New at Reason

David Weigel | August 18, 2006

Roles are reversed and Spock wears a beard when Nick Gillespie interviews former Reason intern Taylor Buley, author of The Fresh Politics Reader.

Comments

|8.18.06 @ 1:36AM|#

Many young Americans look at politics like a treadmill running on high-speed. Standing beside it, it can be pretty intimidating.

Not when you look at it for what it is; it's just some folks figuring out how to spend other people's money the way that they want to, and also figuring out how to make excuses to justify it. This is one of the reasons why...

When you take a look at the world we live in, I think that small government is the obvious conclusion.

...is so fair, as well as practical.

|8.18.06 @ 2:00AM|#

reason: Do you think America is getting more or less free?

Buley: I think that today we are certainly more free than in the past, and here's a good litmus test: Ask any young American if they had the choice, would they rather live in the 1950s or today? I'm pretty sure most of them will say that there's no better time to be alive. Thanks to technology, and in spite of politics, our standard of living is better today then ever before.

This answer definitely needs to be re-worked. The first and last sentences are in contradiction. When we say: "in spite of politics" we are really saying: "in spite of less liberty". And the "litmus test" doesn't substantiate the contention.

The evidence is that the inertia of the progress of technology has everything to do with the individual liberty that has engendered it.

|8.18.06 @ 4:34AM|#

Ask any young American if they had the choice, would they rather live in the 1950s or today?

Though I think we have more freedom in some ways than we did in the past, my question is: could your average "young American" actually respond to such a question in a meaningful, thoughtful, substantive, etc. manner?

I'm pretty sure most of them will say that there's no better time to be alive. Thanks to technology, and in spite of politics, our standard of living is better today then ever before.

Yeah, but that does that mean we are more free?

Personally I think one needs to come up with an adequate definition of freedom before you can answer these sorts of questions.

|8.18.06 @ 4:46AM|#

reason: Do you think America is getting more or less free?

Buley: I think that today we are certainly more free than in the past, and here's a good litmus test: Ask any young American if they had the choice, would they rather live in the 1950s or today? I'm pretty sure most of them will say that there's no better time to be alive. Thanks to technology, and in spite of politics, our standard of living is better today then ever before.

This answer definitely needs to be re-worked. The first and last sentences are in contradiction. When we say: "in spite of politics" we are really saying: "in spite of less liberty". And the "litmus test" doesn't substantiate the contention.

Well it depends who you ask for this question. I hate to bring race into this, but if you're a straight, white American, then the choice is harder. Many would say the 50s had more freedom.

However, ask a black, brown or gay American that same question (or, for that matter, a straight couple "living in sin" for years) and they'd say now.

For example, look at Rick's response (no offense intended Rick, but it's illustrative). If Rick was black, there's no way he would have equated "in spite of politics" as "in spite of less liberty". Few minorities would say, "Man, I miss the good ol' days of the 50s." However, white Americans create magazines (like the National Review) and movies wishing for those halcyon days.

|8.18.06 @ 7:45AM|#

I think that today we are certainly more free than in the past, and here's a good litmus test: Ask any young American if they had the choice, would they rather live in the 1950s or today?

Hello. Of course young American's would choose today. Why not ask older Americans, the ones that actually experienced it? I myself can't speak for the 50s but I can speak for the 60s.

I would go back in a New York minute.

|8.18.06 @ 8:49AM|#

In the 1950s you could hop on a plane, often without a passport, and travel to most places on earth with about as much hassle as getting on a bus. Frank Sinatra's "Come Fly With Me" is actually a pretty accurate depiction of what travel felt like. (So long as you had the money, of course: air travel was expensive.) In the 1950s you could get drunk at an office party without triggering the corporate fink apparatus and ending up in a 12-step program, babbling your sins to strangers. Identity programs were of course not computerized, so if you wanted to quit your job, move across the country, and start over with a new name and identity, it was easy to do. Living "off the grid" was still possible. There was widespread ignorance and fear of marijuana, and while law enforcement was brutal and intrusive, the penalties for being caught with a few joints or a plant were by modern standards fairly light. At least the police couldn't take your house away.

Or take those little "safe sex" tables you see on college campuses at the start of every year. In the 1950s you'd have been arrested for handing out condoms and sex information pamphlets. But sex, having been turned into another "campus activity," made safe and hygenic and rational, is delivered into the hands of administration. Conservatives who go on about "anything goes" campus morality are wrong. It's not true that anything goes. People have more sexual options, but they are practiced within a highly detailed, explicit set of conventions enforced by the very openness of public conversation about sex. (Actually, I'm stealing this argument from Norman Mailer and Michel Foucault, both of whom had pessimistic libertarian leanings that both their admirers and detractors often overlook.)

I'm not saying that things were better in the 1950s, but that the cartoonish image of the time as an era of conformity doesn't do justice to the complexity of how freedoms change over time. The trade-offs between freedom then and now are complicated by the way new social freedoms, once they become institutionalized, evolve a range of internal controls that codify and standardize practices, often in ways that are more restrictive than when those practices were still kind of outlaw.

|8.18.06 @ 8:52AM|#

I don't think reason should be bolded here:

"At the time, liberals were better at marketing a reason: Bush was in it for the oil."

|8.18.06 @ 8:58AM|#

A few years ago a radio station had an all 90's flashback weekend. I found myself wishing for "the good old days" of the 1990's.

It scares me to think what sort of old person I'm going to turn into.

|8.18.06 @ 9:01AM|#

I think that today we are certainly more free than in the past, and here's a good litmus test: Ask any young American if they had the choice, would they rather live in the 1950s or today?

i'd rather be a viking, but thats just be, the issue of freedom aside

victory!

|8.18.06 @ 9:26AM|#

Mo:

However, ask a black, brown or gay American that same question (or, for that matter, a straight couple "living in sin" for years) and they'd say now.

Let's not forget about women.

|8.18.06 @ 9:33AM|#

I myself can't speak for the 50s but I can speak for the 60s.

I would go back in a New York minute.


You must have been on a different planet than I was then.

|8.18.06 @ 9:40AM|#

I, too, miss the 60s. Back then, people carried me around, fed me, bathed me, and I was responsible for nothing but Teddy Bear. And I could defecate at will. Good times, good times.

|8.18.06 @ 10:13AM|#

"Abortion is a little more sticky. My publisher bills me as "pro-life," but I think that's just an effort to fit my view into the current paradigm. I wasn't alive for Roe v. Wade, and so America's stance on abortion isn't so much as a "debate" as it is a reality."

Hey, moron, that IS THE PRO-CHOICE position. Ever heard of the Human Life Amendment, Stem Cell debate? This kills me. This guy is not 'pro-life', he's pro-choice. He just has no clue as to what the anti-abortion forces want.

Jennifer|8.18.06 @ 10:15AM|#

Just as Mo suspects Rick's view of 1950s freedom would be different were Rick not a white guy, I suspect Phord's view of 1950s sex would be different were he not a male.

The 50s were probably a lot better for white guys and independently wealthy white women. For the res of us, not so much.

|8.18.06 @ 10:28AM|#

Don't most young people think the 50's are like that movie Pleasantville? I agree with Phil-Lip, I doubt the young people even have a clue what that question means.

|8.18.06 @ 11:11AM|#

Just as Mo suspects Rick's view of 1950s freedom would be different were Rick not a white guy, I suspect Phord's view of 1950s sex would be different were he not a male.

The 50s were probably a lot better for white guys and independently wealthy white women. For the res of us, not so much.

I don't want to be misunderstood: I'm not saying that sex in the 1950s was better (define better?) or less tightly controlled than sex now -- that would be absurd. Attitudes towards sex have changed to a greater degree than anything else in the past half-century. Once I was reading through old magazines from the late 1960s/early 1970s and found an advertisement for Avant Garde, a glossy early-1970s magazine that tried to present counterculture sexuality to a mass audience. The ad was a quiz with questions like, "are you comfortable with gay people"? and "do you think young people can live together before marriage"? "If you've answered 'yes' to these questions, you might be . . . Avant Garde!" Which I thought was funny, because none of those positions are the least bit avant-garde now. But it's interesting that they kind of were even in the early 1970s, which we tend to imagine as the age of key parties and Plato's Retreat. As I say, attitudes have shifted a lot. And I'm glad they have. My point was about how people think about and imagine history. People want to imagine that liberties can be won free and clear, with no complications and no qualifications, and therefore that we can recline comfortably in the knowledge that our own time is categorically freer and more enlightened than all that have come before. I think this misunderstands the nature of power and the complexity of history. I have no problem with condoms being handed out on university quads, but I also think it's naive to think that this represents the absence of socialization. It's a different kind of socialization.

|8.18.06 @ 11:22AM|#

Sweet, Penn has a libertarian news paper now. And to think I had to read that Daily Pennsylvanian drivel for 4 years...

|8.18.06 @ 11:43AM|#

However, ask a black, brown or gay American that same question (or, for that matter, a straight couple "living in sin" for years) and they'd say now.

Let's not forget about women.

Of course, silly me. I'm guessing Jennifer would pick now over then in a New York minute.

|8.18.06 @ 11:56AM|#

ken, maybe he is pro-choice with a little less choice which would be against the PRO-CHOICE position.

|8.18.06 @ 1:44PM|#

>The last time I checked, all of the above Most >Sacred Minorities are just as subject to being >cavity searched at an airport, sobriety >checkpoints, smoking bans, gun laws, police >surveillance practices, eminent domain laws, and >taxes as I am.

Pig Mannix -I would much rather be subject the above practices along with everybody else than have most of the rest of the population off the hook, while I am singled out for worse treatment than them. Relative equality like that matters. Ask any racial or ethnic minority, and I guarantee that they would agree. And same for women. The college that I teach at paid female professors then an explicitly lower salary under the notion that men needed income to support a family, but that women's earnings were either for a single person or gravy on top of the husband's salary. That sort of different treatment stinks, and we have a lot less of it now than before.

Jennifer|8.18.06 @ 1:46PM|#

Phord, I'm not talking about sexual equality and tolerance as is measured by magazine quizzes titled "How Queer-Culture With-It Are You?" I'm talking about being glad that I, a woman with no desire to become a housewife or mommy, can nonetheless find doctors willing and able to prescribe birth control if I request it (in Florence King's autobiography, she describes trying to find a doctor willing to prescribe a diaphragm for her in the early Fifties; after some furtive questioning of the bohemian girls at her college, she found a renegade doctor who would give a diaphragm to an unmarried woman, if she lied and said she was engaged, so the doctor would be covered).

I don't know if it was the government saying "Thou shalt not allow single women to have birth-control devices." But had I been around in the 50s, that would have made no practical difference to me.

I am also glad that when I go looking for a job it is the exception, not the rule, to find employers who think "No sense in hiring her since she'll just quit as soon as she lands a husband."

Actually, I don't think I've ever had that problem. I doubt that would have been true 50 years ago.

Jennifer|8.18.06 @ 1:47PM|#

Phord, I'm not talking about sexual equality and tolerance as is measured by magazine quizzes titled "How Queer-Culture With-It Are You?" I'm talking about being glad that I, a woman with no desire to become a housewife or mommy, can nonetheless find doctors willing and able to prescribe birth control if I request it (in Florence King's autobiography, she describes trying to find a doctor willing to prescribe a diaphragm for her in the early Fifties; after some furtive questioning of the bohemian girls at her college, she found a renegade doctor who would give a diaphragm to an unmarried woman, if she lied and said she was engaged, so the doctor would be covered).

I don't know if it was the government saying "Thou shalt not allow single women to have birth-control devices." But had I been around in the 50s, that would have made no practical difference to me.

I am also glad that when I go looking for a job it is the exception, not the rule, to find employers who think "No sense in hiring her since she'll just quit as soon as she lands a husband."

Actually, I don't think I've ever had that problem. I doubt that would have been true 50 years ago.

Jennifer|8.18.06 @ 1:47PM|#

Phord, I'm not talking about sexual equality and tolerance as is measured by magazine quizzes titled "How Queer-Culture With-It Are You?" I'm talking about being glad that I, a woman with no desire to become a housewife or mommy, can nonetheless find doctors willing and able to prescribe birth control if I request it (in Florence King's autobiography, she describes trying to find a doctor willing to prescribe a diaphragm for her in the early Fifties; after some furtive questioning of the bohemian girls at her college, she found a renegade doctor who would give a diaphragm to an unmarried woman, if she lied and said she was engaged, so the doctor would be covered).

I don't know if it was the government saying "Thou shalt not allow single women to have birth-control devices." But had I been around in the 50s, that would have made no practical difference to me.

I am also glad that when I go looking for a job it is the exception, not the rule, to find employers who think "No sense in hiring her since she'll just quit as soon as she lands a husband."

Actually, I don't think I've ever had that problem. I doubt that would have been true 50 years ago.

|8.18.06 @ 2:37PM|#

Are you sure you're not confusing the concepts of "freedom" and "equality"? Methinks the Equality Nazis have done an exemplary job of obscuring the difference.

Right, because the right for a business to serve white and black customers in the same was prevented by government laws. Or if the person that I loved happened to be of a different race, I could not marry them.

I find it funny that you are making a big deal about government mandated anti-smoking statutes, but think that I've fallen under the sway of the "Equality Nazis" when talking about an era when there was government mandated discrimination. That freedom to get sloshed and drive home is "freedom" but the right of people to love and/or have sex with those they choose is "equality".

Lucky for Adam and Steve, when they go home and have sex, they don't have to worry about a neighbor being upset, calling the cops and getting thrown in jail.

Do smoking, seat belt and privacy violations suck? Yeah. Though I don't see DUI laws as some tragic loss of liberty any more than laws against shooting a gun in the air in a densely populated city. Some enforcement tactics are draconian, but not DUI laws are not a tragic loss of liberty.

|8.19.06 @ 7:46PM|#

"The evidence is that the inertia of the progress of technology has everything to do with the individual liberty that has engendered it."--Rick Barton

What on earth does that mean?

Robert|8.20.06 @ 3:56PM|#

"There was widespread ignorance and fear of marijuana, and while law enforcement was brutal and intrusive, the penalties for being caught with a few joints or a plant were by modern standards fairly light [in the 1950s]."

In most places it was a felony.

As far as changes since 1970 in the USA, there are quite a few ways in which we're freer. So many, that I have trouble remembering them all, so here's a sample:

There's no more draft, which is huge. You can choose your phone company and own your phone equipment; in some places you can even choose your electric co. Transportation & shipping deregulation has lowered costs & expanded our options enormously; you can even hitchhike legally now, which was illegal in many states. Most states have shall-issue gun carry permit laws. Even consumer fireworks are legal in more states. You can own gold. In 1970 there were still vestiges of sexually-oriented publications having to be avowedly "educational" or "artistic", as for instance smut in the guise of sex manuals. Also even the Citizens' Band was only for certain specified purposes; now you can even have a permanent ham license without knowing code; not to mention parts of the spectrum being opened to mobile phones for the masses. A number of drugs have been moved from prescription to OTC, and many new ones have been licensed that would've been illegal to market then. Many professional services can be advertised legally now that couldn't then in many jurisdictions. Mandated Sunday closings are gone.

Think about a Sunday in 1970 in a typical part of the USA. Assuming you weren't serving involuntary in the armed services, you might've been at home wishing you could shop for certain goods, but you couldn't because the stores selling them were closed. So you're home, and you might wish you had more choices on TV, but your jurisdiction hadn't franchised a cable TV provider. Good time to make a long distance call to relatives, but you'd better keep it short, considering the costs in those uncompetitive days. Smoking a joint involves you in a felony, as does your preferred sexual practice. Having fun yet?

|8.20.06 @ 10:35PM|#

Hm, upon further consideration of the matter, Robert, it appears I was full of shit. Here is an interesting run-down of marijuana laws in the 1950s:

http://www.druglibrary.org/Schaffer/LIBRARY/studies/vlr/vlrtoc.htm

See especially sections VI and VII.

These were draconian laws, though, again, at least they didn't include asset-forfeiture laws. Still, damn.