From Utilitarianism to Libertarianism

Given all my recent posts about presidential candidates, it might be worth taking a step back to remind ourselves “why we fight”: in truth, because I just want everyone to be happy.

That is, I’m a utilitarian, seeing increases in general happiness (on balance, long-term) as synonymous with good and decreases in happiness (everyone’s happiness, on balance, long-term) as synonymous with evil. Anyone opposed to this orientation is, to the degree they oppose it, rather fiendish, though few people consciously set out to be evil. More often — if they aren’t mere unreflective predators — they’ve just latched onto some crude proxy for happiness-maximization and come to treat that proxy as if it trumps happiness itself. Usually, they’ve (somewhat arbitrarily, to my mind) picked a set of intuited, metaphysical rules — whether Christian, Muslim, Kantian, Randian, Marxist, or egalitarian-liberal — and decided, as if bowing down before an invasion force of extraterrestrials, that that set of rules “ought” to take precedence over humanity’s happiness. Why? I don’t know.

Of course, it might just happen to be the case that adherence to one of those rule-sets maximizes human happiness — by getting everyone into a blissful Heaven, say, or by ending the alienation of labor — but those rule sets must themselves be evaluated by their capacity to create happiness, which is the more fundamental underlying foundation of all ethics. And there is no point in asking “Is happiness good?” — I’m treating that as definitional, but not in a way that begs the question. If you insist “good” means something else and the dictionaries come to agree with you, then take “good,” it’s yours — but the rational and decent person remains a happiness-increaser, even if happiness-increasing must now be called “schmood” instead of “good.” Happiness, we know from direct experience of it, is not subject to the same “Is this good?” regress of questions that, say, a proposed set of Marxist or Kantian rules is. The regress ends at happiness (and not merely one’s own happiness, as utilitarians are sometimes falsely accused of thinking — indeed, in my experience, are often accused of thinking even after you carefully explain to people that that’s not even what “utilitarianism” means and never has been).

One year ago (!), before this blog was even fully functional, my January 2007 Book Selection of the Month was Alasdair MacIntyre’s After Virtue, and for all his brilliance, he still unfairly dismissed utilitarianism as a solution to the problem of foundational ethics in that book on the grounds that basic utilitarianism tells us happiness is good but does not provide rich, detailed advice on how to achieve it (for which, quite rightly, he suggests we may need guidance from tradition and communities). This objection is (not coincidentally, I would argue) very similar to a criticism often targeted at libertarianism: that it presents us with the blank slate of freedom but does not tell us what things to do with our freedom.

But it can still be the case that happiness is the proper moral gauge (or liberty the proper framework for fostering individual happiness) even if we disagree about the substantive details of how to be happy — just as people may agree they want to be healthy without knowing what specific diet regimen or medicines will produce that outcome. Disagreement over the “subsequent” question of whether living like a Catholic or like a hippie or like a tech-nerd is the best route to happiness (or even a more complex and convoluted disagreement over the extent to which happiness should be treated as a conscious goal) need not undermine happiness’s status as the ultimate destination. Indeed, it seems likely that some people will most easily find happiness by living like hippies, some by living like tech-nerds, etc. — all the more reason to deduce the need for some sort of individual-liberty-based social system from the deeper goal of fostering happiness.

As a “rule utilitarian” as opposed to “act utilitarian,” I recognize the practical dangers of inviting people (selfish, biased, fallible people) to guess anew from moment to moment what actions are sanctioned by the pursuit of general happiness, so I counsel adherence to that set of rules most likely to foster happiness — and an extreme reluctance to violate those rules, lest they erode (indeed, they may in practice end up being adhered to more rigidly than the metaphysically-intuited pseudo-rules I mentioned at the start — but we never make the mistake of thinking the utilitarian rules are somehow more important than the total set of humans adhering to them, the way someone might declare, say, equality to be an ideal worth making all of humanity less happy in order to achieve).

“Happiness-Seeking and Free” Ought to Be Just the Beginning

Imagine my frustration in many moral and political arguments: I think that getting people to agree on the goodness of increasing happiness — and getting them to agree that liberty makes possible individual pursuit of happiness — is merely the starting point for ethical and psychological development (and does indeed leave us with a host of barely-explored sociological and psychological questions about how to shape the best possible life), but I can’t even get most people to agree on the happiness part or the liberty part, let alone my own idiosyncratic, more detailed recommendations for fostering happiness (read books, avoid callousness, be skeptical, foster friendships, have a good sense of humor, etc., etc.).

I know it must seem to some readers that by being a utilitarian and libertarian (not to mention a skeptic and an atheist) I’m pushing a very weird, obscure creed indeed, but try to imagine it from my perspective: I often feel like a pacifist in ancient Viking times saying, “Well, here’s my humble suggestion, for starters: let’s just all maybe consider not slaughtering each other constantly” — and hearing the ancient masses respond, “Are you crazy? Stop the slaughtering? We must do the slaughtering! That’s our whole way of life! The gods smile upon the slaughtering!” (No need to write in explaining that I’m oversimplifying the Viking way of life — I’m sure I am.)

But even if very few people are conscious adherents of utility or liberty, I think collectively, over time, humanity participates in some sorting processes (you might almost call them “evolutionary,” though not in the biological sense — for the most part) that produce good results precisely because they tend, in fits and starts, to weed out sources of misery and perpetuate sources of happiness (in analogizing these processes to each other, I echo Jonathan Rauch). Ranking these processes from the least-efficient to the most-efficient, I’d say they are:

•Democratic government (the most primitive of sorting processes, since it basically entails either that most of us must agree on a given course of action or that most of us must entrust some ruler or set of rulers to choose our course, whether those rulers are representatives or monarchs)

•Tradition (which deviates from utilitarian norms to the extent it is imposed on suffering participants by force but is nonetheless prone to some extent to preserve practices that work and aid survival and punish — weed out — practices that do not)

•Science (a competitive process of fact-checking, false-hypothesis-debunking, and constant reimagining with the goal of more closely, asymptotically approximating a correct description of reality, discarding failed hypotheses over time in the process — though science is done by humans, and they can certainly skew the process of science and act to protect an undeserving establishment with almost as much ease as an oligarchy can deform democratic processes or lying priests can perpetuate harmful traditions)

•Markets (the best weeding-out process of all, characterized by constant, rapid experimentation, with rewards for the ideas that work and cost-bearing for the proponents of the ideas that do not — to the extent markets prevail, happiness tends, over time, to be efficiently achieved)

Evolutionary, free markets are like fractals to government’s barbarous, simplistic circles — the millions of music-purchasing decisions made in a decentralized fashion each day occur with a subtlety that a single, once-a-year National Album Purchase could never have (likewise, we might not have fared well in a single up-or-down vote on the question “Reptiles-only or mammals-only?” 60 million years ago).

The need to let constant, decentralized, individuated happiness-seeking decisions be made explains, incidentally, why violence is especially immoral: you can’t easily exit a prison or kidnapper’s den, or even your own living room if a burglar (or abusive spouse) is holding a knife on you. Violence cuts off the evolutionary, happiness-seeking, efficiency-seeking, individual-wishes-respecting process. Instead of acting on your own preferences, they are overridden forcibly by someone else’s — and that other person, to put it in value-neutral terms for a moment, may not gain as much happiness from his actions as you lose. There’s no way to know whether he does, which is why all force-based interactions are dangerous, abandoning mutually-beneficial, mutually-pleasing transactions in favor of ones that may or may not bring about a net gain in happiness and quite likely leave one party weeping.

From Utility and the Epistemological Problem to Libertarianism

The economist Murray Rothbard, who I mentioned in a recent Retro-Journal entry, recognized in this epistemic hurdle for utilitarians a reason to adopt strict property rights (and he thus created a philosophical bridge between utilitarianism and libertarianism and made plain a practical connection between human happiness and markets, a historic intellectual achievement that puts us all in his debt no matter how much some of his associates late in his life, mentioned in recent entries on this blog, may have sounded like deranged militia men).

Property rights give each individual an inviolable sphere of action in which each interaction becomes a mutually-beneficial exchange — no matter how much initial social conditions vary (due to humanity’s barbarous, disutile, non-libertarian history) — mutually beneficial in the sense that the individuals who are party to a trade decide whether the trade (or the party invitation or the conversation or any other human interaction) is worth doing and leaves both parties better off than before by their own subjective, individual standards. The alternative is some subset of people — whether a monarch, “representatives,” or a mob — deciding, in what is quite likely an incorrect fashion, what they think should make everyone else happy and imposing it upon them with the threat of violence, whether in the form of imprisonment, fines, taxes, regulations, or simply a beating.

Well-timed beatings could perhaps in principle make people happier, but experience suggests why the odds are slim, and that realization should be expanded to skepticism about all forms of slavery, government, and physical coercion. Leave individuals as free as possible to dispose of their bodies and property as they individually see fit and the world (while it will not be perfect) will be perpetually improving, by its inhabitants’ individual standards, in a piecemeal fashion, something of which there is no guarantee anytime the tribe or mob or social-democratic collective runs roughshod over dissenting individuals’ wills in favor of its own.

Tragically, we are for now ruled by politicians, but we can hope to see the most pro-government politicians fail and be ousted, be they Democrats, Republicans, Islamists, or Communists — until the distant but hoped-for day that all government functions are finally privatized and words like “rulers” and “politicians” are things for the history books, much like “absolute monarch.”

Some Preference Sets Are Indeed Better Than Others

And one last wrinkle: Contrary to the simplest version of either utilitarianism or libertarianism, in which people’s preferences are taken as given and the question is merely how to get obstacles such as laws out of the way of their fulfillment, I recognize that some sets of desires enable humanity to engage in mutually-beneficial action more easily than others. A nation of sadists will have a harder time achieving happiness than a nation of people who enjoy making each other happy — which is why culture really does matter, and why someone like Martin Luther King (tomorrow being the anniversary of his birth, even if we celebrate it a week from now) is a truly heroic figure: he didn’t just change the nation’s laws, he changed people’s preferences in an immense way and thereby made it easier for all of us to interact happily with each other. That’s an important model for non-governmental change if ever there was one, with the legal changes mainly an after-effect of that shift in attitude.

And all this leaves thousands of questions unanswered — but there are thousands of books responding to those questions, fortunately, and this blog entry is just a tiny, tiny start. It might be enough to produce a kernel of curiosity in the mind of someone who’s previously looked at things in some radically opposed, anti-libertarian way, though. (And I’ll certainly be revisiting some of these issues in the months ahead, as I work on writing Conservatism for Punks, finish the remaining two thirds of my “Retro-Journal” — next stop 1994 — and grudgingly evaluate the presidential race.)

Some Related Items of Interest

•Applying libertarian ideas to something of greater moral urgency than minute variations in marginal U.S. tax rates, Karol Boudreaux and Paul Dragos Aligica suggest to analysts of Africa possible Paths to Property.

•Though I recall having a testy e-mail exchange with him about the utility of some people’s often-conflicted preference for smoking, I was delighted by Bryan Caplan’s recent Washington Post column explaining voter irrationality, which noted in passing the important point that voters’ various forms of ignorance don’t all “balance out” to make government an effective engine of happiness — the ignorant tend to be anti-trade protectionists and the informed to be pro-trade, for instance.

•News reports about the FBI having some of its wiretaps fail because the FBI neglected to pay its phonebills are a great reminder that government is just as inefficient and Soviet-like even when doing the handful of ostensibly vital things the right likes. (I fear this civilization will end not with someone villainous saying “Now your destiny is at hand!” but with someone saying something bureaucratic like “I ain’t authorized to let you use that containment suit here — you can try coming back next week maybe.”)

•If you agree that efficiency, happiness, and individual preference-fulfillment are strongly correlated — indeed, in some ways near-synonyms, rightly understood — you might enjoy this argument against gift-giving (a position Sasha Volokh, who I was lucky enough to have lunch with a couple times in recent months, greatly sympathizes with, at least in theory).

Thompson Unbracketed! (and a review and ranking of all the viable candidates)

If you’re sick of reading about the primaries and your motto is “Wake me in November,” I understand (indeed, I was starting to think that was Fred Thompson’s motto). Otherwise, you may enjoy watching me struggle to come up with a new favorite candidate in the presidential primaries.

First of all, I am familiar with both the practical arguments and moral arguments against voting (respectively, they come down to “Your one vote is not going to make the difference” and “Voting for politicians only encourages them”). Somewhat ironically, I think the “practical” argument is trumped by quasi-Kantian reasoning (you should behave as if others might follow your example, as with littering — and if you’re a media person or just outspoken, some people actually may follow your example and end up being numerous enough to make a difference) and the “moral” argument is trumped by utilitarian reasoning (you are not in a position, either by voting or refraining from voting, to send a message so clear that it is now inscribed on the hearts of men or written into the metaphysical heavens, so there’s little point in sending some “absolutist” message as opposed to worrying about the more practical question of how to steer the least-bad viable candidate into the White House, making the world slightly better off than it otherwise would have been, since perfection is unattainable).

I should add that neither the Kantian nor utilitarian argument seems to me to create a strong duty to vote — I’m merely saying voting shouldn’t be ruled out of bounds as either irrational or immoral, if some of my readers are inclined to think that (you know who you are, you filthy anarchists and statisticians). The Kantian argument can plausibly be trumped by, say, being really busy that day, and the utilitarian argument can be trumped by a year when all of the candidates are so monstrous that, merely as a practical matter, the message “None of the above” must be sent. If you don’t want to vote, in short, I don’t blame you, but I vote.

It’s also interesting, just as an intellectual exercise, keeping track of what you’d like to see happen (sort of like sports, which Josh the bartender at Merchants NY was stunned to discover I don’t care about). And this year is a mighty interesting intellectual exercise. (I’m so tired…help me…)

Third Parties

OK, here we go. First of all: “third parties.”

Well, since I think government is a counterproductive, systematic threat of violence — obey or go to jail — I can’t support any party that wants (on balance, deliberately, and in principle) to increase the power of government, so I’d say that rules out the Green Party and the Prohibition Party right off the bat (yes, there’s a Prohibition Party candidate running this year — if Progressives want to remain true to their historic roots, they may want to consider him). The Constitution Party is better but is essentially sort of a theocratic version of the Libertarian Party, so why not just vote for the Libertarian Party instead?

And the Libertarian Party, obviously, embodies my philosophy in a way that neither the Democrats or Republicans even come close to doing. However, as a utilitarian (a position I hope to explain at greater length tomorrow), I have little patience for the view, which to me seems naive, that a vote is supposed to be some profound expression of exactly what I believe. Philosophy is a profound expression of exactly what I believe. Blogging is at least a shallow expression of what I believe. Voting is tactical — I want (to the extent I am, in principle, setting an example for like-minded people) to foster the least-bad outcome, where “outcome” means all the foreseeable fallout for the rest of time, not just the election itself.

So, just as a lot of people on the left decided after 2000 not to vote for Ralph Nader again, I am within my rights to refrain from voting Libertarian — when voting Libertarian is likely, as a practical matter, to split the less-statist vote and help put the more-statist candidate (and the more-statist party, which has to be factored into the calculus) in power. And let’s not rehash the Bush experience now. It has at least historically been the case that the Republicans have shown greater potential to behave as government-shrinkers (or at least slower-government-growers) than the Democrats, though I’m well aware that’s no iron law of history and that both parties are, post-Bush, de facto socialist.

I think there may just be the tiniest hope of redeeming one of those two major parties, though, since it has at least a minority of pro-free-market, government-shrinking members, while the other party has essentially none. On to the two major parties, then (but don’t despair altogether, LP — I’ll be back in nine months if my major-party options are grim enough).

The Democrats

By my count, there are three viable Democratic candidates (my condolences to Gravel and Kucinich) and five viable Republican candidates (my condolences to the candidate I wrote about yesterday, as well as to Keyes and Hunter, the last of whom I admit I didn’t examine as closely as perhaps I should have, but it’s far too late for that now). For the most part, much as we ideologues and intellectuals might whine, America does a pretty good job of avoiding the extremists in favor of the more palatable candidates, so let’s forget about the fantasy scenarios and just look at what we have left.

By my standards, all three of the viable Democrats are arguably worse than any of the five viable Republicans — with the intriguing exception of Huckabee, but I’ll get back to him later. For now, let me rank the Democrats, even though there is not a chance that I will be voting for any of them.

The worst of the three: Edwards. I’m glad the Democrats seem to agree, though their reasons are probably very different from my own. They may just consider Obama and Clinton more exciting, but my dislike of Edwards is driven by the belief that a man who rails against the rich might actually do something about it, most likely something involving higher taxes and additional regulations that will weaken the economy, fostering more poverty, and leading to still more idiots like Edwards calling for still more taxes and regulation — the all-too-likely downward-spiral path into national oblivion that keeps me awake at night and rambling about libertarianism by day.

I hope Edwards will not even get a v.p. candidate slot — which means I’m basically rooting for a Clinton/Obama or an Obama/Clinton ticket on the Democrat side, and not because I think a woman and black man (in either order) will be easier to beat in the general election due to lingering racist and sexist sentiment among voters or anything like that. I really think Clinton and Obama are better.

Then again: sometimes politicians (like all of us) are shaped more by their habits than by their conscious pronouncements, and perhaps Edwards would govern for the most part like a typical corporate lawyer rather than a rebel and rabblerouser, which wouldn’t be so terrible — bad, but not apocalyptic.

Ranking Clinton vs. Obama is tricky (as Democrats have noticed). In subtly different ways, they both want to be perceived as moderates while harboring lefty principles and ambitions, so from my perspective, figuring out which one is preferable becomes a game of trying to figure out which one is least likely to act on principle. Given that unresolvable ambiguity, though, I’m inclined to say punish Clinton for past misdeeds and give the new guy (who brings less of a machine with him) a shot. Thus: Obama-Clinton ’08 (if I had to pick the Dems’ ticket for them, which, thank goodness, I don’t — because there’s still that maybe-potentially-redeemable other major party I mentioned earlier). Would Clinton go for that, though? Would either of them work with the other at this point? Or is Edwards in the v.p. slot almost inevitable?

The Republican Worst-Case Scenario: Huckabee

For twelve years, from 1994-2006, Republicans dominated government and accomplished little (by which I mean government grew and grew, not “I think they should have created more programs and passed more bills”). One of the healthiest things about American politics right now is the widespread agreement, particularly among Republicans, that the Republicans failed and can no longer be given the benefit of the doubt even by their natural constituencies. For their shame to be translated into any sort of improvement in their behavior, though, they really need a tough, driven president who will keep fighting to get the Republicans to behave like Republicans even when it is unpopular and they are feeling lazy. Can any of the viable five (Giuliani, Romney, McCain, Thompson, and Huckabee) be that president?

Huckabee, far from showing any interest in restoring the forgotten government-shrinking principles of 1994, has campaigned as an economic populist not so different from Edwards — and a Jesus freak to boot, making him by some measures a worst-case combo from my perspective, though as a practical matter there are plenty of secularists on the left doing far worse cultural damage, something that some of my fellow fiscal conservative/social liberal types forget to factor into the equation sometimes. As with my cynical calculations about Obama and Clinton, my fondest hope if we ended up with a President Huckabee is that he would completely abandon his religious and economic-populist principles and that the only thing he would stick to is his promise to abolish the IRS and the tax code (an admirable but oddball plan made implausible by his record as a taxer in Arkansas — he seems to grab the closest snake oil at hand and tout it with eloquence, humor, and vigor).

If he gets elected, I just hope everyone — everyone — will devote their political energies to holding him to that IRS-abolishing pledge above all else (and, crucially, before the institution of a national sales tax). I don’t think Huckabee will be the top of the ticket, but we need to think about how he’d behave because he may still have a shot at being the v.p. candidate (helps motivate the South) and thus becoming president sometime after this election cycle.

In any case: Huckabee, worst of the five viable Republicans, may be just as bad as the Democrats — maybe sufficient reason to vote Libertarian this year, if the differential consequences between a Huckabee victory and a Dem victory are small enough (and if there is the added danger of Huckabee’s anti-capitalist, anti-corporate views becoming dominant in the Republican Party, with all the tragic long-term consequences that could have).

A sidenote: My very rough perusal of state polls suggests that states where Huckabee has (at some points in time) been favored also like Obama — suggesting, in my opinion, not that those states are schizophrenically right-left polarized — nor that they’re moderate/vertical/purple, as the two candidates themselves might claim — but that those states are religious (as Iowa and South Carolina are).

Obama and Huckabee may not seem all that similar, but each is considered the most religion-friendly candidate within his own party. Obama called for an end to red state/blue state divisions, and in so doing (like my friend Mark Stricherz) also called upon his fellow Democrats to become more comfortable with “the language of faith.” And Huckabee, of course, wants us to be Christian soldiers, though I think he’s too bland and moderate to do much about it, thank the void.

A Consensus Candidate from Among the Other Republicans

With Giuliani having been way up in polls nationally (mostly in later-voting states) and more fiscal conservative/social liberal than the other four viable Republicans, he’d seem my natural choice at this point — but, since I acknowledged my willingness to pick candidates for strategic reasons rather than simply philosophical compatibility, I have to acknowledge that a lot of religious Republicans, who will be needed in the general election, have serious reservations about Giuliani (I know one die-hard Republican who has already sworn she would never vote for him, the poor guy).

That means that to some extent I become willing to sit back and see who the Republicans are capable of coalescing around and, as long as it’s not Huckabee, reluctantly yet decisively rooting for that candidate over the Democrat. So pick one, GOP, and if it must be someone more pro-life or socially conservative than Giuliani, let it not be Huckabee but rather: McCain, Romney, or Thompson (all of whom are pro-life enough to get by but — to whip out my cynical calculus again — have been sufficiently waffling and uninterested in those sorts of topics over the years that they don’t scare me).

Now, admittedly, as of about six months ago, I was thinking of Giuliani as my fallback choice if there wasn’t a viable libertarian in the GOP race at this point (and there isn’t) — and I was “bracketing” Thompson, who I would have picked as the fallback if he weren’t dithering and being mindbogglingly boring and thus dooming himself to the single digits in the polls. But today, six days from the big South Carolina primary, I think the situation may be reversed: Giuliani seems to be sinking and looking less plausible as a consensus candidate (though I still sort of like him, for all his flaws), while Thompson apparently drank some much-needed coffee or something before the most recent debate, dominated it, and has shown a tiny hint of having new life in South Carolina polls.

So — with the same ruthlessness that I showed in giving an earlier candidate until New Hampshire to prove himself and then bidding him farewell — I am now rooting for Fred Thompson to emerge with astonishing new strength in South Carolina and go on to become our next president (and as a pro-life Southerner himself, he sure as hell has no need to add the dreaded Huckabee to the ticket).

Realistically, McCain will probably win South Carolina, though, and if he does, it may be just as well, since (a) he may be the only GOP candidate with a chance against the Dems in the general election, based on recent national polls (moderates like him, but for all his weird pet liberal issues he also suffices as a budget-cutting, pro-life, hawk candidate who can appeal to those three GOP factions), and (b) he might even give us a way of salvaging Giuliani, since they’re friendly (Giuliani has pretty openly said he’d like McCain as his v.p., and perhaps McCain would return the compliment). That could lead to a Giuliani presidency after a McCain one, making McCain a slow off-ramp to an eventual restoration of secularism in the GOP.

Both McCain and Giuliani strike me as tough enough to weather criticism and dips in the polls once they’re in office and tackle tough issues like Social Security and Medicare reform, which we very desperately and urgently need — and which Huckabee would not likely handle the right way, while Romney just screams “non-boat-rocking, smiling caretaker-president” to me, meaning four (or eight) more years of letting things slide and putting a happy face on it. That beats making things worse — and the mere fact that National Review endorsed Romney actually does give him some added strategic value as a potential consensus candidate, to my mind — but we should aim higher.

So (like Karol Sheinin, who has long been rooting for Thompson) I say: please surprise us in South Carolina, Fred, or, failing that, exit the race (along with the other three even-lower-polling GOP candidates) and let the GOP consolidate at last around a McCain-Giuliani ticket, which I think can beat Obama-Clinton, once Republican voters have a clear choice to focus on instead of the current scattered field.

Thus, with the numerous caveats stated or alluded to above, as of today I rank the candidates something like this:

•Thompson
•McCain
•Giuliani
•Romney
•whoever the Libertarian Party candidate is (it was down to a pot-grower, sportscaster, or businessman last time I checked)
•Huckabee?
•Obama
•Clinton
•Edwards

At the very least, I owe you an explanation of how I weigh McCain’s pros and considerable cons, but that will have to wait a while — maybe until South Carolina primary day. Aside from that omission, though, I’m sure everyone reading this entry is in complete agreement with everything I’ve said…right?

Live Free or Whatever: A Ron Paul Postmortem

Forgive me for writing one more Ron Paul entry (though I will otherwise stick to my plan to ignore him henceforth). Count the layers of my confusion (probably shared by many libertarians to some extent but perhaps interesting to people haven’t already obsessively catalogued all their own mixed feelings about Paul):

•I was rooting for him — and writing about it — prior to Tuesday, since he’s a libertarian and I agree with him that government should be radically downsized, something none of the other major-party candidates are promising to do.

•And yet: Tuesday, he came in a useless fifth in the New Hampshire primary and was outed as having racist newsletters in his past.

•And yet: Just for the record, an issue of the current, thoroughly non-racist version of his newsletter happens to sit atop the big heap of books and magazines in my apartment right now, and there’s nothing in it that most people would find remotely offensive (unless they really love high taxes or something).

•And yet: That doesn’t erase the ugly past.

•And yet: I still think that his set of preferred policies would be the best thing for America (downsizing the government radically and paying off our debts instead of coming up with new domestic programs and new wars), and I am confident he’s far too ideological and libertarian to do anything terribly unpredictable if he were in the White House (such as pass some racist law — assuming for the moment we agree that the basic libertarian agenda of individual freedom and tolerance is not itself inherently “racist”).

•And yet: I agree that allowing those newsletters to go out under his name years ago (even if they were ghostwritten and he wasn’t paying much attention to them and convincingly claims now not to be a racist) shows astonishingly poor judgment, of the sort one doesn’t want in a president.

•And yet: I am (as is probably no great surprise) sufficiently illiberal to think that racial insensitivity is not such a uniquely horrific, taboo-violating crime that it should disqualify a candidate in a way that, say, supporting the continued existence of the Department of Commerce does not. In the end, the Department of Commerce harms the world far more than Paul’s cranky old hard-to-find newsletters do — and more than any of his policies would.

•And yet: It is perfectly reasonable for the American populace to say — even if they say it in a mildly social-democratic way — that no man aspiring to the one office that ostensibly represents us all should be associated with such animus toward any subset of that populace.

•And yet: No one seems to care that Obama’s mininster-mentor is a purveyor of racist conspiracy theories (in the “opposite direction”) himself.

•And yet: The “other team’s” stupidity never, never excuses one’s own — indeed, thinking it does is half the reason we’re in a perpetual right-vs.-left Punch and Judy show instead of engaging in critical self-examination (you can always point to something stupid the other team did — that way lies a spiral of madness).

•And yet: Paul’s libertarian agenda actually does, I think, offer the best hope of ending that Punch and Judy show once and for all by removing the weapon that is government from our cultural fights, and thereby removing a lot of the animus that accompanies some of those cultural fights (the bigger the state becomes, the more our political dialogues are like a heated argument conducted by two untrusting people standing near a table on which lies a gun that is magically slowly growing in firepower, which either side just might grab and use at any moment — each side thinking “The other person will grab it if I don’t grab it first to pursue my own agenda”). [Note: this metaphor is not an argument for gun control -- gun ownership is much more diverse and decentralized than a unitary state.]

•And yet: Paul never had much hope of being the nominee anyway, and certainly has none now. So, if his candidacy was always to some extent valuable mainly as a publicity stunt for libertarianism, his PR value is so damaged now that he should quickly exit the race.

•And yet: The newsletters controversy hasn’t been as harped-upon or as immediately-fatal to his candidacy as I would have thought.

•And yet: That’s mainly because he has no chance of becoming the nominee — if he started rising in the polls, we would hear more and more about the newsletters (imagine if Obama became the Dem nominee and there appeared to be something more than a snowball’s chance in hell of Paul being the GOP nominee — the Dems would rightly have a field day, saying, “You can choose hope, change, and tolerance or choose the man whose old newsletters warned that the ‘animals’ are coming to destroy suburbia and must be fended off with guns”; no frickin’ contest).

•And yet: The militia-man mindset of some on the libertarian fringe back in the 80s and early 90s, when the newsletters were produced, wasn’t all bad. I wasn’t entirely joking when I went to Kyle Smith’s “90s party” in 1999 as an “Upper East Side Militia” member (I sympathized with the idea of retaining the ability to fight the government openly if it ever became overtly fascistic and — not really expecting it to do so — thought the fightin’ spirit of the militias potentially helped keep people on their toes about civil liberties violations, not so unlike an overheated fundraising letter from the ACLU, which also has its uses).

An aside: My then-girlfriend Indrani went to the same party dressed as Scary Spice (and looked fabulous, I must say — a living argument for miscegenation if ever there was one), while our (pale and Norwegian-descended) friend Scott Nybakken went as a “grunge guy” (an even easier costume to construct than his brilliantly-conceived Halloween costume “Dr. Mullet, M.D.” last year, a costume that itself struck his Pennsic-attending recreational-medievalist girlfriend as too simple). But the weird thing is that despite the party being explicitly advertised as a “90s party,” with encouragement to wear your favorite 90s costume, no one at the party except us interpreted the invitation to mean they should literally dress up, and the others all just looked like the unimaginative yuppies they presumably were (even Kyle, a creative guy, said dismissively, “But it still is the 90s — so the invite was obviously just a joke”). Yet I contend that wearing costumes that parody the present as if it were already a source of nostalgia is plainly an interesting and worthwhile challenge and thus not obviously a joke. People are so uncreative. (If Scott’s girlfriend thinks Dr. Mullet, M.D. is lame, she should consider how many people fail even to put in that much effort — not that we should judge costumes by the vile labor theory of value.)

•Where was I? Oh, yeah: And yet: Many militias were tainted by bizarre, non-libertarian or simply tangential beliefs such as racism.

•And yet: I honestly didn’t know how far into that rhetoric the Ron Paul newsletters got.

•And yet: I’m not entirely shocked. (Departing Reason editor Nick Gillespie apparently is, while his predecessor Virginia Postrel basically says “I told you so,” which seems a little cruel to me — it’s not like we all had access to those hard-to-find newsletters before Tuesday, nor has Paul been saying things remotely like that in his speeches or years’ worth of more recent newsletters. True, plenty of people, such as Dorothy Rabinowitz and Mona Charen, were already saying he was crazy but not for legit reasons — they’d call him crazy just for wanting to shrink government, being wary of creeping fascism, and having some nutty fans.)

•And yet: I gather (though it has not been officially acknowledged) that Lew Rockwell, formerly a Paul staffer, may be the ghostwriter who is in some sense to blame for it all.

•And yet: That doesn’t excuse Paul implicitly endorsing the stuff.

•And yet: Even Rockwell has his uses, doing good work to promote (plain-old, non-crazy) libertarianism and even appearing in mainstream venues like Bill Moyers’ show to intelligently and civilly make his case against Bush foreign policy missteps, in a way that even the most urbane and sophisticated liberal would consider valuable and un-militia-like.

•And yet: It was never the positions unique to Paul and his paleolibertarian cohorts such as Rockwell (like their ardent opposition to the Iraq war or their sometimes-creepy culturally-ultraconservative impulses) that made Paul interesting to me anyway — that is, I am mainly drawn (as are plenty of sane people) to the positions that all libertarians have in common: cut taxes, cut the budget, deregulate, legalize everything that doesn’t harm others’ bodies or property, keep government’s hands off pocketbook and genitalia alike. That’s why I’ve been trying to avoid calling either hawkish neocons or isolationist Paulistas crazy — just cut the damn budget while you’re at it. I’d practically vote for Bin Laden at this point if he convincingly promised to cut the budget (Note to FBI: Just kidding! [Note to critics of the Ron Paul campaign: Just kidding about thinking an FBI conspiracy is listening to me!]).

•And yet: I can understand people thinking war is the most important issue.

•And yet: I can’t understand that belief leading them to any clear-cut conclusions on the topic, whether interventionist neocon conclusions or anti-interventionist paleocon/leftist conclusions. Foreign policy seems like a very complicated, contingent-facts-driven crapshoot to me, not amenable to simple, principles-based answers. (It sounds like one soldier recently killed in Iraq — who was an occasional blogger and a libertarian, as noted in a story linked on Drudge — may have agreed with me, since he had said that if he died he didn’t want his death used to shore up the arguments of either side.)

•And yet: That may mean Paul’s strict anti-interventionist principles, even if too-dogmatically held, happen to be conducive to the best outcomes anyway, gauged in a consequentialist-utilitarian as opposed to strict-principles way (and I’ll try to spell out more of the case for utilitarianism in a post Monday or so, since I brought it up).

•And yet: It really doesn’t matter anymore, except in so far as I may have to pick political candidates more carefully in the future.

•And yet: The others are all arguably still worse and are themselves always mixed bags of good things and worrisome things, so it’s not as if I think, say, Edwards supporters are the “responsible” ones. (Maybe that handful of friends I had who liked Richardson weren’t so crazy…even though he had called for an end to the UFO cover-up, which should please Kucinich…who was, incidentally, the one rival candidate for whom Ron Paul had kind words during his Leno appearance Monday night, which now seems an eternity ago, like a moment from my lost youth.)

A Few Final Ironies

•I just today received word that Ron Paul will be on the New York Republican primary ballot (never an easy thing to achieve — Buchanan didn’t get enough signatures in 1992). So now I have to decide, in my Kantian-yet-utilitarian way, whether I should still cast at least a protest vote for him on Feb. 5 or just pick a new, second-choice candidate. (You can ask me — and my fellow Ron Paul sympathizer John Derbyshire — what we ultimately decided to do when you see us at Lolita Bar the next night, Wednesday, Feb. 6, at 8pm.) Tomorrow, I’ll try to post an entry about the daunting task of hierarchizing my options for a “second choice,” which involves almost as many mixed feelings as have been expressed in this entry.

•With a heavy heart, I reflect upon the fact that I know at least three people who have in the past almost always refrained from voting, on principle (unable to endorse any candidate), but were planning to vote for once this year, thanks to Ron Paul. One of them is still urging people to vote for him, bless her (and she does come from the Berkeley-style California-anarchist wing of the movement, which has often sympathized with conspiracy theories and the like on principle, as a sort of subversive tool, one that I hope will never be deployed again). Another, I suspect, will now stick to his usual practice of sitting out the whole electoral process. I’m too depressed to ask the third one his plans, but maybe he’ll show up on Feb. 6 as well and can be grilled then.

•On top of it all, now Radar and others are amateur-diagnosing Paul as an Asperger’s sufferer (Asperger’s being a sort of mild autism that produces social ineptitude, a blank expression, and weird obsessions — though that just sounds like “being a nerd” to me, which some readers may take as confirmation that I, too, have Asperger’s). I think it’s creepy and Soviet-like to label people crazy without really good reasons — Radar seems to suggest that favoring the gold standard is sufficient to make one certifiable. It’s half-tempting, though, to say that if we can simply blame the racism on the Asperger’s, the two problems sort of cancel out and we still have ourselves a viable candidate (ha ha! sob!).

•Just this week, I had the confusing experience of talking to a Ron Paul delegate from New York who sees himself as basically a subversive liberal infiltrating the Republican convention and undermining it, not by supporting a candidate he truly likes but by supporting the candidate he thinks is craziest (due to beliefs like the gold standard, not the more recent racist revelations), the candidate who would be most embarrassing to the GOP. The delegate at first assumed, when I said I was no longer gung-ho about Paul, that I was also liberal (as many liberal New Yorkers are prone to do upon meeting anyone without horns and a pitchfork). Thus, it took several back-and-forth comments for each of us to figure out what the other actually believed (“supporting…but not really…would still love to see…sort of sad…” etc.). The guy is expecting to get some juicy interviews once he’s “on the inside,” apparently not understanding that convention-attending Republicans — Paul-supporters and otherwise — are more than happy to talk your ear off about what they believe without any need for subterfuge.

(Psst, c’mere man, let me tell you what I really think: we ought to get rid of the whole government, privatize every useful function and abolish the non-useful ones, make everything nice n’ voluntary n’ efficient, about 300 million times more responsive to people’s individual needs than any majority vote could ever be — yeah, you know what I’m sayin’. Now do the secret handshake. Don’t tell anybody I used to read comic books.)

•Finally, an anecdote from what will probably be remembered as Paul’s last good weekend: At that Paul fundraising party I went to last month, there was a young man who was both a libertarian and an employee of, yes, the infamous and conspiracy-theory-inspiring Council on Foreign Relations. If you’re sane, you don’t see that as a huge paradox, and if you do see that as a huge paradox, you’re probably one of the people who’s still gung-ho for Paul (and I am not entirely without sympathy for you, as I hope this entry suggests).

The CFR guy was a big Ron Paul fan, but he was also annoyed with the candidate, since he’d wrangled an invitation to Paul on behalf of CFR to speak to that body — and he hadn’t gotten any response from Paul. “We’re the most important foreign policy organization in the country, and he won’t return my messages — I don’t get it,” he said, or words to that effect.

That should be proof, if you needed any, that not all Ron Paul supporters were believers in (or hip to) the conspiracy theories. (I wonder if McCain ever gets invited to address the Michigan Militia?)

P.S. It’s also ironic that Paul, in reassuring people after the newsletters became public, said “a libertarian can’t be racist,” by which I’m sure he meant that libertarians are adherents of methodological individualism and thus do not judge people solely as members of a collective or group — but that doesn’t strictly speaking prevent them from being racists. Ironically, this is a mirror-image of the far-leftist argument that “black people can’t be racist” since they aren’t part of the dominant, oppressing collective — and that claim is also false.

P.P.S. While looking for the skull/death image above, I stumbled across this cool motorcycle. If the militia-man thing didn’t work out so well, maybe it’s time for outreach to freedom-loving biker gangs — now this plan can’t fail…

P.P.P.S. If you think the Ron Paul campaign is the silliest thing I’ve ever supported for the larger purpose of promoting libertarianism, you obviously need to come back here on Friday and read my next Retro-Journal entry — about the 1994 Howard Stern for Governor campaign.

Retro-Journal: Man of Letters, Late 1993

The Clintons weren’t all bad, of course. True, they have been a fount of ideas for new government programs — and Hillary, more disturbingly, an advocate of one particularly large program — but Bill, at least, and even his leftist Labor Secretary, Robert Reich, intended in part to use government to make America more ready for competition in a global, mostly-capitalist marketplace — thus all their emphasis on worker retraining and the like (and thus, perhaps, an explanation of how a future libertarian convert like one of last month’s Lolita Bar debaters, Sarah Federman, could fit in as a White House intern in the mid-90s and not feel guilty about it years later).

So, to the delight of the relatively moderate Democratic Leadership Council, 1993 saw Bill — and even Al Gore — arguing for free trade agreements like NAFTA (even while Hillary was trying to Canadianize the healthcare system), Ross Perot all the while lamenting the “sucking sound” of jobs ostensibly fleeing to Mexico.

I didn’t feel as if the culture was in a hopelessly anti-capitalist spot (even lefty Star Trek: The Next Generation had started depicting the evils of collectivism, thanks to the advent of the Borg). I took some pleasure in symbolic efforts like Gore’s “reinventing government” push for greater efficiency. ReGo was full of empty gestures, though, like Gore criticizing complex government regulations regarding ash tray use — even though all federal buildings had long since banned smoking, meaning Gore, cynically, was criticizing one of the few sets of regs that no longer applied anyway, as my friend Chuck Blake noted at the time. No smoking in the Vice President’s office, perhaps, but certainly smoke and mirrors.

•••

I made my own pitch for NAFTA to a group of leftists that met once a month at the Lower East Side performance space called ABC No Rio, whose regular discussions I had joined (I no longer remember how). I wore a cowboy hat as a symbol of partnership across the Rio Grande and brought along some libertarian supporters mostly drawn from Chris Whitten’s Classical Liberal Organization, but I don’t think the leftists found my pro-trade arguments any more convincing than they’d found my argument at a previous meeting that fascism is mainly an anti-individualist, anti-capitalist, collectivist movement related to socialism.

If the participants are still interested in that topic fifteen years later, they, more than anyone, really need to read that new Jonah Goldberg book — especially the oddly burly and mustachioed Midwestern-type guy who liked to talk about how he used to fear a coming race war but had decided to start encouraging a class war instead. (Then again, some of those old Ron Paul newsletters might be a good conversion tool for that guy. Sigh.) When I asked the burly guy whether he really thought talk of a class war was a wise way to peacefully resolve society’s problems, he replied, sounding far more like a cowboy than I ever have, “Oh, it ain’t gonna be peaceful.”

The cowboy hat I wore to the NAFTA meeting would also get worn to the Kaplan company picnic, where, as if in a parody of misguided corporate efforts to “have fun,” we were harried all day long by bullhorn-wielding goons from a company called UniRec who demanded we participate in recreational activities such as the tug of war. The bottle of wine I brought along was confiscated. Out of such incidents are anti-corporate left-anarchists created, I suspect.

One of the smarter members of the ABC No Rio group was in fact the left-anarchist guy with whom, for the only time in my life, I went out “wheatpasting,” that is, putting posters about the NAFTA talk all over the Village and Lower East Side. Not wanting to shirk my discussion-group duties but not wanting to damage any private property, I talked the left-anarchist into only wheatpasting on public property such as mailboxes. While we worked, he told me stories about the real difficulty of organizing his fellow anarchists for marches and such (just like the dumb jokes always say) and said he sometimes longed for a Stalinist to come along and start giving orders, just so something would get done.

The ABC No Rio group was headed by a charismatic young woman who was so committed to egalitarianism that her rock band would occasionally invite random members of the audience onstage to take over playing one of the instruments. “Yeah, I’m glad they don’t use that system for flying passenger planes,” said my friend Dave Whitney, who attended one of the leftist discussions with me. That meeting was headed by two anarchists who had recently returned from Mexico, bringing tales about many Mexican anarchists who were also skinheads — believing not in white supremacy but in the common ancestry of all Mexicans (despite their seeming diversity) in an ancient race descended from Aztec-style sky gods. Upon hearing this, Dave quietly leaned over toward the notebook I was using — I wrote about the group for Reason — and he scribbled the summary: “SPACE NAZIS.”

The egalitarian leader-lady had a boyfriend from Colombia who seemed nice enough but was a living reminder that many countries that are not the U.S. are scary and violent. He once said that leftist militias in Colombia occasionally do “good things” like threaten to kill American missionaries unless they depart Colombia and stop committing “cultural imperialism.” In a bid to rescue leader-lady from it all, I tried inviting her to the short-lived poker circle that I hosted at my second Manhattan apartment (the circle didn’t last long enough for me to actually learn how to play poker; it contained Brown alums Ali Kokmen and Polly Kanevsky and one or two other people — while my apartment contained perky roommate Dana Bopp, later replaced by her event-planner boyfriend Bill Morrison, who would somehow talk me into moving out of the apartment four years later, even though I lived there before he did).

When I suggested to leader-lady that she join us for poker “sometime when you’re tired of politics,” she got on her bike, said “I never get tired of politics,” and rode away down Rivington Street, never to be seen by me again.

•••

Speaking of political leaders, much as I revere Virginia Postrel as a mentor, inspiration, and even friend, she decided after my piece on the ABC No Rio group to retire my bimonthly-or-so humor column “A Crazy Man’s Utopia” in Reason. I’ve written for the magazine only once every two years or so since, having become busier with age. No complaints, though — with that gig over and other libertarian writing assignments several months away, I had some spare time on my hands — spare time with which to write letters!

Yes, back then — for just a short while longer — instead of “e-mailing” friends, you’d actually snail-mail them something fairly lengthy, sticking postage on it, even if the friends were living in exotic places like China and Australia for a year, as libertarian Brown-alum pals X (let us call him) and Jacob Levy were, respectively. Jacob wrote back an almost movie-poster-like summary of conditions in the Outback: “Comic books are scarce. Books are expensive. Meat is cheap.”

X described the beautiful European women, including a model from Spain, who were in the Chinese language program he was in in Beijing, so I used his life as the basis of two (presumably unpublished) letters to Penthouse (which I do not buy — I just sent them the letters because of their well-known and oft-parodied practice of running ribald letters), which he was not at all happy to hear about, though I didn’t use his full name and meant it as an homage, of course. Lesson: do not base letters to Penthouse on your friends’ lives, even as an homage.

My letter-writing was sometimes useful to X, though. I see that I was keeping him informed of celebrity deaths here in the U.S. while he was in China, with that year bringing the deaths, among others, of the following (taken verbatim from one letter):

•Hervé “The plane! The plane!” Villechaize (suicide)
•Raymond Burr (some ailment that big fat guys get)
•Vincent Price (chronic spookiness)
•Federico Fellini (after a stroke)
•River Phoenix (combination of many drugs)
•Bill Bixby (cancer, presumably caused by exposure to gamma rays)

In other celebrity news that year, I narrowly missed seeing Axl Rose walk by that pizza place near Tompkins Square Park because when my friend Soraya Shalforoosh said “Axl Rose!” I assumed she meant a homeless guy standing in the pizza place who looked like Axl Rose, but when I tried to discreetly gesture toward the homeless man, he muttered, “I ain’t fuckin’ Axl,” which ironically sort of sounds like something Axl would say. And with The Spaghetti Incident out that year, destined to be the last Guns N’ Roses album Axl was ever able to complete (as of this writing), Axl would soon be seen as little saner than the homeless guy. A shrieking, laughing, insane black dwarf was thrown out of the pizza place that night, too, dragged by her (?) jacket hood at the hands of one of the restaurateurs. That’s how the Tompkins Square Park area was in those days. (Giuliani was elected around then, not coincidentally.) Did I mention that Fellini had just passed away?

•••

My own life became fodder for snail-mailed personal newsletters around that time, first known as The Seavey Post-Intelligencer (sort of post-collegiate, sort of Seattle newspaper, sort of Sub-Genius, sort of stupid) and later as The Flying Pig Dispatch, since I found a nice rubber stamp of a flying pig. But e-mail — and now this blog — have rendered all that unnecessary. Closest I ever got to a ’zine, I suppose. No regrets.

Oh, and I almost forgot that I basically wrote a whole book manuscript starting around that time. That book was not the still-in-progress Conservatism for Punks (though I continued to note instances of politicians’ pop ineptitude, such as Sen. Fritz Hollings condemning the then-new cartoon characters “Beaver” and “Buff-Coat”). It was instead a straightforward anarcho-capitalist argument for abolishing government. When I was getting close to putting the final touches on the manuscript two years later, though, I’d instead end up cannibalizing some of it for my weekly New York Press column, then working for six years for Stossel at ABC News (which frowned on outside writing of an openly polemical nature), and the next thing you know it’s the twenty-first century and you have grey chest hair like the human equivalent of a gorilla that’s become a silverback, and young people ask you what life was like during the Cold War.

But in next week’s Retro-Journal entry, it’s only 1994, and our magical twenty-year journey is but one-third over.

Rambo vs. Rimbaud

VS.

Can you guess which important cultural icon — film character John Rambo (due back in theatres this month in his fourth film) or nineteenth-century French poet Arthur Rimbaud — each of the following ten phrases describes?

•Joined the army

•Sent to Southeast Asia, grew disillusioned

•Dealt in rifles and other weapons

•Had longtime homosexual affair with Symbolist poet Paul Verlaine

•Injured by gunshot from man he had trusted

•Attacked by communist soldiers

•Shocked local bourgeoisie with his shabby dress and long hair

•Suffered emotional instability

•Spent time as an impoverished drifter

•Achieved happiness for a while through immersion in non-Western culture

All right, it’s sort of a trick question — all these descriptions apply to both men (except for the affair with Paul Verlaine). But speaking of poetry, I have long been bothered by the names given to the Rambo movies, and the impending fourth installment only makes matters worse. See if you can detect a problem or two with the naming system of these films:

First Blood

Rambo: First Blood Part II

Rambo III

Rambo

So by my count, there have been two films called Rambo and a film called Rambo III despite there never having technically been a Rambo II — and the whole series being sequels to a film called First Blood. That bothers me (as does William Powell becoming the presumed Thin Man after the first of those, in which the title clearly referred to another character).

I was even more bothered by the idiot couple who sat in front of me when I saw the third Rambo film (which was a big mistake, I know — I haven’t liked any of them except possibly the first), the woman seemingly genuinely worried that Rambo would be killed by the Soviet helicopter gunship near the end, despite the fact that we’d already seen him slaughter untold legions of communist soldiers without much trouble — and her husband or boyfriend attempting to reassure her with the rude and overbroad comment, “The star never dies, asshole!” Something sort of pulpy and Sunset Boulevard about that comment.

At least they talked less than the elderly women who sat in front of me during the 1988 film The Bear (from the same country as Monsieur Rimbaud). Those two had to confer incessantly in order to follow the plot, which was about a little bear who lives in the woods (and does not talk) and just encounters some hunters and other animals and typical bear-situations. (“Did the little bear do that?” “No, no, I think the big bear did that!”) The only time the old ladies got quiet was during the one scene that I think actually called for some analysis (but was presumably beyond their skills) — when the bear ate psychedelic mushrooms in the woods and had a weird trip involving visions of giant butterflies. That shut ’em up.

The best shot in the whole film, by the way, which should be discussed in filmmaking classes, was a shot from an impossible point of view situated at the base of a small collection of upright bullets sitting on a rock near one of the hunters, pointing up at a star-filled night sky, making them all look unmistakably like nuclear missiles. Kudos to director Jean-Jacques Annaud on that one.

And now, one verse of Rimbaud, dedicated — just to make it all the more French — to a beautiful, special lady currently looking forward to a new gig and a trip to Paris:

The Sun, the hearth of affection and life,
Pours burning love on the delighted earth,
And when you lie down in the valley, you can smell
How the earth is nubile and very full-blooded;
How its huge breast, heaved up by a soul,
Is, like God, made of love, and, like woman, of flesh,
And that it contains, big with sap and with sunlight,
The vast pullulation of all embryos!

You know, that last line reminds me a little of the Goat with a Thousand Young from H.P. Lovecraft, but more on him next month. (The whole thing also reminds me a bit of perhaps my favorite 80s song, Peter Murphy’s “Cuts You Up,” which I really have to do in karaoke one day.)

On a less romantic note, this is the first entry on ToddSeavey.com written on commission, so by all means let me know what other topics I should address, as long as you pay first. Some, they will call me a whore, but all the world she is a whore, yes? I tell you this, though — never the principles do I compromise. Always, to the God, to the government, I say no. To the science, to the capitalism, to the little Tin-Tin picture books, I say oui.

That's Entertainment!

Turning our horrified gaze away from the political primaries, we find an impressive media year ahead — starting with the monster movie Cloverfield, from Lost/Alias co-creator J.J. Abrams, rumored to have been influenced by H.P. Lovecraft, who I mentioned at the end of yesterday’s entry. But besides that:

•DarkHorizons.com reports that this summer’s Iron Man and Hulk films will include a crossover scene in each, underscoring the fact that the films take place in the same fictional universe and implicitly setting the stage for an Avengers movie (starring a roster of Marvel heroes) down the line. Best of all, not only will Robert Downey Jr. cross over into Hulk as Tony Stark, the crossover scene in Iron Man will reportedly involve an appearance by Col. Nick Fury, played by none other than Samuel L. Jackson (after whom the Ultimate Marvel version of the character was modeled). Jackson will be the first person to tackle the role since the surprisingly entertaining David Hasselhoff TV-movie featuring the character (and the giant, rotating, holographic head of Madame Viper, not to mention Life Model Decoys, the Helicarrier, and Hydra Island).

•I also learned from DarkHorizons yesterday that Dune is being remade by the acclaimed director of The Kingdom (which makes sense if you think about it for a second — from House of Saud to House Atreides)…so some people may soon want to see Dune for a sixth time (I’m counting the Sci-Fi Channel miniseries version and all four cuts of the Lynch/Smithee 80s movie, each cut longer and worse than the one before it, like some repeating nightmare out of Inland Empire, itself worse than any of the Dune cuts). As for me: when I try to watch Dune, all I see is an Atreides that I want to kill (my friend Christine Ames liked Dune, but she is the only person I know who was handed a glossary by the movie theatre staff on her way in, which would have helped immensely).

•Slash is at #17 on the New York Times best-seller list this week with his self-titled autobiography, sandwiched between books on the American Revolution (#16) and Nikki Six of Motley Crue (#18). I genuinely love our culture (and the Whitneys for providing the photo of Slash and Bill Gates above — thanks).

•In the final hours Tuesday before the Ron Paul campaign ceased to be a source of pleasure, it offered me one last moment of joy when Jason Zengerle, on The New Republic’s blog, noted a Ron Paul fan dressed as Chewbacca waving a Paul sign on an overpass in New Hampshire, and a TNR reader rightly responded by asking, how do you know it wasn’t the real Chewbacca? Chewie, too, hates empire. (The real Chewie died in the Star Wars spin-off novels not long ago, but the actor who portrayed him, Peter Mayhew, lives on and once gave my acquaintance Jared, a DC Comics staffer, a thumbs-up sign from across a bar room, while eating a large cookie, when he saw that Jared was kissing a girl — if Jared dies tomorrow, I will not look upon his short life with pity.)

•I saw Sweeney Todd (bloody but good), and at its end, I got a glimpse behind the curtain of Hollywood magic — and you can, too. At least, on the print I saw (and perhaps all the others), at the very end when the R for Restricted notice appeared again for a split second, I noticed that at the bottom where it would normally say something like “Mature themes and brief nudity” it instead said “Reason box.” Oops. Who edited this thing — Edward Scissorhands? Ha! Edward Scissorhands! ’Cause, see, he’s like almost the same character!

•As if it weren’t enough that Michael Malice was the speaker at Lolita Bar and the co-author of my Book Selection this month, the versatile man has just launched the website WorstEmailEver — a hilarious forum for formerly-personal e-mails that are in the running for precisely that title.

Race, Ron Paul, the Primaries, and More -- Now and...at Lolita 2/6 with John Derbyshire!

Well, so much for that Ron Paul thing — he was fine on Leno last night, with or without media training from me, but he didn’t pull off any miracles in today’s New Hampshire primary and now has other PR problems, which I will attempt to explain below. As promised, I’ll turn my attention to other candidates after tonight, since he appears to be coming in fifth in the state that was perhaps most likely to love him.

It seems increasingly likely Republicans will consolidate around McCain as the one guy who can unite conservative factions and win over enough moderates to triumph in the general election — hopefully yielding budget cuts next year, the one thing I keep desperately longing for out of the whole sick political process — remember the idea of budget cuts?

Regardless of where things go from here, though, the nominee of each party will almost certainly be known by Feb. 6, the day after the so-called Super Duper Tuesday primaries, when about half the states vote — and on that day-after, we’ll gather at Lolita Bar at 8pm to hear some reactions to it all (Obama, Paul, Giuliani, race politics, math, or whatever else he feels like talking about) from National Review’s John Derbyshire, himself a Ron Paul booster heretofore.

Tempting as it is to bid farewell to my own Paul obsession on an optimistic, high note (crusade for liberty continues and all that, which is true), I ought to say something about the not-coincidental primary-day onslaught of articles about his past flirtations with conspiracies, racism, and militia-think, with two articles on the topic (from New Republic and Pajamas Media) linked for an oddly brief period on Drudge this afternoon (mercy on the part of libertarian-leaning Drudge?).

The Anti-Paul Articles

I can’t fault journalists for turning a harsh spotlight on Paul or any other political candidate, but I will say that Koffler, the Pajamas writer (and former Reason intern, apparently), must either have been a poor philosophy student or not much of a libertarian, despite his claims to the contrary. I know of no other libertarian who would consider it shocking that Paul admires gun ownership or that Paul denounces p.c. jury-tampering and UN eco-summits, for instance. Yet Koffler includes such items in his litany of ostensibly scary quotes from Paul’s old newsletters (which were apparently ghost-written and which he has since partially disavowed). Koffler seems thereby to suggest that these are alarming positions — or worse, he simply expects that his liberal-leaning audience will see them as shocking positions and doesn’t care whether they’re reasonable ones or not.

A handful of the quotes are genuinely shocking and inappropriate, but most are simply tactless statements of unpopular facts — such as the black crime rate being (for whatever tragic historical reasons) about seven times the white crime rate — a pattern that has held for at least twenty years, since it was about that long ago that I stumbled upon this unpleasant fact myself, not while reading some deranged Klan pamphlet but while reading through lots of Department of Justice stats based on crime victims’ own reports. I was at Brown at the time, so I had never once before — not once — heard that there really was a substantial difference in rates of criminality between ethnic groups and, arch-rationalist and arch-individualist that I was, took a thoroughly liberal pride in thinking that anyone who thought there were differential ethnic crime rates was probably an ignorant bigot.

Now, whether those differential rates are attributable to anything more than a lot of fleeting historical and social factors (for which whites are perhaps primarily to blame) or whether they are even fit topics for conversation is a complex subject on which reasonable people can disagree — but simply noting them cannot be considered damning evidence of evil intent. One could be the most warm-hearted of social-working reformers and prison-abolitionists — even a Marxist who viewed all crime through a lens of materialist determinism and class conflict — and still start from recognition of those differential rates. Claiming they aren’t there doesn’t make you a good liberal or libertarian individualist, it makes you wrong — as far as we can tell from the stats.

That doesn’t excuse turning social problems into apocalyptic or race-baiting rhetoric, of course, but like a lot of libertarians familiar with the weirder corners of the movement, I think I can understand how something resembling that happened.

How Did Paul Get Like That (Even If It Was Decades Ago)?

I notice Nick Gillespie, the outgoing (and outgoing) editor of Reason, basically called the Paul comments “jaw-dropping” and horrific on Reason’s blog. I’m sure he’s sincere (and that the militia-like views in Paul’s old newsletters are a far cry from the admirably hip, tolerant, and cosmopolitan version of libertarianism Nick did so much to forge during his stint as Reason editor). However, the newsletter quotes can’t be too much more shocking to Nick than they were to me — I’ve seen enough of the Mises Institute faction of libertarianism to know they sometimes sound like that (or used to, or do when taken out of context). Perhaps Nick, understandably, is a bit uncomfortable about how the public will now react to the February issue of Reason, already on stands, which has a fairly laudatory Brian Doherty cover article about Paul (and is scheduled to be followed with a March cover story by me about nanotech if all goes according to plan, by the way).

What a lot of the overheated Paul rhetoric of decades past comes down to, I think, is mainly the fact that he (like the establishment-hating Mises Institute crowd) never really expected to be in a position to have any of these hyperbolic rants affect policy or mainstream discourse in the slightest — any more than Ron Paul expected the countless bills he has introduced over the years calling for the abolition of the Federal Reserve and similar radical changes to get brought to the floor, let alone pass the House.

So, a lot of the nasty-sounding rhetoric, written in the militia-compound-like isolation of legislative irrelevance, was really meant to create colorful depictions of the sort of worst-case-scenario situations in which philosophy — not polite political debate — often deals:

•What if a mob came at your house threatening injury — not death — but you had a deadly Gatling gun as your sole means of fending them off?

•What if civilization fell apart and you had to declare your neighborhood a sovereign nation?

•What if some UN cabal said you had to wear a tracking device at all times but would otherwise leave you unmolested?

•Does a Korean protection racket cease to be a racket if they actually turn out with guns to defend your grocery store when the riots come?

Back when there was (more clearly) no hope of libertarian politicians getting anywhere in mainstream politics, libertarians — including, apparently, some on Paul’s congressional staff — spent a lot of time idly tossing around such questions, not so unlike the writers of the anarchist books that used to be sold by the (defunct) fringe publishing company Loompanics — post-apocalyptic how-to titles such as Where There Is No Dentist and Home and Recreational Use of High Explosives (both real). That doesn’t excuse the inexcusable bits, but it’s the broader, more harmless context in which a lot of those doomsday-is-at-hand Paul newsletters have to be taken (they were also from the 80s and early 90s — militias seem a lot less cute after Oklahoma City, and violent solutions to domestic problems in general are pretty taboo post-9/11, even among the kind of people who used to join militias — most of whom, of course, never shot anyone, it must be noted).

Similarly, I’ve got leftist friends who enjoy talking about idly-speculative questions like whether a perfectly egalitarian society would be devoid of gendered clothing, but even I would not suggest those people are an imminent threat to my (extremely manly) wardrobe.

What Is to Be Done?

So, yes, I knew — though not in as much gory detail as I do now — that Paul had ties to that milieu. I had hoped, nonetheless, that we’d at least make it to the New Hampshire primary without this side of Paul becoming a significant element of the conversation about him, so that when, (almost) inevitably, he exited the stage without becoming president, he could be remembered for the substantial good things about his campaign, as I hope will still be the case. He has obviously inspired far more lovers of liberty and limited government than he has hatemongers, and I trust those lovers of liberty will have far more impact on politics in the future than the handful of malevolent crackpots will.

And then, one day (as I have hoped for nearly two decades), I expect a smarter, more moderate, more polished version of Paul (or rather, of Paul’s best qualities) will emerge — someone with Steve Forbes’ establishment cred and Reagan’s charm — who will build upon that impressive tenth or so of the GOP vote that Paul has shown is ready for a libertarian message.

If someone as tongue-tied as Bush could become president and someone with as many fringey inclinations as Paul could get this far, I think a rational, clever, articulate, mainstream-sounding person adhering to the best aspects of their (admittedly very different) worldviews could win a landslide of American support. America apparently has principled conservatives as well as open-minded libertarian-leaning voters aplenty, and now it’s a question of getting someone to run who’s fully worthy of their support and their intellectual respect — not that electoral politics is the only way to make a difference (nor militias the only alternative).

The Weirdest Part

Incidentally, the most entertaining — though not necessarily most politically relevant — paragraph of the New Republic article about Paul is probably this one:

What’s more, Paul’s connections to extremism go beyond the newsletters. He has given extensive interviews to the magazine of the John Birch Society, and has frequently been a guest of Alex Jones, a radio host and perhaps the most famous conspiracy theorist in America. Jones — whose recent documentary, Endgame: Blueprint for Global Enslavement, details the plans of George Pataki, David Rockefeller, and Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands, among others, to exterminate most of humanity and develop themselves into “superhuman” computer hybrids able to “travel throughout the cosmos” — estimates that Paul has appeared on his radio program about 40 times over the past twelve years.

If Jones is against us becoming superhuman computer hybrids who can travel the cosmos, I am indeed appalled.

In other strange, transformative news, my friend Ali Kokmen, himself somewhat libertarian-leaning (and not in a remotely militia-like way, for any of his co-workers or neighbors reading this) reports that while the rest of the nation is excited about Obama, McCain, Paul, and such, he had a dream about lackluster Democratic candidate Chris Dodd. I don’t know what to make of that any more than he does, though I think I recall hearing it said that people sometimes hear the voice of Dodd in the middle of the night.

Book Selection of Last Month, Book Selection of Next Month

And speaking of blasphemous jokes, Ali recently gave me a copy of the book Atheist Manifesto, which I’ll review next month along with the opposing book Irrational Atheist — and an overview of the godless and eugenics-influenced early-twentieth-century horror stories of H.P. Lovecraft while I’m at it. In short, February will belong to St. Valentine and Black History for most Americans, but it’ll be atheism and eugenics here at ToddSeavey.com — what else would you expect from one of those libertarian fringe types?

To understand just how popular eugenics and political extremism were back in Lovecraft’s day — and to start the long, slow process of setting America free from that authoritarian legacy, a process of which the Ron Paul campaign is but one small, faltering step — don’t forget to read Jonah Goldberg’s Liberal Fascism, reviewed by me a couple weeks ago and officially on sale today. (Then come see Jonah’s fellow NR editor Derb talk at Lolita on Feb. 6, and you can give us an earful about every heretical idea alluded to in this blog entry.)

Media Training for Paul and Thompson

After the pre-New Hampshire debates yesterday, I wasn’t left thinking Hillary Clinton looked bad — her fleeting minute of controlled anger was far less creepy than the perpetual smoldering hostility McCain exudes (as in his remark about flip-flopping Romney being “the candidate of change,” which was delivered in such a menacing tone that I didn’t get the relatively benign joke at the time — it sounded more like McCain was threatening to neuter Romney or something). Nonetheless, since, last I knew, Obama was on top in New Hampshire Dem polls and McCain on top in New Hampshire GOP polls, I may well end up rooting for McCain in the general election come November.

And he might be the only Republican — Ron Paul excepted — with enough crossover/moderate appeal to combat Obama’s own broad appeal in the general election. At the same time, for all his apostasy, McCain can convcingly appeal to the pro-life, hawk, and budget-cutting GOP factions in a way no other lone GOP candidate does (about a year ago during a discussion at a New York Young Republicans Club meeting, I picked him as the best bet to unite Republicans but had since grown to hope that Paul, Thompson, or Giuliani could get the job done, too).

If it ends up being McCain vs. Clinton — the two of them having been friendly in the past — they can commiserate about having run against primary rivals who blathered about change last night. If it ends up being McCain vs. Obama, it will be interesting to see if McCain’s personal animosity toward Obama, caused by the latter’s failure to follow through on some of their joint legislative plans, manifests itself in a counterproductive, hostile-seeming way.

In the meantime…

If all those libertarians who were supposed to move to New Hampshire under the so-called “Free State Project” a few years ago have arrived there in sufficient numbers to make Ron Paul the GOP victor there, I’ll be thrilled.

If he should fare poorly there, though, I blame myself. Or rather, I can’t help thinking that I could have given Paul some media training, or that someone should have. He says all the right things — libertarian things — but he has a tendency to say technical things that only economists, libertarians, and Paul supporters understand and to say them with as much gusto as if he just said something that the other 90% of the crowd could follow. Where a more mundane politician might say simple, concrete things like “I want a safe democracy and a prosperous economy so that families can work and thrive,” Paul says things like “You see how the prices go up if we monetize debt and that causes instability!” What? Huh? (I’m paraphrasing, just barely.) Principled, passionate, yet not exactly pithy sometimes — and I just hope New Hampshire will forgive him for it and help save the republic.

I’ve seen video about traders on the floor of the stock exchange cheering for Paul when he criticizes government spending and Ben Bernanke, but different audiences demand different rhetoric.

Then there’s Thompson (who, for anyone understandably confused about who my “second choice” is, would have been #2 for me after Paul — based purely on his positions — had he not dithered about entering the race and then proven hopelessly boring and uninspiring when he did enter, elevating Giuliani to the #2 slot philosophically but perhaps Romney or McCain to the #2 slot for purely strategic reasons if Giuliani proves unable to bring the GOP coalition together). Someone tell Fred that one of the most important principles of public speaking (a principle I made up just now, but it’s crucial nonetheless) is that you have to make the causal connections between the things you mention as clear as if you’re talking about a cat who stole a biscuit and dropped it in a lake, dammit. You can’t say things like (I’m paraphrasing again, just barely), “Immigration is seen through an issue of security with regard to the American people having considered the way we ID the whole problem with the” blah blah blah.

If George W. Bush is enough to make one miss the rhetorical skill of George H.W. Bush, Thompson is enough to make one pine for the electrifying speeches of Bob Dole. It’s all very frustrating.

Then again: the Founders actually believed that great oratorical skill was a bad thing in a president, since it made him more likely to become a demagogue (that thought consoled me when W. became president and decided to avoid press conferences). We aren’t electing Henry V, we’re electing someone to run what should be a humble, unobtrusive government with few duties, and a soft-spoken gynecologist and amateur economist like Ron Paul is still the right man for the job. We’ll see how he fares Tuesday (and for the record, I never thought that Dean scream was so odd, either).

UPDATE: Ron Paul has reportedly been dropped from Fox News’s scheduled Sunday-night debate, though the more-boring Thompson remains. Don’t take that lying down, NH voters!

UPDATE 2: Ah, but in addition to appearing on CSPAN instead last night, Paul is on Leno again tonight (Mon.) — good news with or without the Sex Pistols!

UPDATE 3: Dorothy Rabinowitz, by contrast, today calls Paul supporters the kind of people who think the CIA has put radio receivers in their teeth — but I will respond kindly by saying that Dorothy Rabinowitz is no free-market ideologue and neither, I guess, are the establishment-protectors at Wall Street Journal. That must make them feel very, very responsible, since pro-government politicians never do harm. It would be interesting if we did have a market-oriented major newspaper, though.

Give Me Liberty or Give Me the Mildest Possible Statism

A few observations as we’re poised between the Iowa caucus and the New Hampshire primary:

•This past Wednesday’s Lolita Bar talk by Michael Malice saw two amazing coincidences: (1) Mitch Verter, one of the Brown-alum Leo Buscaglia fans I blogged about one month ago — who has since talked to me about his hopes of getting Institute for Humane Studies backing for his research on anarchism at the New School — walked into the bar right after Malice’s talk despite not having realized we’d be there and despite the fact that he lives in Canada and I haven’t seen him in seventeen years, and (2) he was carrying a copy of one of the books that had the biggest influence on Malice, Max Stirner’s anarchist classic The Ego and Its Own. Small world. You can understand why I believed in synchronicity for a little while as a child before becoming a skeptic.

•On a somewhat related note (for those who can see the connections), one of my ACSH co-workers yesterday noted this amazing, simple, straightforward, five-minute video about why, no, you really do not want to live (or rather, die) under a Canadian-style, single-payer, government-run healthcare system (and thus cannot vote for Hillary Clinton, not that ACSH has a position on that — nor on William Kristol becoming a columnist for the Times, though another co-worker pointed out this great Slate piece about how much some people are freaking out about Kristol being hired).

•My conflicted Republican friend in Iowa, when asked directly on Thursday night who she voted (caucused? whatever) for, simply e-mailed me back saying that she was too busy drinking to answer, though her local caucus went for McCain as its first choice, and she assures me she didn’t vote for Huckabee.

•You know, suddenly Romney, McCain, Giuliani, Thompson, and Paul all seem like great candidates, compared to the GOP winner in Iowa — and it would be a tragedy if Republican support for these five men remained sufficiently divided that the Huckster was able to win a plurality (I think it’s a fair nickname for him — one conservative writer labeled Bush an “imposter,” so there’s a precedent for slapping negative labels on phony conservatives, though in the Huckster’s case there isn’t even any pretense he’ll promote free markets, unless you count his unconvincing tax reform plan).

•It’s a prisoner’s dilemma sort of thing: we anti-Huckabites could each abandon our favorite candidate (Paul in my case) to shore up one of the others — but, dammit, why can’t the other camps budge first? I will nobly do my part, though. Mark my words: If Ron Paul doesn’t pull off something amazing in New Hampshire, which is fertile libertarian-friendly territory that certainly ought to vote for him, I will lay off the Paul talk afterwards in favor of urging people to consolidate around some other GOP candidate who can stop the Huckster (as if anyone’s listening to me — but think of it as a Kantian thing, acting as if my example might in principle be universalized). Paul has earned my patience through New Hampshire, at least, though. May he flourish in today’s early-evening debate and then in the Tuesday New Hampshire vote, changing history and making my second-choice calculations unnecessary.

•The Democrats, by contrast, picked the best of the three most prominent candidates in Iowa (though their fourth, Richardson, is arguably the most libertarian of the Dems, which isn’t saying much). Edwards is (not so unlike the Huckster) an economically-ignorant populist, and Clinton is part of an unprincipled and power-hungry machine undeserving of another four (or eight) years in the White House. Obama is just a Democrat, as far as I can tell, which is bad but not the worst thing in the world — and he has almost verbatim promised to be a uniter, not a divider, which would probably turn out to be more accurate a statement coming from him than it was the last time a presidential candidate promised that.

Encouragingly, Obama also said, “we should be asking ourselves what mix of policies will lead to a dynamic free market and widespread economic security, entrepreneurial innovation, and upward mobility.” On the other hand, like virtually all Democrats, he opposes vouchers for school choice, as cruel and child-punishing an anti-market position as one could hold, dictated to the Dems by their ruthlessly self-serving union funders.

•Just as my Iowa Republican friend had noted people lining up in the streets with enthusiasm (even Republicans!) to caucus for Obama, writer John Blesso mass-e-mailed yesterday to say that he saw amazing activity among Obama volunteers in New Hampshire while he was there and only lackluster, minimally-staffed efforts by Clinton. If neither Clinton nor the divided Republicans get their acts together, I suspect this guy’s our next president. Then again, the Ron Paul campaigners in New Hampshire probably look pretty energized, too.

•In unrelated news, the week’s most shocking — and possibly dyslexic — political headline remains this one from the New York Post (unless they’ve fixed it by now): “Blind Eye to of Unholiest Horrors Muslims.” (Dawn Eden, who used to write headlines for the Post before she became a full-time chastity-promoter, may have depth perception problems, but she was never dyslexic — and here’s hoping she’s doing well in Washington, while I’m at it.)