Kudos to Johnny Rotten for denouncing the people exulting
about Thatcher’s death last week.
Similarly, the Saturday
Live Sketch about a
punk who alienated his bandmates by liking Thatcher touched on one of my
favorite topics: the tragic (and ultimately unnecessary) divide between people who love freedom for essentially
left-anarchist reasons and people who
love free markets. Not that their
differences aren’t real or important, but consider, for example, that the most
notorious anti-Thatcher riots back in the day were still (long story short)
riots against taxes. (By the way, a free-marketeer must respect
SNL’s right to ban troublemaking performers, but an anti-authoritarian might
still find some amusement in how
prestigious the list is.)
I wrote in the anthology Proud
to Be Right about bridging the punk/conservative gap in my own
youthful, Reagan-era mind. But I haven’t
harped on that specific theme too much since then, mainly because I
increasingly think that if I take the idea to its logical (and in some ways far
less fun) conclusion, I need to go far beyond stitching together a few
ironically-compatible elements of the culture – and far beyond the
tradition-plus-markets “fusionism” those on the right often laud.
I need to tackle the much more daunting task of figuring out
how to “reconcile” the whole culture
to itself, so to speak, patiently and diplomatically finding ways to draw upon
the best elements of every major political tradition without simply denigrating
them or combating them.
(By contrast, Proud to
Be Right may well end up being remembered most for combat, namely the
C-SPAN2 panel on which I condemned fellow PBR contributor Helen Rittelmeyer for
being a closet nihilist – but she’s settled down, moved to Australia while
still blogging wittily for First Things,
and gotten engaged, and I wish them both well.
I honestly don’t like to fight.)
So much of human life is about performative ruts: People’s
brains aren’t just making arguments, they’re constantly asking, “Should I be in
aggrieved-party mode now?” and “Is this a right/left argument...is this turning
into a city/rural argument...do I need to defend my favorite sports team now?”
etc. As Jonathan Haidt’s
psychology-of-conflict book Righteous
Mind suggests, needlessly escalating clashes may be more than just a troubling
footnote to politics, it might be the main story, and not one we should be proud
of endlessly retelling.
And that story probably won’t change much as long as
politics resembles Crossfire and,
perhaps worse, the short sniping of Twitter, Facebook, and online comments
threads (which so quickly seem to turn everything
into cycles of abuse that sound very much like two-party politics). Now, I could try just mastering the quick-insult art form – I think you know I could –
but I basically vowed back when the troubling show Politically Incorrect first became popular that I didn’t really
want to go that route. I have tried not
to, but conflict is pervasive...and instinctually satisfying. But no matter how risky it is to abandon that
familiar game, I have to say no to it.
Coincidentally, the same week various punks, anarchists, and
even comic book creators in the UK were playing their assigned roles by celebrating Thatcher’s death (probably
feeling a bit nasty about themselves, not just her, in the process), a study
reportedly suggested that social media is tending to make us still nastier – and
more shallow.
I’ll soon try other approaches, then, reflected in the near
future in a few projects that’ll take me away from Facebook, Twitter, and
Blogger most of the time (really – reach me via e-mail if you need me). I know I recently tried to exit a few times
before, but the timing wasn’t quite right for both exiting and explaining myself. The
near future, though, should bring, among other things, (A) essays about
reconciling political factions, (B) a site for libertarian pop culture (more
decisively entertaining rather than argumentative), (C) an article about
gold, (D) the moderating of ever-civil Dionysium debates, (E) possibly the
moderating of much larger debates, and (F) various bits of ghostwriting (for
you too, if you like). More about all
that as warranted.
The combat model of politics was well-suited to the Cold War
era and is perhaps well-suited to a two-party system, but it’s healthy to take
a step back and ask whether it’d look ridiculous in, say, a healthy system of
twenty parties in a world with minimal threat of violence. If it’d seem jarring in that world, wouldn’t
it be nice, and probably quite productive, to behave right now more like a citizen of that imagined world than like
one forged by the tragic conflicts of the twentieth century that molded minds
from mine to Thatcher’s? (Even punk has
by now been tamed, after all – and I’m definitely going to see that museum
exhibit, without shame or griping about lost “authenticity.”)
Of course, different mindsets are appropriate to different
eras:
•A few years after the Cold War ended, I was pleased to see
Howard Stern running for New York governor in part because libertarian ideas
were still so obscure in the early 90s that court jester seemed like a pretty good gig for our kind, perhaps
the best we could hope for.
•A long-overdue switch in the dominant party in Congress in
the mid-90s made a calm, economics-oriented “consultant” vibe seem more apt (thinktanks and the like).
•Slightly more familiar in the 00s but still
reckless-sounding to most mainstream listeners, libertarians were perhaps then
best suited to play the badboys, a la Tony Stark and his
faux-callous capitalist arrogance, or the vaguely-related gadfly vibe Ron Paul
occasionally aimed for.
•Rand Paul, though, seems to understand the need to combine principle
and outreach, at least in his best moments (which may or may not be
frequent enough, hinging in large part on how
many women flock to Hillary’s banner in 2016 and how cozy Paul is seen to
be with his party’s waning religious right and fringe elements, if he tries to
be the GOP nominee – but so far, I think he’s mostly doing quite well).
I think I could do a sort of grand-fusionist outreach – not
just within the right but beyond it – fairly well, and I’d be more proud of
that than of just “winning” a few nastier arguments (for all my criticisms of
Occupy, for example, I suspect a brainscan of me would show they do not set off
my “enemy” neural patterns – nor, certainly, do some other
anarchically-inclined recent factions like WikiLeaks and Anonymous, not to
mention the very left-wing and gender-bendy protestors who turned out here in
support of Pussy Riot several months ago).
So, much as I hate to ruin all the fun, the overarching
mature, grown-up project of conflict resolution has to be the next step (but
then, much of what I’ve done over the years has happened on the border between productive communication and fighting: involvement in the Skeptical
movement, majoring in philosophy, writing columns, co-producing unusually
polemical TV, debunking unscientific claims, moderating debates, etc.).
My apologies to a few friends who’ve said my goal should be
to sound even snarkier. I could, I really could. But something tells me that’s the last thing
the world needs right now.
Take North Korea, for example: the conservative temptation
might be to focus on how awful that regime is, and the liberal temptation might
be to support Obama, but if my limited scraps of info are anything to go on, the
complex truth – which does not speak particularly well of any faction and doesn’t
much lend itself to snarky sparring – may be that the U.S. and others are
sabre-rattling at the deranged North Korean regime in hopes, essentially, of
securing better terms for potential U.S., South Korean, and Saudi business
investment and even shopping malls in North Korea if it opens up a bit. Stick a situation like that in a simple right/left combat model – or worse, just a good
guys/bad guys model – and you just end up deforming reality and probably saying
something stupid. Maybe even causing a
nuclear war, which would not be cool.
And I increasingly think that our main domestic task must be
untying the very messy corporatist-governmental knot that the Progressives of
both parties created a century ago. The
old, perfectly-balanced right-left tug of war sure won’t accomplish that (it
may not accomplish much of anything, really).
It’s going to require much more thoughtful picking and finagling – which
is not to say passivity. Radicalism may
be called for. We may just need to spend
more time imagining what it would look like if all the radicals were cooperating
for a change.
P.S. I double-majored in philosophy and English literature back in the day, and if I’ve sounded pained at times about how to put in the most apt “final word” for a given chapter, fellow literature majors will understand why I always had a soft spot for Samuel Beckett.
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