Jonah Goldberg makes some very good points about human welfare and markets:

I’m no unmitigated fan of Wal-Mart, but it can’t be denied that Wal-Mart—and stores like it—have improved the lives of a lot of low-income families by making life’s necessities, and even its luxuries, affordable. Lightbulbs put a lot of candle makers out of business[*], but lightbulbs also made indoor lighting cheaper, safer, and more widespread. That’s a good trade.

Indeed, the market is the only thing that transforms luxuries into affordable indulgences. A low-end car today has features that the best Mercedes didn’t have a generation ago. Teenagers have phones that are more powerful than the computers that NASA used to put men on the moon. Indeed, even leisure has become democratized.

[…]

One last point. I love the Templeton Foundation and I think they do fantastic work. But questions like “Does the Free Market Erode Moral Character?” bother me a great deal. As opposed to what? Socialism? Socialism certainly erodes moral character. Some of the most alienated, selfish, deracinated people I’ve ever met were people who grew up under the yoke of Communism. Arthur Brooks’s work has definitively shown that large welfare states siphon off philanthropy and erode altruism.

Adam Smith’s case for the free market rested on the fact that it encouraged good character (as Yuval Levinrecently detailed), and I think Smith won that argument a long time ago. A more fruitful question, with deep religious and philosophical implications and precedents, would be “Does wealth erode moral character?” Debating that would still allow for some healthy attacks on the free market, because without free markets, wealth really isn’t something to worry about.

First of all, I know citing Goldberg round these parts will earn me a whole host of angry comments.  How dare I quote the man who wrote Liberal Fascism!?  He’s a fascist!  He’s not very nice!  He strawmans liberals!

I admit, I have a fondness for Goldberg which allows me to ignore our many points of disagreement long enough to point out the many smart, sensible things he does write.  And this is one of them.

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I think Jason and I disagree less than his critique of my post would suggest.  He is correct that my rather brief treatment of markets (and the purpose of markets) leaves a great deal to be desired.  I was not intending to write a piece explaining the many benefits (or limitations) of markets per say – mainly because, like Jason and the other libertarians here, I am an advocate of the free market.  I am not terribly interested in arguing the merits of a free market economy.  Certainly this will lead only to partisans in both camps hurling strawmen at one another.  As Jason notes, both the success and failure of markets can “discover distributed and inarticulate knowledge about preference and utility.”  And this is a good thing.

I think Jason’s strongest point is this:

But the real question is not whether markets work perfectly. It’s whether any of the alternatives can do the job as well or better. When we consider that the real work of markets is to gather up distributed knowledge and render it publicly legible, it seems clear to me that few other social institutions are even seriously trying. Many of the worst of them, government programs above all included, act as if this work has already been done — as if Hayek’s dispersed knowledge had already been aggregated once and for all, and as if the action at hand weren’t going to upset it all in the process.

To be perfectly clear, markets aren’t the be-all and end-all of public policy for me. They are, however, the option we ought to try first, because properly designed, they tend to tell us what’s going on. This is tremendously important, and it’s very difficult to admit that we don’t know it.

He goes on to argue that markets should also be a last resort – and that if there is a market failure, it is often as not a failure of the “given ruleset” not necessarily the market itself.  Healthcare is a prime example of this.

And of course, in order for markets to work, for human progress to continue, and really for a sane and somewhat rational, stable economy to flourish, above all else we must maintain choice.

Indeed, Jason’s advocacy of choice is compelling, and I tend to agree that the more choice the better, if only because I could not tell you where or with whom we should limit it.  The more freedom the better.  I certainly don’t want to be constrained in my own choices, and I am not nearly paternalistic enough to want to constrain others in theirs. Whatever constraint or sacrifice we make based on coercion is a false one.

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So, somehow new Gentleman Jason Kuznicki – hereafter known as the most unlucky blogger on the face of the planet – had his user account deleted along with all his posts.  In my attempt to restore these, I killed the last day’s posts and comments.  Sorry to all the writers and commenters.  Hopefully, we’ll have the posts back and Jason up and running soon.  I, meanwhile, will try to find out why my daily backup apparently does not include backups of user accounts.

Any questions, shoot me an email: erik dot kain @ gmail dot com

Thanks and sorry for the confusion and loss of comments and posts.

Following up a bit on my “General America” piece, I wanted to add that I find the “all markets all the time” position within conservatism to be somewhat unfulfilling as well.  Market solutions are only solutions insofar as they do not necessarily perpetuate problems quite so badly as government solutions.  Choice and economic liberty are only useful instruments within society because they avoid many of the traps that come along with big government picking winners, rewarding rent seekers, and so forth.  To base an entire philosophy of governance along these lines is somewhat short-sighted, I would argue.

Perhaps this comes down, paradoxically, to the philosophy of choice –that very thing which rests at the heart of both liberalism and capitalism and, for that matter, contemporary conservatism.  There is something fundamentally antithetical to conservatism – or to the way conservatism has been classically understood – about the notion that choice should rest at the epicenter of society, should so inform all public debate and should so define who we as a people.  With choice you must also parcel competition, liberty, and a host of other ideas which conservatives and libertarians especially hold dear.  That these things are the best vehicles for our economy is hard to debate, but that a world of limitless choice, fierce competition, and little if any public sector (or ‘commons’ for that matter) is best for society in the long run is a more difficult claim to make.

This is not to say that we should scrap free trade or limited government or any of these things – only that as a philosophy, man cannot live on free trade alone.  A conservatism not rooted in tradition is not really conservatism at all. A conservatism focused too entirely on market solutions inevitably ends up falling short, and may as well be libertarianism with a dash of culture war populism sprinkled on for flavor.

Similarly, a conservatism which takes its first philosophical baby-steps only as far back as the American revolution is doomed to perpetual immaturity.

Some hail the 1950s as America’s golden decade.  It was boom time in America, and like the Big Automakers, Big Government continued what was begun during the Great Depression, adding notches to the belt of the New Deal through expansions of Social Security and other entitlement programs, culminating the next decade with the passage of Medicare.  Times were good for American manufacturing during the post-war years as well, and America looked to be on its way toward perpetual prosperity.

However, the intervening years have been more of a mixed bag for Americans.  Free trade and globalization as well as the constant advancement in technology have led to an entirely different workforce than the one we had six decades ago.  Similarly, immigration, the civil rights movement, and the society-wide integration of women into the labor force have changed the face of American jobs entirely.  Many people look at all these changes and point only to free trade or globalization as the culprits in trying to understand why the world has changed so drastically, but this misses all these other changes which have occurred since the days when American made vehicles were really the only ones to choose from, and the concept of a two-income household was as strange as the idea of rearing children out of wedlock.

So what would have changed if the American people had decided to enact protectionist policies instead of free trade agreements?  And to what extent would we have needed to go to maintain the sort of civil society we had in 1950 or 1960?  Could we have, through protectionist and greater redistributive policies, created a society wherein the same level of economic prosperity and indeed preeminence could have continued to present day while at the same time bringing minorities and women into the work-force?  Would this be possible (is it possible even now?) to sustain without also maintaining a large, even global standing army?

Furthermore, to what degree is the perceived prosperity of the 50’s and 60’s in fact merely an illusion of the ‘good ol’ days’?  There is a widespread belief that this was an era of prosperity, and that in recent times people have become worse off, poorer, less able to achieve the American dream.  A college degree is the new high school degree.  There are not as many good blue collar jobs, etc.  But could we have enacted policies to counter this?  Could we have kept the lumber jobs, the fishing jobs, the manufacturing jobs?  What policies would this have demanded?  Less strict environmental regulations, to begin with. Some cap on innovation of new technology.  Much higher taxes, and very strict protectionist policies.  The protection, even, of very big corporations against competition – especially automakers, but other industries as well, such as telecommunications.  Then the question becomes, what would have been the side-effect of these policies?

These are the questions we need to ask when we begin to question free trade.  It is only one component in the change the world has undergone in recent decades.  Many of the changes are far more egalitarian in nature.  How much has the two-income family had an effect on home prices – effectively pricing out single-income families from the housing market?  How much has federal tuition assistance led to much higher college tuition?  The dead lumber towns are the result of legislation aimed to save forests.  And on and on.

So went the agrarian society.  So goes manufacturing.  Why staff a mail room full of mail runners and sorters when machines can do it better?  Why hire elevator operators when elevators are pretty easy to operate on our own?  Why charge more for a product, when you can undercut your competitor by making large capital investments in computers and machinery which save on costs in the long run?  In the end all these changes lead to a new sort of economy, and they can be a painful process, but there is really no stemming the tide.

Certainly the cost of stemming the tide would be much greater than merely enacting some stricter tariffs.  I don’t think economic populists have a clear vision of the America they imagine could be preserved through protectionism, or a good handle on the lengths such protectionism would truly need to go to do the trick.

P.S. – all this being said, I think that Randian advocacy of markets with no regulation, etc. is at least as Utopian.  Few people actually believe that no regulation would be the best policy, only that regulation should be efficient and limited because it is subject to capture and manipulation.  Also, this is not really an argument against taxes or anything of that nature.  Countries like the Netherlands or Denmark have very free trade and very high taxes, managing to keep government out of the economy while still providing strong safety nets (indeed, perhaps too strong!)  The trick, I think, is figuring out how to maintain as much economic liberty as possible while still providing effective state services and safety nets.  This is impossible when both parties spend all their time talking past one another or come up with healthcare plans that are “bipartisan” only inasmuch as they are good ideas stripped down to rather watery ones, diluted to the point of being almost entirely worthless.

Reading both Andrew’s comments on the Atlantic’s site re-design and Ta-Nehisi Coates, I am reminded again of the importance of creating something personal with new media, that blogging is not journalism exactly, and that bloggers themselves are more rightly the “brand” in question than the publications they write for (though, in all honesty, there is and should be a mix – Coates and the Atlantic are in some sense a dual-brand, neither one the same without the other.  Same goes for all the Atlantic bloggers.)  As Andrew notes,

[A] blog is inherently a live process and conversation and anyone who actually understands blogging’s intimate relationship to its readership – and the critical importance of conversation to the endeavor – would never have dreamed of turning it into a series of headlines. That’s what worries me deeply. Not the inevitable transitional glitches but the philosophy behind it.

I think this cuts to the heart of the matter, and cuts directly to why so many people – myself included – really dislike the re-design at the Atlantic.  It’s not the aesthetic that I find so bothersome – and indeed, I don’t notice much of a change at all at Andrew’s digs – but the transformation of the other blogs into essentially archives, subsumed into the larger “channels” and thus stripped, to some degree, of their personalities.  Since the draw of these ‘voices’ has always been one of the Atlantic online’s strongest features, I find this disappointing to say the least – but like Andrew notes, it is the philosophy behind it that is most troubling.  This passage from Coates is worth reading also:

For my part, you have to understand that, to a large extent, whatever beautiful things have happened here, over the past two years, were, essentially, a fortunate mistake. What you’ve gotten is me hopping online and rather carelessly deciding to be myself, to talk to you, as much as possible, in the same way I talk to the people I know. And then basically curating the comments, banning people, deleting, and coaxing until there was a comments section that I, personally, loved reading.

It wasn’t market-tested. When I first got here, we didn’t even really have a web editor, and none of us expected this to grow into what became. We didn’t discuss whether it would be a good idea to have a post about Barry Sanders, next to a post about the Real Housewives of Atlanta, next to a series about the Civil War. We didn’t discuss commenting policy. We just kinda liked each other (me and my editors here) and decided to try something.

In short, none of this was intentional. It was all intuitive. And it’s fucked up, but it’s only as I’m writing this that I’m actually getting that that really is the point, and a big part of the draw. I kind of knew that, but it’s only in the absence of a coherent thing that I’m really seeing that.

This unintentional process is important.  There is something spontaneous and personal about blogging that is a serious if intangible change from traditional journalism. It is also, I think, the most important thing about a successful blogger – this ability for readers to connect and empathize with them. Similarly the community created around a blogger or a project is vitally important.  Jaybird has likened our own humble digs to a bar where we can all sit around and talk politics and culture and whatever over beers.  I have adopted this analogy in how I think about The League.  Indeed, I have come to think of The League as more than just a site, more than just a cadre of writers, but as a community unto itself, with all our commenters as part of the larger project.  The place would not be the same without the many commenters who liven up the threads – from Jaybird to Bob Cheeks to Michael Drew to North to greginak and so on and so forth – the list is too long to name you all. 

One of my great struggles writing elsewhere has been the lack of this relationship.  (New technical limitations have limited my own ability to respond to comments here in a timely fashion, but I do read each and every one.)  Indeed, though I am paid to write at True/Slant, I find myself devoting more time and energy to my writing here – and not just because it is a project that I helped start and continue to help shape, but because of this ongoing conversation we have gotten ourselves into – I can only frequent so many bars, I suppose, and this is my bar of choice.  (I know there is some crossover between commenters here and at True/Slant, but to be honest the comment system there is somewhat inhospitable.  And I dislike, perhaps, being just one of several hundred writers, whereas here I feel like I am part of a team, or at least a band of misfits…)  There is something organic about it that I enjoy.  I can anticipate who will be sitting where and drinking what, and who will storm out angry and who will chuckle at the antics and so forth.   And part of this is the site design, how we have worked to make the comments an integral part of this site, how we have kept the site fairly clean and ad-free, and so forth.  Perhaps it is also human nature to seek out communities (and bars) which we feel comfortable in. 

However, one of our original intentions with this site was to create a place where sustained, internal dialogue between writers, commenters, and guest-writers could be nurtured and grow into something rather unlike anything else on the interwebs.  I think, to some degree, in our push to increase traffic, to link to (and be linked by in return) Really Important Bloggers, we have let that part of our mission fall to the wayside.  I know others here have expressed a similar sense that this is the case.  Whether this has been an inevitable side-effect to creating a successful site, or to simply running out of things to talk to each other about is hard to say.  For my own part, I know that I focused a great deal on increasing traffic, on making the site as good as possible – and I admit to feeling a bit of a rush when I’d pick up a link from the Dish or get a good response from Larison or other bloggers who I had read and admired.

Either way, I wonder how the readers and commenters feel about this (not that the two groups, I hope, are mutually exclusive).  After just over a year, it’s incredible to see how far this blog has come.  We have gained and lost bloggers.  We are still (I hope, and believe) producing good, interesting, and relatively unique content.  We are still ad-free and entirely self-funded or funded by the generosity of the best damn commenters on the internet.  But have we lost some of that original vision?  Some of that original intent?  I would be interested to hear from both writers here and commenters on how, if at all, we could right the ship, reorient to bring back some of the conversational aspects of the original mission.  Make the site even better and more lasting.  We ditched the “series” function, but perhaps went too far in ditching the concept of series altogether.

In other words, this is a space to talk about blogging, this blog in particular, how it is doing things right and how it is doing things wrong, and so forth.  Thanks.

I think I’m going to start blogging weekly on the final season of Lost.  I wish I’d started this with the season premiere, but it’s too late for that.

As a primer – I become very disgruntled with the show around season 3.  It was a combination of burn-out (too much Lost in rapid succession) and the show’s own struggles which had me doubting whether I’d keep watching.  Suffice to say, I’m glad I did.  Season 4 was much better, and Season 5 was excellent.

So far, the final season looks to be shaping up to be just as good or even better than the last one.

So – some thoughts and spoilers on the season so far, and especially the latest episode, “Lighthouse”, after the leap…

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A reader writes:

Erik, as someone who lives in the Mighty Whitey Elite NY-DC Corridor, but who comes from Tea Party America, and who has lots of friends and relatives highly sympathetic to the Tea Party movement, I want to say that I think you and Freddie are both right, though your point in defense of the Tea Partiers is a more difficult one for people who live in your (our) social and professional milieu to grasp.

Like Freddie, and I think also like you, I don’t have much time for the Tea Partiers. Their protests are incoherent. Whether they realize it or not, they are setting themselves up as tools of the Republican Party (I’m a registered Republican, by the way, though a deeply disaffected one). In conversations with these people, I am impressed, and not in a good way, by how totally unrealistic they are about the problems facing our country, and the possible solutions. They think Sarah Palin is untouchable, and when you actually try to talk to them about what she stands for, they can’t do it. "Palin good, anti-Palins bad!" is the response I get. They hate "Washington" (and who could blame them for that?), and they hate "big government," but as far as I can tell, their rage is inchoate — which is to say, ultimately pointless, though it can do a lot of damage before it plays itself out. As a conservative who thinks the GOP is pathetic and bereft of ideas, I find the Tea Party movement frightening, when it’s not silly. Strange that a movement can be both ridiculous and unnerving, but that’s how I see them. I think Freddie is right to point out that there’s a lot of bad, crazy stuff going on with those people. To me, the worst thing I’ve seen and heard from them is flat-out racist commentary about President Obama.

But when I read or hear people like Freddie portray these people as nothing more than whiny babies who have lost their "privilege" and who can’t deal with it, I instantly sympathize with them, for reasons you’ve articulated. Look, I know these people. I grew up with them. I am related to them. For all their flaws, I can say confidently that they are in most respects the backbone of this country. They live their own lives, work hard, treat people fairly, and expect to be treated fairly in return. They’re patriotic and proud of what they have, which is too often not a hell of a lot (you don’t see many upper middle class or wealthy people identifying with this movement). It’s easy for people like Freddie to hate on them, not only because some of them make it easy with bigoted statements, but also because they are The Other, and are pleased to identify themselves in opposition to people like Freddie. We are constantly admonished by the media to be understanding and accepting of "diversity" among the various peoples of America, but these white working class and middle class people are the only ones it’s okay to define only by their flaws. I’ve struggled with the same thing many educated Southerners of the post-civil rights generation have: how is it that people who can be so good, so deeply kind and selfless and brave, can be so completely blind and ugly on the question of race? That is, thank God, less of an issue today than it was 20 years ago; times change, and so do people. But the fact is, there are few people, or peoples, who are all good or all bad, and learning to see the people I come from in Tea Party America as fundamentally good despite their (often nasty) biases has been for me a moral education. If you were stranded on the side of the road in rural Alabama, your best friend is likely to be a redneck churchgoing Tea Partier who would come out in the middle of the night to rescue you, and either put you up for the evening or buy you a hotel room. It might not make sense, but I’ve seen this kind of thing happen a thousand times.

The tragedy of these people — hell, my people — is that they don’t grasp how the Republican Party and Fox News exploit them. Did they benefit from the depredations of Wall Street? Hell no! The Republicans and the Democrats both allowed that to happen. In my view, the Republicans have made an art of appeasing the Tea Party types (before they were called that), while really pushing hard for the interests of Wall Street. And the Democrats, despite their pretenses otherwise, consider these white people to be an embarrassment at best, but more often than not a menace. Who is really for them? Nobody, not really. No wonder they’re angry, and confused. I dearly wish they had real leadership, and weren’t taken in by that clown Glenn Beck, that cynic Dick Armey, and that nitwit Sarah Palin. Their grievances are real, and legitimate. But, as Freddie understands, they have chosen whom they’ve chosen, and however sympathetic I am to their plight, I cannot entirely blame people for scorning them for the way they have chosen to express those grievances.

It’s a real mess. In my state’s Republican primary this year, I’ll probably have to choose between a party hack or a Tea Party loon. I don’t know how I’ll vote, if I vote at all. Choices on the Democratic side seem as bad or worse. We’re in a bad fix in this country.

I agree with pretty much all of this.  I still think that the tea party members are more diverse than we give them credit for, and not all of them are as Utopian in their vision of a small-government America as the most vocal ones, but I still see no political home there, any more than in the GOP (let alone the Democrats). 

I’m just going to go start my own political non-movement.  Let’s call it Beat Conservatism.  We’ll all be bums and rail against the centralization of power, against war, against modernity and all that jazz.  We won’t be pissed off all the time, we’ll write poetry.  We won’t rally or make signs or go on TV or run candidates – we’ll just embrace our ineffectualness.  The great irony of true conservatism, if I may call it that, is that at its heart is a distrust of power.  So to really embrace it you must give it up, let go of power, let go of political ambition.  Become political pacifists.  Embrace the culture and not the war.  That’s what my non-movement will be about.  (P.S. if anyone has any literature or references on the end-days of Jack Kerouac I’d appreciate  hearing about it.  He was a life-long Republican, and toward the end of his life re-embraced Catholicism.  Quite a fascinating, but terribly sad man and story.)

I have learned far more about healthcare reform than I ever thought I would in recent months.  In the end, what leaps out at me is that this issue – unresolved – will become a more and more of a thorn in conservative’s side.  If people think the Tea Party phenomenon is bad, just wait until a real populist movement rises up that is fundamentally opposed to free trade, that wants more rather than less government, that demands protectionist policies and entitlements.  The one thing which I can see spurring on something like this more than any other issue is a combination of poor employment and poor (and expensive) healthcare.  Is it so hard to imagine the Tea Partier who wants government to keep its hands off his Medicare, to be turned into an advocate of protectionist policies?

The current reform bill is not nearly liberal enough to avoid such a movement, nor is it conservative enough to really put into place any real chance at a market solution.  It keeps the lousy system we have in place now, and adds to it a tremendous cost to the middle class.  Furthermore, I see no future political will to actually implement any true market solution for healthcare.  So Republicans should think about ways to make national healthcare more sustainable via market mechanisms (choice, HSA’s, etc.) while still accepting the fact that an overall national/social model will be adopted eventually.  Otherwise healthcare will likely persist as an issue and Republicans will be increasingly on the losing side of that issue.

I think the best model would probably be something like single payer plus health savings accounts.  Make people of whatever income responsible for basic healthcare costs, but protect them from really damaging bills.  Free up businesses and entrepreneurs from the chains of healthcare uncertainty.  Somehow find a way to increase the supply of healthcare; and work toward means by which we can make cheaper, alternative healthcare solutions more available.  Alternatively we could adopt something like Wyden-Bennett.  My reluctance to support this bill, pure ideological concerns aside, is that I worry it will only help persist the status quo, and the status quo is no good.

Whether there is a reasonable alternative is harder to say.  Federalism is quickly going out of style – and the next real national movement may be a unity of tea partiers and union members, social conservatives and progressives – the sort of movement Mark has predicted, but one that is bereft of libertarian and free trade principles.  What would that do to our trade policies?  To our employment rate and productivity?

Suffice to say, for anyone with a libertarian economic outlook, or for anyone with concerns over civil liberties, this should be a concern.  Perhaps fending it off with a reasonable compromise on healthcare reform would actually make a great deal of sense.

In the comments to my tea party post, Freddie writes:

It would help, you know, if you didn’t caricature my argument, or insert terms I didn’t use. Indeed, the point isn’t that they are redneck or that they are racist, but rather that they are, like all people who have found themselves leaving a position of political privilege, scared and angry. That you can’t take that as anything other than racism reveals again that you are a poor student of history, Erik, and you act out against those who  call you on it.

At some point, there’s just got to be an acknowledgment of this bare fact: all of these soi disant dissident conservatives, bohemian libertarians and reform Republicans– they are not like the Tea Partiers. And you know they aren’t. What’s the biggest tell? They don’t live where the Tea Partiers live. How many of the self-styled defenders of the Tea Party movement live where the Tea Partiers live? How many conservatives writing for <i>The Atlantic</i> or libertarians at Cato live in rural Texas or the Mississippi Delta? When do you think the last time was that your average boho DC blogger had a real Tea Partier over to their home? How often does your average pomo conservative or libertarian go out for beers with a genuine Tea Partier? What percentage of the real Tea Party protests, do you think, are from New York and DC?

Ah, you say, that just goes to show how close minded you are! But it doesn’t, though. It shows how close minded <i>they</i> are. Because they have explicitly and consistently defined themselves culturally. <i>You can ask them</i>. It’s all over their signs and literature. What did they say about Sarah Palin in the proto-Tea Party moment? They said, "She’s just like us. She’s one of us." She wasn’t– she was always rich, and now she’s downright <i>wealthy</i>–but she plays the game by hating the right people and defining herself <i>against</i> the right people. You really think that all that talk of the "real America" didn’t mean anything? You think that doesn’t have anything to do with how this country is changing? Or did you just ignore that like you ignore everything they say, so that you can foist more and more virtues onto them that they don’t possess and <i>don’t want</i>. What do they have to do to convince you that they are serious when they say that they don’t like who they don’t like? How many signs does it take? How many slogans?

That’s the bottom line here: there are an awful lot of fantasy going on. You throw on so many wonderful virtues to people who are not like you, because you are using them. They are a symbol for you, a political mass to be exploited. <i>They are telling you they are not like you</i>. I assure you, when they constantly attack the "college elite" or whatever is their preferred euphemism at the time, they are saying, among other things, "we don’t like people who write thought provoking blog posts on the Theogony."  What planet do you live on where that is not the case? Ask yourself, Erik, really ask yourself, what percentage of Tea Partiers would slur Andrew Sullivan and his husband in a heartbeat if they had a chance? 50%? 60%? You’ll rush to deny that there’s any element of homophobia in the Tea Parties, but I’ve <i>read their signs</i>. I’ve read their literature. I go to their websites. I don’t have the time for pleasant fantasy.

I don’t have the time, and I won’t permit myself, because the beginning of respect, the precondition for respect, is listening to people and extending to them the right to self-define. That’s the laurel I’ll give them that you won’t. I’ll actually extend to them the courtesy of listening to them, rather than inventing some idealized version of them for my own ends. And it’s because I listen to them that I don’t respect them. I don’t respect their incoherent political platform. I don’t respect their fear mongering. I don’t respect their conspiracy theorizing. I don’t respect the hundreds– hundreds– of flat out offensive signs and images that you and I have both seen at their rallies. Me, personally, I’d rather be disrespected for who I actually am and what I actually say than respected as a symbol or a fantasy.

What the Tea Partiers tell me, in so many ways, is that they are my enemy. And so they are.

I’m not sure that it makes sense to respond to each of these points.  So let me first say that most of what Freddie is writing here is a straw man.  I have never been a loud defender of the tea parties, nor have I foisted virtues upon the tea party movement which don’t exist. Indeed, if anything I have spent a good deal more time and ink criticizing the tea parties than I have spent defending them.  Freddie is right – this isn’t my movement, nor do I think I would much fit in at the rallies or with the folk out there proclaiming that they are in fact the “true conservatives” or supporting someone like J.D. Hayworth who says things such as “Like the liberals, John McCain opposes water-boarding terrorists like the Christmas bomber.”  I may very well register as a Republican for the first time ever just to vote for McCain in the primaries!

Just the other day, I wrote in response to Mark,

Reading through the issues up for a vote in the Contract From America, it’s hard to take most of them terribly seriously, and while Mark is right that they are tightly focused on fiscal and economic issues, it’s hard to ascertain any coherent economic or political philosophy from the list.  The only consistent thread is reflexive anti-taxation which is neither new or unique.  And while some of the ideas are good ones, it’s hard to take the entire batch seriously.  Sooner or later, as certain groups develop more mature policy prescriptions the larger movement will splinter.  Some elements will be absorbed into the Mt. Vernon establishment which will gain some new faces but little else.  The remaining elements will be outsiders, and perhaps even morph into a third party.  But that group will be more extreme, more ideologically “pure” and thus even less relevant than the mainstream elites.

I have previously written that the Tea Party movement is similar to a glorified revolutionary war reenactment.  I have written against the reflexive anti-tax sentiment of the Tea Parties.  And while, on occasion, I have mused with optimism that the tea parties represent a new beginning, a move toward a better sort of conservatism in the future, I am largely cynical that this is the case (except that perhaps the more extreme elements on the right will end up self-destructing and will be resurrected as something wholly different and better…)  I am not starry-eyed about my relationship to the tea parties.  I may as well be an ‘elite’ and a RINO and all those other slurs and slings and arrows and talking points.

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There is a common narrative surrounding the Tea Parties which goes something like this: Obama was elected and now a bunch of angry, ignorant white folk afraid of the fact that they are being displaced by immigrants and liberal elites are making a whole lot of noise and calling it a Tea Party.

There may be some truth to this notion.  There are some angry white people in America, even a few very racist ones – but I think this particular narrative is mostly wrong and is based largely on a sort of trendy prejudice. I call it a “trendy” prejudice, because it’s exactly that – a prejudice that is very in vogue among critics of the Tea Parties or critics of those awful, no-good Republican obstructionists.  It’s also trendy in that nobody in the political-correctness crowd really sees it as a prejudice.  It’s just fine to think of the Tea Partiers as “teabaggers” and snicker at them because, well, look at them!  They are surely deserving of mockery and disdain….

It’s very much the sort of arrogant opinion you might find Bill Maher espousing as he derides Christians for their nonsensical faith or those stupid, ignorant rubes clinging to their guns when – if they were of the enlightened class – they could be wondering about the carbon footprint their assault rifles were leaving instead.

Naturally many of the more vocal components of the Tea Parties or the American right do themselves no favors in disabusing us of these notions.  The Michele Bachmanns of the world lend some hint of truth to accusations of paranoia.  Glenn Beck is a little wild-eyed at times. 

But I wonder, have rural whites (i.e. angry rednecks) really been in power for decades?  And what do we mean by “in power” anyways?  Is it possible that people in general have simply been more in control over their own destinies in the past, making most of their decisions at a local or state level? Then, as the federal government becomes increasingly stronger and more pervasive, that local and community control becomes more and more diminished?  This isn’t a question of power over others, then, but one of power over ourselves.

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“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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