“I don’t want to say that liberaltarianism is dead. But is it endangered? Sure. It deserves to be.” ~ Jason Kuznicki

I think the hopes placed in the Obama administration by libertarians have been fairly well dashed at this point.  On civil-liberties issues and on economic issues, the President has not gone nearly far enough to end the bad practices of the last administration, or to promote anything like market solutions to the many problems facing the country.  Jason goes on to write:

If libertarians seem more conservative lately, it’s not only that we’ve been pushed away by the left. Attendees at this year’s CPAC ranked “reducing size of federal government” and “reducing government spending” as by far their highest policy priorities. They also chose Ron Paul as their preferred presidential candidate. Those same attendees even booed speaker Ryan Sorba for condemning gay Republicans:

I’m not sure the left-libertarian alliance was ever really meant to be anything more than a fragile oppositional alliance to the big-spenders masquerading as conservatives during the Bush years, united by a common antipathy over the wars and the infringements upon civil liberties.  I know Mark has hopes that a populist left-right alliance could rise from the ashes of the current establishment, but I see the fundamental divide between Tea Partiers and progressives as too wide a gap for anything but a similarly tenuous & oppositional alliance.

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Well, not quite. But she has an interesting post on obscenity law and firearms:

If you consider a stash of obscene videos scarier than a stash of firearms then this is the country for you.  In America you have a constitutional right to own a gun, and you may traffic in firearms with legal impunity; but you risk being imprisoned for buying and selling arguably obscene pornography.

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It’s an odd notion of liberty that equates the dangers of legalizing pornography and the dangers of prohibiting gun ownership, but it’s not an uncommon one.  Consider the views of the Liberty Counsel: “(O)bscenity, pornography, and indecency debase our communities, harm our families, and undermine morality and respect,” according to the Counsel’s Declaration of American Values. “Therefore, we promote enactment and enforcement of laws to protect decency and traditional morality.”  But if “smut” poses demonstrable harm to “(m)en, women, children, families and larger society,” gun ownership (according to the Declaration of American Values) is “central to the preservation of peace and liberty.” The Second Amendment “stands as an impenetrable wall between tyranny and freedom,” Liberty Counsel founder Mathew D. Staver declared, lauding the Supreme Court’s recognition of a constitutional right to own a gun:  “Praise the Lord and pass the ammunition,” he chortled; cower when confronted with pornography.

If you had asked me about this two years ago, I probably would have described myself as a pro-gun, pro-porn maximalist. Upon further reflection, I’m now less sure about the porn. Regardless, I think Kaminer’s post is another argument in favor of radical political decentralization. People’s views on porn and guns vary so dramatically that I think it’s basically impossible to devise a one-size-fits-all firearm or obscenity policy. The irreconcilable nature of these disagreements also makes me doubt the existence of some universally acceptable middle ground between Second Amendment absolutists and the Brady Campaign (or between Larry Flint and the Family Research Council, for that matter).

So while national compromise is unlikely, hashing out obscenity guidelines or firearm controls at the local level strikes me as a plausible alternative. Kaminer can have her liberalized obscenity laws, the Liberty Counsel can continue to “praise the Lord and pass the ammunition,” and we’ll figure out what works and what doesn’t somewhere along the way.

This reminds me of the ridiculous measures taken after the lead scare.  Not good news, to be sure.  Funny how we got along just fine without any of these massive outbreaks of food-contamination until Big Agriculture made distribution of crops so widespread.

I think it was smart that Mark walked his arguments around free trade and globalism back a few steps in the light of well-founded arguments presented to the contrary. Not only is it the intellectually honest thing to do, but I think it gives us an opportunity to breathe and take a look at what it is that we’re actually arguing about.

In some senses I find these discussions about localism and globalism, free-market economics and distributism/protectionism, interventionism and isolationism to be among the most interesting and exciting discussions going. It’s my own humble opinion that the issues grappled there within are perhaps the most pressing and vital on our collective plate, both because they lie at the heart of the question we all face on a day-to-day basis (whether we choose to acknowledge it or not), “How shall I live?” and because that question is the pulse that lies within the veins of so many other truly daunting and important questions (economics, environment, politics, culture, technology, architecture, the list goes on).

Alternatively; however, I also find these conversations truly frustrating because the tendency for their participants is to get caught in dichotomous tropes, well worn pathways that inevitably lead to brick walls of disagreement and intractability. To wit, Mark and his interlocutors all chose to frame their discussion in either/or language; we either go local or we go global, period (Dr. Larison explicitly titled his well-received rejoinder as such). There is always some benefit to strongly stated cases and arguments flying about on either side, but at some point you come to an impasse when the letters “vs” are stuck into your articulation — and this is all the more the case when it comes to issues that are as well debated as globalism and localism. For me, the truly fascinating space of the debate is that sliver of an opening that suggests that both sides have a good deal of proprietary truth they bring to the table, but still possess enough cracks in their master plan to allow for a certain intellectual legoing of the ideas offered.

Hence, my real direction in all of this is to explore the notions of how the truths uncovered by localists about a certain way of living that seems increasingly vital, especially insofar as value and integrity are concerned, might be fit together with the powerful potential of global networks with which our free-market economic adventures and resulting global cultural cross-pollination have provided us with. In my first crack at this I termed what I was trying to articulate was a sense of glocality, and appropriately warned of my neologistic midwifery. Imagine my surprise (probably not all that surprising, actually, but delightful all the same) when a couple of posts down the road, Dara Lind alerted me to the fact that my somewhat half-baked wordplay had a semi-coherent correspondent body of thought. So it is that my belief in matters large and small have come to rest on the notion that neither globalism nor localism themselves provide a full answer to the question, “How shall I/we live?” Rather, each contains some element of powerful but limited truth in the matter and that a fuller picture is best painted by finding some kind of fusion between the two.

Welcome to glocalism.
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Daniel Larison picks up arguably one of my most awkwardly worded sentences in one of my most awkwardly written posts and then writes:

It’s true that idealism would be quite heavily burdened by idealism, but if we set this odd statement aside I’m still not sure what Kain means

Quite right.  It was an odd statement.  Poorly written.  Look, I’ll reproduce it one more time:

The idealism of the paleoconservative cause is simply too burdened by the idealism of its vision. Politics is not a time machine and we are not ever going to travel back to whichever pre-modern, small government existence that many paleos envision.

What I meant to say, I suppose, is simply that the paleo/agrarian/localist cause is often too wrapped up in its own idealism and fails largely to come up with practical solutions to the ills of modernity.  There is a lot of great writing out there on the subject.  Go spend a few hours pooring through the Front Porch Republic – Deneen, Larison, Kaufman, Stegall, Shiffman, etc. – these are all smart people writing excellent critiques of modernity, globalization, free trade, and so forth.  I find myself nodding in agreement much more often than not.

So what I was attempting to do with that post, after writing about a dozen posts in the localist, anti-corporate vein, was to try to see where the chinks in the armor were.  And quite frankly, the most glaring of these is that despite all of this very smart stuff, there is little being offered by me or anyone else that is terribly practical; or rather that offers a very concrete alternative plan by which to enact this alternative vision. Vision is all well and good, but without a map, without a plan – well, it becomes very, very difficult to implement.

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One has to admire Murtha’s honesty. “If I’m corrupt, it’s because I take care of my district” might not represent the best of disinterested liberal governance, but it’s a refreshingly frank admission of his core political priorities. And whatever one thinks of Murtha’s methods, the sentiment behind them is certainly understandable. Murtha was elected to conduct the people’s business. In Western Pennsylvania, the people’s business is ensuring a modicum of stability in the midst of a disorienting economic transition. The impetus behind Murtha’s penchant for pork, at least, is actually quite noble.

So is Murtha wrong for shamelessly funneling government largess to his beleaguered district? Well, yes, I suppose he is. But for all his faults, Murtha is a creature of the system. He wants to help his district. In an earlier era, he may have been a particularly effective ward boss or a successful small town mayor. Now, however, congressional earmarks have replaced local patronage as the best way to keep his constituents fat and happy.

Had Murtha acquired a similar reputation for creative financial disbursement as town mayor or state representative, I doubt he’d be villified by anyone. Earmarks, special expenditures, patronage – these things grease the wheels of local democracy. Moreoever, their proximity to the people who originally supplied the funds and voted the relevant elected officials into office gives them a special kind of legitimacy that national earmarks sorely lack . At the state or regional level, the connection between government spending and citizen welfare isn’t tenuous. To those of us outside Western Pennsylvania, however, the supposed benefits of the John P. Murtha Technology Center are less apparent.

Too often, critics of earmarks obsess over the latest in asburd congressional spending without examining their larger context. Murtha’s prodigious earmarks are symptomatic of real social needs that deserve to be addressed by elected officials. That these officials are best-positioned to act effectively at the national level is an indictment of our top-heavy political infrastructure, not an indictment of public welfare spending per se.

*This headline brought to you by Slate Magazine.