing to lessen this peasant mentality among the masses. It's time to consider the possibility that democracy has failed. Democracy is impossible because when power is given to the masses, they give it right back. Those of us who want freedom will have to find it ourselves. If we want a society of equals, we will have to find it separately from the servile masses. We obviously can't physically separate ourselves from them, but we can weaken the institutions that they use to force themselves on us.

The cult of the Presidency: cultural leadership

Cross-posted to SwordsCrossed and FreedomDemocrats.

During the Presidential campaign, Gene Healy at Reason wrote up an article about the Cult of the Presidency -- describing the unreasonable faith that many Americans place in the Presidency and its occupant.* Despite the hypocritical right-wing hand-wringing over the implications of Obama's effectiveness in mass politics, Obama cannot take credit for inventing the Cult of the Presidency.

A number of recent events have vividly illustrated one long-standing aspect of the Presidential cult -- the idea that the President is the ultimate arbiter of cultural worth and the representative of a national consensus on cultural issues. These events showed that Americans expect the President to be the ultimate representative on issues as broad as military valor, piousness, and athletic accomplishment.

It is this last issue --condemnation of James Harrison for abstaining from the customary White House reception for the Superbowl victors-- that really shows the American people's obsession with the President's cultural leadership. Harrison was roundly condemned for bucking convention and the decision of his team (and his failure to provide a reasonable explanation for doing so). The more extreme commentary depicted his refusal not just as a foolishly missed opportunity, but as a snub against the entire American nation:

I find Harrison’s quote to be in the slap in the face you, me, the entire Pittsburgh Steelers organization, the NFL, the President or the United States, and our entire nation.

Other commentators examined what might pass as a good explanation for his behavior:

Some people say that he just doesn’t see a presidential visit as anything special, and that he’s just being a rugged individual. Harrison did, in fact, pass on a trip to the White House in 2006, when the Steelers won the Super Bowl and when George W. Bush was president.

But most people who exercise individualism usually have put some real thought into why they’re defying the status quo. They don’t just blurt out nonsense.

I would have loved for Harrison to say something like "I've received enough recognition from the league and our fans; the President has his own job to do and I don't think this is a good use of time for either of us." Unfortunately, he didn't give any such explanation, so we'll never know how American football fans would have responded to a direct criticism of the President's role as cultural leader.

On the issue of recognizing military valor, it is reasonable that the President would be involved. After all, he is the commander-in-chief of our armed forces. Likewise, it would be appropriate for the President to recognize outstanding contributions from any government employee.

I think that the President's role as military leader makes it easy for his office to experience a sort of mission creep in cultural areas. When he recognizes the sacrifices of soldiers under his command, he has to appeal to the values that led the soldier to make his sacrifice. This quickly brings us to religious issues, and other profound cultural statements.

Of course, this bumps right up against the notion of the US government as a secular institution. To those who would encase the Presidency in their own religious rhetoric, a good response comes from Rev. C. Welton Gaddy of the Interfaith Allaince:

President Obama is not the Pastor-in-Chief of the nation and Shirley Dobson's Task Force is not the spiritual judge of the president's personal or official actions.

I also wonder how the religious-right reconcile their merger of religion and politics with Jesus' prohibition against public/political displays of piety.

In summary, we don't have to be die-hard libertarians to object to the idea that the President embodies a national cultural consensus. We don't even have to be fans of cultural pluralism -- we only have to believe in the separation of power and responsibility among various institutions in society: the President is in charge of running the government, not guiding our cultural life.

*Following the election, some progressives took a moment to reconsider their relationship with Obama now that he had won the election, but this did not obviate the need for a continued "Cult of the President Watch" at Reason.com, reporting episodes of the volk fawning over Obama. The zealous adoration of President-elect Obama bothered me also, and I felt a bit nauseous when I heard that some cities had made special arrangements to name streets after Obama, not only while he is alive, but while he is still President. Getting elected to the Presidency is undoubtedly a great personal accomplishment, but the social accomplishment of electing a black man is not Obama's accomplishment -- it is the accomplishment of all those people who fought racism throughout American history.

My left-libertarian pedigree

Via the Freedom Democrats blog (and Brad Spangler), I have been tagged with the "left libertarian pedigree meme":

“What motivated you to start looking into Anarchist/Libertarian thought?”

Well, it all started as I was approaching adulthood and deciding what to do with my life. I had developed the general attitude that life is easy and that I could make a great life for myself if others would only get out of my way. I felt that others were constraining me both with their lifestyle laws, and by demanding tribute for access to natural resources. At this point, my vision of "the good life" was most influenced by Thoreau's Walden and Huxley's Island*.

Based on these attitudes, my political outlook developed into a very ideological form of geolibertarianism, though I had never heard of "geolibertarianism", nor had I read core works such as Agrarian Justice or anything from Henry George, or even heard of "wage slavery". At university, I discussed these ideas with friends and received two responses that helped define my political path:

1. A friend involved with the local LP told me that my ideas sounded like Dan Sullivan's.
2. Another (non-libertarian) friend called me an anarchist.

Following these exchanges, I started to study anarchism and geolibertarianism. I rejected anarchism at the time, and turned my attention to geolibertarianism in the Libertarian Party. I helped out with Harold Kyriazi's campaign for state senate, in which we were trounced.

That electoral defeat marked the beginning of the end of my activities with the LP and serious electoral activism. I developed a renewed interest in electoral reform, with a special focus on proportional representation and strategic voting. This interest had originally been seeded in high school by Lani Guinier's The Tyranny of the Majority. This shift in attention marked a more general shift from an ideological (top-down, wholistic, megalomaniacal) view of politics to a more organic (bottom-up, individualistic, practical) view of politics, in which I focused on the nature of power in society.

This realignment of viewpoint coincided well with my increased involvement with the Unitarian Universalist movement. Their emphasis on freedom of conscience always attracted me, but now I was also attracted by their grass-roots organizing and their "peer-to-peer" approach to solving social problems. I was excited when I found out that the UU movement had a history of involvement with Henry George's movement, but I was turned off when the congregation would take positions that called for increased state activism in society.

My most recent political transformation occurred in 2002-2003. I was in the San Francisco Bay area while Bush was pushing for war with Iraq. I checked out one of the early anti-war rallies (Oct 2002, I think), but was turned off by the Marxist/Leninist organizers. The rallies grew and became more mainstream over the next few months. My congregation and many of my peers were involved in these massive protests, but by that time I had concluded that no protest would deter the invasion; the logic of the state had taken over.

During this crisis, a woman addressed my UU congregation. I don't remember much of what she said, but she identified herself as an anarchist. Her witness persuaded me to reconsider anarchism. I rejected the common Democratic idea that Bush's presidency (and the invasion of Iraq) were an avoidable mistake. I knew that the "lesser of evils" problem delivered political power to a self-interested elite and we'd get crappy Presidents on a regular basis. Even more troubling, I saw how the vast majority of Americans felt compelled to march to war without a good justification; some simply decided to give the President "the benefit of the doubt", but even those who strongly rejected the war would never consider withdrawing from the war machine. At this point, I recognized what libertarians meant by "the cult of the state".

Following this, I reconsidered the numerous arguments underlying the ideology of hierarchy (the mother of all ideologies), and realized how weak they were. I realized that the problem of cheaters and fools within society is nothing compared to the problem of a cheaters and fools ruling society, and I realized that we did not have an effective way to prevent cheaters and fools from taking the top spots in our hierarchy.

With this, I became an anarchist. I decided that my (casual) activism would focus on combating the cult of the state. Somehow, I found Kevin Carson's blog, which fed my growing awareness that the state exists specifically to allow the cheaters to rule society. Carson directed me to Benjamin Tucker's work, which has provided the most recent revelatory reading: State Socialism and Anarchy.

So here I am.

*Island presents an interesting vision of "the good life", but it's a poorly written book, probably because it was written specifically to present that vision.

Fascists among us

Cross posted to Daily Kos and Freedom Democrats (a week ago)

The Philadelphia Daily News has published a disturbing commentary that comes close to being a piece of fascist propaganda: Stu Bykofsky's "To save America, we need another 9/11". Before laying into Bykofsky, I'll acknowledge that he later wrote "I WAS WRONG ABOUT ANOTHER 9/11", in which he claims that the headline exaggerated his thesis a little bit. However, the same can be said for the headline of his "apology" because he doesn't admit to having been wrong; instead, he claims that he was misunderstood.

Despite his clarifications, I still think that he expressed fascist sentiments in "To save America...". The basic thesis is that the September 11th attacks generated a sense of unity among Americans, which has since fallen apart even though we still need it in order to fight Islamist terrorism. The main problem in his argument is its circular logic: We need to be attacked, so that we will be united, so that we can fight the enemy, so that we won't be attacked. It apparently doesn't dawn on him that if we aren't attacked again, then we won't have any need for this unity. In other words, he's seeking national unity for it's own sake -- which is the core of fascism.

Another fascist element in "To save America..." is the implicit message that Americans should rally behind the President. He may not even realize that his call for unity implies subordination to the President. Of course, one way to maintain unity would be for the President to give some consideration to others, but that isn't going to happen with this President. Furthermore, the President has the political advantage; being the executive, he gets to initiate things, and no "disunity" is apparent until opposition develops. Consequently, an ideology of unity gives the Presidency a major political advantage.

Finally, Bykofsky's assumption that Americans would unite after another attack is quite debatable. Sure, we united after the 2001 attacks, but back then we felt a shared sense of confidence in a number of institutions, including the Federal government. Since 2001, many Americans have lost that sense of confidence in the Federal government, so we may not turn to it to protect us in the wake of another attack. Indeed, given the large number of neo-cons/Republicans who have been pining for another terrorist attack, there's a good chance that many Americans will succumb to "Bush did it" conspiracy theories. More skeptical Americans may still decide that the Federal government is a hindrance in fighting terrorism, rather than an asset.

Finally, I have to acknowledge a few writers who have inspired this analysis. First, there is Milton Mayer's "They Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1933-1945", which has made me sensitive to the types of appeals that persuade "little folk" to support fascism (thanks to mstein for recommending this excellent book). Also, there are three stories at DKos addressing "To save America...", but I didn't notice the above analysis in any of them, so I wrote my own analysis.