It was early 1793, and the situation in France after its revolution had begun to spiral out of control.
The Jacobins by then had split into factions. The Girondins, initially at the revolutionary vanguard, were disturbed by the movement's tendency to descend into violent radicalism. The previous year, mobs had slaughtered thousands of alleged counterrevolutionaries in their jail cells; in January, the deposed King Louis XVI had been guillotined as a tyrant. The Girondins blamed their rivals, the Montagnards, for these excesses.
Now rioting was breaking out again, spurred by rising food prices. So in March, in an effort to tamp things down, "the Girondins set a precedent that was later used against them," wrote Jeremy D. Popkin in A Short History of the French Revolution, "by stripping the Montagnard journalist-deputy [Jean-Paul] Marat of his parliamentary immunity and having him tried for inciting violence."
They weren't wrong about Marat. He was indeed a rabble-rouser, having declared early in the revolution that "five or six hundred heads cut off" could have stopped the opposition. Yet it didn't take long for the move to backfire. Marat was acquitted by a friendly tribunal in April, and the Girondins were purged from the National Convention, France's governing body, in June. According to the historian Isser Woloch in his foreword to Twelve Who Ruled: The Year of Terror in the French Revolution, the Convention "then was free to begin putting into place draconian emergency laws that amounted to a temporary revolutionary dictatorship."
The Girondin leaders weren't just removed from their legislative roles. Branded as traitors, dozens were executed or driven to suicide before year's end. When a Girondin sympathizer stabbed Marat to death, it provided all the justification the remaining Jacobins needed to inaugurate, and then escalate, the Reign of Terror.
What seems notable in this snapshot of events is that, each step of the way, participants felt they had every excuse and perhaps no choice but to ignore the rules of the game that might otherwise have reined in the excesses of the day. Yet at every stage, a breach on one side provoked an even more extreme response on the other, and the crisis spiraled further.
American politics today can follow a similar pattern. The far left demands that President Joe Biden pack the Supreme Court before it's too late—and points to the hardball politics of Senate Republicans that brought about the high court's conservative majority as a pretext. Republicans counter that they were just mirroring the tactics of Democrats, who during the Reagan administration politicized the confirmation process and during the Obama administration invoked the "nuclear option" for judicial appointments.
The parties jostle for temporary advantage, certain of the righteousness of their respective crusades, while trust in the institutions that make peaceful coexistence possible drains away.
The post What Republicans and Democrats Can Learn From the Jacobins' Spiraling Crisis appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>It's not particularly surprising that President Joe Biden has become a de facto champion of industrial policy, with his National Economic Council director calling for a "modern industrial strategy" involving "strategic public investments" to bring about "the full potential of our nation's economy." A hallmark of left-of-center economics has always been a high degree of comfort with attempts to manage the economy from the top down.
More surprising has been the rise in recent years of a cadre of self-identifying conservatives who think industrial policy is wise or even necessary. Prominent within that cadre is Oren Cass, who founded the group American Compass in 2020 to push back against the free market "dogmatism" that he says has caused generations of Republicans to resist economic meddling on principle.
Among the strongest arguments for insisting that government remain as hands-off as possible toward the economy is that there is something fundamentally unjust about using public resources to give a leg up to individuals or segments of the population that isn't available to everyone. To sidestep that objection, some industrial policy proponents make a curious claim: that everything government does necessarily involves choosing winners and losers, and so all we can hope to do is to choose wisely—to pick the right winners and losers, if you will.
Cass articulated this view in unusually explicit terms near the end of a recent podcast episode. "Any country is going to have an industrial policy. It's just a question of what industrial policy," he said. "And you're always going to have special interests steering it. So the art is not in draining the swamp or keeping the special interests out. It's in picking the right special interests and having them push towards things that might actually be useful."
A similar idea was floated by the Financial Times columnist Rana Foroohar at an event hosted by American Compass last week. "Decisions are always political," she said during one panel. "Everything's an industrial policy in the sense that different interest groups are being prioritized or not."
But is it true that all policy is industrial policy? That's a puzzling suggestion given that one of the core complaints of Cass et al. is that the so-called neoliberal order has failed to do what they consider a sufficient amount of industrial policy. If the only choice is which industrial policy to pursue, then being "for industrial policy" (or even for an increase in industrial policy) would be just as meaningless as being against it.
But as the American Enterprise Institute scholar Michael Strain put it during the American Compass event, "I don't think it's the case that all policy is industrial policy. Industrial policy is a set of policies that are designed to prop up a particular industry….Some people may think particular sectors are more important than others. I think a lot of people in this room probably think that manufacturing is particularly important…but let's be clear: The absence of doing that is not itself an industrial policy."
Set aside the semantics. There are, in fact, two broad visions on offer in this debate. One says that people should be as free as possible to make their own resource-allocation decisions, and markets should be allowed to sort things out from there. Economic winners and losers will emerge, but they won't be "chosen." The state's role is to enforce the basic rules of the game, which apply to everyone equally, and it should never abuse its power by tilting the playing field to favor one team over another.
The other vision is one in which markets cannot be trusted to produce good outcomes, so government actors must step in and overrule them. The state isn't a referee; it's a mechanic, and subsidies and regulatory carve-outs are levers that can be pulled and tools that can be employed to fine-tune the economic machine in the best interest of society as a whole. Needless to say, there is a clear substantive difference between these libertarian and technocratic approaches.
Industrial policy advocates will occasionally make a fuss when their position is characterized in terms of picking winners and losers. But industrial policy, as Cass himself defends it, involves making exactly those sorts of judgments about which industries are deserving of a boost from Uncle Sam and which are not. One of Cass' favorite dictums is that producing computer chips serves the national interest more than producing potato chips does, and he wants our public policy to reflect that.
Back in 2019, Cass participated in a high-profile debate at the first National Conservatism Conference (check out my writeup of that event) in which he admitted that his aim was to have Washington privilege "the sector of our economy that makes physical things—traditional manufacturing, resource extraction, energy production, agriculture, some construction, and so forth," because he believes those industries "matter more for the economy's health and long-run trajectory."
There's just no way around it: Cass wants to empower policy makers to put their thumbs on the scale on behalf of certain sectors. And that's a best-case scenario; attempts at industrial policy in practice often devolve into handouts from taxpayers to individual companies that have political connections to those in power. Think of the outrageous amounts of money the Export-Import Bank funnels to Boeing (and how well has that been working out?), or the Trump administration's Foxconn boondoggle, or, well, pretty much everything about the CHIPS Act implementation.
It is true that there will always be special interests vying to capture what economists call "rents," or goodies available to private actors via the political process rather than the market. Some of us look at that reality and resolve on doing everything we can to constrain state interference in the economy, since by reducing the rents that are available you reduce the incentive for private actors to focus their resources on Washington instead of on actually productive pursuits. Others apparently think the fact that rent-seeking interests will always exist gives them moral carte blanche to use public power on behalf of whichever interests they like best.
A helpful example of this distinction was on display during a different panel at last week's American Compass event, when National Review senior writer Michael Brendan Dougherty trained his ire on America's higher-ed financing apparatus, which he correctly noted enables the existence of "bottom-tier colleges" that are surely a net drain on society:
There's one near me, Mercy College. Almost all the students at Mercy College are brought in by advertising saying, 'Hey, you make a million dollars more over your lifetime if you have a college degree.' The college does not advertise that it has like a sub–33 percent completion rate after six years. Almost all of the people who even complete the [degrees] go back to the service industry that they left, with no improvement in their earnings. So what you've done is you've used the government to load a giant debt load onto a low-five-figure-earning worker to subsidize the existence of a totally mediocre six-figure professor and the administrative class around them.
The federally subsidized student loan system is an obvious instance of government tilting the playing field to benefit a well-connected segment of the economy at the expense of the majority of Americans who will never earn a college degree. It's something that libertarians have been beating the drum about relentlessly for as long as it has existed. And it's something that supporters of the Republican Party's working-class turn, which I presume includes Cass and his allies, ought to be particularly aggrieved by.
But there are two crucially different positions that a proponent of student-loan reform might take. One is that the current system is corrupt and we should roll it back, full stop. The other is that we should redirect the resources from one well-intentioned but disastrous federal subsidy program into a different federal subsidy program, benefitting some other, more deserving constituency, in the deluded belief that this time we'll be able to avoid the pitfalls that have plagued so many of the mind-bogglingly wasteful, tragically distortionary, and inherently unfair federal subsidy programs that came before.
Dougherty suggested we have two choices on the higher-ed issue: "Do we want to keep protecting the lowest third of colleges with the way they're given this gusher of money from the government through student loans," he asked, "or do we want to protect some workers with those resources?"
Friends, there is a third option: Just say no. It may be futile to think we can get special interests entirely out of our politics, but we can choose to move, however imperfectly, in the direction of less government interference in the economy.
The post Not All Policy Is Industrial Policy appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>This week's featured article is "Can Free Markets Win Votes in the New GOP?" by Stephanie Slade.
This audio was generated using AI trained on the voice of Katherine Mangu-Ward.
Music credits: "Deep in Thought" by CTRL and "Sunsettling" by Man with Roses
The post <I>The Best of Reason</I>: Can Free Markets Win Votes in the New GOP? appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>"Holy Miami-Dade, Batman," tweeted then–Politico reporter Tim Alberta on election night in 2020. Early returns had started rolling in, and the numbers from South Florida were not what people were expecting. President Donald Trump was dramatically exceeding his 2016 totals in the county's majority-Hispanic precincts.
Hillary Clinton had carried Miami-Dade by almost 30 percentage points four years earlier; Joe Biden took it by a mere seven percentage points en route to losing the state. "It was a bloodbath," one former Democratic Party official would tell The Washington Post.
Trump's strong showing in Miami-Dade was an indication that something strange was happening with partisan affiliations. Like most ethnic minorities, Hispanic Americans have long been viewed as a loyal Democratic constituency. But in recent years, that trend has begun to abate.
Back in 2002, journalist John B. Judis and political scientist Ruy Teixeira published The Emerging Democratic Majority, a book that "forecast the dawn of a new progressive era" powered by the organic growth of left-leaning demographic groups, including college-educated professionals and immigrants.
Now the pair have a new book, Where Have All the Democrats Gone? (Henry Holt and Co.), that sounds the alarm about "the cultural insularity and arrogance" driving blue-collar voters away from their party.
"We didn't anticipate the extent to which cultural liberalism might segue into cultural radicalism," Teixeira told The Wall Street Journal in 2022, "and the extent to which that view, particularly as driven by younger cohorts, would wind up imprinting itself on the entire infrastructure in and around the Democratic Party."
Among close political observers, the sense that the major parties are undergoing a major realignment has become pervasive. Whereas the GOP once was popularly associated with country club members and other relatively wealthy, highly educated constituents, the party is increasingly being referred to as the natural home of America's "multiethnic working class." The distinction is less about income, at least for now, and more about education: In 2020, Biden won handily among voters with a college degree, while Trump edged him out among those without one.
Meanwhile, the Democratic Party—once associated with labor unions and the relatively less well-off—is struggling with parts of its former base. A staggering two-thirds of white voters who didn't graduate from college went for Manhattanite Trump over Scranton-born Biden. The former vice president did earn the support of seven in 10 nonwhite voters, a respectable showing, but also an underperformance compared to Clinton's numbers in 2016 and Barack Obama's before that. Miami-Dade was not the only place where people of color swung toward Trump on the margins.
These shifts have caught the attention of political commentators and operatives of all stripes. Some, like Judis and Teixeira on the left, hope Democrats can stem their losses by moving to the middle on social issues. Others, including members of the "New Right," believe Republicans can expand their gains by moving leftward on economics. Hardly anyone seems to think there's a place for a principled defense of free markets and free trade.
If the parties are truly realigning, what does it mean for the future of American politics—and where does that leave libertarians?
In terms of pure electoral math, "nonwhites and working-class whites combine for a more than two-to-one advantage over whites with a college degree," Patrick Ruffini writes in Party of the People (Simon & Schuster). "In recent years, all the energy and growth in the Republican Party has come from this multiracial populist coalition."
Ruffini, a GOP pollster, is lauding the same phenomenon in his book that Judis and Teixeira are lamenting in theirs: Working-class whites have abandoned the Democratic Party in droves, while ethnic minorities are increasingly up for grabs. True, highly educated whites have swung toward the Democrats during the same period—and in 2020, that was enough to offset Biden's losses with nonwhite voters and deliver him to the White House. But because the share of Americans with a college degree is not likely to increase much more than it already has, this is questionable as a long-term strategy.
Given these changes, it has become fashionable on the right to demand that the Republican Party shed what is disparagingly referred to as its "free market fundamentalism"—the deregulation and international trade that the GOP championed for decades, in words if not in deeds. A whole ecosystem of nationalist-populist institutions, from think tanks to media platforms, has sprung up to push Republicans to embrace left-wing economics, which can include support for everything from tariffs to pro-labor regulations to industrial policy to targeted antitrust enforcement against disfavored companies.
Sen. Marco Rubio (R–Fla.) offered an example of this perspective in The American Conservative in June 2023. "We are living through a historic inflection point—the passing of a decades-long economic obsession with maximized efficiency and unqualified free trade," he wrote. "It's time to revive the American System," that is, "the use of public policy to support domestic manufacturing and develop emerging industries."
Some members of the New Right go even further, calling, in the most extreme cases, for an "American Caesar" strong enough to purge the land of its libertarian elements and forcibly reorient society to the common good. But even the more temperate voices generally see the idea of limited government as passé.
Advocates of such a turn often point to a widely circulated graph produced by the political scientist Lee Drutman after the 2016 election. It maps the electorate along two axes: economic left vs. right (along the horizontal) and social left vs. right (along the vertical). The upper right quadrant depicts consistent conservatives—those whose survey results are both socially and economically conservative, the vast majority of whom supported Donald Trump. The lower left quadrant depicts the inverse constituency, consistent progressives, the vast majority of whom supported Hillary Clinton. The lower right quadrant is allegedly for libertarians: economically conservative and socially liberal.
Whether that quadrant does a good job of actually capturing libertarians is a different question. Some of the social issues it uses to separate left from right are items that might indeed help distinguish between conservatives and libertarians, such as support for gay marriage and opposition to a Muslim ban. But others are items on which libertarians are not all in agreement with each other, such as whether abortion should be legal or whether illegal immigrants are good for the country. And on several—such as whether black Americans should receive special favors—you would expect libertarians, who tend to believe strongly in equality before the law, to come down on the "socially conservative" side. Taken together, this raises the possibility that quite a few self-identifying libertarians were coded as conservatives.
The economic issues index also is not perfect: Thanks to corporate welfare, a free marketeer might well agree with the supposedly progressive statement that our economic system is biased to favor the wealthy, for instance.
But the chattering classes have focused their attention on the upper left quadrant: people labeled socially conservative and economically progressive, sometimes referred to as the "populist" cohort. When Rubio et al. call on the GOP to move left economically, it is these voters they want to reach. Indeed, among those who flipped from supporting Obama in 2012 to supporting Trump in 2016, populists were overrepresented. It's natural to infer that Trump's willingness to stray from free market orthodoxy—his trade protectionism, for example—was the reason.
But does support for government intervention in the economy really deserve credit for landing our 45th president in the White House? Perhaps not. Look again at the four quadrants: The graph depicts a clear positive correlation between social and economic conservatism, and most people who voted for Trump also said they support free markets and free trade.
Both Party of the People and Where Have All the Democrats Gone? suggest it's social issues that are driving the realignment. In other words, working-class voters didn't rush into the arms of Trump because they saw him as an economic populist; they fled the Democratic Party because they saw it as a bunch of cultural radicals. It's the obsession with stating your pronouns and the perception that Democrats are soft on crime, not the economy, stupid.
"You're going to tell all white people in this country they have white privilege and we're a white-supremacist society?" Teixeira told the Journal. "And that we're all guilty of microaggressions every day in every way? Not only is this substantively wrong in my opinion, but as politics it's batshit crazy. You can't win if people think that's where you're coming from."
Ruffini concurs. Swing voters "are hardly New Right ideologues, espousing a combination of hard-left economic views and hard-right cultural views," he writes. "The key point about these voters is that they are only slightly off-center in their views on either dimension, hardly good recruits for a new ideological vanguard." Nonetheless, of the two, he believes "cultural questions are more and more central to how people vote these days."
This is reflected in a poll of Trump supporters commissioned by the Ethics and Public Policy Center just after the 2020 election. That survey did not find respondents consistently taking the New Right position. On some economic questions, such as whether trade with other countries helps or hurts America, they were split. On others, they expressed traditional free market views, such as that "government doesn't create wealth; people and businesses do." They strongly favored securing the southern border but were somewhat less sure how to handle those illegal immigrants who are already here. More than half believed that "climate change is real but science and technology developed by the private sector and government can help make its effects less severe," a refreshingly middle-of-the-road stance.
When it came to cultural grievances, however, the poll found overwhelming agreement: 89 percent of respondents believed that "Christianity is under attack in America today," 90 percent fretted that "Americans are losing faith in the ideas that make our country great," 92 percent thought that "the mainstream media today is just a part of the Democratic Party," and 87 percent worried that "discrimination against whites will increase a lot in the next few years."
Note that the moral questions of yesteryear, such as abortion and school prayer, are no longer central. Instead, GOP voters appear to be united around issues of culture and identity.
When people on the left discuss how on Earth Donald Trump managed to get elected president, they tend to assume that racial resentment was at work. When people on the right tackle the same question, they usually insist it was an uprising by blue-collar voters who felt "left behind" by our modern, globalized economy.
In The Overlooked Americans (Basic Books), Elizabeth Currid-Halkett, a professor of public policy at the University of Southern California, casts doubt on both those explanations. Her conclusion is that rural Americans who gave their votes to Trump "supported him for a wide range of reasons that had nothing to do with economic grievance or racism."
Currid-Halkett's research shows that on metrics from median income to homeownership to unemployment, rural America is actually doing quite well—especially compared to the prevailing narrative. By one measure, income inequality was higher in urban counties than in rural ones in 2019.
"For the most part, the people I interviewed also didn't feel particularly left behind," she writes. "As a man from Missouri who asked to remain anonymous remarked, 'The truth is, Elizabeth, we don't feel left behind. We want to be left alone.' He meant by the government and the media, which he felt encroached on his way of life." Later in the book, she summarizes the position of rural Americans as follows: "They don't want to feel looked down upon because of their lack of education or their belief in God….They don't want to be canceled for inadvertently saying something 'unwoke.'"
These voters were clearly turned off by the behavior of Democratic elites rather than turned on by Trump's economic agenda. Similarly, a distaste for white Christian identity politics, not a strange new predilection for left-wing economics, may be what's pushing highly educated voters away from the GOP.
"It used to be fashionable for country-club Republicans in [wealthy suburban communities] to say that they were 'fiscally conservative and socially moderate,'" Ruffini writes. "Now most of the rank-and-file voters who describe themselves this way have another name: Democrats."
Those who saw nonwhite voters as a permanent Democratic constituency miscalculated on a number of points. For one thing, they failed to appreciate that black and Hispanic Democrats were always more conservative on social issues than their white peers within the party. "Many Black voters hold socially conservative positions on abortion and LGBTQ issues consistent with their higher levels of religiosity," Ruffini writes. They have historically voted blue despite, not because of, the party's cultural stances.
For another thing, America is extremely good at assimilating immigrants into the larger culture. Research from the Cato Institute's Alex Nowrasteh finds that second- and third-generation Americans are hardly distinguishable, politically and ideologically, from those whose families have been here longer. This is one of the reasons the so-called great replacement theory advanced by right-wingers such as Tucker Carlson was always so suspect: Even if the Democratic Party were trying to "import" left-leaning voters from developing countries, it would have no way of keeping them on the left.
"When a group moves from the margins and into the mainstream of American life," Ruffini writes, "history provides ample proof that their politics change to match their newfound social station. After World War II, the children of nineteenth-century immigrants to the United States moved to the suburbs, married across ethnic lines, went to college, and saw their economic fortunes rise. In doing so, they joined a Republican Party many of them had formerly shunned."
The same thing is happening today. Ruffini estimates that, between 2012 and 2020, Hispanics shifted 19 points, African Americans shifted 11 points, and Asian Americans shifted 5 points toward the GOP.
It's not clear Republicans need to embrace leftist economics to win over these groups. Immigrants are highly entrepreneurial, starting their own businesses at a significantly higher rate than does the native-born population. And Hispanics have seen particularly fast-paced income growth in recent years. "They are making it in America," Ruffini writes.
This has the potential to make such constituencies more receptive to free market messages. Party of the People includes an interview with Oscar Rosa, a Texas politico from one of the heavily Hispanic counties along the Rio Grande that swung toward Trump in 2020. "Today, Rosa sees a new wave of Republicans," Ruffini explains. "They are younger and hungrier, able to see a way out of the poverty of their parents' and grandparents' generations."
"The son who's working away at the oil rigs," Rosa said, "who's making $150,000 but only keeping $100,000 after taxes, is like, I'm a freaking Republican. I am a Republican. I don't want to pay taxes."
One poll of Texas Hispanics found that their No. 1 problem with the Democratic Party was that it "supports government welfare handouts for people who don't work." Another poll found that majorities of both Hispanic Americans and working-class Americans believe that "most people who want to get ahead can make it if they're willing to work hard." (In contrast, 88 percent of strong progressives thought that "hard work and determination are no guarantee of success for most people.")
The country as a whole is economically conservative in some important ways. A 2023 survey from the Center for American Political Studies at Harvard University found that a majority of registered voters think the U.S. government is spending too much money, and an even larger majority thinks it has taken on too much debt. Six in 10 say they would support a budget freeze.
Several New Right thinkers have recently become discouraged that more Republicans don't seem to be in a rush to tack left economically. In August, the Catholic journalist Sohrab Ahmari declared at Newsweek, "I Was Wrong: The GOP Will Never Be the Party of the Working Class."
"For half a decade following the rise of Donald Trump," he wrote, "I took a leading part in the effort to bring about a populist GOP." But since "the Republican Party remains, incorrigibly, a vehicle for the wealthy," he said, "I'm increasingly drawn to the economic policies of the Left—figures like Sens. Elizabeth Warren or Bernie Sanders, who…are willing to tackle the corporate hegemony and Wall Street domination that make daily life all but unlivable for the asset-less many."
Last February, political scientist Gladden Pappin (who was since installed as president of the Hungarian government's foreign policy research institute) published a long article at American Affairs titled "Requiem for the Realignment." Much like Ahmari, his complaint was that "neither conservatives at the Heritage Foundation nor 'based MAGA' advocates online have articulated a positive governing agenda that would use the power of the state to bolster the national industrial economy and support the American family." Pappin attributed Republicans' mediocre showing in the 2022 midterm elections to their reflexive invocation of Reagan-era talking points.
To the extent the GOP is hewing to the old playbook, though, it's likely because its base still largely supports economic freedom. Contra Ahmari, it's not just the donor class: According to a recent Gallup survey, 78 percent of Republicans think government is doing too many things that should be left to individuals and businesses, compared to just 18 percent who think government should do more to solve our country's problems. Among Democrats, those numbers are reversed—and at this supposed moment of realignment, the two parties are further apart on that question than they were 20 or 30 years ago.
Alas, it's not all good news. Americans may favor cutting government in theory, but once programs get going, they're damnably hard to eliminate in practice. Ruffini cautions that proposals to reform Social Security and Medicare are unpopular, especially among moderate swing-voter demographics. "The country may well need to reform entitlements to ensure their fiscal solvency," he writes, "but there are substantial political costs for Republicans who try to go it alone. Until and unless a bipartisan solution avails itself, Republicans would be wise to tread lightly."
Those political costs are real. A 2021 analysis by the pseudonymous blogger Xenocrypt found that many of the voters who fall into the upper-left (socially conservative, fiscally progressive) quadrant of Drutman's graph are only there because they don't want to see Social Security and Medicare benefits touched. Remove those two issues and an awful lot of supposed populists look like run-of-the-mill pro-market conservatives. No wonder so few Republican lawmakers are willing to die on the hill of entitlement reform.
Henry Olsen, a conservative Washington Post columnist who has more than earned his reputation as a shrewd observer of global politics, takes an even stronger view. Republicans "can't be the party of tax cuts to the exclusion of government spending," he says. "They don't have to be the protectionist party. But they do have to be the party that stops treating free trade as religious doctrine. And if the party doesn't want to do that, it will eventually find itself on the outs with its voters."
He doesn't think the GOP should reject markets entirely or "become indistinguishable from the Democrats," Olsen says. But he supports far more economic intervention than a libertarian would like. He thinks government has a responsibility to keep our food and drugs safe, to make sure workers aren't being exploited by employers, and to prevent "industry concentration" and the "unfair competition" that results. "A conservatism that wants to say 'no, no, no' to all of that," he concludes, "is a conservatism that wants to continually be a minority, and wants the country to move even further left than would otherwise be the case, because it forfeits the opportunity to define the center."
Recent elections do suggest a realignment is occurring, with more-educated voters increasingly identifying as Democrats and less-educated voters increasingly identifying as Republicans. Judis, Teixeira, and their allies hope the Democratic Party will adapt by moderating its cultural stances. Olsen and his allies hope the GOP will be more willing to compromise on economics. The result, as the ideological center of gravity on both sides shifts toward the middle, is that the major parties could start to look more and more alike.
This, in fact, is what the "median voter theorem" suggests should have been happening all along. That's the idea from political science and public choice economics that says, in essence, that elections will be won by whichever candidate is closer to the average member of the electorate—and that, as a result, candidates will tend to converge toward the center.
It's great if that means less mindless woke overreach by the left. But is there hope for economic freedom in such a future?
Libertarians needn't despair just yet. There may be tough times ahead for advocates of free minds and free markets, but then, what's new? We can take some solace in the knowledge that, while the median voter theorem might seem to have logic on its side, the reality has never been quite what the model would predict.
Part of the reason is that a major party that actually moves to the middle opens itself up to a third-party challenge from the outside flank. Another part is that it's hard to get people excited about milquetoast centrism. As Olsen himself put it in a recent column, "Historically, American voters have been attracted to parties and political figures with strong agendas and stronger personalities." They want "bold, unmistakable colors," to borrow President Ronald Reagan's metaphor, not "pastel shades."
A candidate with the conscience of his convictions who knows how to connect with voters can be a powerful force. At the same time, most regular Americans are not wedded to one ideological position, especially when it comes to complex economic policy questions: Their intuitions are often self-contradictory, and exposure to more information (like how much a proposed government program would actually cost!) can move the needle quite a lot.
All of which suggests that efforts at persuasion are not futile. We've already seen that Hispanic voters and other former Democratic constituencies exhibit an openness to free market ideas. The notion that left-wing positions are always better for working-class Americans is a gross oversimplification, after all. Just ask the many energy-sector employees in places like Louisiana and Texas how they feel about the Democratic Party's environmental agenda.
If we care about America's future, giving up on fiscal sanity is simply not an option. The entitlement system is going broke, whether or not it's politically popular to do something about it. Social Security and health insurance programs such as Medicare account for nearly half the federal budget, and as the ranks of retirees swell, they will consume an ever larger share. Debt service—that is, paying interest on the trillions of dollars Washington borrowed to finance its previous overspending—has exploded as interest rates have risen in the last couple of years. These problems are structural, and they will sink our economy eventually if they're not addressed.
Dismissive as he may be of libertarianism, Olsen understands this and has some ideas. "My view is that what the Republican Party needs to do is treat the budgetary crisis as a moral question as much as a political question," he says. "In large part, we have a deficit because we've been giving money, both through the tax code and through expenditures, to people who don't need it."
Olsen thinks the path forward is to eliminate tax breaks and subsidies that go to the rich. First and foremost, that means implementing a means test for entitlement programs: People bringing in hundreds of thousands of dollars in retirement income neither need nor deserve the same Social Security benefits as those who are just scraping by, he says. But it would also involve reforms like doing away with the tax break enjoyed by elite university endowments and ending farm subsidies. (Hilariously, "common-good conservative" Rubio, by insisting on handouts for his pals in the sugar industry, is a major obstacle on that last item.)
"I would never use the word austerity," Olsen says. "You're talking about a question of morals. The welfare state exists in theory to help people who need it overcome obstacles they can't bear on their own. The welfare state in practice—particularly because, for the left, the welfare state is meant to socialize life—gives money willy-nilly to people who need it or don't need it." That has to change, as libertarians and blue-collar voters alike should be able to agree. And approaching the budget with that goal in mind, Olsen says, "could go a long way toward closing the deficit."
An enduring tension in politics, Ruffini writes, is that "to get to 51 percent, the coalition needs to not entirely make sense." Yet there's no reason working-class and nonwhite Americans have to be at odds with those who strongly favor economic liberty. "When people hear about Republicans as a working-class party, they might assume this means an embrace of left-wing ideas about government spending, taxation, and regulation," he writes. "But the new Republican voters are not demanding this, and the current working-class realignment is happening under the umbrella of a pro-capitalist" GOP.
The Democratic Party has driven away droves of swing voters with its radicalism. The Republican Party has a choice about how to try to keep them. It can double down on the culture war, inflaming political tensions further. Or it can appeal to their aspirations; to their support for equality of opportunity, not equality of outcomes; and to the widely held belief that America is, and should remain, a place where people get ahead by working hard, not by looking to the state to solve their problems.
The second option is not only healthier for our country. Done well, it might just be smart politics.
The post Can Free Markets Win Votes in the New GOP? appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>On November 21, 2023, a BBC reporter unearthed a 20-year-old interview in which the pseudonymous street artist Banksy disclosed his first name (Robbie) for the first time.
The British graffiti artist is famous around the world for his use of stencils and for his work's anti-establishment, anti-war themes. A protester tosses not a Molotov cocktail but a bouquet of flowers; a young girl hugs a bomb instead of a teddy bear; a reproduction of Monet's lily pads is marred by rubbish; the communist leader Che Guevara wears sunglasses with dollar signs over his eyes.
Many of these images appear in "The Art of Banksy," an unauthorized exhibit in downtown London tracing the artist's career. Notable is a series of ad materials for The Walled Off Hotel, an actually operating lodging house in the Palestinian West Bank, which Banksy opened in 2017 to draw attention to a physical barrier constructed by the Israeli government. The wall, the hotel's website declares, is "either a vital security measure or an instrument of apartheid," depending on one's perspective.
Given the war now raging between Israel and Hamas (and the worldwide protests that have followed), Banksy's political statement seems just as relevant as, and even more controversial than, ever.
The post Review: Banksy's Iconic Art on Display in London appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>This week's featured article is "Long Live the Conch Republic" by Stephanie Slade.
This audio was generated using AI trained on the voice of Katherine Mangu-Ward.
Music credits: "Deep in Thought" by CTRL and "Sunsettling" by Man with Roses
The post <I>The Best of Reason</I>: Long Live the Conch Republic appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>The United States acquired the island of Key West through neither military conquest nor diplomatic treaty. In good American fashion, it was purchased with private funds.
The island was uninhabited except by foliage and flamingos when John Whitehead spotted it while sailing from Nassau in 1819. It had little to recommend it—not even a source of fresh water—except a deep harbor, fortuitously placed between America's Eastern Seaboard and the busy gulf port of Mobile, Alabama.
Sensing the potential in that location, Whitehead and a business partner, John Simonton, tracked down the island's owner, a Spanish citizen named Juan Pablo Salas, and made him a $2,000 offer. "Salas accepted, no doubt believing he'd gotten the better part of the deal," writes Maureen Ogle in Key West: History of an Island of Dreams.
The island began to fill with settlers and just as soon acquired a reputation as a "deadly nest" of pirates and disease. "In another time and place, such a reputation may have killed the settlement," Ogle explains. "But in early-nineteenth-century America—alive with the pioneering spirit—that reputation only added to Key West's allure." As Simonton himself put it, "Capital and capitalists will always go where profit is to be found."
Wrecking, or salvaging the cargo of distressed sea vessels, was the town's chief industry. Wreckers provided an invaluable service, venturing out during violent storms at grave risk to themselves to prevent the loss of both life and goods when ships foundered on the hazardous coral reefs. "It was a vocation regulated by few laws," writes Victoria Shearer in It Happened in the Florida Keys, "but governed by firm rules of honor: The first wrecking vessel to arrive at a distressed ship became the wrecking master of record, directing the salvage and earning a larger share of the proceeds. Other wreckers received shares in proportion to the amount of tonnage they saved."
On shore, commission agents waited to receive the cargo and arranged to have it auctioned off—for a cut of the reward, of course.
The construction of public lighthouses (and the introduction of steam-powered ships, less likely to be blown aground) eventually put the wreckers out of business. Sea-sponge harvesting, cigar manufacturing, and tourism took over as engines of the local economy. The second of those was a product of government intervention: In the 1850s, Congress imposed stiff tariffs on Cuban cigars but failed to apply the duty to raw tobacco leaf. Predictably, entrepreneurs took to making bulk ingredient purchases in Havana and then set up factories in Key West, a mere 90 miles away. The workers were largely imported from Cuba as well.
During the 19th century, "a decidedly cosmopolitan city slowly emerged from the mangrove thickets," Ogle writes. "Because Key West sat at the crossroads of the Caribbean, everyone crossed paths with throngs of what one islander called 'world wanderers,'" from Bahamians to Irishmen to "Hindoos" to Swedes.
Key West naturally selected for a certain anti-authoritarian disposition. When state health officials responded to an 1896 smallpox outbreak by establishing a quarantine camp and closing the harbor, residents "balked," Ogle recounts. "At a town meeting, seven hundred people listened as one speaker after another denounced government interference. Key Westers paid taxes and got nothing but grief" from the state capital, they said. Eventually, "the crowd voted to inform the state legislature of their desire to secede."
It wouldn't be the last time.
***
By the early 20th century, Key West was gaining fame as a haven of vice. Saloons lined Duval Street. Gambling and prostitution were major attractions.
The situation intensified with the passage of the 18th Amendment, which banned the manufacture, sale, and transportation of alcohol. Suddenly, rumrunning became the biggest business of all. "Liquor washed over Key West during Prohibition like high tide under a full moon," Shearer writes. "Given its proximity to Cuba and the Bahamas, both of which were swimming in booze, the Florida Keys became a wide-open distribution point….Locals considered smuggling liquor a public service."
In Key West, even the Prohibition agents often left the islanders well enough alone—and for good reason. One story, recounted in both books, involves a 1926 speakeasy raid by a group of federal "revenooers" down from Miami. For whatever reason, this time the townspeople weren't having it. "Proprietors of the raided properties swore out warrants against the agents," Ogle writes, "charging them with assault and battery, destruction of private property, and larceny."
The justice of the peace for the Keys, Rogelio Gomez, "sided with the locals and granted the warrants," Shearer explains, making him "the only county magistrate in the United States ever to issue an arrest warrant against a Prohibition agent." The Miami agents, apparently seeing the writing on the wall, snuck out through the back door of the courthouse and escaped aboard a Navy ship. "The mess was finally cleaned up when the two sides—locals and feds—reached a compromise and dropped both cases," Shearer writes.
Around this time, Key Westers (also known as "Conchs") rejoiced when the U.S. Coast Guard relocated its headquarters away from the island. "And why shouldn't they have?" asks Ogle. "From the point of view of Key West rumrunners, the Coast Guard represented unfair competition. As soon as the Guard's servicemen seized a cargo of contraband booze, they turned right around and sold it….Who wouldn't be resentful?"
The onset of the Great Depression a few years later hit the island city hard. It's an exaggeration to say Ernest Hemingway's personal expenditures single-handedly kept the economy going, but only just. The celebrity writer ate and drank at the city's taverns; took out-of-town friends on deep-sea fishing expeditions; bought and renovated his now-famous residence on Whitehead Street; and lured in other literary types with disposable income, including the poet Robert Frost, the philosopher John Dewey, and the playwright Tennessee Williams.
But even Hemingway's largesse wasn't enough for the struggling town. In 1934, Julius Stone Jr., head of the Florida division at the Federal Emergency Relief Administration, arrived with an ambitious plan: to "turn Key West into a first-class tourist destination" by rehabilitating the historic downtown with a combination of federal dollars and local volunteer labor. Hoping to cultivate the arts scene, Stone also tasked a cadre of writers, painters, thespians, and musicians employed by the Works Progress Administration and the Federal Writers' Project with beautifying the island.
Perhaps the least libertarian aspect of Key West history, then, is that its fame as a hub of arts and culture was purchased in sizable part with tax money. But that story's epilogue is worth bearing in mind: After the New Deal programs dried up, locals created an arts league in an effort to maintain their new reputation. Stone himself, "back in town as a practicing attorney and mover-and-shaker, served as one of the organization's first presidents," Ogle writes. "Later, he would flee the island when one of his many shady deals turned sour."
Leading lights such as Hemingway and Frost, lamenting the touristification of the island, decamped. But those who remained bet on the allure of "bohemianism," producing glossy brochures that, in Ogle's words, "played up the island's live-and-let-live attitude and portrayed the community as a hotbed of eccentricity." Later, the same spirit would make Key West into a gay enclave famous for its drag shows.
There does seem to be something to the notion that Conchs are just different from other folks. In 1962, Americans held their collective breath as the country tottered on the edge of war. News broke that the Soviets had installed nuclear missiles in communist Cuba, putting attack capabilities in the United States' backyard. But despite being on the literal frontlines of that showdown, Shearer reports, "Life in Key West remained curiously, quintessentially laid back. After all, October in the Florida Keys, the height of hurricane season, had always been fraught with a degree of danger."
In the 1970s, the Keys emerged as a way station in the international drug trade. The same personal and geographic characteristics that had allowed Key West denizens to flourish during Prohibition (including a high tolerance for risk and hundreds of miles of marshy coastline) made it tough for federal law enforcement officials to keep up with traffickers half a century later—especially when local law enforcement officials were sometimes in on the game.
***
By 1982, the feds had come up with a new tactic for catching drug runners and illegal immigrants entering the country through the Keys. Their move sparked an uprising that, in a sense, continues to this day.
On April 18, without warning, the U.S. Border Patrol set up a checkpoint on U.S. Highway 1 at the top of the Keys—the only road out of town—and began searching all vehicles attempting to pass north onto the mainland. By some reports, the roadblock caused traffic to back up for 19 miles. Motorists, most of whom were vacationers headed home at the end of the weekend, sat for hours in the heat waiting for their chance to pass.
The tourism industry felt an immediate impact in the form of canceled reservations. Proprietors didn't take that lightly.
Mayor Dennis Wardlow and the island's Chamber of Commerce initially tried the legal route: They flew to Miami and filed for an injunction in federal court. It was to no avail. So the outraged Key Westers opted for a more dramatic response.
On April 23, Wardlow announced that Key West was seceding from the Union. "They're treating us like a foreign country," he said, "so we might as well become one." Assuming the title of prime minister, he lowered the stars and stripes and raised the light blue flag of the fledgling Conch Republic. "We serve notice on the government in Washington," he declared, "to remove the roadblock or get ready to put up a permanent border to a new foreign land. We as a people may have suffered in the past, but we have no intention of suffering in the future at the hands of fools and bureaucrats….We're Conchs and we've had enough."
Wardlow's cheeky intention was to declare war on America, fire one shot, surrender, and then ask for $1 billion in aid for rebuilding. His countrymen carried out the plan of attack as only Key Westers would. "Using the Conch Republic's weapon of choice—hard, stale Cuban bread," Shearer writes, a member of Wardlow's war cabinet "hit a cooperative young uniformed naval officer over the head, then immediately handed over the loaf."
The rebellion was part publicity stunt, part genuine protest. ("We're happy to secede today with some humor," Wardlow said. "But there's some anger, too.") It was effective on both counts: The roadblock was speedily removed, and the gag became a tourism bonanza.
Today, Conch Republic apparel is available at pretty much all of Key West's many, many T-shirt shops. A 10-day "independence" celebration happens every April, drawing thousands to the island. (The festivities include a mock battle in which combatants pelt naval vessels with water balloons and conch fritters.) Community leaders boast that Conchs are a people with a "sovereign state of mind." The micronation even sells novelty passports—and there are documented cases of holders successfully using them to travel abroad and reenter the United States. Sovereign, indeed!
In 1994, the Conchs sent an "official" delegation to the Summit of the Americas in Miami. In 1995, when a government shutdown in Washington caused the closure of Dry Tortugas National Park, just off the Florida coast, the Republic "threatened to use three antique biplanes loaded with stale Cuban bread to bomb the park's Fort Jefferson" unless the popular tourist destination was reopened, Shearer writes.
More recently, in 2006, the fake country "annexed" a stretch of an abandoned overseas bridge after the Coast Guard told a group of Cuban refugees that landing there did not trigger "wet foot, dry foot"—the policy at the time of granting legal status to any Cuban who landed on American soil.
Peter Anderson, who held the title of Conch Republic secretary general, "led a landing party of Conchs who staked miniature flags along the bridge," wrote Darien Cavanaugh in a 2015 article for the War Is Boring website. "Since the federal government decided in its infinite wisdom that the old Seven Mile Bridge is not territory of the United States, the Conch Republic is very interested," Anderson told reporters; Washington "chose not to defend" the bridge against the invasion.
And there you have the colorful history behind the Key West motto, emblazoned on everything from sweatshirts to souvenir passports: "We seceded where others failed."
The post Long Live the Conch Republic appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>January marks the 120th anniversary of "Gasparilla," a simulated pirate invasion of Tampa, Florida, held (almost) every year since 1904. The flotilla, parade, and street festival celebrate the fictional exploits of José Gaspar, a Spanish marauder who, according to city lore, terrorized the Gulf Coast in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. In his final sea battle, he is said to have wrapped himself in a ship's anchor chain and jumped overboard shouting, "Only I will choose my destiny!" rather than be taken alive.
There is no evidence that Gaspar actually existed, but piracy was all too real and none too pleasant for those who encountered it. Many tales of rape, pillage, and murder in the Caribbean are not apocryphal, even if the event "commemorated" by Tampa's pirate festival is.
Today, with such lawlessness safely in the past, hundreds of thousands of attendees join Ye Mystic Krewe of Gasparilla, the group that sponsors the festivities, to demand that Tampa's mayor turn over the keys of the city to the invading hordes for one weekend each winter. Thus, human creativity has made what would probably have been a harrowing experience into a source of fun and entertainment: "Tampa's most prized tradition."
The post Review: When Pirates Take Over Tampa appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>In a special bonus Reason Roundtable podcast, Reason's very own Floridians Peter Suderman, Stephanie Slade, Zach Weissmueller, and C.J. Ciaramella discuss stories specific to the Sunshine State culled from the upcoming Florida-themed issue of the magazine. Topics include the origins of the infamous "Florida Man," monkeys with herpes, the colorful history of Key West, and alligator knowledge.
09:30—The Villages, a unique retirement community
21:44—Origins of the "Florida Man" meme
41:00—Key West, the Conch Republic
39:50—The Bushwacker cocktail
44:54—Favorite weird Florida stories
Mentioned in this podcast:
"The Villages Is America's Boomer Boomtown," by Zach Weissmueller
"Monkey Herpes, Face Eating, and the Pork Chop Gang: How Public Records Laws Created the Florida Man," by C.J. Ciaramella
"Long Live the Conch Republic," by Stephanie Slade
"How the Bushwacker Cocktail Migrated to Florida," by Peter Suderman
"Florida vs. California," by Matt Welch, Katherine Mangu-Ward, Nick Gillespie, and Peter Suderman
Send your questions to roundtable@reason.com. Be sure to include your social media handle and the correct pronunciation of your name.
Audio production by Ian Keyser; assistant production by Hunt Beaty.
Music: "Angeline," by The Brothers Steve
The post A Bonus <I>Reason Roundtable</I> Featuring Four 'Florida Men' of Our Own appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Richard M. Weaver's Ideas Have Consequences, published 75 years ago, is not really a book about how ideas have consequences. It's a book about what one idea, propounded by the medieval friar William of Occam—"the fateful doctrine of nominalism, which denies that universals have a real existence"—has wrought through the ages.
In Weaver's view, the answer was nothing good. Occam's nominalist philosophy has produced a squishy relativism that rejects objective morality and a blindered materialism that doubts the validity of anything that can't be empirically measured. It has led us to undervalue community, eschew tradition, and forget that rights are accompanied by duties. Weaver's book, the title of which became an anthem of mid-century American conservatism, was an attempt to revive the notion "that there is a world of ought, that the apparent does not exhaust the real." But mostly it was a catalog of complaints against modernity.
Like the more extreme voices on today's New Right, Weaver seemed to question whether liberal order was compatible with human flourishing. But by the end of his life—he died suddenly at the age of 53—his tune had changed. Individual liberty, he eventually realized, was more than incidental to the good society.
The Weaver of Ideas Have Consequences could be insightful, even prophetic. He could also be a curmudgeon, dismissing jazz music as "the clearest of all signs of our age's deep-seated predilection for barbarism" and lamenting, at length, that "woman has increasingly gone into the world as an economic 'equal' and therefore competitor of man." (He describes working women making "a drab pilgrimage from two-room apartment to job to divorce court" and posits that "woman will regain her superiority when again she finds privacy in the home and becomes, as it were, a priestess radiating the power of proper sentiment.")
Weaver's politics were, if anything, even more eyebrow raising than his cultural critique. Ideas Have Consequences was published in 1948, a moment that was closer to the Bolshevik Revolution than to the fall of the Berlin Wall. Few people then entertained the possibility that the Cold War might culminate in the total defeat of the USSR, but it's plain the idea would have struck Weaver as downright delusional. The text of the book is replete with suggestions that the Soviets understood, as the West did not, the necessity of controlling their population, including through censorship.
"The Russians, with their customary logical realism, which ought to come as a solemn admonition to the Western mind, have concluded that freedom to initiate conflicts is not one of the legitimate freedoms," he wrote, not exactly disapprovingly. "They have therefore established state control of journalism. If newspapers can do nothing but lie, they will at least lie in the interest of the state, which, according to the philosophy of statism, is not lying at all. Certainly it remains to be seen whether the Western democracies with their strong divisive forces can continue to allow a real freedom of the press."
Weaver likewise believed there was something to be said for a command-and-control economy. Modern man is weak and decadent, he thought—spoiled by a rotten culture and lacking the self-discipline to do great things. Left to their own devices, then, Americans would surely opt for ever more leisure and ever less work. Communism at least offered a response: "The Russians with habitual clarity of purpose have made their choice," he wrote. "There is to be discipline, and it is to be enforced by the elite controlling the state."
Could a free society hope to outcompete such a system? Weaver appeared to doubt it. "There seems to remain only the question of whether the West will allow comfort to soften it to a point at which defeat is assured," he wrote, "or whether it will accept the rule of hardness and discover means of discipline." If the latter route were followed, "personality will hardly survive," he acknowledged. "The individual will be told that the state is moving to guarantee his freedom, as in a sense it will be; but, to do so, it must prohibit individual indulgence and even responsibility. To give strength to its will, the state restricts the wills of its citizens. This is a general formula of political organization."
Like many traditionalists, Weaver prioritized order above freedom. The chaos of the modern age struck him as a death sentence for Western civilization. "For four centuries every man has been not only his own priest but his own professor of ethics," he wrote, "and the consequence is an anarchy which threatens even that minimum consensus of value necessary to the political state."
That, at least, was how Weaver felt in 1948. Twelve years later, he published an essay on the similarities between conservatism and libertarianism that struck a different tone. Where the Weaver of Ideas Have Consequences was nonchalant about the use of government power, this Weaver took almost the opposite position.
"I maintain that the conservative in his proper character and role is a defender of liberty," he wrote in the May 1960 issue of The Individualist. "He is such because he takes his stand on the real order of things and because he has a very modest estimate of man's ability to change that order through the coercive power of the state."
In one particularly striking passage, Weaver drew what he saw as a crucial distinction between persuasion and compulsion. "There is a difference between trying to reform your fellow beings by the normal processes of logical demonstration, appeal, and moral suasion—there is a difference between that and passing over to the use of force or constraint," he wrote. "The former is something all of us engage in every day. The latter is what makes the modern radical dangerous and perhaps in a sense demented. His first thought now is to get control of the state to make all men equal or make all men rich, or failing that to make all men equally unhappy. This use of political instrumentality to coerce people to conform with his dream…is our reason, I think, for objecting to the radical."
What accounted for this change of heart? Like certain members of today's illiberal right, Weaver was ideologically promiscuous throughout his life, flirting with socialism during college, adopting a Southern agrarian outlook early in his career, and cementing his place as a leading traditionalist—the "captain of the anti-liberal team," according to his fellow conservative Willmoore Kendall—with Ideas Have Consequences.
That remains his best-known work, but something happened in the years after the book's publication: a new philosophical synthesis emerged, defended by writers such as Frank S. Meyer and M. Stanton Evans in the pages of newly launched journals like National Review. This "fusion" of conservatism and libertarianism was quickly adopted on much of the American right, becoming the foundation upon which the conservative movement as we know it was built. It held that liberty and virtue were mutually reinforcing—and that government's sole purpose was to protect our freedom, while our job was to use that freedom to pursue the higher things in life.
Within a dozen years, Weaver went from questioning whether liberal democracy could survive to exhorting conservatives, in thoroughly fusionist fashion, that when someone "tries to use the instrumentality of the state to bring about his wishes…we have to take our stand." Perhaps ideas really do have consequences.
The post <i>Ideas Have Consequences</i> Turns 75 appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>New Deal Rebels, a new anthology published by the American Institute for Economic Research, is an antidote to the idea that there ever was a consensus behind President Franklin D. Roosevelt's attempts to end the Great Depression by, among other things, forcing farmers to destroy crops the government deemed "surplus."
A long, illuminating introduction from the volume's editor, Amity Shlaes, is followed by 53 short selections from the New Deal era. Some are a bit tedious for bedtime reading, but many are jewels. These include "One From One Leaves Two," a spunky poem by Ogden Nash from the perspective of a farmer wondering how to make his cow and hens stop "overproducing" milk and eggs (concluding lines: "I pray the Lord my soul to take/If the tax-collector hasn't got it before I wake"); several exasperated Garet Garrett columns for The Saturday Evening Post; the text of the Supreme Court's Schechter Poultry Corp. decision, which unanimously found the National Recovery Administration to be unconstitutional; and an editorial from the Chicago Defender, an African-American newspaper, celebrating that ruling as a vindication of "the wisdom of the founders of the Republic."
Best of all is a 1936 essay by Winston Churchill, not yet prime minister of the United Kingdom, who did not hold back in excoriating Roosevelt's disdain for the U.S. Constitution. The piece begins by imploring readers to decide, first and foremost, whether they "value the State above the citizen, or the citizen above the State? Does a government exist for the individual, or do individuals exist for the government?" His answer was clear. Ours should be as well.
The post Review: Not Everyone Liked the New Deal appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>In 2015, when GOP presidential contenders took the stage at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library and Museum, the 40th president's legacy loomed large. Debaters mentioned Reagan nearly four dozen times, according to Fortune.
Eight years later, the Gipper's reputation has taken a beating in some quarters. The illiberal right treats "Zombie Reaganite" as a go-to insult for old-school conservatives and libertarians, deriding the Reaganesque emphasis on free markets, limited government, and "peace through strength" as quaint at best. The GOP is "probably more of a Trump party" than a Reagan party at this point, one attendee of a soiree at the Reagan Library told Politico a couple of weeks ago.
Nonetheless, former Vice President Mike Pence has made it clear that he believes GOP primary voters still have an appetite for a candidate in the Reagan mold. At the second primary debate of the season last night, also held at the Reagan Library, he defended "the conservative agenda that Ronald Reagan brought forward in this party, of a strong national defense, standing with our allies, standing up to our enemies, supporting limited government and traditional values."
"Frankly, our party does face a time for choosing," he said, referring to an iconic speech delivered by Reagan at the 1964 Republican National Convention. It's a choice of "whether we're going to stand on the foundation of that conservative agenda that Ronald Reagan poured, or whether we're going to follow the siren song of populism unmoored to conservative principles."
Earlier this week, four former Reagan administration officials, including former Heritage Foundation President Ed Feulner, released an open letter "wholeheartedly" endorsing Pence as the "candidate who embodies the spirit and principles of Ronald Reagan."
Republican voters are, in fact, slightly more likely to name Reagan than Donald Trump as the best recent president, according to Pew. In June, Gallup found that Reagan enjoys a 69 percent approval rating overall, more than 20 points higher than Trump's.
For all that, of course, it's Trump who is dominating the primary field. Pence is currently in fifth place, with less than 5 percent in the RealClearPolitics polling average. Republican voters still love the idea of Reagan, but at a moment when culture war concerns seem to rule, their preference in 2024 may be for an angry warrior over a happy one.
The post Mike Pence Claims the Reagan Mantle. So Far, It Isn't Helping Him. appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>The government may not compel someone to "create speech she does not believe," the Supreme Court ruled in June. In a 6–3 opinion authored by Justice Neil Gorsuch, the Court sided with a graphic designer, Lorie Smith, who wanted to expand into the wedding website business without being forced by Colorado law to create products celebrating same-sex marriages.
Back in 2021, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 10th Circuit found that the planned websites would each constitute "an original, customized creation," designed by Smith with a goal of celebrating the couple's "unique love story." As such, it said, they "qualify as 'pure speech' protected by the First Amendment." The appeals court admitted that Smith was willing to provide her services to anyone as long as the substance of the project did not contradict her values. It also recognized that "Colorado's 'very purpose' in seeking to apply its law to Ms. Smith" was to stamp out dissenting ideas about marriage.
Despite all of that, the 10th Circuit held that the state government was within its authority to compel her to create such websites. Lamenting "an unfortunate tendency by some to defend First Amendment values only when they find the speaker's message sympathetic," Gorsuch et al. concluded otherwise.
The ruling in 303 Creative LLC v. Elenis is neither as narrow nor as broad as it (theoretically) could have been. The Court did not do away with public accommodations laws or allow businesses to discriminate against customers on the basis of characteristics such as skin color or national origin. But it did note that "public accommodations statutes can sweep too broadly when deployed to compel speech."
The high court also did not establish a right for any and every business owner to decline to provide services for same-sex weddings—only those whose services involve expressive activity. Whether a particular service (say, cake baking) is expressive will have to be litigated case by case.
At the same time, the majority decided Smith's case as a matter of free expression rather than religious liberty. It did not say the faith-based nature of Smith's beliefs about marriage entitled her to an exemption. Secular people with moral or factual objections to expressing a particular message presumably would receive the same protections as Christians or Muslims with religious objections—as they should.
"The opportunity to think for ourselves and to express those thoughts freely is among our most cherished liberties," Gorsuch wrote in the majority opinion. "Abiding the Constitution's commitment to the freedom of speech means all of us will encounter ideas we consider….'misguided, or even hurtful'….But tolerance, not coercion, is our Nation's answer."
The post SCOTUS' Ruling in Gay Wedding Website Case Was a Defeat for Compelled Speech appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>In the new Netflix comedy Unstable, Rob Lowe stars as a lightly fictionalized alternate version of himself. Rather than a wildly successful, Earth-stoppingly charismatic Holly‑wood star, Ellis Dragon is a wildly successful, Earth-stoppingly charismatic Silicon Valley scientist. He runs a biotech lab that's working to save the world by, among other things, growing cheap replacement human organs and developing a carbon-capture procedure that will turn greenhouse gasses into cement.
The startup's future is at risk as Dragon spirals into mental-breakdown territory following the death of his wife. In a last-ditch effort to restore him to sanity and get the company back on track, his chief of staff secures the reluctant help of Dragon's son (played by Lowe's real-life son), who traded a promising career in science for work as a children's flute instructor in an ill-fated effort to outrun his father's celebrity.
The mental health angle may sound heavy, but the show's vibe is playful and heartwarming. With a plot that involves geoengineering, futurism, and the potential for entrepreneurial eccentrics to change history for the better, there's plenty here to smile about.
The post Review: <i>Unstable</i> Is a Futurist Comedy appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Kimberly Naranjo makes for a sympathetic protagonist. In childhood, she suffered abuse at home. In early adulthood, she struggled with addiction. But with the help of a kindly aunt, she got help, went back to school, and found a rewarding job as a drug and alcohol counselor.
Then came the mesothelioma diagnosis, which her lawyers say was caused by asbestos in Johnson & Johnson baby powder.
With less than 16 months to live, Naranjo hoped to collect damages from the megacorporation that could be used to support her children when she was gone. But her lawsuit quickly ran aground. Facing tens of thousands of potential claimants, Johnson & Johnson turned to a controversial aspect of the bankruptcy reorganization process in a bid to limit its liability. "Yes," writes the post-liberal journalist Sohrab Ahmari, "J&J—a profitable firm with a market capitalization of nearly half a trillion dollars—claimed to be broke."
This is just one in a litany of human-interest stories that Ahmari tells in Tyranny, Inc. (Forum Books), each of them eloquent and dripping with pathos. His book's goal is to show "that private actors can imperil freedom just as much as overweening governments," and his central claim is nothing if not bold: "Private tyranny precisely describes the world we inhabit today: a system that allows the asset-owning few to subject the asset-less many to pervasive coercion."
In the face of this nightmare, Ahmari says, the way forward is clear: reject unfettered markets and shift from the current "neoliberal" system to a different arrangement. Call it "social democracy," "socially managed capitalism," or—Ahmari's preference—"political-exchange capitalism": a sort of light democratic socialism in which "the state" takes "a far more active role in coordinating economic activity for the good of the whole community."
More concretely, Ahmari suggests that the state restrict international trade, encourage unionization, exert veto power over the financial sector, mandate higher minimum wages, spend far more on large-scale public works projects, and so on. He looks wistfully back at the New Deal, which he sees as a period "when government, big business, and big labor had joined hands…showcasing the productive genius of highly regulated, heavily unionized capitalism." The problem today, in his telling, is "a failure to subject the market to sufficient political control."
But hang on a moment. Careful readers of the opening anecdote might note that bankruptcy law is a creation of the state and that the judges who have handed down the decisions Ahmari laments are government employees. The bankruptcy process, in other words, is already subject to political control.
"The way to think of bankruptcy is as the least bad way we've been able to come up with for dealing with a fundamental problem, which is what do you do when there are more claims than there are assets to go around," says Todd Zywicki, a professor at George Mason University's Antonin Scalia Law School who specializes in bankruptcy and contract law. "It's an imperfect system to a fundamentally unsolvable problem….To think of it as being about private power is wrong."
***
This turns out to be true of several of the book's examples of "private tyranny," a reality Ahmari half-concedes. ("The point is to notice that market power is coercive power," he writes, "often relying on the state's backing and benefiting those blessed with legal sophistication at the expense of those who lack it.")
For instance, there's the Arizona family hit with a massive bill after a private emergency services provider they had never heard of, let alone signed a contract with, belatedly showed up to help put out a fire at their trailer. But such a scenario is imaginable only if the local authorities contract on residents' behalf, neglect to inform them of the terms, and then fall down at providing basic oversight of the vendor. Surely that is better described as an instance of government failure than market failure.
Then there's the former Sears auto mechanic who lost his job after a private equity firm purchased the struggling retail giant and ran it into bankruptcy. Ahmari says the man's story epitomizes the carnage wrought by a financial sector that enriches itself by buying, "looting," and then discarding the husks of once-great American companies.
That characterization is more than a bit rich. As Avik Roy, president of the Foundation for Research on Equal Opportunity, puts it, "You don't make money by stripping a company of its assets and selling them to the ground." While not every attempt will be successful, the goal of private equity is to create value by finding mismanaged businesses and turning them around.
At the same time, Ahmari's story overlooks the ways public policy introduces distortions in this space. Money printing, artificially low interest rates, and the implicit guarantee of government bailouts if things go sideways have all pumped up the financial industry, pushing people to invest in the stock market, increasing demand for ever more exotic financial instruments, and generally leading to riskier behavior than we would otherwise see. These are knock-on effects of government's attempts to manage the economy—to subject it to political control.
Ahmari is correct that coercion can be either private (as when a guy on the street puts a gun to your chest and demands you turn over your wallet) or public (as when the IRS threatens you with jail time if you refuse to pay your income taxes). But he goes much further than this, implying that unless employer and employee or producer and consumer enjoy precisely the same amount of bargaining power, coercion is necessarily at play.
This commits him to using the same label to refer to everything from "warn[ing] a bank teller that her children will be tortured unless she empties the vault" to telling customers that if they want a product, "they have to pay the price [the factory owner] demands." In one chapter, he calls it "class-based coercion" for a retail executive to record a podcast attempting to dissuade her workers from joining a union. In another, he implies that your employer abuses its power if it contractually bars you from trying to steal its clients when you leave the job.
This is colossally unhelpful. Even if you think there's something unseemly about certain types of private-sector arrangements, there has to be a way to rhetorically differentiate between a situation that involves violence or the threat thereof and a situation in which one party to a transaction merely has more market power than the other. Tyranny, Inc. stubbornly papers over all such distinctions. Under the book's logic, an employer expecting an employee to show up on time is just as guilty of coercion as is a bank robber.
Ahmari makes a half-hearted attempt to deal with this objection by stipulating that not all coercion is a bad thing. But since he repeatedly conflates coercion with tyranny, the effect is to reduce both concepts almost to meaninglessness.
It's also hard to square the apocalyptic picture Ahmari paints ("class domination," "financial misery," "the shattered edifice of middle-class dignity") with the generally positive view most people have of their own situations. Things aren't perfect, of course, but a 2022 Gallup poll found that 88 percent of the Americans who had jobs were completely or somewhat satisfied with them. The Edelman Trust Barometer reported this year that business is the only institution the global population views as both competent and ethical. Likewise, 78 percent of respondents say they trust their own employer, compared to 50 percent who say they trust the government.
The book has little to say to that, beyond telling us that "as a society we are captives of market utopianism" who "fail to notice the coercion that envelops us in the course of our routine economic activities." Well. OK, then.
***
Notwithstanding the survey data, it's true that all manner of things about our everyday market interactions strike lots of people as somewhere between mildly annoying and deeply unfair. The frustration of being bounced to voicemail while trying to get a customer service rep on the phone. The unpredictable schedules that make it difficult for service-sector employees to line up child care.
To be presented with, say, a nondisclosure agreement to sign on your first day of work may not be coercion in the same way the government's ability to seize your house through eminent domain is; that doesn't change the high personal costs associated with refusing to sign and having to start your job search over from scratch. Social media companies may have a First Amendment right to prohibit certain views from their platforms, but when they seem to penalize one political perspective more than another, it can just feel wrong. And Americans who perceive executive compensation vastly outpacing middle-class income growth are likely to be only so placated by a reminder that the middle class is becoming materially better off by the day (although it is).
The question is what, practically, to do about all this. Ahmari's solution is to use the heavy hand of government to brute-force outcomes he likes more. Not only is this unlikely to make things better, but it has the potential to make them much worse.
As a market participant, your bargaining power is a function of the quality of the alternatives available to you. The better your alternatives, the more credibly you can threaten to walk away, and the more concessions you'll be able to extract from the other party. The fewer your alternatives, the more unpleasantness you'll be willing to put up with.
This is why a wealthy, productive society is better for everyone. (As the economist Paul Krugman once said, "Productivity isn't everything, but in the long run, it's almost everything.") Ahmari frets about "the power of those who control most of society's assets to make others do their bidding—or go hungry," but 21st century America is rich enough that hunger is rarely the next best alternative. More often, a person may have to accept a lower salary or a less convenient commute. And this is true even for the relatively less well-off among us.
"There aren't many advantages to being a low-skilled worker, but there is one," says George Mason University economist Donald Boudreaux. "The skills that you're paid for are very versatile….You can flip hamburgers at McDonald's or Wendy's or Burger King. You can mow grass for Jewel's Lawn Care or Herman's Landscaping. And so precisely because low-skilled workers have skills that are so general—the market for them is very thick and wide—the notion that [any job is] a take-it-or-leave-it situation is absurd."
These realities should lead us to oppose government interventions that get in the way of starting new businesses and rolling out new products, because entrepreneurship and innovation increase the opportunities available to workers and consumers. Meanwhile, even well-intentioned public policies can inadvertently trap people where they are. Think of how the tax code makes it cheaper to obtain health insurance through your employer than to purchase it yourself—and how employer-provided insurance makes it harder to leave a crappy job.
Examples are everywhere. Price controls meant to protect customers lead to shortages of critical goods. Minimum wages price the lowest-skilled workers out of the labor market. Subsidies meant to bolster domestic competitiveness flow to well-established corporations at the expense of startups. And regulations, which Ahmari wants more of, put a damper on economic growth.
"The regulatory compliance burdens of the last 20 years have made it almost impossible to have small nimble firms be an alternative to these large hidebound bureaucratic companies," with their armies of lobbyists and compliance officers, explains Duke University economist Michael Munger. "There are far fewer business opportunities than there should be, and as a result, the very least well-off are subject to coercion. But the answer is not new regulatory burdens that will make it even harder for new businesses to come online but to get rid of the existing regulatory burdens, which will allow me to say, 'You know what, I'm tired of your bullshit, and I'm going to get a job somewhere else.'"
Government interventions often look good on the surface, but the tradeoffs can be enormous. A few years ago, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D–Mass.) proposed a law mandating that large corporations hand 40 percent of their board seats to worker representatives. It's easy to wonder who could be against giving employees a say in how the companies they work for are run. But if such arrangements ultimately make firms less efficient—and if you have to mandate them, there's a good reason to expect they will—the result will be less wealth to go around, which means fewer jobs and worse compensation, at the lowest rungs especially.
The same goes for the naive embrace of laws like one Ahmari touts requiring companies "to offer laid-off employees at least a week's worth of pay for every year of service." It doesn't seem to have crossed his mind that such mandates reduce full-time employment by raising the cost of each new hire and increasing the relative attractiveness of short-term contracts, automation, offshoring, and the like. Bless his heart, perhaps he thinks he can regulate those out of existence too.
***
This brings us to a different problem with Ahmari's desire for "a structural overhaul in the direction of greater political control." It's not just that more government interference in the economy diminishes productivity, making society less prosperous and reducing the alternatives available to employees and consumers. It's that politicization leads to, well, politicization—decisions made not because they're in keeping with sound legal or economic principles but because they benefit groups with political connections to those holding the reins of power.
Zywicki, the law professor, points to the auto bailouts to show how this approach threatens basic justice and the rule of law. Besides providing General Motors and Chrysler with piles of taxpayer cash, the Obama administration in 2009 also stepped in to overrule the normal bankruptcy process, dictating terms under which politically favored groups (such as members of the United Auto Workers) were protected while politically disfavored groups (including secured creditors who by rights should have been first in line for repayment) got fleeced.
Ideally, "the politics comes in when you're setting up the bankruptcy laws, just like when you're setting up the corporate laws," Zywicki says. "The idea is that after that, once the laws are in place, people understand the rules, and they can contract with respect to those background rules just like in any other contractual system." What happened in 2009, by contrast, assumes that technocratic regulators know best—and have the authority to impose their will coercively on everyone else, even when it means ignoring existing legal processes.
They don't know best. And because that sort of thinking—Zywicki has called it "the New Deal vision of the regulatory state"—opens the door to making choices for reasons of political expediency, it's also likely to be a boon for the very corporations that Tyranny, Inc. wants to see reined in.
Ahmari rightly bemoans the ways that "asset owners used economic and state power to stack the deck in their favor," a phenomenon free marketeers usually refer to as "crony capitalism." He goes so far as to write that the state today "actively abets private tyranny" (emphasis his). But if he really believes that, why on Earth would he want more political control over markets, more interference in the economy, more coziness between the public and private sectors, a more powerful state?
Some amount of politics is unavoidable. Markets will struggle to function if property rights aren't enforced, for example, and that requires laws and courts. Nor does the state always get everything wrong. In February, a three-judge panel rejected Johnson & Johnson's bankruptcy petition, finding it to be an abuse of the bankruptcy system. Naranjo's children may yet get their day in court.
Finally, there's no reason we can't work through the legal and democratic processes to roll back misguided government interventions. Abolish the Export-Import Bank, which funnels billions of tax dollars to well-connected megacorporations. Quit making it so much costlier to buy health insurance on your own than through your employer (and for goodness' sake, get rid of the ban on bare-bones catastrophic plans!). Put the regulatory state on the chopping block. Constrain the Federal Reserve. And to the extent that public policies create barriers to voluntary unionization, we should be willing to scrutinize those too.
In that sense, the choice isn't really between more politics and less; it's between more government interference in our lives and less. The alternative to trusting markets to sort things out is letting the state choose winners and losers. Tyranny, Inc. leans on the assumption that you'll be happy with those choices. I wouldn't be so sure.
The post 'Private Tyranny' Is Less Private Than You Think appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>At times over the last few years, observers of America's conservative movement could be forgiven for thinking the "New Right" was the only game in town.
That was never true, but today, 80-plus writers and thinkers from within the broad center-right released "Freedom Conservatism: A Statement of Principles" to make the existence of an alternative clear. (Although I'm not a signatory, I offered feedback to the organizers on an early draft of the document.)
Whereas the New Right is loosely united by skepticism, if not hostility, toward classical liberal norms and institutions, the "freecons" seek to revive a fusionist approach. "We believe in free enterprise, free trade, free speech, strong families, balanced budgets, and the rule of law," wrote John Hood, president of the North Carolina–based John William Pope Foundation and one of the organizers of the statement, at RealClearPolitics this morning. "We champion equal protection and equal opportunity."
The document is an implicit rejoinder to the National Conservatism statement of principles released last fall. In my own extensive coverage of the natcons, I've noted that one of their distinguishing features is an unabashed "will to power"—the idea that conservatives should be comfortable wielding the heavy hand of the state to reward their friends and punish their enemies. Limited government, in this view, is for suckers.
A close read of the two statements reveals key differences between their perspectives. The natcons pay lip service to federalism, for example, but quickly pivot to empowering the feds to make exceptions. "In those states or subdivisions in which law and justice have been manifestly corrupted," they write, "or in which lawlessness, immorality, and dissolution reign, national government must intervene energetically to restore order." One wonders what the limiting principle is if Washington is authorized to "intervene energetically" anytime it perceives immorality and "dissolution" within its borders. The freecons, on the other hand, insist that "the best way to unify a large and diverse nation like the United States is to transfer as many public policy choices as possible to families and communities."
Likewise on economic matters, where the natcons choose to emphasize that "the free market cannot be absolute" and go on to enumerate the various problems with current market outcomes that they presumably think justify government intervention. Conversely, the freecon statement points to the many ways that a "corrosive combination of government intervention and private cronyism" is making life unaffordable and looks to "competitive markets, greater individual choice, and free trade," not top-down management, as the answer. It also explicitly calls out the national debt as a threat to American security and prosperity.
"We call ourselves Freedom Conservatives not because freedom is our sole interest," explained Hood in his RealClearPolitics piece, "but because without it, our other fundamental values and institutions will prove impossible to sustain."
See the full statement and long list of signatories (several of whom are also Reason contributors) at the freecon Substack.
The post 'Freedom Conservatism' Statement of Principles Shows the New Right Isn't the Only Game in Town appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>The government may not compel someone to "create speech she does not believe," the Supreme Court ruled this morning. In a 6–3 opinion authored by Justice Neil Gorsuch, the Court sided with a graphic designer, Lorie Smith, who wanted to expand into the wedding-website business without being forced by Colorado law to create products celebrating same-sex marriages.
Back in 2021, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 10th Circuit found that the planned websites would each constitute "an original, customized creation," designed by Smith "using text, graphics, and in some cases videos" with a goal of celebrating the couple's "unique love story." As such, it said they "qualify as 'pure speech' protected by the First Amendment." The lower court admitted that Smith was willing to provide her services to anyone, regardless of race, religion, or sexual orientation, so long as the substance of the project did not contradict her values. It also recognized that "Colorado's 'very purpose' in seeking to apply its law to Ms. Smith" was to stamp out dissenting ideas about marriage. Despite all of that, incredibly, the 10th Circuit held that the state government was within its authority to compel her to create such websites against her will.
Lamenting "an unfortunate tendency by some to defend First Amendment values only when they find the speaker's message sympathetic," Gorsuch—joined by Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Clarence Thomas, Brett Kavanaugh, Samuel Alito, and Amy Coney Barrett—concluded otherwise.
The ruling in 303 Creative LLC v. Elenis is neither as narrow nor as broad as it (theoretically) could have been. The Court didn't do away with public accommodations, or businesses prohibited from discriminating against customers on the basis of characteristics such as skin color or national origin. It did note that "no public accommodations law is immune from the demands of the Constitution" and that "public accommodations statutes can sweep too broadly when deployed to compel speech." (The Colorado law was guilty in this instance.)
The high court also didn't establish a right for any and every business owner to decline to provide services for same-sex weddings—only those whose services involve expressive activity. Whether a particular service (say, cake baking) is expressive will have to be litigated case by case.
But the majority did decide Smith's case by appealing to free-expression precedents rather than religious-liberty ones. In other words, the justices didn't say that the faith-based nature of Smith's beliefs about marriage entitled her to an exemption. Presumably, a secular person with moral or factual objections to expressing a particular message would receive all the same protections as a Christian or Muslim objecting on religious grounds. As it should be.
"The opportunity to think for ourselves and to express those thoughts freely is among our most cherished liberties and part of what keeps our Republic strong," Gorsuch wrote in his majority opinion. "Of course, abiding the Constitution's commitment to the freedom of speech means all of us will encounter ideas we consider…'misguided, or even hurtful'….But tolerance, not coercion, is our Nation's answer."
The post Colorado Can't Force a Graphic Designer To Create Same-Sex Wedding Websites, Supreme Court Rules appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>In the closing weeks of 1969, a debate broke out in the pages of National Review about how American conservatives should respond to the threat posed by the New Left—the expanded universe of socialists, civil rights activists, anti-war protesters, feminists, environmentalists, and other lefty radicals then making political waves. Fifteen months earlier, police and demonstrators had met in a bloody clash outside the Democratic National Convention. The year before that had seen the storied "summer of love," coverage of which drove home for many Americans the sweeping cultural changes that were afoot.
For an ornery political science professor named Donald Atwell Zoll, the implications of these developments were clear: Conservatives must reject liberalism's thanatos, or death wish—"its preference for extinction (with its ideological purities preserved) as against adaptation or revision." By purities, he meant commitments to pluralism, individualism, and proceduralism, the "rules of the game" by which liberals were convinced opposing groups could coexist in peace.
The core problem, Zoll wrote, was that the New Left had proven itself uninterested in playing by those rules. "Its adherents were obviously willing to shoot at people," he claimed. "When they talked about 'revolution,' they meant storming a hundred Bastilles, not changing the minds of men after the fashion of older and more comfortable collectivists."
In response, liberalism might have opted to "repress its opponents…thus entailing a candid recognition that it had real live opponents." Alas, "the liberal establishment was unwilling to embrace" any solution that "would involve the abrogation of its 'democratic' preferences." This, Zoll thought, put conservatives in a sticky situation. They could either "go down with liberalism, clinging to the common values and abiding by the traditional rules of the game," or they could "elect to fight, uninhibited by the liberal thanatos or by liberal proprieties as to method."
Zoll allowed that this was "not an easy choice to make." But the risk, should his side choose not to fight uninhibited, was that "totalitarian radicalism would win the day." Against such an outcome, what's a little "countermilitancy, repression, force and forms of authoritarianism"? To survive, Zoll concluded gravely, conservatives would have to reject their traditional "anti-authoritarian inhibitions" and "prepare to fight—whatever this may entail—against the tide of contemporary Jacobinism, candidly facing the necessity of employing techniques generally ignored or rejected by contemporary Western conservatives."
Among those who were disturbed by this vision was National Review senior editor Frank S. Meyer, who fired back in the following issue of the magazine. "Professor Zoll's rejection of the values of an order directed toward the preservation of liberty and pluralism is a rejection also of the American tradition, the tradition of the Constitution and the Founding Fathers," he wrote. The choice between hard left-wing totalitarianism and soft right-wing authoritarianism, Meyer argued, was a false one: "There is a third alternative, and it is the only one conservatives can embrace if they are to remain conservatives": neither Robespierre nor Bismarck but George Washington.
Zoll was, to put it mildly, unsatisfied by this rejoinder. The back-and-forth continued until Meyer's death two years later, when it went dormant—for a time.
Back in 2019, then–New York Post opinion editor Sohrab Ahmari published an essay in First Things magazine with the curious title "Against David French-ism." Ahmari trained his guns on a lawyer and writer then employed by National Review, an evangelical Christian with a long record of defending civil liberties. The piece resurrected many of the notes Zoll had sounded 50 years prior.
"Conservative liberalism of the kind French embodies has a great horror of the state, of traditional authority and the use of the public power to advance the common good, including in the realm of public morality," Ahmari wrote. Attempting to change the culture through noncoercive means, he warned, would not stop the left. Instead, conservative Christians must be willing to "fight the culture war with the aim of defeating the enemy and enjoying the spoils"—that is, with the goal of acquiring sufficient power "to enforce our order and our orthodoxy."
French, through his commitment to civility and liberal proceduralism, had "kept his hands clean, his soul untainted," Ahmari sneered. "But conservative Christians can't afford these luxuries. Progressives understand that culture war means discrediting their opponents and weakening or destroying their institutions. Conservatives should approach the culture war with a similar realism."
Thus reads the script for the modern New Right: The left doesn't play fair. Survival necessarily means responding in kind. Liberalism prevents us from recognizing our enemies for what they are.
Sound familiar?
French responded much as Meyer had. "America will always be a nation of competing worldviews and competing, deeply held values," he wrote. "We can forsake a commitment to liberty and launch the political version of the Battle of Verdun, seeking the ruin of our foes, or we can recommit to our shared citizenship and preserve a space for all American voices, even as we compete against those voices in politics and the marketplace of ideas." But as French saw it, "there is no political 'emergency' that justifies abandoning classical liberalism, and there will never be a temporal emergency that justifies rejecting the eternal truth."
The historical resonance of this exchange suggests that conservatives inclined to agree with Ahmari might want to consider what happened the last time around. The Zoll of 1970 might be surprised by the state of things five decades on. His prophecies of doom have not panned out as expected.
Zoll's call to arms rested on a belief that not acting would be tantamount to suicide. Sure, he acknowledged "a theoretical chance that democratic pluralism might somehow survive on its own, in which case conservatism could weather the storm without coming down from its intellectual mountain to employ techniques both unfamiliar and distasteful." But that possibility clearly struck him as implausible. It rested on the hope that "decisively large sectors of the population" would reject the leftist agenda and that "the New Left, through lack of either will or means, [would fail] to bring about a violent political and social upheaval that would make the peaceful continuity of power and authority impossible."
Notwithstanding all the tumult of the '60s and '70s, the New Left did fail to bring down the liberal order or bring about a violent social upheaval. Not one Bastille has been toppled in America, let alone a hundred. Democratic pluralism has endured. Totalitarian radicalism has not yet won the day. The cultural cataclysm remains, as ever, in the future.
Is there reason to believe the danger now is greater than it was then? Are Ahmari and his fellow travelers more likely to be right about the intensity and imminence of the threat they face than their predecessors were? Time alone will say for sure, although it's worth noticing that most state and local governments, nearly all law enforcement agencies, the military, and the Supreme Court in 2023 skew conservative.
Incidentally, Zoll faded from the conversation after it emerged that he had lied about earning a Ph.D. Having lost his Arizona State University professorship, according to the 2006 tome American Conservatism: An Encyclopedia, he "apparently made a new career in elephant training." Should the predictions of today's New Right turn out to be overblown, its proponents will perhaps take consolation from Zoll's example of the expansive possibilities available in our mostly free society for personal and professional reinvention.
The post The New Right Isn't So New appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>"You can't have one faction of society weaponizing the power of the state against factions that it doesn't like," Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis told the North Carolina Republican Party on Friday night. That's absolutely true. It's a shame he has spent much of the past year flouting that injunction himself.
DeSantis was evidently referring to the recent indictment of former President Donald Trump over the classified documents Trump allegedly removed to his home in Florida and then refused to return. "Hillary had the emails," DeSantis also said during his speech. "Is there a different standard for a Democrat secretary of state vs. a former Republican president?"
It's fair to scrutinize the standards applied to prominent members of the different parties, and it's right to ask the justice system not to give preferential treatment to either side. It's also reasonable to question whether the law under which Trump is being charged should exist at all or should be used the way it historically has been, including to prosecute government whistleblowers.
But DeSantis ought to reevaluate his own record as governor in light of the principle he articulated Friday night. No two cases are ever identical, but wielding state power for political reasons is a rule-of-law violation that inexcusably undermines the legitimacy of our liberal order. That's just as true when the target is a former president as when it's a private company exercising its First Amendment right to free expression.
DeSantis has repeatedly admitted to using state power to retaliate against the Walt Disney Company for criticizing legislation signed by DeSantis last year and has otherwise threatened it for not playing nice with his administration. He has also replaced multiple members of the board of directors of a Florida university with his own political cronies, including the conservative activist-troll Chris Rufo, who in turn has bragged about ousting professors with "left-wing" views, an action the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression called flatly unconstitutional.
Among the larger "New Right" (of which DeSantis is considered a leading member), the idea that conservatives should get comfortable "wielding public power in muscular fashion to reward friends and punish enemies" has become a popular refrain. One can hardly imagine a more explicit endorsement of the use of government as a political weapon.
If DeSantis, who announced his presidential candidacy last month, really believes it's a problem to "have one faction of society weaponizing the power of the state against factions that it doesn't like," he owes it to the people whose vote he's asking for to model good behavior himself—and to speak out when his co-partisans, not just his opponents, are in the wrong.
The post DeSantis Complains About the Weaponization of State Power. He Should Reexamine His Own Record. appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>A third of the way through Regime Change (Sentinel), a table appears. The top two quadrants are "Progressive Liberal" and "Classical Liberal." The lower left is "Marxist." The lower right is blank.
That open spot will soon be filled by the author's proposed alternative. Like Marxism, he says, his approach is "deeply critical of the resulting alienation of humans from the fruits of their labor, from knowledge of how their work contributed to a common good, and from each other." But unlike Marxism, this system is fundamentally conservative rather than revolutionary, prizing stability, continuity, and order above all. It is economically leftist, socially reactionary, and unapologetically anti-liberal.
Students of history may be relieved to hear that University of Notre Dame political scientist Patrick Deneen is not—despite what the schematic just described might suggest—arguing for fascism. Instead, the fourth quadrant represents what he refers to throughout the book as "common-good conservatism."
Deneen, who taught at Princeton and Georgetown before landing at Notre Dame, is one of the more prominent intellectuals on what is often called the New Right. He's best known for articulating the idea that liberalism—not just the modern political faction but the broad philosophical tradition emphasizing individual liberty, limited government, personal responsibility, and the rule of law—has failed America. An earlier book of his on that subject even appeared on former President Barack Obama's reading list in 2018. Today, along with Harvard Law School professor Adrian Vermeule and a couple of lesser-known academics, he pens the Postliberal Order newsletter, which explores the system they hope will eventually take liberalism's place.
Given Deneen's influence, the incredible sloppiness of the writing in Regime Change is a surprise. Many of his sentences are ambiguous if not incomprehensible, many of his paragraphs internally contradictory. There are places where the literal meaning of the words on the page are precisely opposite to what he plainly intends to convey. (When he says that it was "not uncoincidental" that two related things coincided, I doubt he means they happened together merely by chance.)
Even going to great lengths to puzzle out the strongest versions of the arguments Deneen seems to be making will get the reader only so far. Every one of his major claims disintegrates under scrutiny. You're left with the impression that he barely understands his own ideas, and that he misunderstands entirely the thing he's arguing against.
Deneen's case rests almost entirely on the idea that left-progressive liberalism and classical liberalism, far from representing opposing worldviews, are in fact "identical, monolithic, and eager to deploy power in the name of enforcing individual expressivism." What unites them, he says, is a commitment to unrelenting progress. Classical liberals (including many American conservatives) might emphasize economic dynamism, innovation, and wealth creation, while progressives are focused on liberating people from lifestyle constraints by clearing away what they see as outdated social institutions such as religion and the traditional family. But Deneen thinks these are really two sides of the same coin. Liberalism is progressivism, full stop.
What's more, he argues, upper-class members of the two camps have secretly combined to form a "power elite" or "party of progress," which perpetuates its position by demolishing the legal and social "guardrails" that once allowed regular people to flourish. "Primary [to liberalism] was a belief in self-making," he writes, "demanding a social order that allowed the greatest possible freedom—even liberation—from unchosen commitments."
Somewhere in here, there is arguably a fair critique. Markets really are disruptive, and those disruptions really do have costs. Community ties may be weakened, for instance, when people marry later, have fewer children, and settle at a distance from extended family members and close friends. Most people benefit from a growing economy, but the benefits are never equally disbursed. Dizzying change can be destabilizing.
But Deneen is not satisfied with the suggestion that liberalism has negative side effects; he insists the destruction wrought by liberalism is the point. "Modern thought rests on a core assumption: transformative progress is a key goal of human society," he says. Liberalism "is a revolutionary doctrine that aims at the constant transformation of all aspects of human social organization," he says. Its "aim," he says, is "unceasing instability."
This is a wild claim—not just uncharitable but entirely unsubstantiated in the text. It evinces little familiarity with the theoretical underpinnings of liberalism, which, as the name conveys, gives pride of place to liberty, not progress. And while classical liberals may have a higher degree of tolerance for creative destruction than Deneen does, it's rare to find one who desires social upheaval for its own sake, particularly among the classically liberal conservatives who are Deneen's philosophical rivals.
Just how "identical" and "monolithic" are progressives and classical liberals, anyway? Deneen's own description of the liberal/progressive power elite includes four key characteristics, half of which don't even apply to classical liberalism.
First, he notes that the new elites are "managerial," or members of what is sometimes called the laptop class. Second, he says "this class arose specifically in opposition to…the old aristocracy" and is thus "fiercely opposed both to the principle of hierarchy and the inheritance of status." (This despite being at the top of America's social and economic hierarchy.)
Third, Deneen says elites use tyrannical identity politics to demonstrate their commitment to egalitarian principles without actually having to do anything to help the less well-off. Through claims of subjective harm (think of microaggressions), "the ruling elite seeks to limit and even oppress or extirpate remnants of traditional belief and practice—those especially informing the worldview of the working class—while claiming that these views are those of the oppressors." Imagine how students at a top-ranked college would react to a speaker saying there are only two genders and you'll get the picture.
Finally, he says, "the main locus through which today's elite exercises control" is not the state. It's through centers of cultural production such as academia and Hollywood, as well as through woke corporate governance.
Do either of those last two features sound like they apply at all to classically liberal conservatives and libertarians? Of course not. The power elite described above is obviously not a melding of left- and right-liberalism. This is a garden-variety complaint about left-progressives.
In fact, classical liberals have been on the front lines of the fight against Deneen's third characteristic, which they recognize as a product of illiberal progressivism. Public interest law firms such as the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression defend religious liberty and free speech against militant political correctness. For that matter, libertarians are practically obsessed with eliminating occupational licensing and similar barriers that make it hard for people outside the laptop class to make a living on their own terms.
Another big idea in Regime Change is that different regime types are characterized by the way the people relate to the elites. Marxism, he writes, sees the masses as inherently revolutionary and wants them to have power, overthrowing the bourgeois upper class violently if need be. Technocratic progressivism, on the other hand, sees the people as inherently conservative and wants progress-oriented technocrats to rule over the masses, tyrannically if necessary. Common-good conservatism, Deneen's preferred system, agrees with the progressives that the people are naturally conservative and agrees with the Marxists that the people should be in control.
Or does it? Actually, this is one of the many things about which Deneen can't make up his mind. Initially, he says both Marxism and conservatism favor the people over elites. Later, he admits political movements always "claim to speak in the name of 'the people' against an elite that seeks to oppress and circumvent the popular will" while really empowering an elite to do the governing. But while "Marxist strains sought to deny their reliance upon elites," he writes, conservatism has at least been open about its belief that the people need good elites to support them. Except—wait—one sentence later he reverses himself again, now saying that "conservatives have been generally unwilling to make explicit the claim" that elites are necessary to their vision.
Eventually, Deneen rolls out the concept of a "mixed regime," which for some reason he decides to call a "mixed constitution." This is the goal of common-good conservatism, he says: a system in which the elites don't have to dominate the people and the people don't have to overthrow the elites, because the people and the elites are conveniently aligned. (Assume a harmony of interests, and most of the challenges of governance disappear!)
According to the Greek historian Polybius, ancient Rome had a mixed constitution. Instead of choosing between the rule of one (monarchy), the rule of the few (oligarchy), or the rule of the many (democracy), it combined all three. "The benefits of kingship were manifested in the unitary rule of the emperor," Deneen summarizes, "but the tendency of the monarch to become overbearing and tyrannical was restrained by the political power of the common citizens. They in turn were ennobled by the aristocracy—gathered in the Senate—who in turn were balanced by the other elements of the government." In theory, this "mixing" will produce the sought-after alignment between the people and the elites.
At this point, you may be wondering what distinguishes the modern American regime from what Polybius is describing. After all, we have universal suffrage (rule of the many) paired with a Senate and "expert"-staffed bureaucracy (rule of the few) and a unitary president (rule of one). But if we already have a mixed constitution, to what does this book's titular "regime change" refer?
It seems that a true mixed constitution isn't just a system in which the few and the many share governing responsibilities. A true mixed constitution is one in which the few, like the many, are in wholehearted political agreement with Deneen. "The answer," he writes, "is not the elimination of the elite (as [Karl] Marx once envisioned), but its replacement with a better set of elites"—that is to say, a governing cohort that prioritizes conservative values such as stability and order. "Existing political forms can remain in place," he writes, "as long as a fundamentally different ethos informs those institutions and the personnel who populate key offices and positions."
Deneen wants conservative views to be "the price of admission to elite status itself," with people fearing that "not conforming to the regnant ethos" will disqualify them from positions of power (emphasis his). But those are wishes, not plans. How does one bring about such a "regnant ethos" where it clearly does not exist? The closest he comes to an answer—"the raw assertion of political power by a new generation of political actors inspired by an ethos of common-good conservatism"—raises at least as many questions as it resolves.
Even when he finally turns to policy, Deneen seems oblivious to the distinction between structural reforms that might theoretically help bring about a greater alignment between the people and the elites, on the one hand, and the kinds of ideologically conservative policies that his side would already need to hold power in order to implement.
The book calls, for instance, for dramatically increasing the number of U.S. House districts so each member of Congress represents fewer constituents; for "breaking up" D.C. by moving the federal agencies to other parts of the country; and for switching from primaries to caucuses. These are the sorts of suggestions around which it might be possible to build a transpartisan consensus on good-government grounds, and which might then lead to reduced estrangement between the upper and working classes (although Deneen couldn't be bothered to make those arguments explicit).
But Deneen's agenda also includes socially reactionary ideas ("renewed efforts to enforce a moral media") and half-baked industrial policy ("domestic manufacturing in certain sectors should simply be mandated"). Often, his own means and ends aren't even aligned. At one point, he names as a goal that "university education could be substantially reduced" and then, in the same paragraph, asserts that "vocational schools or tracks ought to be supplemented by required introductory courses in a university-level general education"—a proposal that would force people who want to pursue careers in the trades back into the classroom.
Deneen's arguments frequently fall apart in just this way. Near the end of the book, he makes the case that a hallmark of liberalism is "separation" (e.g., between church and state) while a hallmark of conservatism is "integration." Of course, economic liberalism includes a default commitment to allowing goods and people to flow across borders. Deneen waves this away, writing that "the ultimate logic" of globalization is "disintegration, the weakening and outright elimination of all cultural, geographic, traditional forms of membership," apparently hoping readers won't notice that the barriers to trade and immigration that he supports are ways of keeping us forcibly separated.
The thing Deneen most takes for granted in this book is also the thing his entire argument turns on: an assumption that the American people are ideologically with him, and that their democratic power can thus be used to force "an ennobling" of the elite.
That the masses are with them is also, you'll recall, an assumption of Marxists, who are continuously discovering that they've deluded themselves on that point. Deneen knows as much, writing that "false consciousness among the proletariat about what they should really want and how they should authentically act" forced Marx to turn his hopes "to the cultivation of a revolutionary elite….The people were simply not good enough for the anticipated utopia—and would have to be pressed into its service if they refused to follow the playbook."
Yet the possibility that he too could be wrong about what the public wants does not appear to have occurred to Deneen. He treats as a given that the U.S. is undergoing a political realignment that will pit the liberal party of progress against a much larger conservative party that will be socially traditionalist but economically of the left.
There is indeed some evidence for a partisan realignment based on educational attainment. Much harder to believe is that the new conservative coalition supports anything like what Deneen has in mind. Many observers assumed that Donald Trump's success was a sign that the American working class had rejected economic liberalism, for example, but an Ethics and Public Policy Center survey taken after the 2020 election found that just 35 percent of Trump's own voters thought the United States should reduce foreign trade.
The "Barstool conservative" phenomenon identified by journalist Matthew Walther suggests that Deneen would have trouble building a consensus for his social agenda as well. Yes, people are ticked off about woke overreach by the progressive left. But the idea that most Americans favor a crackdown on pornography or a reintroduction of Sabbath laws or any of Deneen's other post-liberal fantasies is comical.
Interestingly, some of his associates on the New Right accept what Deneen is in denial about. His co-blogger Vermeule has called for a small number of activists, who may represent only "a tiny minority of the population," to reshape the culture from the top down by, say, obtaining positions within the administrative state. "It is a useless exercise to debate whether or not this shaping from above is best understood as coercive," Vermeule has written, "or rather as an appeal to the 'true' underlying preferences of the governed." All that's missing is a reference to false consciousness.
Perhaps Deneen's least defensible claim is that liberalism, like progressivism, is a philosophy that wants the elites to rule over the masses. As if brandishing a trump card, he observes that classical liberals are "suspicious of majoritarian democracy" and supportive of "constitutional constraints" that "insulat[e] the economically successful few from the average and 'querulous' many." Yet he also admits that liberalism developed in opposition to the aristocracy, an arrangement under which the few held all the political and economic power.
Sure, liberals worry about tyranny of the majority. That doesn't mean they favor tyranny of the minority. The liberal throughline is a desire to stop either from dominating the other, a goal liberalism seeks to accomplish by limiting the power of the state through which both groups are tempted to exert control.
Contrary to Deneen's clever schematics, liberalism is not about empowering the few vs. the many; it's about empowering the individual vs. the collective. Classical liberals think people, whatever their station, should get to make as many decisions as possible for themselves. Instead of a government—whether elite-dominated or mass-dominated—imposing its vision of the common good on us, we should all have the freedom to decide what a good life looks like and how best to pursue it.
The post Liberalism Isn't Rule by Elites appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>An epithet has emerged on the post-liberal fringes of the online conservative movement: right-liberal. It's a term these critics apply to libertarians, old-school Reaganite conservatives, and anyone else who prefers individualism to collectivism or believes that it benefits everyone to keep markets as free as possible from government meddling.
Liberal in this context means classically liberal, the political outlook that emphasizes individual rights, limited government, and the rule of law. But the writers who deploy this supposedly disparaging sobriquet hope that rank-and-file conservatives will hear liberal and assume a leftist orientation.
"America is an idea," scoffed Newsweek Opinion Editor Josh Hammer in a recent tweet. He attributed that sentiment to "every right-liberal and left-liberal platitude-regurgitator ever." Note the facile elision of any difference between the two groups: To be a "right-liberal," in Hammer's formulation, is no better than to be a Democrat.
Yet right-liberalism and left-liberalism, to borrow the terms, are not exactly interchangeable. Old-fashioned American conservatives favor deregulation, legal protection of private property, free trade, decentralization of power, and reliance on a thick stratum of community institutions ("little platoons") rather than government to solve social problems. Left-liberals—a.k.a. progressives—favor nationalization, bureaucratization, standardization, regulation, taxation, and redistribution. On the American right, their position has long been viewed as a rejection of core conservative commitments.
The journalist Matthew Continetti put it well at a conference last November. "The classical liberalism that we're talking about, I think, is the liberalism enshrined in the Declaration of Independence," he said. "But there's another liberalism. There is modern liberalism, or progressivism, which the conservative movement has traditionally understood itself in opposition to."
Post-liberal scribblers like Hammer "collapse distinctions," Continetti noted. "It's all one thing. Everything that conservative movement figures for decades said was a problem of modern liberalism or progressivism, they say, actually stems directly from the American founding."
But the invocation of "right-liberalism" is ironic as well as facile, because the post-liberals who disparage it are unapologetic proponents of actual left-wing policies, such as tariffs, industrial subsidies, and aggressive antitrust action, even against companies that don't meet the traditional definition of monopolies. It would be no exaggeration to designate this cohort right-progressives. And just about the only thing that makes them right is that they hope to use their power, once attained, to enforce aspects of traditional religious morality rather than left-wing identity politics.
In a recent American Affairs article, for example, the University of Dallas political scientist Gladden Pappin chastised old-fashioned conservatives for fretting about government spending and opposing student loan forgiveness. Instead, he proposed that the GOP adopt "a positive governing agenda that would use the power of the state to bolster the national industrial economy and support the American family"—i.e., corporate and individual welfare.
Pappin is not the only one. A few years ago, you may recall, MAGA hero Tucker Carlson praised the "economic patriotism" of a plan from Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D–Mass.) on his show. More recently, Sens. Marco Rubio (R–Fla.) and Josh Hawley (R–Mo.) outflanked the Biden administration by siding with a rail workers union that was demanding more generous benefits. When an observer suggested that the post-liberal journalist Sohrab Ahmari and his pals might accurately be called "pro-life New Dealers," Ahmari welcomed the label. Later, on Twitter, he came out emphatically "FOR the administrative state."
Conservatives of the "right-liberal" variety have long recognized the problems with this approach: the dangers of empowering unelected bureaucrats; the futility of trying to beat the left at the game of buying voters' favor through federal spending; and the reality that many of the country's intractable problems are the result of previous government interventions. When it comes to deindustrialization, "one major cause is America's regulatory structure, which is a function of progressivism," Continetti pointed out last fall. "One of the reasons the industries left America was they cannot compete, because of environmental regulations, labor force regulations, the tax burden. Companies ship jobs overseas because America makes it very hard for them to do business here."
Right-progressives see the left's mistakes and call for doubling down on the hubris that produced that wreckage. Let's hope conservatives decline the invitation.
The post The Rise of Right-Progressivism appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>On Wednesday night, Sen. J.D. Vance (R–Ohio) took the stage at Catholic University in Washington, D.C., and declared—to the astonishment of many who subsequently read the quote online—that "there is no meaningful distinction between the public and the private sector in the American regime."
The remark came during a panel discussion about Regime Change, a new book by the "post-liberal" Notre Dame political scientist Patrick Deneen, in which Deneen argues that classical liberals and left-progressives are all pushing the same agenda and need to be "replaced" by a new conservative elite. (Keep an eye out for a review in the August/September issue of Reason.)
A longer version of the Vance quote gives the context:
One of the really bad hangovers from that uniparty that Patrick talked about is this idea that there is this extremely strong division between the public sector and the private sector. You know, the public sector is the necessary evil of government. We want to limit it as much as possible, because to the extent that we don't limit it, it's going to do a lot of terrible things. And then you have the private sector, that which comes from spontaneous order. It's organic. It's very Burkean. And we want to let people do as much free exchange within that realm as possible. And the reality of politics as I've seen it practiced, the way that lobbyists interact with bureaucrats interact with corporations, there is no meaningful distinction between the public and the private sector in the American regime. It is all fused together, it is all melded together, and it is all, in my view, very much aligned against the people who I represent in the state of Ohio.
I will give you a couple of examples here. One, when I talk to sort of more traditionalist economic conservatives, what Patrick would call economic liberals, when I talk to these guys about, for example, why has corporate America gone so woke, I see in their eyes this desperate desire to think that it's all just coming from the [Securities and Exchange Commission]. That there are a couple of bad regulations at the SEC, and that in fact [BlackRock CEO] Larry Fink would love to not be a super woke driver of American enterprise, and that Budweiser has no desire to put out a series of advertisements that alienate half their customer base. They're just being forced to do it by evil bureaucrats. And there is an element of truth to that. The element of truth is that the regime is the public and private sector. It's the corporate CEOs, it's the H.R. professionals at Budweiser, and they are working together, not against one another, in a way that destroys the American common good. That is the fact that we are dealing with.
There are, of course, countless ways that the public sector—government—has its tentacles in private sector affairs. Through taxation and regulation; through the subsidies and targeted benefits that are a mainstay of the industrial policy that so many on the New Right want to double down on; and, yes, through insidious pressure campaigns like those uncovered through the Twitter and Facebook Files, state power is routinely brought to bear to nudge or compel private actors into doing what those holding the power want. Needless to say, we should be skeptical, if not hostile, toward all such efforts.
Interestingly, this does not appear to be what Vance is referring to. If anything, he's saying it's naive to focus on instances of state coercion. Instead, Vance seems upset that some business executives share the same "woke" values that government actors express. (They are, after all, highly educated fellow members of the professional managerial class!) And because they believe in radical environmentalism, trans-inclusive politics, and all the rest, according to Vance, these private sector leaders are all too happy to collaborate with lawmakers and federal bureaucrats to put those values into practice.
Vance here is channeling the neoreactionary blogger Curtis Yarvin, a.k.a. Mencius Moldbug, who has popularized the idea that "all the modern world's legitimate and prestigious intellectual institutions, even though they have no central organizational connection, behave in many ways as if they were a single organizational structure" with "one clear doctrine or perspective." He calls this decentralized entity "the Cathedral" and argues that the only way to combat it is by replacing America's liberal democratic regime with an absolute monarchy or (benevolent, one hopes) dictatorship.
But Vance goes further even than Yarvin, who defines the Cathedral as consisting of the mainstream media and the universities; Vance insists that government officials are also implicated. This step is critical, because the New Right, rejecting the classical liberal commitment to limited government and rule of law, openly calls on conservatives to wield state power against their domestic political "enemies," among whom it counts lefty corporations, universities, and nonprofits.
I've made this point almost ad nauseam by now, but if you need a refresher, look no further than this illustrative quote from Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts: "This is our moment," he recently told The American Conservative, "to demand that our politicians use the power they have. This is the moment for us to demand of companies, whether they're Google, or Facebook, or Disney, that you listen to us, rather than ram down our throats and into our own families all of the garbage that you've been pushing on us. This is our time to demand that you do what we say. And it's glorious."
For an even more concrete example, consider the time Vance went on live TV and proposed targeting left-wing institutions such as the Ford Foundation and Harvard for their political views. "Why don't we seize the assets," he asked, "tax their assets, and give it to the people who've had their lives destroyed by their radical open borders agenda?"
This is obviously contrary to the laws of our land. The American constitutional system "protects private actors," says Notre Dame law professor Richard W. Garnett, while constraining how government officials can exercise their power. "Private actors have free speech rights. The government doesn't. Private actors have freedom of religion. Government doesn't. Private schools can train kids for their sacraments. Government schools can't. The whole landscape of our constitutionally protected freedoms depends on this conceptual distinction between state power and the nonstate sphere."
But that distinction is an obstacle preventing post-liberals such as Vance from using the government to punish private entities who express views or implement policies that they, the post-liberals, dislike. And so, to give themselves permission to do what they want, they have to get people to believe that the distinction is already obsolete.
It's not. In fact, the "collusion" that Vance would use as justification to strip private actors of their rights consists of some of the very activities named in the First Amendment: voicing political opinions and advocating for changes to public policy. That some business executives happen to agree with some federal bureaucrats on some topics does nothing to transform private entities into public ones or to erase the distinction between the two spheres. (And that assumes Vance et al. are correct about the scope of the overlap, which they've thus far made little effort to demonstrate.)
None of this means you have to like the way companies use their rights. "If there are large private entities that are engaging in speech that some might find offensive," Garnett says, "you can boycott them, you can not patronize them, you can criticize them, you can set up your own businesses" to compete with them. But the New Right appears to be "impatient" with these remedies.
"It seems to me that it's perfectly appropriate to point out, as Deneen and Vance are doing, that a lot of corporate America seems to be going outside of its lane in very ideological ways," Garnett says. "But it doesn't follow from that that the government can silence them or punish them."
The post The Post-Liberal Authoritarians Want You To Forget That Private Companies Have Rights appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Shortly after announcing his candidacy for president on Tuesday, the biotech founder and anti-woke crusader Vivek Ramaswamy tweeted a short list of his goals. Alongside such items as imposing term limits on federal bureaucrats and achieving "total Independence from China" was one that might look unobjectionable but deserves a thorough rebuke: "Make political expression a civil right."
The precise choice of language and larger context here are critical: Ramaswamy isn't saying he wants to stop the government from punishing citizens for their political views, something that is obviously already proscribed by the First Amendment (and something that certain anti-woke Republicans have themselves flirted with recently despite the crystal-clear constitutional prohibition). Instead, "civil rights" is a reference to laws such as the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which reach into civil society and constrain what private organizations, such as clubs and businesses, may do.
In essence, Ramaswamy is suggesting that the government treat political opinions the same way it treats race, which under federal law is a protected class. Employers may not make hiring and firing decisions on the basis of skin color; same goes for landlords deciding whom to rent to, hotel or restaurant owners turning away customers, and so on.
To treat viewpoints in the same way would amount to an egregious infringement on the right of free association—that is, our ability to join together with others who share our values or beliefs for a common purpose. Churches, charities, social clubs, and yes, even political entities such as advocacy organizations are all examples.
A healthy, pluralistic society is one that has space for all manner of social institutions, many of which we may not individually be fans of. Some (though by no means all) will be based upon mutual affinities that might be described as political. Inconvenient as it may be for those who desire to end all discrimination, though, there can be no association without disassociation. The right not to be affiliated with views we find erroneous, dangerous, or repulsive is no less worth defending than is the right to speak our minds.
Ask yourself whether a pro-life group should be required by law to accept a job candidate who loudly espouses a right to abortion. How about the reverse? Should an environmentalist nonprofit have to admit members who deny the existence of climate change? Should the libertarian club on campus be compelled to take those who want a larger welfare state and more aggressive intervention in foreign wars? And if an entrepreneur doesn't want to work with a Trump supporter at the small business she founded and pours her time and energy into, is that any of the government's business? What if it's an Antifa rioter she objects to? What about a neo-Nazi?
Like it or not, one person's right to disaffiliate from white supremacists depends upon another person's right to disaffiliate from conservatives—or communists. The government is not empowered to decide which substantive views are out of bounds, and thank God for that. A law (or worse yet, an executive action) that purports to turn "political expression" into a "civil right" is no modest threat to liberty. It's a direct assault on one of the bedrock principles of a free society.
The post No, Vivek Ramaswamy, 'Political Expression' Shouldn't Be a 'Civil Right' appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>As Donald Trump walked into the Mar-a-Lago ballroom where he was about to announce his 2024 run for president, the words "Do you hear the people sing, singing a song of angry men?" boomed over the loudspeakers. Whether or not their politics match those of the protagonists of Les Misérables, the musical from which that song originates, angry men and women have indeed formed the backbone of the Trump political phenomenon over the last seven years.
Today, the question on many minds is whether those still loyal to the former president will be enough to return him to the White House for a second nonconsecutive term—or whether Republican primary voters may finally be ready to try their luck with someone else.
As onlookers try to deduce where the GOP and the country are heading, they may find value in reviewing the journey that led to this point. How did the Republican Party get from Ronald Reagan—a man who read F.A. Hayek and Frédéric Bastiat and who spoke of America as a welcoming "city on a hill"—to the nativism, protectionism, and populism of Trump?
From the moment he launched his first campaign in 2015, pundits and politicos were staggered both by Trump's behavior and by voters' enthusiastic response to it. "Conservatives believed in the magic of a free market unconstrained by government interference, while Trump openly tried to pressure and coerce private companies to act as he thought they should," writes Wall Street Journal editor Gerald F. Seib in a recent book. "Conservatives believe in limited executive power; Trump envisioned himself as a president with wide latitude to use executive orders to do as he pleased. Conservatives seek to reduce government spending; Trump proudly proclaimed he had no desire to cut the fastest-growing government programs."
It wasn't just his rejection of economic liberalism and embrace of big government that shocked people. It was his crude insults, his attacks on fellow Republicans, his willingness to transgress norms and to encourage an ugly us-vs.-them mentality among his supporters.
But in 2020's We Should Have Seen It Coming: From Reagan to Trump—A Front-Row Seat to a Political Revolution (Random House), Seib suggests onlookers shouldn't have been shocked. Anger had long been a recurring theme in right-wing politics.
"The signs were there for years," he explains. "The populist presidential campaigns of Pat Buchanan and Ross Perot; the anti-establishment, anti-intellectual vice presidential campaign of Sarah Palin; the Tea Party revolt; and above all, the rancorous debates over immigration reform were just the most obvious of indicators. Most of us either didn't take them seriously enough or had other explanations."
In 2022's Partisans: The Conservative Revolutionaries Who Remade American Politics in the 1990s (Basic Books), the Vanderbilt historian Nicole Hemmer advances a similar hypothesis: that the real rupture on the right happened almost three decades before Trump burst onto the political scene. "Nearly as soon as Reagan left office," she writes, "the conservative movement he represented began to rapidly evolve, skittering away from the policies, rhetoric, and even ideology" associated with the Gipper. During the '90s, she says, "the sunny optimism of the Reagan era fell away, and grievance politics took over."
Seib and Hemmer agree: Before there was Donald Trump, there was Pat Buchanan.
A political commentator and Reagan administration alum, Buchanan eventually adopted a "paleoconservative" worldview: economically protectionist, militarily noninterventionist, socially traditionalist, and rabidly anti-immigrant. In 1992, he announced his decision to challenge incumbent President George H.W. Bush for the Republican nomination with these words: "He is a globalist, and we are nationalists….He would put America's wealth and power at the service of some vague new world order. We will put America first."
Buchanan, Hemmer writes, "develop[ed] a politics that was not just conservative but antiliberal, that leaned into the coarseness of American culture and brought it into politics, that valued scoring political points above hewing to ideological principles." Think of it as a pilot program for the flavor of conservatism today that's obsessed with "owning the libs."
Along the way, the peculiarly angry Buchanan picked up the moniker "Pitchfork Pat"—an implicit callback, Hemmer notes, to "Pitchfork Ben" Tillman, who had "led the Red Shirts, a white-supremacist paramilitary group, in their efforts to seize power in South Carolina in the 1870s" and later "worked to disenfranchise all Black voters, called for lynchings, and encouraged a violent coup."
Though Buchanan's candidacy eventually fizzled, Seib notes that the excitement it generated early on "helped persuade billionaire Texas businessman Ross Perot to run as an independent candidate, pushing a similar anti-establishment message" that rejected both trade and military adventurism. Astonishingly, despite an erratic campaign in which he dropped out in the summer and then reentered the race that fall, Perot claimed nearly a fifth of the 1992 popular vote.
Other Republican pugilists also made waves during this period. Newt Gingrich became House minority whip in 1989 and speaker in 1995. He brought a "scorched earth approach" to both roles, Hemmer writes, weaponizing ethics investigations against his Democratic colleagues and enlisting pollster Frank Luntz "to train Republicans to speak a new language, one that would demonize their opponents and shroud even their most unpopular ideas in a gauze of punchy, positive words." (Ironically, Gingrich was forced to resign from Congress following a corruption scandal of his own, while the American Association for Public Opinion Research formally censured Luntz for unethical polling practices.)
Less remembered today are figures such as Rep. Helen Chenoweth-Hage, an Idaho Republican who made good on a promise to serve just three terms in the House of Representatives and then faded from the scene. But during her stint as a congressman—and she insisted on referring to herself as a congressman—Chenoweth-Hage delighted in pushing the buttons of what certain right-wingers today might refer to as "normies" and "libs." Like the time she showed up at a campaign event in a T-shirt emblazoned with the environmentalist message "Earth First!" on the front; the back read, "We'll log the other planets later."
Then there were the conservative media stars: talk radio hosts such as Rush Limbaugh, who trained a maniacal fanbase to shout "feminazi!" whenever Hillary Clinton's name came up; cable news personalities such as Ann Coulter, who responded to 9/11 by declaring that the U.S. should "invade their countries, kill their leaders, and convert them to Christianity"; and public "intellectuals" like Dinesh D'Souza, who wrote a book so flagrantly racist that black conservatives Glenn Loury and Robert Woodson severed ties with the American Enterprise Institute rather than share an affiliation with its author.
All of these figures appealed to a group sometimes referred to as the "middle American radicals," or MARs. This is the same constituency of left-behind blue-collar workers and social conservatives, supposedly long ignored by Republican elites, who fueled the Trump wave in 2016.
At the 1999 Iowa Straw Poll, Buchanan gave a speech that was hostile to trade and immigration, as his speeches always were. "His biggest applause line, though, came near the end," Hemmer writes, "when he said that if he were elected, his first act would be to place Bill Clinton under arrest." More than any particular policy commitment, the MARs seemed motivated by feelings of resentment and a desire to see their enemies humiliated. Trump, of course, would return to that well, leading crowds in exuberant chants of "Lock her up!" a few years later.
If Hemmer's history of conservatism describes the U-turn from Reaganite liberalism to MAGA illiberalism happening earlier than many people realize, another recent entrant in the genre further complicates the story. In 2022's The Right: The Hundred Year War for American Conservatism (Basic Books), journalist Matthew Continetti turns the clock back another seven decades and finds no dearth of economic nationalism or outrage peddling in the interim.
Under Presidents Warren G. Harding and Calvin Coolidge, Continetti notes, the Republican Party of the 1920s was skeptical of internationalism, presaging Buchanan and Perot's opposition to the first Iraq War in the '90s and Trump's repudiation of the second Iraq War during his 2016 run. While Harding and Coolidge tended to support free markets at home, they also favored high tariffs to protect American producers from competition abroad. And like both Buchanan and Trump, they were hostile to immigration.
Proponents a century ago bundled those rough policy positions together under the "America First" banner. Buchanan, as we've already seen, called back to that term in his 1992 announcement speech. Trump, too, invoked it repeatedly on the campaign trail and during his presidency. "A new vision will govern our land," he declared during his inaugural address in January 2017. "From this day forward, it's going to be only America first. America first."
Hemmer says of Buchanan that "he did not run from his more extreme views on race, feminism, and sexuality. Instead, he made them cornerstones of his presidential campaigns…evidence that he would always say what he believed, no matter how outrageous." It was a surprisingly effective tactic: "People liked him because he said outrageous things, because he flouted political norms," she writes.
"Vince Thompson, part of the Buchanan brigade, explained his support to the Los Angeles Times this way: 'We're scared to say what we think some of the real problems are in this country for fear of being called a racist or extremist. Pat says it for us.'"
That should sound familiar, in part because it's the same thing many Trump fans have long asserted about him. "Even when he's not on message or when he's not on issues, he comes across as somebody that says things they would like to say," Limbaugh once explained, channeling his listeners' feelings toward Trump.
But it probably sounds familiar because it's a much older trope as well.
A recurring character in Continetti's book is Gov. George Wallace, an infamous Alabama Democrat who championed racial segregation in the 1960s. Explaining his appeal, the right-wing Dartmouth professor Jeffrey Hart wrote that "Wallace suggests freedom from the conventional taboos. The man says what he thinks. Wouldn't it be fun to do that?"
Finding that outright racism puts a ceiling on one's support, however, Wallace eventually lit on a subtler strategy, one that many a future conservative would also adopt. "As the [1968] presidential election approached," Continetti writes, "he began to downplay his segregationism and stepped up his anti-elitism." His support grew across the board as he fed audiences "a diet of grievances."
Speaking of grievance politics, one group who felt especially aggrieved during this period was the religious conservatives. As time went on, they coalesced into what became known in the '70s as the New Right: those who opposed lax divorce and abortion laws, gay rights, feminism, busing, media bias, and the like. They were intensely socially conservative, and they were livid that their priorities did not seem to be the Republican Party's. Some of them would turn up within the paleoconservative faction a couple of decades later.
The New Right "was different from both National Review and the neoconservatism of…the Wall Street Journal editorial pages," Continetti explains, citing an essay by Kevin Phillips, the architect of the Nixon campaign's so-called Southern strategy. "Their New York–based writers were too removed from Middle America. They were too academic, too upper-middle-class, too closely associated with the Republican Party to be trusted. The conservative intellectuals, Phillips believed, were too interested in maintaining respectability among liberals. The New Right did not care about elite validation." What it did believe in was "aggressive political combat."
Today there's a new New Right, a messy amalgamation of "postliberal conservatives" and "national conservatives," "neoreactionaries" and Trump fans, all united by their own politics of resentment—and their desire to jettison free markets and free trade in favor of a "muscular" government that "rewards friends and punishes enemies," to quote an oft-repeated phrase.
Like the New Right of the 1970s turned up to a higher pitch, the current iteration believes its interests have been overlooked by the institutional Republican Party and the constellation of think tanks and advocacy organizations it mockingly calls Conservatism Inc. Its leaders are uninterested in Reaganesque celebrations of individual liberty and American exceptionalism. It's once again time, they say, for aggressive political combat. And today's New Right is out for blood.
None of the forerunners of today's New Right is a perfect analog. For one thing, many of the groups described in these books were laissez faire when it came to economics—at least for Americans.
Consider that Buchanan's primary challenge to George H.W. Bush was motivated in large part by fury at the latter's decision to renege on his "read my lips: no new taxes" campaign pledge, which confirmed many conservatives' suspicion that he was actually a centrist squish. Buchanan was also doggedly committed to reducing federal spending, while a balanced-budget amendment was at the heart of the Perot campaign.
The Tea Party movement, which Seib sees as a precursor to Trump, was largely driven by limited-government principles. Reducing taxes, regulations, and spending were the centerpieces of the movement's agenda. The spark that lit the initial conflagration was a rant where CNBC's Rick Santelli went nuclear over the idea that Washington should bail out Americans with mortgages on houses they couldn't afford. "We just saw the government was getting too big and doing things that were outside the scope of the government," Seib quotes one Tea Party supporter explaining.
Even the New Right of the 1970s, for all its blustering pitchfork populism, had a libertarian side. "Its aim was a dramatic reduction in the reach of the state," Continetti writes, quoting a New Right activist demanding "99 percent for Defense—keep America strong—and 1 percent on delivering the mail. That's it. Leave us alone."
Today's New Right is, if anything, leftist on economics: enamored of industrial policy, supportive of family subsidies, friendly to labor unions, etc., all with an aim of reaching the working man. But one lesson of 20th century conservative history is that populism need not be linked to calls for an activist central government. Often, anti-elite sentiments emerge as a backlash to feelings of encroachment by the state.
While the New Right today has positioned itself as a rejection of "warmed-over Reaganism"—by which it means reflexive support for free markets and individual liberty—Reagan himself emerged out of the New Right of the 1970s. He offered an alternative to establishment figures such as National Review founder William F. Buckley Jr., whom he debated on Buckley's TV show, Firing Line, in 1978. Like Wallace without the horrifying racial baggage, Reagan stood for a conservatism of "bold, unmistakable colors, with no pastel shades." But nothing about bold, principled politics required the kind of ugly, angry rhetoric associated with Buchanan and Trump.
"Reagan now spoke for the voters who felt ignored or disrespected by bureaucrats, judges, professors, and journalists," Continetti writes. "He did so in uplifting, soothing tones. And he did not dwell on race."
It worked. He defeated incumbent President Jimmy Carter in a 44-state landslide in 1980, then improved on that performance in 1984.
"For decades, movement conservatism had been intractably linked with Arizona senator Barry Goldwater, far-right groups like the conspiratorial John Birch Society, and frothing segregationists unable to come to terms with the success of the civil rights movement," Hemmer writes. Reagan "persuaded a hefty majority of Americans that he was something different."
He did it by embracing optimism and inclusivity, not resentment and distrust—articulating a positive, future-oriented vision in which government is limited and people can be trusted to make decisions for themselves. In the 1980s, Reagan told voters it could be morning in America, and they believed him. As we head into the election of 2024, might Americans be ready to greet the morning again?
The post The GOP's Pitchfork Populism Is Older Than Trump appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>"The greatest duty of America today is to build up our educational system." That sentiment probably seems anodyne, like something you might have heard on the campaign trail in the recently concluded midterms. A century ago, it represented the top priority of the Ku Klux Klan.
"Throughout the boom years of the early 1920s," the historian Adam Laats notes in a 2012 History of Education Quarterly article, "every local Klan group made education reform a leading goal of its public activism." Eventually, Laats writes, a push for compulsory public schooling overseen by a federal cabinet agency became the "linchpin" of the organization's agenda.
Why the Klan's sudden interest in education policy? First and foremost, because of the KKK's virulent nativism and anti-Catholicism. Most private schools at the time were associated with the Catholic Church, while most public schools were openly, if unofficially, Protestant. By requiring all children to attend the latter institutions, Klan members thought they could strip Catholic parishes of an income source, reduce the Catholic hierarchy's ability to indoctrinate the next generation, and secure their own right to inculcate values instead.
The effort to shutter parochial institutions altogether would soon be halted. In 1922, Oregon passed a law requiring every child to attend a local public school. Supporters including the KKK admitted the aim was to drive all private schools in the state out of business. But before the law went into effect, the U.S. Supreme Court deemed it unconstitutional.
Undeterred, the Klan continued pursuing its education agenda in the public sphere. Members bullied Catholic teachers and principals into vacating public school jobs. They made donations of (Protestant) Bibles and agitated for mandatory (Protestant) prayer and religion classes. And they lined up behind the National Education Association (NEA), the country's largest teachers union, as it lobbied over more than a decade for the establishment of a federal Department of Education.
The groups wanted an Education Department that would provide funding to schools across the country, thereby promoting literacy and patriotism. An influx of immigrants had raised concerns that pockets of the country were not being assimilated into the American way of life. Compulsory education was meant to build national unity, ensuring the country's future workers could speak the same language and preparing them to be productive members of society.
Supporters of this effort often portrayed it as a grand humanitarian crusade. "We must have a compulsory education system to reach and uplift every future citizen," national Ku Klux Klan leader Hiram Evans said in 1924. If the campaign was successful, "all our humanity might live in harmony."
The cruelly coercive nature of the proposals nevertheless was apparent. "We will be a homogeneous people," Evans told a friendly audience in 1923. "We will grind out Americans like meat out of a grinder." Or as an early Progressive education reformer chillingly put it in 1902, "The nation has a right to demand intelligence and virtue of every citizen, and to obtain these by force if necessary."
As the NEA and KKK pushed to federalize education funding, they met opposition from Catholic institutions. The National Catholic Welfare Council, a U.S. body of Catholic bishops and staff, worked diligently to oppose bills that would have elevated an Interior Department bureau collecting education statistics into its own cabinet agency. America, a Jesuit magazine, editorialized against the legislative proposals as well. Fearing that federal funding of education would lead to federal control of education, Catholic leaders argued that parents must be allowed to determine what kind of schooling was right for their kids.
History was on the Catholics' side. Education in America had always been a state and local issue. Although the Founders "wanted a nation of virtuous, informed citizens," wrote Kevin Kosar, then of the R Street Institute, in 2015, "almost nobody saw educating them as the federal government's job. The Constitution didn't authorize the federal government to make schools policy."
In the 1920s and '30s, opponents were successful at preventing the establishment of a standalone cabinet agency. But the push for a centralized education authority didn't go away even when the Klan did. Lawmakers in Washington began appropriating school funding in the decades that followed, and a federal Department of Education was officially created in 1979.
The post The KKK's Push for Compulsory Schooling and a Federal Education Department appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Few Republican critics of Donald Trump lasted as long in Congress as Sen. Ben Sasse (R–Neb.). Today his run, like those of so many before him, comes to an end.
Sasse, a Yale-trained historian and onetime president of a small Lutheran college, exits the Senate two years after winning reelection to a second term to assume the top post at the University of Florida.
During his eight years in Washington (not including previous stints in the executive branch), Sasse was often a voice of civility and moderation but also of hard truth telling. In 2016, he was one of the first to say he would vote for a third party rather than support then-candidate Donald Trump. Later, he excoriated the 45th president on a range of charges, saying on one occasion that he objects to "the way [Trump] treats women, spends like a drunken sailor," and more. "He mocks evangelicals behind closed doors. His family has treated the presidency like a business opportunity. He's flirted with white supremacists," Sasse went on.
After a pro-Trump mob invaded the Capitol in 2021 in a half-baked attempt to stop certification of Joe Biden's election, Sasse was among the handful of Republicans who voted to convict the outgoing president. He was similarly one of the small number who voted to create a commission to investigate January 6.
Availing himself of the chance to offer farewell remarks from the Senate floor on Tuesday, Sasse twice lamented the "I alone can fix it" mentality that has arisen on the political right, a barely veiled reference to the former president.
His 30-minute speech, and a companion op-ed published in The Wall Street Journal a day earlier, contrasted two groups that Sasse believes represent America's "true divide": civic pluralists (who "value debate and persuasion" and are "committed to human dignity, even for those with whom we disagree") and political zealots (who "seek total victory in the public square"). Whether they're on the left or on the right, he said Tuesday, "the message of all politics-first folks is basically the same: The only way to put an end to the culture war is to move beyond the outdated idea of a limited Constitution and instead grab more power for the 'good guys' while there's still time. The left's plan is more unelected, unaccountable bureaucrats. The right's plan is now to give similar kinds of power to a strongman. But ultimately, there's not much difference between these so-called plans."
Close readers of Reason may notice a likeness to ideas I've articulated in these pages. "The factions differ on who should be Caesar," Sasse said, "but beyond that, there's much on which they agree. They salivate on the idea of chaos and our disrupted age that can be the excuse for seizing more power. They foment anger and fear because they think if we're angry and scared enough, we'll assent to some Caesarist solution." Or as I put it in the October 2022 issue of the magazine, "Partisan animosity suits the authoritarian elements on the left and right just fine. Their goal is power, and they have little patience for procedural niceties that interfere with its exercise. As history teaches, a base whipped up into fear and fury is ready to accept almost anything to ensure its own survival."
Dark as all that sounds, Sasse's conclusion is surprisingly optimistic: "These factions are dangerous, to be sure," he said Tuesday, "but here's what we fail to appreciate most of the time: They're factions, and they're small, and they command nothing like majority opinion."
He went on to argue that when one side wins an election, it's because voters are "temporarily more disgusted by the other side's arrogant overreach," not because they're giving someone a "sweeping mandate" to impose his or her vision on the country. The zealots may be louder, he was suggesting, but most Americans are pluralists at the end of the day. "They don't want a left-wing nanny state telling them how to live," he said, "and they certainly don't want a right-wing potentate promising to crush all of our so-called 'domestic enemies.'"
None of this is to suggest that Sasse is a model libertarian. His positions on immigration and criminal justice issues in particular offer plenty to offend. But one of Sasse's claims is that there are more important things than disagreement over public policy—like shared commitment to our pluralist founding principles.
"Yes, policy matters, and yes, there must be important and vigorous debate," he said in his speech. "And no, being polite for the sake of being inoffensive isn't the highest good, and no, mushy middle kumbaya-ism will not be a strategy. But more than debates about policy, we need Americans to believe they can build again. We need to believe that loving your neighbor is more important than the policy disagreements."
If Sasse is right, there's far more civic pluralism extant in America than cable news and social media might lead you to think. Alas, after today, there's a little less of it in Washington.
The post Goodbye, Ben Sasse appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Language is the quintessential example of what Nobel laureate F.A. Hayek called a "spontaneous order": institutions that emerge through the uncoordinated, unplanned actions of many human beings. No one invented English; it bubbled up from below, the result of an infinite number of disparate decisions by people seeking to communicate in the pursuit of their own goals.
Washington, D.C., now has a museum dedicated to just this idea. Planet Word opened in late 2020 with a mission to "inspire and renew a love of words, language, and reading." Its three floors of interactive exhibits are informative and surprisingly functional, given the voice-activation technology on which most of them rely. They explore the origins of words, connections among foreign tongues, banned books, pun-based humor, the way music makes use of alliteration and rhyme, and more.
The post Review: D.C.'s Planet Word Museum Celebrates Language appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>For many members of the so-called New Right, one thing is clear: Classical liberal principles are not getting the job done.
The left, after all, has no compunction about using the state to go after conservatives. As far as those illiberal progressives are concerned, Catholic hospitals should be forced by law to perform abortions, and social media companies should be threatened with regulatory action if they don't agree to scrub their platforms of ideas and information unfavorable to the Democratic Party.
So instead of a principled commitment to limited government and individual liberty, the argument goes, conservatives who "know what time it is" should be willing to use public power to attack their foes. Anything less amounts to unilateral disarmament or even suicide.
The stakes, in this telling, are existential. It's not uncommon to hear that a future of Soviet-style persecution awaits those who refuse to embrace a sufficiently "muscular" response. A New Right influencer once told me that the liberalism of the American founding, by making conservatives squeamish about fighting fire with fire, was apt to land her in a gulag. Like the famous maxim from Game of Thrones, it's a vision of politics as a literal war in which you win or you die.
But how like Westeros is the United States? Are American leftists really plotting to round up religious traditionalists and Republican voters? If they were, would they stand a chance of getting away with it under the American system as it exists?
Perhaps the leading argument for classical liberalism is that it turns down the temperature of our politics. By ensuring that the rights even of minority groups are respected, good institutions can remove, or at least significantly reduce, those supposedly life-or-death stakes. Meanwhile, Americans by all accounts want a government that protects basic rights and liberties, not one that imposes a single moral orthodoxy on the country, however much some progressives might wish to do so. Given all this, perhaps the worst thing conservatives could do is to tear down the liberal institutions and norms that keep the left's worst impulses in check.
New Right rhetoric is saturated with talk of the need to restore traditional Christian virtue, by force if necessary. Several prominent New Right voices, including law professor Adrian Vermeule and journalist Sohrab Ahmari, are Catholic converts who dream of subordinating civil government to the church in pursuit of "a public square re-ordered to the common good" and possibly even "the eventual formation of the Empire of Our Lady of Guadalupe." At this year's National Conservatism Conference in Miami, a major New Right gathering, one speaker after another lamented "the things that we've lost" under liberal modernity: God, Scripture, nation, family.
The irony is that the approach to politics outlined by these new, militant conservatives is flatly at odds with authentic Christian virtue. The New Right implies that religious traditionalists have a choice: They can either be the ones inside the gulag, or they can make sure their enemies are. Jesus never would have accepted that bargain.
"You have heard that it was said, 'You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy,'" he says in the Gospel of Matthew. "But I say to you, love your enemies, and pray for those who persecute you, that you may be children of your heavenly Father." These are probably the most radical words in the Bible and almost certainly the hardest to live by. Yet the very heart of Christian teaching (if not necessarily the heart of Christian practice) has always been self-sacrifice, self-emptying, "taking up your cross," and "laying down your life for your friends."
That radical, countercultural message is far too often absent on the right today. As the Catholic writer Leah Libresco Sargeant puts it, "A lot of social conservatism has defined virtue down to 'refraining from certain modern errors' rather than 'living a life shocking in its generosity, courage, etc.'"
To truly care about virtue is to recognize that it matters how you win: Ends don't justify means. If conservatives ever did have to choose which side of the barbed wire to be on—as the gulag inmate accepting persecution or the victor carrying it out—there would be only one right answer from a Christian perspective. It isn't the New Right's.
The post Against <em>Game of Thrones</em> Christianity appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>"Eye-eye-eyeeeeee don't want a lot for Christmas," she said. "There is just one thing I need," she said. It's the secular holiday anthem for the ages. And it's based on a lie.
No shade to Mariah. But we all know that the ambiguous you is not the only thing she needs, nor the only thing needed by the masses—who can often be heard belting "All I Want for Christmas Is You" in unison in the bars and show choir concerts across the country. You can't wrap up a "you." You may get annoyed when "you" refuses to turn off football in favor of Married at First Sight. (This isn't personal.) Who is you anyway?
Since Mariah is no help, Reason is here to make it right.
We're back with our yearly gift-giving suggestions, tailored to all ages, personality types, and affinities, to the practical and the bizarre and (most) everything in between. For the Reason fan in your life, check out our swag, from shirts and hats and onesies to mugs and phone cases and even a stainless steel water bottle. Wow! And for the ones you want to convert, give a three-year gift subscription for the low, low price of $37.97. (Shorter timespans are available for gift recipients with commitment issues.)
For ideas a little more outside the box—to fill the hole Ms. Carey left—we're here for you. Happy giving! —Billy Binion, associate editor
Inflation has made everything at the grocery store more expensive, but prices for meat and poultry rose even faster than average inflation for most of the past year. That means overcooking your filet doesn't just risk ruining dinner. It's a waste of money too.
Clearly, the stakes—and the steaks—have been raised. Now more than ever, a thermometer is the essential grilling accessory.
Meater+ connects via Bluetooth to any smartphone or tablet, providing real-time updates on the ambient air temperature and the internal temperature of whatever is on the grill. With it, the old "well, that looks done" method of grilling can be relegated to the dark ages where it belongs.
Even though it comes pre-loaded with the Food and Drug Administration's recommended temperatures for each type and cut of meat, Meater+ lets you freely ignore the food bureaucrats' often ridiculous edicts. That means Meater+ doesn't merely prevent the dreaded overcook, but also helps you zero in on exactly how you like different meats prepared and consistently hit the sweet spot. —Eric Boehm, reporter
I recently rediscovered the glory of good old pepper. It's underrated by many standards, which is unfortunate, because it's flavorful, packs a punch, and has many health benefits. But that's not all! It's a gift for the diverse palate: Whether from Europe, India, China, (or a blend of them all), whether red, black, white, soft or hard, I love them indiscriminately. And thanks to a free(-ish) trade system, we can buy most of them in the U.S.
Which leads me to my gift suggestion: the Peugeot Olivier Roellinger Pepper Mill. It comes in red or black—doubling as a beautiful fixture on the kitchen or dining room table—and you can change the setting for fine or coarse grinding. Most importantly, this is the gift for the person who already "has everything." Besides, it's a great conversation starter if you say, for instance, "pepper and libertarians have a lot in common." Spicy. —Veronique de Rugy, contributing editor
The "Come Back With A Warrant" doormat is a mainstay of liberty-minded home décor, and for good reason. It fulfills a utilitarian function—giving guests a place to wipe their feet—while also making your legal knowledge known to any state actors who might come a-knocking.
With many stylish variations of the, shall we say, un-welcome mat, there is a design for any taste. The basic version of the doormat is a classic—and it has adorned my entryway for two years, while staying in top condition. However, Etsy is replete with other options, from cutesy to, erm, aggressive.
I'm personally partial to another variation—this doormat reading "hippity hoppity, get off my property," featuring a shotgun-toting cartoon frog. But as both a renter and a non-gun owner, it seemed a bit mismatched to my personal needs.
This holiday season, give the new home or apartment owner a gift that will both spiff up their doorway and remind guests—and government employees—that you are not to be trifled with. —Emma Camp, assistant editor
Buy the staple for $39.20 Buy the frog for $26.10
Give the gift of self-sufficiency—and a side of boho-chic ambiance—with a Burpee self-watering seed starting system. The self-watering tray and pellets of coco coir make growing plants from seeds a breeze, even for anti-green-thumb millennials who still want their homes to loosely resemble a Pottery Barn catalog. Burpee also sells high-quality vegetable seeds, including container-friendly cucumber and bean varieties for those who don't have space for outdoor garden beds. Growing your own food is rewarding, especially during an inflationary period. —C.J. Ciaramella, reporter
If you're looking for a way to sneakily teach your friends and family the ills of taxation and central authority, you need to gift The Great Dalmuti. The game goes something like this: Players try to shed all of their cards, and at the end of each round, those trailing in last must pay taxes to the top two winners. True to form, those taxes lock the losers in a cycle of losing and the winners in a cycle of winning until a revolution happens and power dynamics shift. With no official end to the game, it can be played until your non-libertarian friends and family members become so annoyed with the state that they become libertarians. —Addie Mae Villas, Burton C. Gray Memorial Journalism Intern
While man is still trying to get back to the moon, you can take your family a few million miles further this Christmas by giving them the gift of Terraforming Mars. As the name suggests, the board game tasks players with adding plants and people to the dead, red planet until it starts to look and feel a little more like home.
The libertarian in your life will have a blastoff assuming the role of a geoengineering mega-corporation that tries to fill the driest oceans, build the most domed cities, and smash the most temperature-raising asteroids into the planet's surface. Ample opportunity for player cooperation will ensure the competition doesn't get too heated.
The production value of the game pieces might leave a little to be desired. The real fun is found in exploring the imaginative game's setting and endless victory strategies. —Christian Britschgi, associate editor
Inflation getting you down? If you're like me, you've taken to making a lot more treats at home this past year to save and scrimp. I've certainly been fine-tuning my barista skills as coffee prices rise at many big chains and local haunts. Just because the economy sucks doesn't mean your coffee has to.
Enter Monin. The syrup company has a wide variety of interesting flavors, from amaretto to toasted marshmallow to tiramisu. I love to add the brand's lavender and French vanilla offerings to my lattes, but you can truly have some fun customizing your coffees (not to mention your alcoholic drinks, lemonades, and Italian sodas).
At around $15 per bottle of syrup—a hefty one, at that—you can try your hand at café-caliber drink combinations for pennies on the dollar. Happy mixing! —Fiona Harrigan, assistant editor
In 1933, Italian engineer Alfonso Bialetti invented the Moka Pot—a small, sleek, stovetop coffee maker—democratizing espresso for the masses. It's cheap, easy to use, and makes a perfectly fine cup of joe. And thanks to Italian emigration and Alfonso's marvelously mustached son, Renato, the device grew rapidly in popularity and remains ubiquitous in homes throughout Italy, South America, and Australia.
I've had one for years but have been using it more than ever for the same reason I'm recommending it to you now: Putin's war in Iraq! (Oops, I mean Ukraine.) A one-pound bag of espresso at $15 yields roughly a month of my daily addiction: about a fifth of what I pay for the same dosage from my Nespresso machine. (Let's not even talk about the $4 a day I was paying at Starbucks before the pandemic. Yikes!) And at just seven inches, you can have your bougie java wherever you go. No longer will you be that guy who shows up at the shared beach house with a legit espresso machine, a 26-piece set of Wusthof knives, and filtered ice cubes. (You could even take it camping if that's something that someone ever makes you do.)
While the Moka Pot comes in a variety of sizes and finishes, I own the classic three-cup version. At just $30, you can gift this timeless beauty to all the caffeine junkies in your life. —Jackie Pyke, director of development
If you're shopping for young kids, I highly recommend anything from Lovevery. The toys are made of high-quality materials, are aesthetically pleasing (no garish flashing neon plastic bits!), and are able to take a battering. Best of all, they're designed around Montessori principles to support brain development and inspire independent play.
Lovevery sells some stand-alone toys—you can find some of these on its website, while others I've only seen on Target.com—as well as toy box kits tailored to children's developmental stages. Each kit comes with six to nine different toys and costs $80 to $120 individually, or slightly less with a subscription (with new kits delivered every two to three months). —Elizabeth Nolan Brown, senior editor
Buy kits for $80-120 Shop miscellaneous
Instead of that misconceived (and overpriced) model high-speed-rail train set, consider a copy of How To Build a Road, a children's construction book that, true to its name, walks kids through the ins and outs of roadbuilding. (It's more interesting than it sounds.) Alternatively, there's the Lego City Roadwork Truck, which gives you another holiday excuse to teach a liberty-minded little one that government coercion isn't necessary for successful public infrastructure projects. At a minimum, a firm foundation in road work terminology comes in handy when the future free thinker finds herself dorm room jousting with a "you didn't build that"-kind of collectivist.
And while we can't expect all to grow up and attain Bob Poole levels of transportation policy distinction, kids should at least know the difference between a bulldozer and an excavator if ever they're to engineer that privately owned, market-priced (and pothole-free) toll bridge to a brand new Panamanian seastead around, say, 2042? —Hunt Beaty, podcast producer
No libertarian bunker is complete without a decent soldering iron.
Enter the Hakko FX600. Pair it with free online tutorials and tinkerers can quickly start turning boxes of old cords into practice projects.
For those who get good at it, fixing stuff will become a hedge against instability. Being able to put broken electronics and appliances back into working order during an emergency situation could literally save someone's life. Or maybe even enable them to play GameBoy during the apocalypse.
They wouldn't be able to keep up the salvage-hacker lifestyle forever. But it doesn't take a doomsday scenario for some basic wiring skills to come in handy. It at least might help them weather the whims of a finicky supply chain, lest their replacement gadgets get stuck on a boat coming from China. —Adam Sullivan, digital marketing specialist
First designed by ArmaLite's Eugene Stoner as a survival weapon, the AR-7 is an underappreciated semiautomatic rifle that has gone through multiple manufacturers over the years. This takedown rifle—the barrel detaches from the receiver and both can then be stored in the water-resistant stock—was featured as an assassin's tool in From Russia With Love in 1963, but it works better in the hands of outdoorsy types for small-game hunting and plinking. I like to throw mine into a daypack when I hike and bike in the desert, along with a good supply of the small, lightweight .22 LR rounds it shoots.
My rifle dates back to when Survival Arms owned the design, but current production from Henry Repeating Arms is well-reviewed, though the magazines were redesigned and aren't fully interchangeable with older models. Standard magazines hold eight rounds, but extended magazines can be purchased from other makers. —J.D. Tuccille, contributing editor
You can't make a classic Negroni without Campari, and it turns out it's pretty good in a movie, too. A lavish new book, Campari and the Cinema, traces the Italian bitter liqueur's history on screen, from a 1984 TV commercial for the brand directed by Federico Fellini—it's a love story set on a train—to a more recent short film, Killer in Red, directed by Paolo Sorrentino and starring Clive Owen as a bartender whose cocktails "express people's destiny." (He makes a lot of drinks that use Campari, of course.) One might argue that an oversized, brand-approved book like this doesn't have much practical value, but practicality isn't the point. This is a massive, gorgeous coffee table book that will appeal to fans of movies and Negronis—and even more to people who, like me, love both. —Peter Suderman, features editor
The home bars of true American cocktail aficionados may already be stocked with bottles of green and yellow Chartreuse, a liqueur first developed and still exclusively sold by Catholic monks in a remote valley in the French Alps. The Last Word is one (relatively) well-known drink that contains Chartreuse as an ingredient, alongside gin, maraschino liqueur, and lime juice.
But even serious imbibers may never have tasted the original iteration of Chartreuse, which the Carthusian monks' in-house apothecary perfected in 1737. That even-higher-proof liquid, made from all the same herbs and flowers as the green and yellow versions available around the world, has long been sold in France in tiny bottles labeled "Élixir Végétal." As of fall 2022, it's now available in the United States as well.
Thanks to federal regulators, though, who associate the word elixir with medicines, the same product has to be marketed here merely as "Chartreuse Vegetal." In fact, the Carthusians do consider the liqueur to have medicinal properties, but with three-letter government agencies on the prowl, their distributors find it easier to pretend otherwise. —Stephanie Slade, senior editor
Throw away that five-gallon jug because gravity bongs just got a major upgrade.
Stündenglass combines physics, airflow, and clean design to create a contactless smoke delivery system. With a 360-degree rotatable activation, it's easy to keep herbs burning with no re-light needed. The Stündenglass gravity infuser comes in six colors and glass globes can be swapped out to match your aesthetic. This piece is truly a stunner on your bud cart.
But Stündenglass isn't just for cannabis consumers. They sell an assortment of woodchips, from hickory to apple, for all your culinary and mixology needs. Use the tray cloche to smoke out ribs or the beverage cloche for an added flavor in one of Suderman's cocktail recipes.
Elevate any smoking experience with Stündenglass and leave your janky DIY gravity bong where it belongs—in your college years. —Bess Byers, digital marketing specialist
Buy the gravity infuser for $420 Buy the beverage cloche for $134.96 Buy the tray cloche for $179.96
What do you get your bitcoin-crazy friend who has everything and for whom pesky Christmas gifts seem quaint? More bitcoin, of course.
SATSCARDs are Coinkite's newest vehicle for conveniently gifting bitcoin. You drop bitcoin onto the SATSCARD with a single transaction to the address displayed on the back of the card, hand it to your loved one, and they now control the balance. From there, they can sweep the funds to wherever they please. Gifting the world's hardest money doesn't get easier than this.
Nobody has enough corn—not even your Bitcoiner bro—and you doing the work to put coin on a winter themed SATSCARD is all the more reward. Even the non-techie can pull this one off. —Joakim Book, copy editor
Effective altruism is taking a drubbing as the media covers every detail the implosion of Sam Bankman-Fried's cryptocurrency exchange, FTX. SBF, as he is known, was one of the largest funders of the effective altruism movement, which aims to maximize the impact of charitable giving. SBF's FTX shenanigans aside, effective altruism has a lot to recommend it, and the institutions that practice this type of philanthropy certainly need to diversify their donor base in a hurry. Why not do your end-of-year charity this year through GiveWell? Founded in 2007, the nonprofit is part of the O.G. crew of effective altruists who have worked diligently to find and fund powerful cheap interventions such as bed nets in malarial zones, dewormers for kids, and direct cash transfers to the world's poorest people. (They also take donations in crypto if SBF hasn't scared you off.) Too many Christmas charity donations are political or pointless. GiveWell is neither—and it won't clutter up your house. —Katherine Mangu-Ward, editor in chief
Donate with credit Donate with crypto
When traveling for the holidays, there's nothing like stepping off a germ-ridden plane and into a piping hot sauna, punishing your body with high temperatures to get those heat shock proteins flowing through your veins. The obvious problem: Most of us don't have easy access to saunas on the road. So if you want your loved ones to keep those sniffles at bay and escape the winter blues, buy a sauna they can take with them, like the TaTalife Portable Professional Far Infrared Sauna Dome. It's perfect for family and friends with a PhD in bro science and pairs perfectly with their ice baths and cold showers. —Hilary Hackleman, director of operations
I'm back, baby, with another sleep mask. "Another one!?" you might ask. Hear a girl out. I'm retracting my claim from last year that lumped in any weighted eye mask with flimsy airline freebees. (The latter are still trash.) That's because the Nodpod Gentle Pressure Sleep Mask is a weighted sleep experience that any over-taxed and under-slept (who isn't?) individual needs.
I opt for the "Sedona" shade because I love a desert vibe, but there are plenty of colors to pick from for a loved one (or even just a liked one). The design gently forces any overstimulated eyeballs to get the rest we so need; until some billionaire comes up with a way for us to avoid dedicating a third of our lives to sleep, we might as well be smart about it. The 2022 holiday season doesn't have to be about Black Friday stampedes. So click the link, spend the money, and sleep well. Have a happy, restful holidays, Reason readers and viewers. —Regan Taylor, video editor
Firefly is not coming back to the small screen—I'm sorry, but Nathan Fillion doesn't need the money, and it would probably just be a disappointment anyway. Yet fans of the 2002 space western with libertarian vibes can get their fix with the series of Firefly comics published by Boom! Studios. The libertarian-adjacent themes and well-drawn cast of characters continue their adventures in a series of 36 comic books and two one-off graphic novels. Those ready to jump in should start with the hardcover Firefly: The Unification War Vol. 1 which collects the first four comic books in the series.
Unclear if Boom! Studios has put the series on hiatus (the most recent comic book was published in January 2022), but anyone who makes it through their Firefly collection can indulge in the initial Serenity comic books that were sporadically published by Dark Horse Comics from 2005–2017 (which I have not read and cannot vouch for). Whether you're interested in the comics or satisfied with the TV show's lore, just remember the theme song's opening lyrics: "Take my love / Take my land / Take me where I cannot stand / I don't care / I'm still free / You can't take the sky from me." —Jason Russell, managing editor
Buy Firefly for $19.99 Buy Serenity for $14.99
Exhaustive but not exhausting, if you ever wondered how the geek cultures of comics, science fiction, and animation managed to become huge engines of money and crowds in showbiz, you'll be interested in See You At San Diego: An Oral History of Comic-Con, Fandom, and the Triumph of Geek Culture. This deep dive explores the history of San Diego Comic-Con via the voices of the curious, driven gang of nerdy weirdos and creatives who started small gatherings of fellow fanatics in San Diego hotels. Over 50 years, they took over the town and the entertainment industry. As with the best examples of spontaneous growth, it isn't because they planned or intended it: It's because their fantasies and hard work created a pulsing and paradoxically colorful black hole of attention and energy that gradually drew big money and crowds bigger than the city's convention center could hold.
The kids and their less-than-a-handful of adult mentors who started it all just wanted to hang out, talk to their pals, meet other potential pals, honor their creative heroes, and buy old comic books. When people get attracted to a wonderful dream, the shape of the dream must change. But when your idea is this attractive, it can't be helped. Both those who love and lament how success changes things will be fascinated watching these passionate feuding fans make dreams bigger than they could have imagined come true. —Brian Doherty, senior editor
If you have an Americana fan on your list, consider a Carter Family product. These revered conservators of the Appalachian mountain-music tradition virtually kick-started what became the professional country music scene, providing a repertoire of timeless songs to generations of earnest folkies, dorm-room guitar hotshots, and pop outliers like Devo (who covered the Carters' "Worried Man Blues" in Neil Young's oddball 1982 movie Human Highway) and Anna Kendrick (who turned their "When I'm Gone" into a cup routine in the first Pitch Perfect film). There's a ton of variously packaged Carter Family paraphernalia available, most abundantly on a Bear Family box set called In the Shadow of Clinch Mountain, which collects 307 of the tracks the group recorded from 1927 to 1941. Unfortunately, it costs $237.
If the thought of that sort of gifting outlay puts you in a Scroogey mood, let me suggest a fine alternative. Try Meeting in the Air, a collection of 14 Carter songs performed by Jim Watson, Tommy Thompson, and Mike Craver, all veterans of a long-running North Carolina string band, the Red Clay Ramblers. This record was recorded in 1979 and '80 and thus had the benefit of modern recording technology. The guitars (and occasional banjo and autoharp) are fuller than on the original records and the twining vocal harmonies—at which these guys truly excel—are clearer. Not all of the songs are the usual Carter "hits" (there's no "Wildwood Flower" or "Can the Circle be Unbroken"). But "Lulu Walls" and "The Wayworn Traveler' and the sublime "Give Me the Roses" are here, and they're incandescently rendered.
Meeting in the Air can be hard to find and expensive when you can. Happily, Rambler Mike Craver appears to have stashed away some reserve CDs, and he's selling them on his website for $10.95. A real deal, believe me. —Kurt Loder, film critic
Buy In the Shadow of Clinch Mountain for $237.60
Buy Meeting in the Air for $10.95
Mariah left out a few things with her hit single. But she may have been onto something when she excluded stuff. So for the person who already has all the stuff they need, or whose home is cluttered with stuff they don't need, give the gift of a cultural experience.
Who doesn't love a good musical? I can already hear one response: "A lot of people." I'll counter: Most everyone likes music, and most everyone likes a good story, so there's at least one musical for everyone. And it may be coming to a city near you.
Check out the Broadway shows currently touring the country, which bring the quality of New York theatre to your backyard at a more affordable price. For the history buff, check out the schedule for 1776, Hamilton, or even Les Misérables. For the nostalgic one, look at Beetlejuice, Ain't Too Proud, Beautiful: The Carole King Musical, and Jagged Little Pill (depending on your era of choice). For the Disney princess in your life, get thee to Frozen or Aladdin. And for that person mentioned above who rolls their eyes at the idea of spending a night out at a musical, try the almost-universally crowd-pleasing Wicked. Even if they don't fall in love, at least they'll finally understand the cultural references when Ariana Grande portrays Glinda on the silver screen. Cultured and well-informed. —Billy Binion, associate editor
The post The Best Ever Libertarian Gift Guide appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Shortly after World War II, a young Arthur C. Clarke penned a work of speculative documentary fiction: his account of mankind's first foray to the moon. Written in 1947, Prelude to Space has that accomplishment taking place in 1978—nearly a decade, we know now, after the real-life moonshot.
If Clarke underestimated the speed with which human beings would make it to the moon, he overestimated the speed with which space exploration would advance in subsequent decades. His book takes it for granted that the first journey to Mars will follow closely on the heels of the first lunar mission. Indeed, reaching the moon is seen as valuable in part because it offers a low-gravity launch pad from which to explore the further reaches of space. Needless to say, reality has failed to match those hopes.
Even further off the mark is Prelude's expectation that we would see the first lunar settlements before the close of the 20th century. Most of the story takes place in the months leading up to the launch of the spacecraft Prometheus. But in an epilogue set at the end of 1999, protagonist Dirk Alexson is seen in his office on the moon, where he relocated after being diagnosed with a deadly health condition. In the much lower lunar gravity, Clarke writes, "a heart which would have failed on Earth could still beat strongly for years."
This medical miracle is taken as a confirmation of the immense value of space exploration. Another main character "had been speaking the truth," Clarke concludes, "when he said, long ago, that the greatest benefits which the crossing of space would bring were those which could never have been guessed beforehand." Back on Earth, we're still waiting to find out about most of them.
The post Review: 1947's <em>Prelude to Space</em> Envisioned We'd Be on Mars by Now appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Author and venture capitalist J.D. Vance cruised to victory in Ohio's U.S. Senate contest on Tuesday night. The race looked to be a test of whether combative campaign tactics in defense of nationalist policies can find success at a high level when practiced by someone other than former President Donald Trump. Yet the failure of a predicted "red tsunami" to materialize makes it hard to draw sweeping conclusions from the Ohio outcome.
Viewed in isolation, Vance's win would seem to augur well for both Trump and the national conservative agenda of which the senator-elect has been a high-profile proponent. His victory will make him the third natcon-friendly member of the U.S. Senate, alongside Marco Rubio of Florida and Josh Hawley of Missouri.
A number of other races across the country were too close to call as of Wednesday morning, however, with control of both the House and the Senate hanging in the balance. Vance also badly underperformed a fellow Republican and onetime Trump critic in what has become an increasingly bright red state. Ohio incumbent Gov. Mike DeWine secured a second term by a 25-point margin; in that context, Vance's six-point victory looks less impressive.
This was supposed to be a very good night for the GOP, with both structural factors and economic fundamentals working in Republicans' favor. The party of the sitting president has historically done poorly in midterm elections: As the Republican pollster Kristen Soltis Anderson put it yesterday, "with the exception of 1998 and 2002, this has been true through my lifetime." Meanwhile, amid a slagging economy and high inflation, surveys have consistently found that the cost of living is voters' top concern, and that voters trust Republicans more than Democrats on that issue.
Despite those headwinds, Democrat John Fetterman managed to flip the Pennsylvania Senate seat being vacated by Republican Pat Toomey, defeating celebrity doctor Mehmet Oz, and Democrat Josh Shapiro won the Pennsylvania governor's race against Republican (and vocal 2020 election denier) Doug Mastriano. In Arizona, Republican Senate hopeful Blake Masters—whose candidacy, like Vance's, was bankrolled by the Silicon Valley billionaire Peter Thiel—is currently trailing. Far more surprising is that Kari Lake, a Trumpy local TV celebrity who was expected to easily claim the Arizona governor's mansion, is also behind.
The decidedly non-Trumpy Republican Gov. Brian Kemp won reelection in Georgia. And although Trump threw his weight behind the former football star Herschel Walker for the Peach State's U.S. Senate seat, that race looks poised to go to a runoff. If Walker loses, it will be a blow for the perception, fostered in the wake of the 2016 Access Hollywood tape, that Trump-like fame and fortune outweigh personal sexual transgressions with voters.
The story in Florida, where Republican incumbents Rubio and Gov. Ron DeSantis cleaned up, is more ambiguous.
Rubio has been a fellow traveler of the national conservatives, speaking regularly at their conferences, laying out a case for what he calls "common-good capitalism," and generally embracing more government intervention in the economy than Republicans in the past have tended to be comfortable with. But in the last year he has returned to speaking eloquently about the importance of individual freedom, something many on the New Right consider passé or even naive. And unlike Vance and some others in the natcon movement, he has resisted going all in on what I call will-to-power conservatism: the demand that Republicans use state coercion to reward their friends and punish their enemies, rule of law be damned.
DeSantis, on the other hand, has been an active practitioner of will-to-power politics. He went after Disney for voicing objections to a state education law. He has tried to control social media platforms' moderation policies. And during COVID, he did not stop at rejecting statewide lockdown measures and reopening the public schools; he used government power to preempt the right of local governments to set their own pandemic policies and prohibited private businesses from implementing vaccine requirements. Voters rewarded him with an almost 20-point victory over party-switching former Gov. Charlie Crist, which would seem to offer evidence for the idea that "muscular," big-government conservatism is the Republican Party's future.
At the same time, DeSantis' success on an otherwise disappointing night for the GOP represents a challenge to Trump himself. DeSantis is a much smarter and more serious candidate than the former president, far and away the top alternative for the Republican Party's 2024 presidential nomination. What's more, Trump knows it: He came out swinging against the Florida governor, whom he tried to brand "Ron DeSanctimonious," in the week before the midterms. This unprompted attack against a member of his own party removed any doubt whether Trump sees DeSantis as a threat. The latter's runaway win on Tuesday night suggests the former president's power over the Republican Party may indeed be waning.
Vance, who admits to being a "flip-flop-flipper" on Trump, may seem like a counterexample to this narrative. In 2016, he tweeted that the then–presidential candidate "makes people I care about afraid. Immigrants, Muslims, etc. Because of this I find him reprehensible." Responding to the Access Hollywood tape, he lamented, "Fellow Christians, everyone is watching us when we apologize for this man." He deleted those tweets, and others critical of the 45th president, while bidding for Trump's endorsement in the Senate primary, which he eventually received. (Trump then publicly joked that Vance had "kiss[ed] my ass" to get his support, proving that no act of abject fealty goes unpunished.)
It wasn't long before Vance had warmed to a Trumpy blend of hatemongering and authoritarian braggadocio. My personal favorite example is a tweet from the Senate hopeful last year asking just how "disgusting and violent" it is in New York City—as if Vance, a Yale Law graduate and founder of a multimillion-dollar venture capital firm, required tutoring on such questions from Ohio voters.
In the end, his pandering to Trump's supporters paid off for the author of Hillbilly Elegy. What that experience suggests about the future of his party, and of the New Right, is less clear.
The post J.D. Vance Seized His Chance, but the New Right Had a Bad Night appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>According to the polling averages, Republican venture capitalist J.D. Vance is currently leading his opponent, Democratic Rep. Tim Ryan, by a little over two points in the Ohio Senate race. FiveThirtyEight now gives the Hillbilly Elegy author an 80 percent chance of winning the seat in Tuesday's midterm. Assuming that forecast proves accurate, it will be a major victory for a combative, authoritarian political style increasingly associated with the national conservative movement.
The signature characteristic of the natcons, as I've written elsewhere, is a desire to wield government power in "muscular" fashion against their political enemies. Vance, who spoke at the National Conservatism Conference in 2019 and 2021, epitomizes that lust for power; if anything, he has been more willing than most on the New Right to openly declare his intent to use the state in obviously extralegal ways, telling Fox News' Tucker Carlson, for example, that conservatives should employ the taxation power to "seize" the assets of "woke, leftist" nonprofits such as the Ford Foundation and universities such as Harvard.
Note well the call for a selective application of the law. Vance pointedly isn't saying that we should rethink the tax-exempt status of nonprofits and universities in general. He's saying private entities should be punitively targeted for their political views. This is not noble opposition to cronyism; it's an abuse of power that conservatives would instantly recognize as a violation of the rule of law were it ever attempted by the left.
Vance has also been shockingly candid about the fact that—contra the talking points of GOP political aspirants from decades past—he is not merely out to win power in order to roll back the size and scope of government. He means to rule. Here he is laying out his approach last year in an interview with the controversial men's rights activist Jack Murphy:
So a lot of conservatives have said we should deconstruct the administrative state. We should basically eliminate the administrative state. And I'm sympathetic to that project, but another option is that we should just seize the administrative state for our own purposes. We should fire all of the people. I think Trump is gonna run again in 2024. I think he'll probably win again in 2024, and he'll win by a margin such that he'll be the president of the United States in January of 2025. I think what Trump should do, if I was giving him one piece of advice: Fire every single mid-level bureaucrat. Every civil servant in the administrative state. Replace them with our people, and when the courts—because you will get taken to court—and when the courts stop you, stand before the country like Andrew Jackson did, and say, "The chief justice has made his ruling. Now let him enforce it." [emphasis added]
Vance, a Yale-educated lawyer, knows such a move would be blocked by the courts. Taking a page from the book of neoreactionary blogger Curtis Yarvin, a self-described monarchist, he thinks a Republican president should do it anyway, and then defy any attempt at judicial review. That scenario, if it came to pass, would be a bona fide constitutional crisis.
Ryan, a Democrat who has supported President Joe Biden's agenda as a member of Congress, is no libertarian himself. On economics, the platforms of the two candidates are functionally similar. Both oppose free trade (with Ryan boasting in one campaign ad that "I voted with Trump" on that issue), blame China for many of America's problems, and support industrial policy to prop up domestic manufacturing. Both have focused on drug overdoses in the region and call for increased funding for law enforcement. Both would raise taxes.
The main policy distinctions between the Senate hopefuls, then, are on cultural issues. Ryan has hit Vance for opposing abortion rights, while Vance has hit Ryan for being soft on immigration.
Arguably the most jarring aspect of the Vance campaign, though, is how transparently it has fomented hate and rejected individual liberty as a value. "If we're going to actually really effect real change in the country," he told Ben Domenech, the former publisher of The Federalist, last year, "it will require us completely replacing the existing ruling class with another ruling class." For Vance, as for so many natcons, politics is a war to determine which elites get to impose their will on the rest of us.
The post A New Authoritarian Political Style Is on the Ballot in Ohio appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>In a recent column for The Spectator World, nationalist conservative Josh Hammer makes a revealing logical blunder. Seeing where his thinking goes wrong can help us understand why the New Right's defense of its own yen for power is so inadequate.
Hammer refers to an interview President Joe Biden recently gave with Dylan Mulvaney, a transgender social media star. In it, Mulvaney asks Biden whether "states should have a right to ban gender-affirming health care." Biden answers in the negative: "I don't think any state or anybody should have the right to do that," he says. "As a moral question and as a legal question. I just think it's wrong."
This, for Hammer, is a five-alarm-fire moment. If a majority of voters in a state want to forcibly prevent citizens from accessing transgender medical interventions (whether surgical or pharmaceutical), he thinks they should have the ability to do so. Biden, in contrast, thinks decisions involving such interventions should be, as Mulvaney put it, "just between me and my doctors." Hammer fumes in response:
In articulating his view that the "moral" (read: immoral) imperative to chemically castrate and hormonally bastardize vulnerable Americans is so great as to require removal of the issue from the realm of democratic politics, Biden paid faithful homage to the tenets of the woke catechism. If cultic wokeism is to be our new public orthodoxy, as the progressive faithful wish, then certain things must be legally mandated and certain things must necessarily be proscribed. Biden was only being candid with Mulvaney — his rejection of the foundational liberal paradigm of values-neutrality is emphatic and explicit.
The idea that Biden is rejecting values-neutrality with his answer gets things precisely backward. This becomes clearer if we learn to think of liberalism in terms not of neutrality but rather of mutual forbearance: In cases where fundamental rights are not at stake, I forgo using government power to force you to live the way I want and, in exchange, you forgo using government power to force me to live the way you want. That's the liberal settlement—and if either of us breaches it, liberal institutions will be there to hold us accountable.
It's fine to note that liberalism is not itself morally neutral, in the sense that it rests on implicit moral claims about, for example, all people deserving equal treatment under the law. (That value, thankfully, continues to be widely shared in our society.) But liberalism does insist that government decline to take sides on many other moral questions where there isn't an overwhelming consensus, such as whether Drag Queen Story Hour is a good or a bad thing.
Asked in the Mulvaney interview about one such contested question, Biden says state governments should stay out of it. Far from being a "mask-off moment," this is perfectly consistent with liberalism-as-forbearance.
Hammer goes wrong because he imputes additional beliefs to the president's answer. He assumes that Biden wants conservatives to forgo the use of state power to oppose the woke agenda—but that Biden would be all too happy for his own allies to use state power to impose woke orthodoxy on everyone else.
It's true that many on the activist left clearly do wish to use state power in this way. Principled liberalism requires that the president be just as opposed to those efforts as he is to efforts from the right. Forbearance for thee and power for me is not liberalism at all, and Biden's record leaves much to be desired on this score.
Nonetheless, when Biden is asked in the same interview what Democratic leaders should do to advance trans rights, he pointedly eschews calling for government action. Instead, he says the most important thing is "to be seen with people like" Mulvaney, to show regular Americans that there's nothing to be "fearful" of. The answer is reminiscent of a lesson learned in the 1990s and early 2000s by same-sex-marriage advocates, who famously discovered that voters became more sympathetic to their cause upon learning they had friends or family members who were gay.
Biden's is a thoroughly liberal response, one that appeals to persuasion rather than coercion—changing hearts and minds, not subjugating enemies through the use of state power. Watch the interview for yourself: You don't have to agree with the substance of Biden's views to recognize that his answer remains squarely within bounds. That Hammer manages to misread it as an "emphatic and explicit" rejection of liberal neutrality shows just how deeply confused he is about the ideas he purports to be an authority on.
But this is the New Right modus operandi. Ultimately, post-liberal conservatives want to seize power and use it against their political foes. Such a desire can be rationalized only if they can convince rational onlookers that the other side is on the brink of doing the same to them. Hammer is so desperate for an excuse to indulge his own authoritarian impulses that he finds existential threats even where they don't exist. Rising illiberalism is indeed a problem in our politics, but fatuous columns like Hammer's only make that problem worse.
The post Josh Hammer's Dangerous Misunderstanding of Liberalism appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Two hundred years ago in July, Johann Mendel was born. He would come to be known as Gregor (the religious name he received upon entering the Augustinian Friars at St. Thomas' Abbey in Austria-Hungary) and later as the "father of modern genetics."
Mendel studied math, physics, and eventually botany in school. While conducting experiments with hybridized pea plants in the monastery garden and greenhouse, he discovered the principles of heredity. His process involved carefully tracking various traits, such as pod shape and plant height. From those observations, he developed a theory involving what he called dominant and recessive "factors"—what would come to be known as "genes."
This work paved the way for all future research in the genetic sciences, including the discovery of DNA. But Mendel's contributions would not be recognized in his lifetime.
In 1866, Mendel published the results of his experiments. The paper received little attention. In 1868, Mendel was named abbot (head monk) of his monastery, and his research gave way to administrative obligations. He died in 1884.
Things began to change in 1900. That year, a British biologist named William Bateson unearthed Mendel's paper. He translated it into English and became a proponent of Mendel's ideas. Bateson's own experiments extended Mendel's discoveries, showing, for example, that Mendelian principles applied to animals as well as plants. Bateson also bestowed the name genetics on this area of study. Today, Mendel is widely recognized as "the architect of genetic experimental and statistical analysis," as the Encyclopedia Britannica puts it.
Biographies of Mendel note a history of run-ins with the state. When he first arrived at St. Thomas' Abbey, he was assigned to a teaching job. But the Austro-Hungarian government around that time began requiring an exam for teacher certification. Mendel, who suffered from severe test anxiety, attempted the exam on two occasions, six years apart, and failed it both times.
Two decades later, as abbot, Mendel again found himself at loggerheads with the authorities after a new city law attempted to subject the monastery to heavy taxation. "The very idea made Mendel boil," writes Robin Marantz Henig in The Monk in the Garden: The Lost and Found Genius of Gregor Mendel, the Father of Genetics. "The abbot began a single-handed letter-writing campaign," which became "more detailed, more impassioned, more strident, and more vituperative as the years went on." Henig adds that "the stubborn abbot never wavered in his insistence that a tax on church property was unconstitutional."
The battle lasted until Mendel's death a decade later. He never did agree to pay the tax.
The post Gregor Mendel, the Father of Genetics and a Tax Resister, Turns 200 appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>"Wokeism is not a fever that will pass but a cancer that must be eradicated," declared a main-stage speaker at the third National Conservatism Conference ("NatCon III") last week. "In this new reality, the only institution with the power to contend with and conquer the woke-industrial complex is the government of the United States."
In the task to identify what distinguishes national conservatism from other right-wing varietals, you could do worse than to start with that quote from activist Rachel Bovard. It shows that this burgeoning political faction has at its heart a fundamentally favorable orientation toward federal power and not a mere revivification of national pride. It also makes it clear that the natcons' purpose in acquiring government power is not merely to prevent its misuse by opposing ideologues; it's to use it affirmatively to destroy opposing ideologues.
Bovard continued:
The institutional left does not intend to leave anything of the old republic behind for us to salvage. Constitutionalism, scientific inquiry, individual liberty, civil society, voluntarism, patriotism, parental authority, free expression, free enterprise, religious pluralism, cultural diversity—they are coming for everything. So national conservatism must come for them. We must forge a comprehensive policy agenda for Congress, the presidency, and the states to break apart the left's every source of funding and power. Not as an act of partisan retaliation but one of national survival. [emphasis added]
The Bovard speech was not a one-off. Many of the most popular speakers at the three-day conference in Miami returned to the same theme. "Imagine how quickly the political landscape would change," said Hillsdale College's David Azerrad, "if we had a core contingent of elected Republicans who were committed to using power to defund and humiliate the institutional centers of power of the left."
It was Azerrad who, in 2020, provided an early articulation of what I've called "Will-to-Power Conservatism": "The right must be comfortable wielding the levers of state power," he wrote, and "using them to reward friends and punish enemies (within the confines of the rule of law)."
That language has become a favorite talking point of Newsweek opinion editor (and fellow NatCon III attendee) Josh Hammer, who has repeatedly adopted it in his own tweets and writings—including a column this year that kicked up a storm online. After critics pointed out that using government to "reward friends and punish enemies" is generally considered to run afoul of the rule of law by definition, Newsweek silently altered the sentence to call instead for "the rewarding of good and the punishing of evil." When that was noticed, Newsweek appended an editor's note to the article defending the change on the grounds that Hammer views the two phrases as "substantively…interchangeable."
But even phrases like "using political power…to reward friends and punish enemies" may seem a bit nebulous. What, concretely, do the natcons propose? The answers are illuminating: In her speech, Bovard explicitly urged conservatives to use the government to break up tech companies, tax the endowments of left-wing universities, impose trade barriers, build a border wall, and increase the size of the child tax credit.
In a "primer" on national conservatism released on the heels of the conference, Hammer called for "a temporary full immigration moratorium" to "drastically reduce legal immigration from its current levels"; for "vigorous antitrust enforcement against, and common carrier regulation for," banks and social media companies that discriminate against conservative viewpoints; and for a national industrial policy.
NatCon speakers also voiced support for laws of a religious nature, including conference organizer Yoram Hazony's insistence on getting God back into our schools—or as Hammer put it in his primer, "the American public square should overtly reflect God and the teachings of the Bible and Scripture."
Such calls to embrace government power were front and center at NatCon III. But there were also many blander academic presentations and even some thoughtful admonitions against conservative overreach, such as Fr. Benedict Kiely's comment that "where nationalism can go wrong…is if the good of one's own nation alone is pursued without regard for the rights of others." One question I had throughout the event was the extent to which the most bombastic voices represented the average natcon sympathizer.
The crowd's ebullient response to Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, though, at least suggests an answer. DeSantis, arguably the frontrunner for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination, has been a champion of using the power of the state against individuals and businesses. From his keynote address at the conference:
We were the first state or one of the first to ban so-called vaccine passports, the idea that you have to show proof of a COVID shot to be able to participate in society. And there were some conservatives that said, "Yeah, well, government shouldn't do a vaccine passport, but if a private business wants to do it, what's wrong with that?" Well, I'll tell you what's wrong with that. An individual has a right to participate in society. And we're not just going to sit idly by….
We also were one of the first states to provide protections for all employees in Florida, not just government employees, against employer-imposed COVID shot mandates. Our view is very simple: No Floridian should have to choose between a job that they need and a shot they do not want. And that's the same if you're a police officer at a municipality, if you work for the state government, or if you work for the biggest corporations in the state of Florida.
The idea that the government may stop companies and organizations from setting the terms under which they will do business because other people have "a right to participate in society" is, of course, the same argument that leftists have trotted out to justify crackdowns against Christian wedding vendors that do not wish to participate in gay marriage celebrations and against religious schools that expect job candidates not to openly flout tenets of the faith. Yet conservatives have long argued that private property and free association do, or at the very least should, broadly protect employers' rights.
A free society must respect people's freedoms even when lots of other people dislike how they're used. Fortunately, abiding by that bargain will tend to produce a rich and diverse marketplace where people have the space to experiment with different business practices and consumption decisions.
DeSantis has proven his willingness to wield government power to punish political dissent and pre-empt choices he does not like. Despite that (or perhaps, as I suspect, because of it) NatCon III attendees were in fits of adulation over his speech. The will to power ran deep in Miami.
The post The Will to Power Was Front and Center at NatCon III appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Something is broken in our politics. Just about everyone knows it, but it can be hard to put your finger on what it is.
As the media attempt to grapple with this felt reality, they reach over and over for the same word: polarization. That, we're told, is the shorthand for what has gone wrong. Where once the country had its share of conservative Democrats, liberal Republicans, and mushy moderates, today the two parties are more internally consolidated—and further apart from each other—than ever.
But what if that explanation is missing something? What if there's a sense in which left and right are actually converging, and the nature of that convergence is the real source of the perception that something isn't right?
In 2014, Pew Research Center released a report on the crisis of polarization. "The overall share of Americans who express consistently conservative or consistently liberal opinions has doubled over the past two decades," it explained. "Today, 92% of Republicans are to the right of the median Democrat, and 94% of Democrats are to the left of the median Republican."
According to the report, as the center of gravity within each party shifted out toward the extremes (ideological polarization), dislike and distrust of those on the other side of the aisle increased as well (affective polarization). We disagree on more than ever and like each other less than ever. There you have it: the recipe for toxic politics.
Yet by 2021, Pew had settled on a different framework for understanding the American political landscape. In a major report released last fall, the think tank introduced a political typology that focuses attention on the divisions within the left and right.
Neither of those camps is a monolith, Pew notes. In fact, nine distinct subgroups are observable across the spectrum. You have your business-friendly Republicans and your cultural conservatives, your blue-collar Democrats and your progressive activists. Instead of a mushy middle, there are the "stressed sideliners," less politically engaged than the other groups and, when they do show up, willing to pull the lever for either party.
According to American National Election Studies data, the share of Americans who self-identify as moderates or say they don't know what they are has fallen from 55 percent in 1972 to 39 percent in 2020. In that sense, people really have been moving toward the poles. But if partisan consolidation is the story of the last few decades, the story of the last few years is one of fracturing. More people are calling themselves conservatives, for example, but their preferences and priorities are not necessarily shared.
The future of the parties is now a matter of live debate. But in both cases, the elements that seem to have the most energy behind them have something important in common: a desire to move their side, and the country as a whole, in an illiberal direction.
On the left, a new crop of socialists hope to overthrow the liberal economic order, while the rise of intersectional identity politics has supplanted longstanding commitments to civil liberties. On the right, support for free markets and free trade are more and more often derided as relics of a bygone century, while quasi-theocratic ideas are gathering support.
What has not changed—what may even be getting worse—is the problem of affective polarization. Various studies have found that Americans today have significantly more negative feelings toward members of the other party than they did in decades past.
But partisan animosity suits the authoritarian elements on the left and right just fine. Their goal is power, and they have little patience for procedural niceties that interfere with its exercise. As history teaches, a base whipped up into fear and fury is ready to accept almost anything to ensure its own survival. Perhaps even the destruction of the institutions and ideals that make America distinctively itself.
You've likely seen some version of the statistic: Before Bernie Sanders' surprisingly strong showing in the 2016 Democratic presidential primaries, the average age of a member of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) was in the late 60s. Within a couple of years, it was early 30s and falling fast.
Magazines were soon running articles on figures like 23-year-old Melissa Naschek, an Ivy Leaguer studying neuroscience who, after a few months of attending DSA meetings, had "denounced liberalism and begun identifying as a socialist." Membership rocketed from around 6,000 to nearly 100,000, and the group now boasts four sitting members of the U.S. House of Representatives. The DSA itself has become more extreme as well.
In the last half-decade, this newly energized activist class has been working to push the Democratic Party hard in a leftward direction—and demands such as student loan forgiveness, Medicare for All, and rent control are just the start. "Nationalize All the Oil Companies" reads a recent headline at the socialist magazine Jacobin. "Why not nationalize Amazon?" asked a host of the cult-popular Chapo Trap House podcast in 2017. The same episode declared the need to "decommodify" all "necessary goods," where decommodification means making something free and provided by the government, and where necessary goods—according to the podcast's hosts—include housing, education, health care, elder care, child care, transportation, and food.
Gearing up for his 2020 run, Sanders rolled out a plan that, beyond hiking corporate taxes, would order large companies to hand 45 percent of the seats on their boards and 20 percent of their stock to worker representatives. By using force to appropriate ownership and control of capital, this would be a genuine move toward the democratic socialist goal of abolishing the traditional employer–wage earner relationship and putting the country's productive resources under "democratic control."
Jacobin magazine founder Bhaskar Sunkara emphasized the radical nature of these efforts in The Socialist Manifesto (Verso Books): "Sanders' movement is about creating a 'political revolution' to get what is rightfully ours from 'millionaires and billionaires,'" he wrote. "His program leads to polarization along class lines; indeed, it calls for it."
No socialist himself, President Joe Biden still managed to delight the left wing of his party by unveiling a plan for $4 trillion in infrastructure spending, paid family leave, and various efforts to "secure environmental justice" upon assuming office in 2021. "It is absolutely a bold and transformative and progressive agenda," the chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus told The Washington Post that spring. Only a lack of cooperation from a couple of moderate Senate Democrats has prevented more of it from being enacted.
At a time of polarization, you might expect the right to react by doubling down on support for free markets and private property. Instead, concurrent with democratic socialism's ascendance, many prominent conservatives have taken a leftward turn of their own.
In June 2019, Tucker Carlson spent five full minutes during his prime-time Fox News show praising a plan from Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D–Mass.) to promote "economic patriotism." The proposal, which called for "aggressive" government action to bolster domestic manufacturing and keep American companies from creating jobs abroad, "sounds like Donald Trump at his best," Carlson enthused.
President Donald Trump exhibited a high degree of comfort wielding state power for mercantilist ends, from his imposition of tariffs to his use of subsidies and bailouts to support American companies facing competition. Now a rising cadre of nationalist conservatives (a.k.a. "natcons") are happy to provide the intellectual ammunition for this America First agenda.
In 2019, Republican policy wonk Oren Cass appeared at the inaugural National Conservatism Conference to argue for industrial policy—a robust program of federal interventions meant to resuscitate American manufacturing. He went on to found a think tank, American Compass, that promotes such familiar policies as making corporations give board seats to labor representatives.
In Washington, skirmishes between Republicans are increasingly likely to be over the terms by which the government should support families financially. When Sen. Mitt Romney (R–Utah) last year introduced a plan to provide up to $4,200 a year, in perpetuity, to every American child, Sens. Marco Rubio (R–Fla.) and Mike Lee (R–Utah) balked—but only because they preferred a plan to increase the size of the child tax credit to as much as $4,500 a year. Sen. Josh Hawley (R–Mo.) soon offered a hybrid option, complete with an additional bonus for married parents. So much for rolling back the bloated welfare state.
A bevy of new right-of-center publications paints globally integrated commerce as a threat. Among them are American Affairs (in which one author recently encouraged the U.S. to learn from China's efforts to "subsidi[ze] industry through equity investments") and The American Mind (sample headline: "Make America Autarkic Again"). The Catholic provocateur Sohrab Ahmari, who in March partnered with a Marxist to found yet another new publication, Compact, has for some time been a critic of "warmed-over Reaganism" and is now on the record supporting "a strong social-democratic state."
A common refrain among critics of free markets and global trade is that such institutions, because of their dynamism and reliance on worker mobility, are alienating: They stop people from putting down roots. As one representative malcontent put it, "Nothing highlights libertarianism's cold-blooded disconnection from any notion of human interaction or society better than their penchant for saying, 'We should just have people move around to the jobs,' and create these atomized pinball humans moving from shantytown to shantytown, looking for employment and just sundering all communal bonds along the way."
That sentiment, which might be endorsed by any number of natcons and religious conservatives, was actually voiced on a 2016 episode of Chapo Trap House.
Whether from the left or from the right, such critiques suffer from the same accounting flaw: They see only the upsides of their proposed interventions and only the downsides of the status quo. Missing from the calculus is a recognition that tariffs, by driving up prices, hurt both American consumers and domestic producers who rely on inputs from abroad; that federal "buy American" mandates mean our tax dollars don't go as far; that subsidies insulate incumbent players from competition and lock in old ways of doing things; that wealth expropriation is a death sentence for risk taking and innovation; that someone still needs to produce the goods and provide the services that have been "decommodified"; and that—as the labor market of the last year suggests—people become less willing to work the more they're told that government is responsible for meeting their material needs.
The bipartisan leftward lurch on economics is perhaps most visible in the rejection of any restraint in the response to COVID-19. In 2020, the Trump administration pushed through a $2.2 trillion pandemic bill that dwarfed the Barack Obama administration's historic 2009 stimulus package. It included $1,200 payments to millions of Americans and was followed by a second round of $600 checks that Trump proceeded to denounce as too small. The Biden administration, for its part, was happy to start 2021 with a third round of checks at $1,400 apiece, among other expenditures.
In all, Congress has authorized some $6 trillion in COVID-specific federal spending, more than three times as much as Washington's response over five years to the Great Recession, according to the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget. Meanwhile, since early 2020, the Federal Reserve has injected a staggering $4 trillion into the economy, with nary a complaint from either party's leaders.
Economics is the arena in which the left-right convergence is most obviously apparent. But there are other places in which the two movements, though superficially worlds apart, are tracking in the same disturbing direction at a deeper level.
According to the old American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) mythos, one of the group's finest hours came in 1977 when it successfully defended the First Amendment right of neo-Nazis to demonstrate in Skokie, Illinois. Some 30,000 people reportedly canceled their ACLU memberships to protest the decision, but the group stood by it on the high grounds that speech protections, to mean anything, must extend even to the least popular in society.
That commitment carried the group all the way to Charlottesville, Virginia, four decades later. But in the aftermath of the infamous Unite the Right rally in 2017, ACLU leadership appeared to break. The following June, The Wall Street Journal published a leaked document that had been drafted to help state chapters decide which cases to take a pass on. While insisting the civil liberties organization would "continue our longstanding practice of representing" even repugnant speakers "in appropriate circumstances," the guidelines created an impression that circumstances were highly unlikely to be deemed appropriate when it came to the likes of white supremacists.
As former board member Wendy Kaminer explained in a commentary for the Journal, "The speech-case guidelines reflect a demotion of free speech in the ACLU's hierarchy of values." It's a demotion that is evident across the progressive movement, where "systemic equality," "racial justice," and other manifestations of identity politics that include an ever-more-militant LGBT agenda have sidelined practically all concern for the speech rights of those seen as on the wrong side politically.
"The quest to suppress objectionable reading material in America" was once mostly confined to the right, author Kat Rosenfield argued in a March essay. "But as progressives became increasingly focused on diversity, equity, and inclusion in the arts—and on the potential harm wrought by books that didn't do enough to champion the proper values—they started issuing challenges of their own. By 2020, the [American Library Association's] list included almost as many complaints about racist language, white savior narratives, or alleged sexual misconduct by an author as it did ones about bad language or LGBT themes."
Not that conservatives have abandoned censorship. Cry as they might when their own speech faces adverse consequences, they have few qualms about punishing expression that runs up against right-wing pieties.
J.D. Vance, the GOP nominee for U.S. Senate in Ohio, has called for punitive taxation to "seize the assets" of nonprofits that push a "woke" agenda and of companies like those that dared to oppose voting legislation in Georgia and other states last year. "Harvard University's $120 billion endowment is ammunition for our enemies," he said on one occasion, "and we can't let the enemy have that much ammunition or we're going to lose."
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, a front-runner for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination, has gone beyond lobbing threats. After Walt Disney Co. CEO Bob Chapek criticized a law regulating instruction on sexual orientation and gender identity in Florida public schools, DeSantis pushed through another law stripping Disney World of its self-governing jurisdiction. It was a clear and worrying example of government retaliation against a private actor for political speech displeasing to the party in power.
The law that sparked the brouhaha is one of dozens that seek to clamp down on what can be said in classrooms across the country. Introduced in a mad rush to scrub curricula of what conservatives call critical race theory and progressive sexual politics, these legislative efforts are often sloppily written and open to abuse. Nor do all of them stop with state-run K-12 education. Some claim to apply to private schools; others target higher ed. A different Florida law represents such an egregious violation of the rights of professors and college students to discuss controversial topics that the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression has asked administrators to consider refusing to comply.
These days, prominent voices on left and right alike stand against free speech "absolutism." Michael Knowles, a conservative writer with over 750,000 followers on Twitter and a podcast co-hosted with Sen. Ted Cruz (R–Texas), published a book last year in which he argued that speech in America is too free. Conservatives must "not only articulate a moral and political vision," he wrote, "but also suppress ideologies and organizations that would subvert that vision."
More recently, the Biden administration's erstwhile disinformation czar, Nina Jankowicz—perhaps under the influence of a ubiquitous progressive talking point that hateful words are actually violence—said she "shudder[ed]" to think about "free speech absolutists" running social media platforms such as Twitter. To stop online abuse, she said, "we need the platforms to do more, and we frankly need law enforcement and our legislatures to do more as well."
Note the attention on government action to shut down disfavored speech. Jankowicz's comments represent an emerging consensus among Democratic activists and politicians in favor of an approach more like the one being pursued in the European Union, which has moved to require social media companies to delete user-generated content deemed suspect by the state, from "hate speech" to supposed COVID misinformation. In June, Biden announced a new federal task force (composed of eight cabinet secretaries, among other officials) aimed at stopping "online harassment and abuse"—a category that almost certainly includes some forms of speech protected by law in this country.
Republicans, for their part, have taken up legislation to prohibit social media companies from viewpoint-based moderation of content. While the new Democratic paradigm runs afoul of the Constitution by ordering private companies to engage in censorship, the GOP would violate those same companies' right to control the material that appears on their platforms, forcing them to amplify speech with which they do not wish to be associated. Such laws have already passed in Texas and Florida, though both face preliminary injunctions.
Free expression is not the only First Amendment freedom that has lost its luster in recent years. Religious liberty is also under attack.
In 1993, Bill Clinton signed the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA). The New York Times had editorialized in favor of the bill, and the ACLU had urged its passage. "What this law basically says is that the government should be held to a very high level of proof before it interferes with someone's free exercise of religion," Clinton said at the time. "This judgment is shared by the people of the United States as well as by the Congress. We believe strongly that we can never, we can never be too vigilant in this work."
Today, the idea that people should be protected from government actions that would impinge their religious beliefs is all but anathema on the left.
In 2015—a year after the Supreme Court found that family-owned businesses could not be forced to pay for employees' abortifacient drugs—the ACLU abruptly called on Congress "to amend the RFRA so that it cannot be used as a defense for discrimination." The group has taken numerous Catholic hospitals to court in an effort to make them perform abortions and gender transitions against their will. Christian small business owners have faced human rights investigations and fines for not wanting to be involved in same-sex weddings, and parochial schools have been targeted by the state for making hiring and firing decisions based on would-be employees' adherence to tenets of the faith.
But at least conservatives are solid on religious liberty, right? Alas, a new intolerance toward nonbelievers (or wrong believers) has crept in on the right, with a cohort of "post-liberal" intellectuals trying to build a case for less separation between church and state.
The most radical fringe within this group—people like the Harvard Law School professor Adrian Vermeule and the Cistercian monk Fr. Edmund Waldstein—are the so-called integralists, whose "political Catholicism" calls for a civil government that is subordinate to the Catholic Church and actively privileges the true faith (and its adherents) through the law. A robust understanding of religious liberty that ensures equal rights even for dissenters is a hindrance to the integralist project.
In contrast to social media regulations, these desires seem unlikely to enter public policy anytime soon. Even on the right, there is minimal appetite for enforcing the tenets of Christianity, let alone traditional Catholicism, on a secularizing society. The focus is instead on culturally conservative priorities, such as restricting trans athletes from competing in women's sports, that have little to do with religion per se.
Nonetheless, a number of increasingly influential writers and media personalities have gained a following with calls to reinstate Sabbath laws, ban blasphemy, return school- sponsored prayer to the classroom, and otherwise use the state to root America's "public life" in Christian teachings—all with little concern for whether such policies violate the spirit or letter of the Constitution.
In January, The Atlantic published a long article by an Irish writer who had lived through the ethno-nationalist conflict known as the "troubles." Describing a perception of civil war just around the corner, he writes: "Once that idea takes hold, it has a force of its own. The demagogues warn that the other side is mobilizing. They are coming for us. Not only do we have to defend ourselves, but we have to deny them the advantage of making the first move. The logic of the preemptive strike sets in: Do it to them before they do it to you. The other side, of course, is thinking the same thing."
An analogous logic is on display in America today. It is mostly rhetorical so far. But it is happening at both ends of the ideological spectrum.
The tropes come in escalating stages. One is that the other side is irredeemably evil and out to destroy all that is good. A second is that our side is weak and overly beholden to procedural niceties, whereas our opponents are shameless about breaking the rules in their pursuit of power. The third, following from the other two, is that whatever it takes to win is justified; any institution standing in the way can be demolished; and doing any less amounts to cowardice and surrender.
The left insists that conservatives are engaged in an "eliminationist" and "genocidal" struggle against marginalized communities such as trans people, women, and the working class. "Conservatives are animated by a vision of 1950s-style white Christian patriarchal dominance," a Georgetown visiting professor wrote in The Guardian recently. "It is the only order they will accept for America." The Supreme Court decision overturning Roe v. Wade is "the culmination of a decades-long conservative assault on the constitutional foundations of our modern civil rights regime," tweeted Slate legal reporter Mark Joseph Stern. It's not just that "abortion bans are class warfare" (per the DSA) but also that "austerity is violence" (per Chapo Trap House). The very idea of reducing government spending now has existential stakes.
The right has its own purveyors of dire warnings about what progressives are up to—which supposedly includes grooming children for sexual assault, using immigration to replace native-born Americans with a Democrat-voting electorate, and eradicating traditional Christian beliefs and practice from the public square. Nothing less than conservatives' survival is on the line, they say. In 2020, Vermeule tweeted that the attendees of an anti-Trump conference would not be spared the gulag when the extremist left takes over; four years earlier, an essay in the Claremont Review of Books implored readers to elect Trump with the memorable words, "2016 is the Flight 93 election: charge the cockpit or you die."
Observe the equal-opportunity demonization and the industrial-scale hyperbole about the threat posed by the other side (stage one). Likewise, left and right seem equally convinced that passive co-partisans are undermining the cause (stage two). "Tea and crumpets fussiness and chickenshit unwillingness to wield power is going to end democracy," tweeted the progressive journalist Ryan Cooper last year, in a pitch-perfect instance of the genre.
Finally, each side frequently declares that desperate measures are now required (stage three). And why wouldn't they be, if the other guys really are as bad as all that?
On the left, this most often takes the form of proposals to radically reform governing institutions seen as impediments to enacting policy. Since 2020, the progressive media have issued calls to pack the Supreme Court, strip states of control over elections, abolish the U.S. Senate (or at least the filibuster), eliminate the Electoral College, and generally engage in what one Jacobin article called "an extremely necessary assault on the undemocratic power of the judiciary." All told, such a program would dramatically weaken America's system of checks and balances, making it easier for a slim majority to impose its will on the rest of the country.
Short of restructuring the entire system, there's always executive action, such as Biden's efforts on behalf of the environmental lobby to hamstring energy producers. The administrative state can also be deputized to prosecute the culture war, as when the Justice Department decided last year to treat parents expressing concern at school board meetings as potential domestic terrorists, or when the Department of Education was tasked with ensuring K-12 schools give students access to locker rooms matching their gender identities. And if all else fails to make the left's policy preferences a reality, the implication goes, there's always violent uprising.
On the right, radical ideas are similarly in vogue. Vance's desire to punish left-wing corporations is just the beginning. Vermeule has promoted an alternative to "originalist" jurisprudence that would empower (presumably friendly) judges to read "substantive moral principles…into the majestic generalities and ambiguities of the written Constitution." Adherence to rule of law seems, at best, like an afterthought. "Among some of my circle," one right-wing podcaster told a Vanity Fair reporter last year, "the phrase 'extra-constitutional' has come up quite a bit." In March, Curtis Yarvin, a wildly popular blogger on the "neoreactionary" right, published a long essay arguing that the "only possible cure for 'wokeness' is a change in the structural form of government." His suggested replacement: dictatorship.
More concretely, the GOP has been working since 2020 to make state voting laws more restrictive and to elect or appoint Trump loyalists to key positions at the state and local levels. The goal, it appears, is to prevent a situation in 2024 like the one in which officials in places like Georgia and Arizona willingly certified a Republican loss that members of the party base consider dubious. It's no exaggeration to say that the expectation for a peaceful transition of power is in doubt in America today.
The point is not that either side is wholly unjustified in its motivating grievances. The left really has trained its guns on traditionalist Christians, for example, as the volley of ACLU lawsuits against religious hospitals makes clear. Social media platforms did, as if in lockstep, block a damning news story about Hunter Biden from being shared in 2020, thus choosing sides in the midst of a contested presidential race. And the Supreme Court of Pennsylvania did step in to unilaterally decree that absentee ballots arriving after Election Day should continue to be processed, piquing conservative suspicion about procedural irregularities surrounding the contest.
Meanwhile, the right really does seem woefully indifferent to, for instance, the lingering effects on black communities of three centuries of legally sanctioned oppression. Trump did begin priming his base to reject the outcome of the last election months before votes were even cast, to say nothing of his encouragement of the January 6 riot. And Senate Republicans did pivot shamelessly from refusing to hold confirmation hearings for Supreme Court nominee Merrick Garland to rushing through approval of Amy Coney Barrett, leading many progressives to wonder why they should feel constrained by the norms of congressional process where their opponents manifestly are not.
But each side is using some legitimate complaints to build a permission structure for seizing power by any means necessary and raining down destruction on its foes. One result is a sort of bipartisan apocalypticism: A recent Yahoo News poll found that more than half of each major party believes it's likely that America will "cease to be a democracy in the future." Under these circumstances, extreme medicine can start to seem like the only logical response.
The other side is mobilizing. They're coming for us. Do it to them before they do it to you.
This is what feels most broken in our politics. It's not the ways left and right are further apart than ever; it's the ways they're closer together, with powerful elements on each side having jettisoned the longstanding liberal ideal of respecting the rights of even those with whom you strongly disagree.
The two camps, of course, have different substantive moral visions for the society they wish to construct. But each views a broad conception of individual liberty as a barrier to achieving that vision.
Economic liberty, including international trade and private property rights, stands in the way of progressives' desire for an egalitarian and democratic order in which no one is ever again expected to work for someone else—and in the way of natcons' desire for a revivified American manufacturing sector in which male breadwinners can support a large family on a single income. Speech protections prevent both sides from controlling the conversation as they wish. Religious freedom is seen as either a cover for rank bigotry or a rationalization for excluding God from the public square. And liberal toleration, with its norms of fair play and civility, is at odds with the reigning conception of politics as total war.
As the journalist Sam Adler-Bell (who covers trends on the new right from a perch on the far left) put it in a 2019 essay, both sides "agree that liberal proceduralism, its pretension of neutrality, tends to enervate and disenchant the practice of politics. Both left and right radicals desire—at least affectively—a hot-blooded politics….In this way, both have come to adopt German theorist Carl Schmitt's concept of the political as reducible to the existential distinction between friends and enemies."
But if it's clear that left and right radicals have turned on liberal values and institutions, there is less evidence that the country as a whole has done so. Until now, this article has used the left and the right to stand in mostly for the activist and intellectual class, along with a few politicians here or there. The American people, on the other hand, are instinctual liberals by and large—not in the sense of being left of center but in the sense of believing at a deep level that even one's fiercest opponents have rights.
The American Aspirations Index, a study released last year that used survey research to rank Americans' priorities for the future of the country, tested 55 "national aspirations" to see whether people care more about having a country in which "people receive a high quality education" or "the middle class is thriving"; one that "is the leader of the free world" or one that "has a criminal justice system that operates without bias"; and so on. For all the sense that Americans are further apart than ever, guaranteeing that "people have individual rights" emerged as the No. 1 answer for every demographic group, regardless of age, ethnicity, urbanity, gender, and education level. It was viewed as twice as important overall as the next-most-chosen result.
Individual liberty, equality under the law, protections against the arbitrary exercise of governmental power—these are unmistakably American values. While influential elements on both the left and the right have turned against them in recent years, most Americans are not on board with total-war politics.
Much has been made of rising affective polarization, and there is some evidence to support the concern. People have become more likely over time to say they would be displeased if they had a son or daughter who married someone from the opposite political party, for example. Yet Americans from both parties are still significantly more likely to say they would not be bothered at all. In fact, a 2020 survey commissioned by The Economist found just 16 percent of Democrats and just 13 percent of Republicans saying they would be "very upset" in that situation. Severe affective polarization remains mostly an elite phenomenon.
In a poll commissioned last year by the group More in Common, three in four respondents agreed that "the differences between Americans are not so big that we cannot come together." Demonization of the other is a powerful political weapon, and those inclined toward authoritarianism are particularly comfortable using it. But what is sometimes called the "grand liberal bargain"—a social truce in which each side broadly agrees to respect the other's freedom, even if it doesn't like what the other side will do with it—is a powerful defense, and one in keeping with the natural ethos of America. It's not too late to choose it.
The post Both Left and Right Are Converging on Authoritarianism appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>A provision of the Affordable Care Act, a.k.a. Obamacare, requiring private employers to cover the cost of controversial drugs was struck down by a federal judge today.
Before you start checking the year on your calendar, note that it isn't contraception at the heart of the dispute this time, as it was in 2014, when the Supreme Court found that family-owned companies such as Hobby Lobby couldn't be forced to pay for abortifacients, and in 2016, when the Supreme Court ruled in a similar case regarding religious entities such as the Little Sisters of the Poor. But the facts of the current case are parallel, so the outcome should probably not be a source of great surprise.
"US District Judge Reed O'Connor ruled that the requirement that employers offer insurance plans that cover HIV-prevention pills, known as PrEP drugs, violates the Religious Freedom Restoration Act" (RFRA), reported CNN. "The requirement's challengers, employers in Texas, argued that the mandate facilitated behavior to which they have religious objections."
RFRA, which was signed into law to great and bipartisan fanfare by then-President Bill Clinton, creates a multipronged standard for when the federal government may coerce Americans into violating their consciences: For such a regulation to pass muster, it has to further a "compelling governmental interest" and to be the "least restrictive means" of doing so.
Courts are often loath to interfere when it comes to that first prong. In the Obamacare contraception cases, for example, the justices accepted (dubiously, in my opinion, but we'll set that aside for now) that lawmakers have a compelling interest in ensuring women's access to free birth control. It was the second prong, they said, where the mandate went awry.
As the state was eventually forced to admit, demanding that employers be the ones to pay for women's birth control is not the only means to lawmakers' stated end. Other, less restrictive methods—direct provision through a federally funded program, say—could achieve the same thing. Heck, such an alternative would arguably be more efficient, given that not everyone has employer-provided health insurance (or, for that matter, an employer) at all.
In any case, the "least restrictive means" prong of RFRA's test has for years now been understood to shield many Americans from requirements to pay for drugs to which they have religious objections. The employers in today's PrEP drugs case voiced such objections to being "complicit" in what they view has an immoral sexual lifestyle. (Abiding by the mandate, they said, would amount to "facilitating homosexual behavior, drug use, and sexual activity outside of marriage.")
Whatever you think of the substance of that conviction, the underlying principle remains valid and worth defending: "The government should be held to a very high level of proof before it interferes with someone's free exercise of religion," as Clinton put it back in 1993. "We can never be too vigilant in this work."
The post Yep, Forcing Employers To Pay for Drugs That Violate Their Consciences Is Still Prohibited by Federal Law appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>According to Sen. Mitt Romney (R–Utah), America's current welfare policies have two major flaws: They penalize recipients who get married by reducing the benefits they're eligible for, and they don't do enough to help couples afford to have more kids.
"There's a growing gap between the number of children people say they want to have and the number they actually decide to have," he said during an event yesterday at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) in Washington, D.C. "Just to be clear here, I don't think the goal of policy should be to try to create incentives to have people have more children than they want, but instead should find a way to bridge the gap between what people would like to add to their family and what they're able to afford."
Attempting to address these issues, Romney in June released the Family Security Act 2.0, a proposal to send parents monthly checks of between $250 and $700 per child, beginning midway through a pregnancy. A household would need to have earned at least $10,000 the previous year to be eligible for the full benefit, a provision meant to keep families from dropping out of the work force entirely. The program would be "paid for" by reducing or eliminating various existing income tax breaks.
It's hard to fault efforts to resolve distortions introduced by previous federal policy, including the whoopsie-daisy of incentivizing low-income couples to remain unmarried. The idea that it's the government's job to help people have more kids rests on a more debatable assumption—namely, that parents should not have to shoulder the full cost of raising future members of society.
Regardless of whether you buy that "positive externalities" argument, the federal government does spend billions each year on family programs. Given that these efforts are not likely to go away (however much libertarian purists might wish otherwise), it's worth considering whether Romney's proposal represents at least an incremental improvement over the status quo.
Both Scott Winship, AEI's director of poverty studies, and Robert Rector, a senior fellow at the Heritage Foundation who studies health and welfare policy, say Family Security 2.0 is indeed a step in the right direction. Each independently pointed to aspects of the program that are less than ideal from their perspective—for example, do we want middle-class families to get used to receiving monthly checks from the federal government? But if the choice is between the existing amalgamation of tax breaks or the new consolidated benefit Romney wants to replace them with, they'll take the latter.
This calculation only works if the existing programs really are zeroed out to cover the costs of the new checks, of course. That's something Democrats are likely to resist, though Romney said during the AEI event that the "pay-fors" are nonnegotiable for him and his Republican co-sponsors. But from a libertarian perspective, such negotiations always entail the risk that the parties will settle on a compromise that adds rather than substitutes spending.
The tax breaks that would be eliminated, according to an info sheet from Romney's office, include the state and local tax deduction and the head of household filing status. In addition, the plan would reduce the family portion of the earned income tax credit. These changes would simplify a few commonly maligned "swiss-cheese" aspects of the revenue code, replacing them with direct cash transfers, which some libertarian economists consider preferable to other benefit types.
Part of what makes the Romney plan a good idea, according to Winship and Rector, is the addition of a work requirement—the condition that a household needs to have earned $10,000 the year before in order to qualify for the full amount. That provision, which was absent from the 1.0 version of Romney's bill, is in keeping with Bill Clinton–era welfare reform, passed in response to concerns that no-strings checks sever people's connection to the labor force, drive up out-of-wedlock births, and generally worsen outcomes for kids.
Eliminating those bad incentives from the new version of the plan is not without downsides. In the short run, it means that some of the poorest children in America, those whose parents don't work, won't benefit from the program at all. (The addition of a work requirement also makes it more complex to administer, the progressive blogger Matt Bruenig pointed out, since the government must now track previous-year income levels and adjust each household's monthly payment accordingly.)
Romney sidesteps this objection by insisting that Family Security 2.0 isn't an anti-poverty measure—it's family assistance. There are dozens of other programs meant to help poor Americans, he said at AEI, from food stamps to Medicaid. His plan looks to solve a different problem: Americans choosing for economic reasons to have fewer kids than they otherwise would like.
I question whether that's a good use of government dollars. But Romney's plan may still be better than what we have now.
The post Mitt Romney's Family Plan Isn't Great, but It May Be Better Than the Alternatives appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>The Index Librorum Prohibitorum was a running list of books deemed heretical, blasphemous, or otherwise morally dangerous by the Roman Catholic Church. First published in the 16th century, the Index was ostensibly a response to the Reformation, but its scope went far beyond Protestant theology. More than 4,000 titles would eventually appear on the list, including such literary classics as John Milton's Paradise Lost and Victor Hugo's The Hunchback of Notre-Dame; scientific works by Nicolaus Copernicus and Charles Darwin; even The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.
Political philosophy, too, sometimes made the ignominious cut: The complete works of Thomas Hobbes were added in 1649. Besides containing explicit attacks on various teachings and practices of "the Church of Rome," his Leviathan was a challenge to the governing independence of the Holy See. By defending an absolute (civil) sovereign with power to decide even religious matters, Hobbes ran up against the Church's insistence that it alone was Christendom's spiritual authority.
The Holy See did not merely warn Catholics about doctrinally objectionable content, a service an ecclesiastical body might reasonably be expected to perform. For hundreds of years, with full force of canon law, it prohibited believers from reading or possessing works on the list, punishable by excommunication. (This is not to say the rule was always strictly enforced.)
The fact that Hobbes' works were among those banned points to the problem of such a heavy-handed approach. Today, high school students in the United States and elsewhere study Leviathan alongside John Locke's Two Treatises of Government (which was not listed on the Index, though other Locke works were). It would be difficult to understand the origins of liberal democracy without a view of the social contract theory that so influenced America's Founding Fathers. To prohibit Catholics from engaging with the intellectual history that underpins the modern social order would be a true civic loss.
Happily, Pope Paul VI discontinued the Index in 1966. The Holy See still exhorts faithful Catholics "to be on their guard against written materials that can put faith and good conduct in danger," and the Church may still "reprove" works it considers heretical. But the list and its canonical penalties are no more.
The post Hobbes' <em>Leviathan</em> and Thousands of Others Were Off-Limits to Catholics appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>On this day 200 years ago, Johann Mendel was born. He would come to be known as Gregor (the religious name he received upon entering St. Thomas's Abbey in Austria-Hungary as an Augustinian Friar) and later as the "father of modern genetics."
Mendel studied math, physics, and eventually botany in school. While conducting experiments breeding hybridized pea plants in the monastery garden and greenhouse, he discovered the principles of heredity. As one article on his life explains:
He chose to study the inheritance of seven traits (seed shape, seed coat tint, flower color, flower location, pod shape, unripe pod color, and plant height). Altogether Mendel grew and tested about 28,000 plants. He discovered mathematical patterns in the inheritance of these traits, which he explained in terms of two laws (the "Law of Segregation" and the "Law of Independent Assortment"), which are now called Mendel's Laws of Inheritance.
Mendel developed a theory involving what he called dominant and recessive "factors"—what would come to be known as "genes." This work paved the way for all future research in the genetic sciences, including the discovery of DNA. But his contributions would not be recognized in his lifetime.
In 1866, Mendel published the results of his experiments. The paper received little attention. In 1868 he was named abbot (head monk) of his monastery, and his research gave way to administrative obligations. In 1884, he died.
Things began to change in 1900. That year, a British biologist named William Bateson unearthed Mendel's paper. He translated it into English and became a proponent of the ideas therein. Bateson's own experiments extended Mendel's discoveries, showing, for example, that Mendelian principles applied to animals as well as plants. He also bestowed the name genetics onto this area of study.
Today, Mendel is widely recognized, as Britannica puts it, as "the architect of genetic experimental and statistical analysis."
Biographies of Mendel also point to a history of run-ins with the state by the famed researcher. These took at least two forms.
When he first arrived at St. Thomas's Abbey, Mendel was assigned to a teaching job. But the Austro-Hungarian government around that time began requiring an exam for teacher certification. Mendel, who suffered from severe test anxiety, attempted the exam on two occasions, six years apart, and failed it both times.
Two decades later, as abbot, Mendel again found himself at loggerheads with the authorities after a new city law attempted to subject the monastery to heavy taxation. "The very idea made Mendel boil," writes Robin Marantz Henig in The Monk in the Garden: The Lost and Found Genius of Gregor Mendel, the Father of Genetics. "The abbot began a single-handed letter-writing campaign," which became "more detailed, more impassioned, more strident, and more vituperative as the years went on….The stubborn abbot never wavered in his insistence that a tax on church property was unconstitutional."
The battle lasted until Mendel's death a decade later. He never did agree to pay the tax.
The post Happy 200th Birthday, Gregor Mendel appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>On March 26, during a speech in Warsaw, Poland, President Joe Biden defined the stakes of the war that had enveloped Ukraine during the previous month: "In the perennial struggle for democracy and freedom," he said, "Ukraine and its people are on the frontlines fighting to save their nation. And their brave resistance is part of a larger fight for essential democratic principles that unite all free people: the rule of law; free and fair elections; the freedom to speak, to write, and to assemble; the freedom to worship as one chooses; freedom of the press."
The remarks were in keeping with a widely accepted notion that the conflict constitutes "a battle," as Biden put it, "between democracy and autocracy, between liberty and repression."
There can be no question that the actions of Russia under Vladimir Putin put the country on the side of autocracy and repression. But the West should be clear-eyed about the ways that Ukraine is, and isn't, living up to its end of the democracy-and-liberty formulation.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has been hailed as a classical liberal hero, the inspirational leader who captured the world's attention with a series of video messages immediately following the Russian invasion in which he celebrated those who had taken up arms to repel the attack and pleaded with foreign governments to lend a hand. But Zelenskyy has not merely urged his fellow countrymen to follow his lead. With the declaration of martial law in February came a prohibition on male citizens aged 18–60 leaving the country. Then in March, the government combined the country's national TV stations into a single state-approved broadcast and suspended 11 opposition political parties it described as "pro-Russian."
With Ukraine scrambling to defend itself against Putin's lawlessness, the impulse to shut down anyone with Russian sympathies is understandable. But to act on that impulse is to inflict punishment on Ukrainian citizens, including those who voted for the Opposition Platform for Life, which held about 10 percent of seats in Ukraine's parliament and was the main party challenging Zelenskyy before he disbanded its activities. Ukraine has a large Russian-speaking population, and those who have generally favored maintaining close ties with Russia rather than pursuing greater integration with the European Union have a right to their views, and to representation in government, even at a time of war.
Meanwhile, all Ukrainians have a right to share and access information. There was a disconcerting irony in Biden identifying the country as a combatant on the side of free speech and freedom of the press at the same time its president was clamping down on television stations' ability to present the news to their viewers as they think appropriate. At least one outlet with ties to a Zelenskyy rival has been excluded from broadcasting on the new national channel, reported NPR this month. Zelenskyy's office defended the consolidation, reported Reuters at the time, by "citing the importance of a 'unified information policy,'" a phrase that should be chilling to anyone who values free expression.
That used to be most of us. When Putin in March signed a law making it a crime to disseminate "deliberately misleading information" or to discredit Russian military operations, the U.N.'s High Commissioner on Human Rights was aghast. A statement released by that office said the Russian law "depriv[ed] the population of their right to access diverse news and views at this critical time." Russia under Putin does indeed have a lamentable history of censorship, state-backed disinformation campaigns, and persecution of dissidents. But if the Russian people have a right to a diversity of perspectives, surely the Ukrainian people do too.
Even before the invasion, there was evidence that Zelenskyy's government was less than committed to protecting that right. In early February, he removed three TV stations, again described by the government as "pro-Russian," from the airwaves. In January, he decreed that print media outlets registered in Ukraine publish in Ukrainian. That move—a follow-up to a 2019 law, signed by Zelenskyy's predecessor, mandating that Ukrainian be spoken in schools—arguably aided Putin, who has justified his aggression in part by claiming that Ukrainians "who identify as Russians and want to preserve their identity, language and culture are getting the signal that they are not wanted in Ukraine."
Any defense of these policies would presumably rest on the distinction between Putin's control of the Russian media for the purposes of spreading false narratives to mislead the public, both in Russia and in Russian-speaking Ukraine, and Zelenskyy's control of it to set the record straight and protect the Ukrainian public from Russia's propaganda. Putin is a bad guy, in other words, trying to manipulate people, while Zelenskyy is a good guy trying to inform them.
We should be exceedingly careful about accepting such premises. Not because the Russians aren't spreading disinformation. Not even because there's no danger that Ukrainian consumers of Russian propaganda might fall victim to it.
By trying to ensure that the people of Ukraine are exposed to one narrative over another, Zelenskyy is himself engaging in a propaganda campaign. Governments have an obligation, particularly during a crisis, to communicate with the public, and it's natural that officials would seek to bolster the case for their own side. That's propaganda even if the official narrative is entirely (or very nearly so) based in accurate information. Propaganda isn't necessarily nefarious.
But when a government interferes with the people's ability to hear the other side, it ventures into dangerous territory. In a free society, the state should not be trusted to determine what is true or false, or to forcibly deny people access to speech it deems to be contrary to their interests. Even a head of state who really is a "good guy" risks being corrupted by that much power. The same is true of the authority to suspend opposition political parties. (In Ukraine, that move has already led to allegations, as NPR put it, "that Zelenskyy is clearing out political rivals before the 2024 presidential election.")
Nor are attempts to suppress foreign propaganda likely to help the practical situation. In the era of modern technology, supposedly forbidden content is never truly inaccessible. In fact, censorship attempts often have the perverse effect of making the censors look like they have something to hide and drawing more attention to the targeted ideas, a phenomenon common enough to have earned a nickname: the Streisand effect.
Zelenskyy would do better to use his platform to debunk the falsehoods spread by Russia than to try to shut them down. Transparency and forbearance on the part of his government would undermine Putin by highlighting for the world the contrast between the two countries' approaches.
Like the censorship attempts, the restrictions on male citizens' right to leave Ukraine is a human rights violation that may in fact do more harm than good. "It is one thing to conscript men into military service, providing training and appropriate equipment (although, even in that case, a right to conscientious objection must be respected)," law professor Amy Maguire wrote for The Conversation. "It is another thing entirely to prevent civilians from escaping a war zone … The ban on men leaving Ukraine ought to be lifted, because it is legally and ethically wrong to force civilians to stay in harm's way when they have the opportunity and desire to escape."
Recall that one pretense undergirding Putin's invasion was that many Ukrainians viewed the government in Kyiv as illegitimate and would be glad to be absorbed into Russia's sphere of influence. When invading troops were not greeted as liberators—when instead the armed forces and civilian population of the country fought back with far more zeal and effectiveness than anyone was expecting—it made a mockery of the Putin line.
In the earliest days of the war, social media channels were replete with stories like one about a young couple who were "married on the first day of the Russian invasion, and then immediately took up arms" in defense of Kyiv. Ukraine has benefited from the international goodwill that followed from such acts of bravery. Sadly, the policy of holding "fighting-age" men captive erodes the moral high ground from which Ukrainians are struggling to defend their country.
We in the United States have a lesson from our not-so-distant past to draw on when offering this "fraternal correction," as Catholics might call it. We know that during times of war, even relatively free countries can succumb to the temptation to violate rights, particularly of those with ethnic ties to the adversary, in ways they will come to be deeply ashamed of. It happened here within living memory. Today we recognize the relocation of Japanese Americans during World War II as "one of the most atrocious violations of American civil rights in the 20th century."
When Congress later acknowledged that the U.S. government was in the wrong and issued reparations to survivors of the internment camps, no one imagined it was excusing the attack on Pearl Harbor. Likewise, to critique the Zelenskyy government does not lessen the seriousness of the charges against Putin. Russia's unprovoked military aggression, violation of a neighbor's territorial integrity, alleged war crimes, and continual refusal to respect the rights of its own citizens, including by jailing those who dare to speak out against the war, are far worse than anything Zelenskyy has been accused of.
It's possible to condemn the actions of Moscow without forfeiting the right to point out missteps in Kyiv. If we really care about the future of democracy and liberty, we should be willing to do both.
The post If Ukraine Wants To Stand for Liberty and Democracy, It Should Rethink Some of Its Wartime Policies appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Sometimes called the scariest movie of all time, The Exorcist provoked controversy from its 1973 release. The Motion Picture Association of America shocked Roger Ebert when it gave the film an R rating, allowing minors to view it in theaters when accompanied by an adult.
The U.K. equivalent of that body took a harder line. There, the movie—which graphically depicts the travails of a girl suffering demonic possession—got an X certificate, prohibiting viewing by anyone under 18. In 1988, the British Board of Film Classification took the further step of halting its sale on home video entirely. "At the cinema it had been relatively easy to ensure that young children would be excluded," the board explains, "but video was a different matter."
Even as it gained fans around the world, home sales of The Exorcist remained illegal in the U.K. until 1999.
The post Review: When Britain Banned Home Sales of <i>The Exorcist</i> appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>In this week's The Reason Roundtable, Matt Welch returns alongside editors Peter Suderman, Nick Gillespie, and special guest Stephanie Slade as they dare to consider the earliest (and meaningless) polling and general chatter related to the 2024 presidential campaign.
0:25: Joe Biden 2024 and Democrats
18:49: Post-Dobbs polls on abortion
25:29: "BoJo" banter
33:57: Weekly Listener Question:
I heard about Dutch farmer protests on a social media website (not revealing which one because it is too cringy), and I tried to find out more about what was happening on the interwebs. Couldn't find much coverage in U.S. media, but best I can gather is that the Netherlands adopted a new program to reduce nitrogen emissions that will require farmers to destroy up to 30 percent of their livestock by 2030, which the farmers say will be economically devastating. It would be wonderful to have the experts on The Roundtable shed some light on what is happening and whether this is a good use of government power. I would also like your thoughts on climate change governmental policies generally. They always seem to be hamfisted, arbitrary, and shortsighted or fail to take into account the "unintended consequences" (and I use quotes because if they were thought through better these consequences would not be so surprising).
52:00: Lightning round responses to the question, "How would you change the Constitution?"
This week's links:
"Most Democrats Don't Want Biden in 2024, New Poll Shows," by Shane Goldmacher
"No, Biden, This Is About Freedom and Personal Choice," by Nick Gillespie
"Neal Stephenson's Termination Shock Is a Glorious Sci-Fi Vision of How To Respond to Global Warming, One Geoengineering Problem at a Time," by Peter Suderman
"Evolutionary Ecology," by Lynn Scarlett
"How Would You Change the Constitution?" by John Stossel
"Capitalism Makes You Cleaner," by Matt Welch
Send your questions to roundtable@reason.com. Be sure to include your social media handle and the correct pronunciation of your name.
Today's sponsor:
Audio production by Ian Keyser
Assistant production by Hunt Beaty
Music: "Angeline," by The Brothers Steve
The post No One Wants Biden Anymore, Not Even Dems appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>"In reality," wrote former Reason Editor Virginia Postrel way back in 1989, "overturning Roe would put the abortion question back where it belongs—in the legislative arena."
The Court didn't overturn Roe that year, but a leaked draft of Justice Samuel Alito's opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization has raised the possibility that, more than three decades later, it is now poised to do so.
By finding that "the Constitution does not prohibit the citizens of each State from regulating or prohibiting abortion," and by "return[ing] that authority to the people and their elected representatives," the draft would allow New York to have extremely permissive laws on abortion while Mississippi has much more restrictive ones.
Many people on both sides of this issue understandably recoil from the idea of what they see as a fundamental human right being subjected to a vote. (There's more to life than mere democracy!) Yet on a practical level, if not on a moral one, there is a case in favor of devolving decision making on an issue that has split the country for decades.
Given the current state of public opinion on abortion, any top-down, one-size-fits-all policy is liable to exacerbate divisions and foment animosity. As Reason's Damon Root noted in a 2019 profile, even the late Supreme Court Justice (and feminist icon) Ruth Bader Ginsburg recognized as much:
Ginsburg argued that while the Texas statute at issue in Roe (which banned all abortions except where the life of the mother was at stake) certainly deserved to be struck down, the Court had "ventured too far" when it "called into question the criminal abortion statutes of every state." This "heavy-handed judicial intervention was difficult to justify," she argued, "and appears to have provoked, not resolved, conflict."
That conflict continues apace, and overturning Roe is not likely to end it. Activists on both sides of the issue will surely respond by pushing for federal legislation to protect either a woman's right to procure an abortion or a fetus's right not to be subjected to one. By insisting on a single answer for the whole nation, they'll be ensuring that, regardless of which side is successful, many millions of people are dissatisfied with the outcome. True believers are not likely to be swayed by that consideration—and as a pro-life libertarian, I can see why.
If you, like me, are someone "who looks at an ultrasound and sees a baby, a person, a fully human life," I wrote in 2015, "it's extraordinarily hard to avoid the conclusion that abortion is an act of violence." To the extent that the state has any legitimate functions at all, preventing the intentional destruction of innocent human beings must be at the top of the list. The existence of any jurisdiction, whether or not I live there, that fails in this fundamental task is a tragedy to those who come down where I do.
Nonetheless, the overwhelming majority of Americans are not where I am (and if you're an abortion-rights maximalist, they're not where you are, either). Most people in this country when polled say abortion should be legal under certain circumstances. What those circumstances are remains to be determined, but as Will Saletan explained at Slate a few years back, large numbers of even strongly pro-choice people "aren't sold on abortion rights beyond the first trimester."
The kinds of laws that would make the most sense to most people, in other words, would be somewhere between the two extremes. Negotiating the details of such a system is what the legislative branch exists to do.
But there's also a great deal of geographic variation when it comes to public opinion on where the relevant legal lines should be drawn. "In 2014, according to polling by the Pew Research Center, the share of adults who thought abortion should be legal in all or most cases ranged from 35 percent in West Virginia to 74 percent in Massachusetts," explained Reason's Jacob Sullum in a 2021 magazine piece that remains invaluable as a broad overview of what might happen if Roe is overturned (though some of the statewide legal particulars are now out of date).
Those different states already approach abortion differently. If Roe goes away, none will be required to restrict abortion against the people's will, but (unless or until federal legislation preempts them) all will gain the freedom to draft laws that hew more closely to their electorates' values. And individuals who care to do so will still be able to offer direct assistance to pregnant women—either to help them travel out of a jurisdiction where abortion access is restricted, or to support them in a choice to keep their babies in spite of a legal option to abort.
Activist types won't be satisfied, but fewer Americans will be forced to live under a legal regime, imposed from on high, that is contrary to their convictions on a matter of life and death. At an already precariously toxic political moment, there is something to be said for that.
The post A Qualified Defense of Letting States Decide on Abortion appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>When the political philosopher Yoram Hazony took the stage at the inaugural National Conservatism Conference in 2019, he sounded a giddy note. "Today I feel good, because I know that today is our independence day!" he said. "Today we declare independence from neoconservatism, from neoliberalism, from libertarianism, from what they call classical liberalism."
By the time the second National Conservatism Conference rolled around last fall, Hazony, one of the events' leading organizers, had changed his tune. "America's in a tough spot. The democratic world is in a tough spot," he said. "We're not going to make it through if there's no alliance between anti-Marxist liberals and hardcore, serious conservatives."
By going from purging anyone who does not pledge allegiance to the nationalist agenda to welcoming all comers, the "natcons" have abandoned the original defining characteristic of their movement.
No wonder. Three years ago, it was easy for attendees of NatCon I to believe they were the vanguard of a vast army ready to march into a virtuous mercantilist future. On the right, it was a given that the wave of popular support that had swept Donald Trump into the White House was explained by concern about the loss of manufacturing jobs and attendant disgust at free markets and free trade. So the main substantive themes of the conference were opposition to immigration and support for federal largesse in the form of industrial policy.
Today, things look different. Trump's signature accomplishments turned out to be a large tax cut (the priority of "Zombie Reaganists," as natcons love to say) and a program to expedite COVID-19 vaccines (which a large chunk of his own base rejects). Meanwhile, Trump's efforts to manhandle the economy failed spectacularly: Witness the ruinous effects of his tariffs and the empty shell that was supposed to be a $10 billion Foxconn facility in Wisconsin, touted by Trump as a shining example of his "America First" agenda.
In retrospect, cultural concerns—about runaway political correctness, assaults on religious liberty, left-wing bias in the media and academe—are what pushed so many voters into Trump's arms, and NatCon II reflected that realization. The event's top headliner was Dave Rubin, a YouTube personality ideologically closer to the classical liberals Hazony once wished to banish than to Hazony himself.
Not everyone was pleased. "If your main goal is cutting taxes, or dismantling the administrative state, or banning abortion, or opposing wokeness, or opposing vaccine mandates," Julius Krein, editor of the nationalist journal American Affairs, declared during a panel discussion, "you don't really need nationalism for any of that. And in fact, it's probably counterproductive. You might be better off just being libertarian."
The post The Natcon About-Face appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Westerners, used to thinking about liberal democracy as a package deal, rarely stop to consider the ways in which the two components can work against each other. Liberalism has to do with the protection of rights and liberties for all members of a society. Democracy has to do with rule by the people, whether directly or through representative elections. But what if a population uses democratic processes to empower an illiberal regime?
On Sunday, the Hungarian people voted in a landslide to give Prime Minister Viktor Orbán his fourth term since 2010. Current tabulations give parties allied with the incumbent leader a vote share above 53 percent, an outright majority.
Orbán is a self-proclaimed proponent of "illiberal democracy," which distinguishes, in Amnesty International's summation, "a fully democratic 'Western' system based on liberal values and accountability from what he calls an 'Eastern' approach based on a strong state, a weak opposition, and emaciated checks and balances." Orbán has spent more than a decade engaging in aggressive gerrymandering, court packing, use of state power to drive out or co-opt dissenting media, and more. Corruption is rampant. The Constitution has been rewritten and ever more power concentrated at the top.
The Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe, which took the rare step of sending a full election-monitoring mission to Hungary, has raised questions about the vote. So arguably the country should not be thought of as particularly democratic or particularly liberal right now. The nonprofit Freedom House rates it as only "partly free" and gives it 45 out of 100 democracy points, making it a laggard among European nations on both counts.
At the same time, Orbán's sweeping victory suggests that many millions of Hungarians, well aware of his record, are on board with his vision for their country. This raises the specter of a true illiberal democracy—it shouldn't be hard to imagine a country with genuinely fair and open elections but also majority support for authoritarian leaders and policies that deny equal rights to all.
The point of contemplating such a scenario is to recognize that "assaults on democracy" are not the only threat we face. A society in which 51 percent of a population votes to oppress the other 49 percent can claim the mantle of democracy. The problem is that it is illiberal, not undemocratic.
Democratic institutions, important as they are, only get us so far. We must insist on liberalism as well: free speech, private property protections, religious liberty, freedom of movement, constitutional constraints and separations of power and rule of law and all the rest. We can't know which side of the 50 percent mark we'll fall on; the less of our lives we allow to be put to a vote in the first place, the better off we'll be.
The post Viktor Orbán's Reelection Shows Mere Democracy Is Not Enough appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Post-liberalism has a new online home: Compact, a "radical American journal" launched yesterday by Sohrab Ahmari (formerly of the New York Post) and Matthew Schmitz (formerly of the ecumenical religious* magazine First Things).
As you might expect from two Catholic converts known for their intense religious conservatism, the site boasts contributors such as controversial Harvard Law School Professor Adrian Vermeule and articles bearing titles such as "Why We Need the Patriarchy." But close readers may notice something curious besides: Is that a whiff of socialism?
It's not your imagination. The final co-founder of the site is Edwin Aponte, identified in a New York Times write-up as a "Marxist populist"; according to the paper, he agreed to join up with Ahmari and Schmitz only on "the condition that more than half the articles focused on material concerns."
The first paragraph of the site's "About" page gets right to it: "Our editorial choices are shaped by our desire for a strong social-democratic state that defends community—local and national, familial and religious—against a libertine left and a libertarian right." As Britannica defines it, social democracy is a "political ideology that originally advocated a peaceful evolutionary transition of society from capitalism to socialism," which later came to be associated with more moderate calls for "state regulation, rather than state ownership, of the means of production and extensive social welfare programs."
Americans are primed to think of their politics in terms of a left-right spectrum. But these days, the more interesting and important divide is the liberalism schism, with liberal in this context referring to the principles of classical liberalism rather than left-of-center politics. Both left liberals and right liberals generally support due process, free trade, religious liberty, and the like, although left liberals are usually less concerned with economic freedom than are right liberals.
For the most part, the left illiberals and the right illiberals have maintained a considerable degree of separation, with the socialists tending to inhabit one social and professional world and the nationalist, populist, and theocracy-curious conservatives tending to inhabit another. (The Christian socialist contingent, which has blessedly failed to achieve much mainstream appeal in this country, arguably constitutes an exception.)
Compact appears as a high-profile effort to introduce a united illiberal front, one that couples support for state enforcement of traditional social mores with a healthy appetite for redistribution and central planning of the economy. (For what it's worth, the first day's offerings point as well to a strong anti-interventionist bent on foreign policy.) Gluing it all together is the editors' certainty that liberalism, whether on the left or on the right, is the enemy.
There were hints before now that a convergence was afoot. In summer 2019, Fox News host Tucker Carlson made headlines for praising progressive Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren's "economic patriotism," while former Mitt Romney adviser Oren Cass came out strong for a top-down "industrial policy" to prop up domestic manufacturing. More recently, the "Buy American" section of President Joe Biden's 2022 State of the Union address might as well have been written for his predecessor.
The overlap thus far has been largely confined to economic issues, however, and has been limited even there in its scope. By bringing a "labor populism" with deep roots in the socialist tradition and a "political Catholicism" that questions the very separation of church and state under a single roof, Compact has built an intellectual meeting place not just for post-liberal conservatives but for anti-liberals of every stripe. Watch out.
*CORRECTION: An earlier version of this article referred to First Things as a Christian publication; it is ecumenically religious.
The post In a New Magazine, the Illiberal Right and the Illiberal Left Converge appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>It's rocky times for the conservative-libertarian partnership that characterized American right-of-center politics in the second half of the 20th century.
Considerable attention has recently been paid to the rise of post-liberalism: the right-wing populists, nationalists, and Catholic integralists who fully embrace muscular government as a force for good as they define it. But there's little evidence as yet that most conservatives share such an affinity for big government. The simpler explanation is more banal: Often, when conservatives reject libertarianism, it's because of the cultural associations the word has for them.
Conservatives, after all, are much more likely than other ideological demographics to believe in God and say faith is an important part of their lives; to feel unapologetically proud of American greatness; and generally to hold views regarding personal morality that might be described as socially conservative. Of course they would be reluctant to throw in with a group famed in large part for its licentiousness, hostility to religion, and paucity of patriotic zeal.
But what if those associations are mistaken? If libertarianism properly understood has no cultural commitments, shouldn't that open up room to parley? Such a hope seems to have animated Murray Rothbard when he wrote in 1981 that "libertarianism is strictly a political philosophy, confined to what the use of violence should be in social life." As such, he added, it "is not equipped" to take one position or another on personal morality or virtue.
How convenient it would be—for this Catholic libertarian as much as anyone—if that were the end of that. But the big tent of libertarianism clearly houses many adherents whose self-understanding goes quite a bit further than Rothbard's. In fact, one useful way to divide and corral the unruly menagerie under our great circus pavilion is to ask the question Rothbard begs: Is individual liberty merely the highest political principle, the thing for which government exists, or is it a philosophical north star by which to direct all aspects of our lives? Let us call the two groups "political libertarians" and "comprehensive libertarians."
(What of "lifestyle libertarians" who think we should maximize liberty in our private lives but say the state may prioritize other goods—equality, say, or security—ahead of freedom? I submit that these are not libertarians at all. They're libertines. Libertarianism requires a commitment, at minimum, to prioritizing liberty in the governmental sphere.)
* * *
In a thought-provoking 2015 book, the McGill University political theorist Jacob T. Levy differentiated between two tendencies in the liberal tradition. Pluralism places a high value on individuals' freedom to form associations that will then shape—even constrain—their lives in diverse ways. Rationalism, meanwhile, is concerned with the protection of individual freedom even when private or voluntary institutions threaten it.
John Stuart Mill could be the patron saint of rationalist liberalism. His On Liberty, Levy wrote, "aims to defend individuality, not merely—not even primarily—formal freedom from state regulation." Liberals of the Millian type are not quite coterminous with the group I'm calling comprehensive libertarians. Levy acknowledges that rationalists often support the existence of a powerful central state, equipped with authority to step in and rescue individuals from tyrannies visited by religious organizations, patriarchal family structures, and other private institutions. Expansive support for government interference in private life may be "liberal" in this sense, but it isn't very libertarian.
Still, there is significant overlap between Levy's rationalists and comprehensive libertarians. It's not uncommon in libertarian circles to hear that although a private entity has every legal right to behave in a certain manner, we have an obligation to use our nongovernmental powers to oppose it. For comprehensive libertarians, it's not enough for the state to allow drugs or gay marriage or music with explicit lyrics; we should do what we can to ensure that new forms of creative expression and experiments in living are accepted, even celebrated, at a cultural level. If traditional manners and customs and institutions are in the way, in this view, our job is to stand against them, just as we stand against the government when it infringes on people's liberty.
Violence and the threat of violence are hard infringements on freedom. But culture can limit people's freedom in softer ways, and comprehensive libertarians think that should matter to us too.
* * *
From this perspective, lifestyle freedom is just as much a component of libertarianism as is political freedom. That makes comprehensive libertarianism a "thick" worldview, as laid out in a much-debated 2008 blog post by the philosopher Charles W. Johnson.
"Should libertarianism be seen as a 'thin' commitment," Johnson asked, "which can be happily joined to absolutely any set of values and projects, 'so long as it is peaceful,' or is it better to treat it as one strand among others in a 'thick' bundle of intertwined social commitments?" A thick libertarian might think, for instance, that libertarians should also be feminists out of a desire to free people from the patriarchy.
Yet comprehensive libertarianism and thick libertarianism are not quite synonyms, either. The first is an example of the second, but it isn't alone. Plenty of libertarians see their political worldview as embedded in a larger moral philosophy that their fellow libertarians ought to share, but they don't all agree about what that comprehensive philosophy is.
Consider virtue libertarianism, which recognizes "a duty to respect our own moral nature and to promote its development in others in proportion to the responsibility we have for them," according to a 2016 essay by the political scientists William Ruger and Jason Sorens. "In some cases, this means providing approbation and disapproval of certain choices to foster a culture consistent with human flourishing and a free society."
Clearly, comprehensive libertarians and virtue libertarians both have worldviews in which political and nonpolitical commitments are bundled together. Taken as a whole, however, those bundles are at odds. While members of the two camps will agree that prostitution should be decriminalized, say, they may disagree about its moral valence, with one side viewing sex work as liberating (and thus worth normalizing or even applauding) and the other side viewing it as degrading (and thus worth lamenting or even working to end through noncoercive means).
Political libertarianism would seem to encompass Johnson's thin libertarianism, but it may coincide with some fairly thick worldviews. A political libertarian can believe, as I do, that a virtuous society is important. But political libertarians see our opinions about how the nongovernmental sphere of life should be ordered as falling outside the scope of libertarianism per se, which for us, as for Rothbard, is "strictly a political philosophy" about "what the use of violence should be in social life." Someone who shares all of my political commitments but dissents from my broader moral outlook is no less a libertarian for it.
* * *
There is at least a loose consensus among libertarians about the proper role of the state. Not so when you move beyond government policy and start asking what it means to build a good society or to live a good life.
For comprehensive libertarians, as we've seen, a good society is one in which people are maximally free to be who they want to be, pursuing the good life according to whatever that means to them. Comprehensive libertarians are reflexively opposed to both hard and soft infringements on liberty. The only limit—though it is a crucial one—is that someone's pursuit of happiness can't forcibly interfere with anyone else's. (Kinky sex? Groovy, if that's what you're into. Rape or human trafficking? Of course not! Do you understand libertarianism at all?!)
Political libertarians don't have this sort of straightforward heuristic to fall back on. On any given question in the non-governmental domain, we might see liberty as one of many competing values. It won't always be the most important. Faced with decisions that have nothing to do with the use of coercion—how to structure a business relationship, which causes or community organizations to support, whether to go along to get along with our neighbors—freedom gives us a choice, but it doesn't help us choose.
To be sure, greater cultural freedom can be a wonderful thing. None of us, regardless of our politics, should want to live in a society in which religious, ethnic, or sexual minorities are denigrated or excluded. In this, we can learn from our comprehensive libertarian friends not to undervalue social advances that allow more people to live fuller lives of dignity. The fact that women today can choose among a far wider array of professional opportunities than we once had access to makes this a freer society, and also a better one.
At the same time, political libertarians are on strong footing when we insist that other goods must sometimes take precedence. It is often noble to sacrifice some aspect of your freedom for your family, country, or religion. Yet a strict comprehensive libertarianism would leave no space to appreciate the triumph of loyalty or honesty or bravery or humility or piety or generosity over liberty.
Nor does comprehensive libertarianism grapple with the reality that people can (and frequently do) exercise their liberty in ways that are immoral and/or destructive. Not every free choice is a good choice. Even when the harms from someone's actions are wholly internalized, they still may be tragic: A life is a terrible thing to waste. And don't kid yourself: Bad choices are rarely fully internalized. An absentee father's actions affect his kids, and a culture that is affirming toward men who abandon their families will end up with more of them. The men are arguably freer, but is the society better off?
As good libertarians, we know better than to ask the state to solve these sorts of problems, but we don't have to pretend they aren't real. To say that a good society just is a free society and a good life just is a free life is to miss all of that. Greater freedom from force and fraud is always a positive thing. Greater freedom from cultural constraints may not be.
* * *
For questions in the nongovernmental sphere, comprehensive libertarians have a default answer. Political libertarians have a parable about a fence.
In 1929, the English Catholic G.K. Chesterton asked his readers to imagine "a fence or gate erected across a road." He then described two reformers: "The more modern type of reformer goes gaily up to it and says, 'I don't see the use of this; let us clear it away.' To which the more intelligent type of reformer will do well to answer: 'If you don't see the use of it, I certainly won't let you clear it away. Go away and think. Then, when you can come back and tell me that you do see the use of it, I may allow you to destroy it.'"
This story has given aid and comfort to many an arrogant conservative in possession of exactly half the point. It's true that it counsels respect for tradition—for the wisdom, dearly bought, of those who came before us. Manners and customs and institutions can be obstacles to the cultural liberalization that comprehensive libertarians desire. They also may reflect lessons learned through trial and error, evolved solutions to genuine problems. If we smash any aspect of the culture that isn't fully committed to the project of maximizing lifestyle experimentation, we are meddling in something we do not understand.
Religion arguably is the archetype of soft infringements on personal freedom. Should we favor a culture devoid of religious faith and fervor? Or is it possible that hostility to religion draws people away from a deep source of meaning and belonging in their lives, producing alienation, deaths of despair, and a toxic politics in which people desperate for spiritual succor invest their identities in cult-like movements and embrace power-hungry leaders who assure them they're on the right side of a battle with apocalyptic stakes? We should care about such questions.
Nevertheless, the moral of Chesterton's parable is not that tradition is sacrosanct. The lesson is to use our brains: "Go away and think." He's telling us to reduce our own ignorance, especially by looking to the past—at which point we may reasonably conclude that the fence was ill-considered in the first place, or that it once served a purpose that no longer obtains, or that the problem still exists but there are better ways to address it, or that the potential upside to clearing it away is worth the calculated risks. We are not slaves to those who came before. We need not defer to the way things have always been done.
Chesterton is calling us to exercise prudence, "the charioteer of the virtues." That is, he's calling us to use practical reason to discern the best path forward, ends as well as means, in light of the particular circumstances. Some fences continue to serve valuable purposes. Others—like the one that informally barred generations of women from most careers—deserve to come down. Comprehensive libertarians commit themselves to a blanket fence removal policy. Political libertarianism leaves open the possibility of a more prudent approach.
* * *
Rothbard's definition of libertarianism as "strictly a political philosophy" appeared in a 1981 essay challenging the late National Review literary editor Frank S. Meyer, whose ideas, nearly a decade after his death, continued to have outsize influence on the blossoming conservative intellectual scene.
Meyer's position was that conservatives in America should commit themselves to two nonnegotiable pillars. First, that government exists only to protect life, liberty, and property—nothing more. Second, that people exist to pursue rich and upright lives, traditionally understood, a task made easier when the state does its job well. Against Meyer's will, this philosophical orientation took on the sobriquet fusionism because of the way it joined an emphasis on freedom (in the governmental realm) with an emphasis on virtue (in the nongovernmental realm).
Rothbard wasn't having it. "At the heart of the dispute between the traditionalists and the libertarians is the question of freedom and virtue: Should virtuous action (however we define it) be compelled, or should it be left up to the free and voluntary choice of the individual?" he wrote. "Frank Meyer was, on this crucial issue, squarely in the libertarian camp." Thus, Rothbard concluded that "the fusionist position is simply the libertarian position," that "Frank Meyer was not a 'fusionist' but quite simply a trenchant individualist and libertarian," and that fusionism "is no 'third way,' but simply libertarianism."
This surely isn't right. While Meyer's first pillar is practically indistinguishable from political libertarianism, fusionism is distinguished from political libertarianism by the addition of a second nonnegotiable pillar. The word fusionist carries extra information, identifying a subset of political libertarians with a particular commitment to virtue (and a Chestertonian respect for fences) in the private sphere.
It's well and good to point out that there's space for fusionists of Meyer's kind under the libertarian big top. I too want my small-government-conservative friends to know they have a place in the libertarian movement if they should want it, particularly as movement conservatism continues its frightening post-liberal drift.
But Rothbard seems to think he can use smoke and mirrors to erase comprehensive libertarians from sight, writing, for example, that "only an imbecile could ever hold that freedom is the highest or indeed the only principle or end of life." This claim, which would come as a surprise to any number of my associates, offers a poignant reminder of why Rothbard is remembered as many libertarians' least favorite libertarian.
In truth, there are a variety of libertarianisms. For better or worse, our big tent has always contained a messy congeries of views. So walk the stalls and see what appeals to you. Welcome to the show.
The post Must Libertarians Care About More Than the State? appeared first on Reason.com.
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