Immigration Revolution, Immigration Blog

Revolutions don’t always start for the reasons you think they should have, and they don’t always work out the way you expect.  A libertarian acquaintance of mine, despite being sympathetic to freer immigration, notes that the conflict over immigration laws in Arizona could end up being the spark that leads to states making greater use of nullification, invoking the Tenth Amendment or de facto seceding from DC.

That thought has to leave someone who wants open borders — or no borders at all, to put it in more anarcho-capitalist, post-nationalist terms — with mixed feelings.  If the fifty states near-simultaneously abandoned DC, like outlying regions of China more or less ignoring Beijing, but did it so they could keep out Mexicans, it would be a strange case of the libertarian movement almost repeating the circa-1980 phase of conservatism, when it was sometimes ambiguous when the concept of “states’ rights” was being unfairly depicted by liberal foes as a veil for racism and when the concept really was just being invoked as a veil for racism.

Not that I’m equating resistance to illegal immigration and Jim Crow.  Rather, I’m saying that in each case, after Arizona, people with motives far removed from property rights can now cloak those motives in anti-centralization talk — even though greater decentralization as an outcome would still be a wonderful thing, much appreciated by many of us who really do have property rights as our main goal (when in doubt, go with diversity — I want the states to be free from DC, and free to experiment, for roughly the same reason I don’t at all mind having a mix of Mexicans, Swedes, Japanese, etc. in the country and don’t even expect them to feel bound by every technicality of our immigration laws any more than the average Tea Partier feels obliged to respect every detail of environmental regulation).

Maybe Spain winning the World Cup will decrease condescending attitudes toward our Spanish-speaking brethren in this hemisphere a bit.  That still leaves countless immigration issues — such as how to handle covertly anti-democratic Islamic radicals who are not actually committing any crime — to be addressed.  And it just so happens that Gerard Perry, who knows his stuff (even when I disagree with him), has started a blog to address those issues, called UnreceivedWidsom.

Having heard him debate immigration and Obamacare at Lolita Bar — and being indebted to him for guiding me to Brooklyn College for the under-attended second iteration of my Ayn Rand declamations this spring — I am confident he’ll have interesting things to say.

But tomorrow something even more revolutionary: Bastille Day!  Regardez-vous!

Choosing Sides in Spain

Congrats to Spain.  I’m reminded that a friend of mine was recently falsely labeled a fascist by a leftist, and his one concession to her charge was that he might have picked the opposite side from hers if forced to fight in the Spanish Civil War.

By contrast, he and I have a mutual acquaintance who is ostensibly an admirer of Burkean organic/traditionalist thinking but also likes street brawls, Nietzsche, the Catholic Church, brutalist architecture, folk music, urban planning, labor unions, working-class solidarity, Continental philosophy, anti-bourgeois and anti-individualist thinking, rigid class/gender roles, self-conscious elites, unapologetic regional loyalties, and Carl Schmitt’s insistence that politics requires conjuring and fighting an enemy.  So it is almost as if we know Mussolini, even while being horrified by such views, like all good-hearted people who have learned from the nightmares of history.

But speaking of learning from history: perhaps this week of Bastille Day is a good time to contemplate the causes and aims of…revolutions.

Paul the Psychic Octopus Fhtagn!

As the final World Cup match approaches, I can’t help thinking there is something familiar — and sinister — about the world delighting in combative arena-revels while thinking of a prophetic, tentacled beast with purported psychic powers.

And speaking of dread Cthulhu:

•This two-year-old story about a ban on photographs of H.P. Lovecraft’s grave was just brought to my attention.

•This news story about a woman living among her beloved dead sounds rather Lovecraftian.

•But Julian Sanchez, as one of my co-workers points out, has nicely summarized why we needn’t run around being either dogmatic or completely agnostic all the time.

So don’t waste too much time fearing that today’s game will end with the winning team swearing allegiance to Paul the psychic octopus and ushering in an era of global darkness and bloodshed that will leave us all speaking with sorrow of “the strange events of 7/11” (in a non-convenience-store sense). That probably won’t happen.

The World vs. Paul the Psychic German Octopus

The purportedly psychic (actually “prophetic” would seem to be the more apt adjective) octopus in Berlin who has been half-jokingly watched by the press, due to his thus-far-accurate “picks” for World Cup game victors, is a classic example of how people dupe themselves, with substantial help from irresponsible media.

It’s not that Paul picking winners is a complete fabrication, but the press conveniently drops the context that would deflate the whole phenomenon (and I realize more and more as I age that this is the case with almost everything in the press — few outright lies, but more confusion than information, due to all the essential nuances being pared away, sort of like doing a propaganda story headlined, with technical accuracy, “Norwegians Are Committing Crimes”).

As I type this, there are about twenty-four hours to go before Spain plays the Netherlands to determine the World Cup recipient, and, due to the strange communist/metric rules of soccer, there are about five minutes to go before Germany plays Uruguay to determine who’s in third place. Slightly less confusing, though, is the weeding-out process by which Paul became a prophet and an instant global celebrity.

What’s rarely mentioned in the latest round of “psychic octopus” reports is that he began as part of an entire Berlin zoo of animals engaged in (merely random) “prediction” activities (picking either of two markers, etc.) regarding the World Cup, including a hay-bale-picking hippo. All the other animals have proven to be “failures” at “predicting” the winners, but there was always a very good chance that one, simply by random chance, would keep picking winners. Presto, “psychic octopus,” aided by the quiet dropping of that hippo (if it’s possible to quietly drop a hippo) and all its compatriots from more recent stories.

Paul’s odds of picking the right team in tomorrow’s game remain fifty-fifty — slightly worse than yours, which are at least informed by information about the teams. But you’re not psychic either.

I am persuaded that all supernatural claims — all, I say — similarly unravel under careful examination, as do many stock-picking plans, most predictions of economic downturn, retroactive claims of successful government action, “prophecies” from the Book of Daniel (or Nostradamus or what have you), most news “trend” stories, and tales of “dreams that foretell the future.” We watch the hits and weed out/forget the misses, and then the gullible construct illusory causal narratives that emphasize the hits. Skepticism is not just a matter of saying “These things cannot be!” but of watching more carefully what is occurring (in the world and in our lazy brains) instead of willingly treating life like a stage magic show, in which the audience strives to be fooled.

I may need to get back to pointing out these basics more instead of focusing on later, derivative observations such as the failings of organized religion or government. Critical thinking is, as the skeptical movement increasingly stresses, the first step, regardless of what phenomena we end up accepting as proven or disproved. Keep your eye on the ball at all times or you’re liable to be fooled, especially by prestidigitators with eight arms.

P.S. Drudge nicely undermined the psychic octopus stories by simply juxtaposing them with a headline about a “psychic parakeet” who predicts a different game outcome. Helen suggests a plan that would eliminate the soccer player middlemen: Just have the octopus fight the parakeet tomorrow.

P.P.S. A friend of ours in turn suggests that if Helen’s answer to problems is usually combat, she should be accompanied at all times by the sound of the “fight music” from the legendary “Gamesters of Triskelion” episode of Star Trek. Sounds good to me.

Dobbs/Napolitano, Lady Gaga, and David Brooks

•Coincidentally, the very same week that Freedom Watch is set to run a confrontation between the host (my boss) Judge Andrew Napolitano and populist Lou Dobbs, The Daily Show also depicts differences between the two commentators (starting at 3 min. 28 sec. into that clip). You’ll just have to watch the new episode of Freedom Watch (at Saturday 10am Eastern or 8pm, Sunday 7pm or 11pm on Fox Business Network) to see how closely reality matches comedy. Don’t expect a tranquilizer dart on our show, though (just an array of exciting guests, including Sharron Angle).

•In a further weird coincidence, last weekend, I found a copy of former senator Fritz Hollings’ book Making Government Work at the Strand, and, lo and behold, it had not only been autographed by Hollings — but made out to his friend Lou Dobbs. Small world.

•In yet a third media coincidence, mere hours after I criticized the music of Lady Gaga (at last night’s Debate at Lolita Bar, about whether burlesque is art, to which the audience says the answer is yes), I found myself literally trapped in a crowd of gaga Gaga fans around Rockefeller Center, on my way to the nearby News Corp building for work this morning. Cruel irony (which should be her next album title).

•Back to politics: I’m tempted to go on about how convincing the profile of David Brooks in the new New York Magazine (brought to my attention by Gerard Perry) is, given that it emphasizes his almost pathological ideological squishiness, but I think Kyle Smith may have best summed up New York’s summary of the man who summarizes about one new centrist paradigm per week, sometimes two. Not all neocons are bad — and they are too varied to dismiss as Trotskyites or warmongers the way some paleo types do — but Brooks has several of the bad qualities people usually mean when they complain about neocons (I say this as a man who could by some metrics be called a neocon himself and still misses the Reagan coalition — global markets, selective use of the military, morals and Western Civilization good without the specifics disrupting yuppie lifestyles too badly, yadda yadda yadda).

The next-page teases on that New York Mag article are more vicious than the article itself, including this one: “Next: Why he’s been called a ‘spineless Beltway geek.’” (Sidenote: The issue’s cover story is about mounting evidence that having children makes people less happy, though it’s happy people who tend to have children. Which side are you on?)

My own summary of the Brooks mushiness as media phenomenon: DAVID BROOKS IS THE NEW DAVID BRODER.

Come See the Freaks

Yesterday’s entry may have been grimmer than befits the week of tonight’s fun-filled Debate at Lolita Bar about burlesque (8pm), so today a link to something much more entertaining and closely related to burlesque: an article about freak-filled, sideshow-loving Coney Island…

…specifically, a piece written in anticipation of this past Sunday’s annual hotdog-eating contest there.  The cast of strange characters involved makes it sound like the movie The Quick and the Dead (still Sam Raimi’s best, if you ask me), with colorful, cartoonish weirdoes assembling from far and wide for combat.

I honestly strive to be a straight-laced, moderate fellow but somehow seem to end up being a ringmaster as a hobby and knowing several people with ties to things like sideshows (and burlesque).

One of my favorite bartenders, at the fittingly named bar Shade (not far from the defunct Baggot Inn, where Dawn Eden and Caren Lissner plied their trivia years ago), with whom I’d never really expected a bond to form or common interests to emerge, turned out to be not just a multiply-pierced and tattooed gothy person who likes punk, which is already pretty cool, but also a friend of sideshow people and a fan of sci-fi, Nietzsche, and John Stuart Mill, with a background in biology — and old professional ties to the Kubrick-inspired Korova Milk Bar, where I attended a Space: 1999-themed party on Sept. 13, 1999, the day the Moon blew out of orbit (on a fictional TV show, or so the official story goes).

Ah, but who is to say which are the most valuable forms of weirdness?  Let the market sort it all out, like a giant, beautiful hotdog-eating contest.  Anything else is sheer arrogance.

Picture of an Imperfect World, Made Worse by You

With our debate about burlesque-as-art tomorrow night (Thur. 8pm at Lolita Bar, no longer Wednesdays) likely hinging partly on the photographs of debater Monty Leman, I was reminded of the most disturbing photo I’ve ever seen — twenty-five years ago. With a moment’s Google search, I found it again all these years later, for good or ill. It looks just the way I remember it — and anyone not affected by it is likely a sociopath. Most people feel, or ought to feel, a sense of angry rebellion over the fact that incident couldn’t somehow be prevented.

The faster wealth and technology increase, and thus the ease of taking safety precautions and making rescue efforts increases, the less often things like the incident in the photo have to happen. You may also, then, be a sociopath if you, or the philosophies you embrace, slow the growth of wealth and technology, even if you call yourself an idealist or some other noble-sounding label.

Every communitarian or socialist who says capitalism undermines social cohesion, every green who says let the people live in old-fashioned ways and submit to the beauty of nature, every religious person who says staving off death and injury is less important than what happens after death and that we should not care about material advancement, every antiglobalization activist who hinders free trade and the benefits that flow from it, every moderate who says half a market is enough — the incident in that photo is the sort of thing you invite, with greater frequency than necessary, countless unnoticed times a day.

I wondered when I was young if I’d devote any time to fighting you (instead of doing something more frivolous but remunerative), but by now I know I’ll spend my whole life fighting you and couldn’t live with myself any other way.

The Four Fandoms

Covering all four sturdy legs of the Todd Seavey philosophical table:

•Dave Whitney recommends punk-friendly MUSIC review site MarkPrindle.com.

•Jacob Levy recommends a site about COMIC BOOKS that depict punk.

•Helen Rittelmeyer notes that one of her friends, Leah Libresco, is blogging about being an ATHEIST dating a Catholic (the reverse of Helen’s own highly-enjoyable situation, of course).

•And I should urge every LIBERTARIAN to check out my boss’s site and the linked sites thereon (to keep you occupied between the weekend broadcasts on FBN).

But to stay broad-minded (when I’m not arguing with Eric Metaxas or a public relations man for Opus Dei, as I was at a party last week), I organize debates like the one this Thursday on burlesque.  I’m even moderating this one, so join me.

Alan Moore on Science and Sci-Fi

Ali Kokmen says:

Available online for a few more days, at least, is [anarchist comic book writer] Alan Moore’s appearance on the BBC Radio science/comedy show The Infinite Monkey Cage, talking science and science fiction.

Bleeding Cool writes up the thing briefly.

Devo: Freedom of Choice

Dave Whitney forwards this recent irono-patriotic, campaign ad-like message from Devo, just in time for the Fourth of July. The message reminds me of the old Devo compilation video that featured a military commander broadcasting desperately-needed Devo videos from a bunker in an effort to aid “a world gone soft”(showing the clear influence of cartoonist/director Paul Mavrides, who, in addition to working with Devo early on, co-founded the similarly ironic/proselytizing joke-religion the Church of the Sub-Genius).

The recent Devo message also explicitly invokes my favorite Devo song, “Freedom of Choice,” the first music video I ever saw (fittingly), back when it was shown on The Merv Griffin Show (on October 16, 1980, which may rank with important formative dates from my childhood right up there with May 25, 1977).

Happy Independence Day (and remember that you can still catch Freedom Watch tonight at 7 and 11 Eastern on Fox Business Network if you didn’t see it yesterday).

Tomorrow, a note about everyone’s (other) favorite anarchist comic book writer talking about science.

Hentoff or Krugman?

Since a couple of my acquaintances have criticized (Freedom Watch fan) Nat Hentoff (including in yesterday’s comments thread), the contrarian/balancing/moderating impulse tells me I should seize this opportunity to describe myself in terms that sound as left-wing as possible, both as an explanation of why Hentoff doesn’t automatically horrify me the way some leftists do, and as a brain-limbering experiment (a reminder, periodically necessary, of how rhetorically flexible some of the categories by which we define ourselves, and thus history’s ever-shifting political alliances, really are).

I’m pro-drug-legalization, atheist, skeptical, gay-tolerating, anarchist yet Constitution-respecting, mostly anti-death-penalty, pro-open-borders, wary of police and military, mostly anti-nationalist, racially tolerant, punk- and avant-garde-admiring, science-loving, abolitionist- and flapper- and beatnik-admiring (I think it’s swell that Hentoff loves jazz), strong-women-preferring, suspicious of fashion and some other major elements of mainstream consumer culture, a lifelong Northeasterner, almost Marxist in my wariness of the shaping of people’s beliefs by institutional incentives, and basically anti-sports.

(Perhaps more shockingly, I’m also dating a woman who likes teachers unions, some gun control, drag queens, Pat Moynihan, military non-intervention, modernist urban planning, the Black Panthers, and green anti-car urban planning — there being essentially no real female conservatives in New York City, apparently. [CORRECTION: Helen says she has become more sympathetic to military intervention and has just renewed her subscription to Commentary -- so here's hoping that in addition to enjoying our drag-like debate about burlesque this coming Thursday, she will enjoy our tentatively-planned August debate about "benign imperialism," a topic partly inspired by Conor Friedersdorf, though he's leaving the imperial city of DC.])

•••

Despite all the above, though, having respect for property rights will damn you in a modern liberal’s eyes every time. Unless amidst the current big-government-debt crisis even many liberals are beginning to learn…?

In any case, I tend to admire principled people, and you can see how people might be principled adherents of property rights, traditions, religious rules, the scientific method, the Constitution, and/or, yes, civil-libertarian procedural rules, all in ways that spoke well of them and helped keep chaos at bay — or, tragically, in ways that made them martinets (in the classic sense of rigidly adhering to rules, such as table etiquette, while forgetting their underlying purpose of improving human life).

I think, though, that property is the rule that solves the most otherwise-chaotic social problems with the most easily-transmissible, most sustainable, and least abusable formula, and there’s a great deal to be said for that (even if that doesn’t say everything there is to be said). May the day yet come, then, when it’s all of us (even Nat Hentoff) vs. Paul Krugman.

Tomorrow, a word about Devo for July Fourth.

DEBATE AT LOLITA BAR: "Is Burlesque Art?"

Thursday (again, that’s Thursday), July 8 at 8pm:

“Is Burlesque Art?”

featuring:

•Monty Leman, photographer (with photographs)

VS.

•Michel Evanchik, grumpus

Moderated by Todd Seavey

WHERE: basement level of Lolita Bar at 266 Broome St. at the corner of Allen St. on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, one block south and three west of the Delancey St. F, J, M, Z subway stop.

Are participants in burlesque artistes or little better than Montreal-dwelling strippers?  You get to cast the deciding vote at the end of next week’s thrilling discussion.

And coming up later this month: my Book Selection entry about Victorian Norwich, my own old home town as it was in the nineteenth century, complete with riverboat prostitutes, apparently.  Today, by contrast, the town is wholesome (and still Victorian) enough that when a friend who was planning a bachelor party at nearby Foxwoods Casino asked me where he could hire strippers, I had to ask my mom — who knew, oddly enough (you talk to Billy at the Log and Lantern Tavern down at the bottom of the hill, or at least did at the time).  I don’t know why mom knew that, nor why she was quicker than I was to realize that the “papers” we were being offered in Washington Square Park once were rolling papers for leaves of the dreaded marijuana plant.

Mom has also been enjoying Fox Business Network’s Freedom Watch (the show I write for), hosted by Judge Andrew Napolitano, and she watched three out of four airings of the premiere episode (on which Sarah Palin, as you may have heard, admitted that arresting pot smokers should not be a police priority).  Surely you can watch the show at at least one of its four broadcast times: Sat. 10am and 8pm, Sun. 7pm and 11pm (with this week’s having Bob Barr, Gary Johnson, Geraldo Rivera, Steve Horwitz, Peter Schiff, Connie Mack, and other guests).

And, hey, Nat Hentoff likes the show.

Hobbits, Ants

DarkHorizons.com reports that the delays and legal wrangling on the Hobbit movies appear to have yielded Peter Jackson as the director instead of just producer, which means abandoning his plan to direct one of the Tin Tin movies.  Fine with me.

And an upside to Joss Whedon directing the Avengers movie in 2012 is that Nathan Fillion, who was not picked to play Captain America, will reportedly play Ant-Man.  I’m smiling with amusement at that thought already — even though he’d make a fairly convincing spouse-abuser, if they get into that disturbing subplot from the comics.

And while we’re talking about his wife, the Wasp (Janet Van Dyne), let me add that despite growing up in New England, it took me decades to get the ethnic joke inherent in the combination of her codename and wealth/social status.

Book Selection of the Month: "Victorian Vista" by James Laver

ToddSeavey.com Book Selection of the Month (June 2010): Victorian Vista by James Laver

First: If you’re Victorian enough to dislike burlesque, please contact me immediately — per the Contact page in my front page right margin — and volunteer to be our anti-burlesque debater at Lolita Bar next week. In this town, alas, it’s easier to find intellectuals who actually do burlesque themselves — hard to avoid them, in fact — than to find one who denies burlesque is art, whether for moral, political, or aesthetic reasons.

Nonetheless: a Camille Paglia piece this weekend blamed Americans’ purportedly waning libidos on our cultural inheritance from the staid, bourgeois Victorians — and praised Southerners and 80s New Wave acts such as Belinda Carlisle as exceptions, while dismissing Lady Gaga. I agree with some of that, obviously. I would contend, though, that the Victorians actually achieved an impressive balance of happiness and self-restraint from which we can still learn (and, not coincidentally, they were culturally dominated by a combination of utilitarian Darwinians and evangelicals).

Luckily, I happen to be doing a summer of Victorian-themed reading (which will pay off in the form of a steampunk comic book script if all goes as planned), so I can learn from James Laver’s Victorian Vista (published in 1955). It’s an entertaining, scrapbook-like collection of telling little pieces of nineteenth-century British culture: menus, song lyrics, newspaper reports — the random things that remind you there was internal logic to that era (and that humanity has nonetheless always been nuts).

As my Book Selection last month detailed, the stereotypically “Victorian” middle third of the nineteenth century was preceded by a period that was both more decadent and more Tory-dominated, odd as that may sound to most moderns (except Helen). The very first page of the first chapter of Victorian Vista (this book mainly concerning the middle part of the century) contains this sentence summing up the earlier period: “Many of the grandes dames were openly promiscuous, and their husbands and lovers drank heavily, gambled prodigiously, and consorted with pugilists and jockeys.”

By contrast, intellectuals were already griping by 1864 that Brits were becoming a bunch of tacky tourists at the shore, with one of the pieces excerpted in Victorian Vista from that time describing a typical beachgoer (then a new phenomenon) thusly:

[H]e reclines upon the sands, and gazes lazily upon the ocean, [succumbing] to a state of the most helpless inactivity. The monotony wearies, yet fascinates him; and it is difficult to do otherwise than stare in a vacant manner at the moaning, foaming, sad waves. To fling pebbles, at deliberate intervals, into the sea, is an occupation perhaps the best suited to the situation, the effort to throw while one is in a sitting posture taxing to the utmost the physical energy, while the strain upon the attention required in aiming at a particular crest of an advancing wave is as much as the mind can conveniently bear under the circumstances.

Twentieth-century condescension toward the Victorians seemingly can’t match their own self-loathing when it peeks out between bouts of progressive triumphalism and imperialism. Speaking of military matters — and tourists — Laver wittily notes that there was unrest on the Continent but also an increasing tendency for the English tourist to head to the Continent for vacation. “He was therefore extremely annoyed when, in 1848, revolutions broke out all over Europe. For the first time for many years he was compelled, for political reasons, to ask himself the question, ‘Where can we go this year?’”

This collection is, by design, a bit fluffy at times, but still revealing. An excerpt from an etiquette book of 1855, for instance, teaches us that the breakdown of manners has been a concern for over a century and a half:

[I]t is now not only allowable, but even thought clever, to be loud, positive, and rapid; to come into the room like a whirlwind, carrying all before you; to look upon everyone else as inferiors, with the idea that it enforces that conviction; to have your own set of opinions and ideas, without the least reference to what others think; and to express them in terms that would have been far better comprehended in the stable than by a company of ladies and gentlemen some twenty years ago.

On a more serious note, we learn that the pre-Raphaelites, lofty as their artistic aspirations may seem now, were part of a larger and arguably lamentably-bourgeois tendency toward literalism and realism in painting. They just used more forest nymphs.

We learn that archery was considered suspect because of its tendency to be played by both sexes (it being less physical taxing for the increasingly liberated modern woman than would be, say, rugby). Archery clubs were everywhere, and rumors about them abounded (just like gender-equalizing croquet — but more about that in next month’s Book Selection, which is about my own home town, Norwich, CT).

The pretensions of the moderns were kept in check through satire, such as this Python-worthy 1877 poem from Punch mocking aesthetes (Wilde being among their targets):

Glad lady mine, that glitterest
In shimmah of summah athwart the lawn,
Canst tell me which is bitterest –
The glamour of Eve, or the glimmah of dawn,
To those whose hearts thou litterest
The field where they fall at thy feet to fawn?
As a buttahfly dost thou fluttah by!
How, whence, and oh! whither, art come and gone?

In short, I contend these Victorians were fairly self-aware, and, you know, I suspect some of them were darn sexy to boot (there are some cute women doing archery in one painting in the book, I must say). Contrary to Paglia’s take, maybe Americans’ libidos wouldn’t be waning — if something like that can even be accurately measured — if they still had the Victorian capacity for self-restraint and modesty instead of walking around with belligerent slogans written on the seat of their pants and gold jewelry worn instead of shirts on hot days.

And if you think likewise, again, please contact me and argue against burlesque next week. (I live in a city where even the religion correspondent of a major news network celebrates her birthday with a big “margarita party,” so I could really use a Mennonite or something here, but a garden-variety ballet snob or curmudgeon would also be appreciated.)

Ideological Weigel Room

It’s tempting to just pile on Dave Weigel after he was outed as hating many of the libertarian/conservatives he was writing about for Washington Post, ostensibly as a movement insider. One could condemn him as a traitor, or at least a disappointment on a par with conservative-turned-moderate David Brooks. One might even go on to ask why Reason, which earlier employed him, can’t find more libertarians to hire. But then again: when did Dave ever promise the world he’d be a strict libertarian? The sad truth is, even if he thought many libertarians are idiots and swore at them, he probably still understands us better — and was covering us more sympathetically — than virtually any other Post staffer would, for what that’s worth.

I was one of those who was sometimes bothered by his Reason writing, not because he was failing to toe the party line but because I didn’t think he was communicating clearly where he was coming from (even while he seemed to be adamant and intensely sarcastic). In retrospect, he was probably ambiguous with good reason, so to speak.

But it’s not as if it’s a crime to write for a libertarian magazine without being a full-fledged libertarian, nor for that matter a crime to write about conservatives without being a full-fledged conservative, nor (as may be the next, and perhaps most useful, step) to write for liberal publications without being a conventional liberal. Moderation in pursuit of liberty isn’t the worst thing in the world, much as I might prefer everyone be an anarcho-capitalist. And much as I might like it if all legislators became anarcho-capitalists, I realize that writers all being anarcho-capitalists could get boring (at least at this early stage in human history, you understand, before we’ve ended government once and for all and moved on to other topics).

•••

Maybe Dave should become Libertarian Type #11 on this admirably succinct and accurate About.com list (forwarded to me by someone, and my apologies for forgetting who) of Ten Types of Libertarian (to which one could perhaps add “liberaltarians,” if that small movement can’t just be lumped under “classical liberal,” and perhaps add Extropians/transhumanists and their tech-focused ilk as a separate category, though “we are all transhumanists now (or soon, very soon)” and the actual Extropy Institute has apparently closed). I should note again that I tend to err on the side of saying that anyone who thinks a label suits him — and seems to share at least the basics of a political philosophy — is indeed inside the club, terminologically speaking, even if he’s wrong about some things (I’m not now necessarily referring to Dave, who may not call himself a libertarian, but to any people who sincerely insist they’re libertarians yet find themselves being read out of the movement).

In a world where actions can determine life or death but words are often just hot air, I have never had much patience for people who waste time saying “You’re not a real libertarian [or for that matter, conservative or liberal or Marxist or punk or American or Scotsman or what have you]” or “Those so-called libertarians [at AEI, in the Texas statehouse, what have you].” You don’t generally speaking build a coalition — which, like it or not, you’re desperately going to need if you want to have any impact on politics beyond words — by telling everyone they’re disqualified for 600 petty reasons.

Yes, I’ve argued with the “liberaltarians,” but that was about whether they are correct to think Democrats/modern liberals are more useful allies than Republicans/conservatives (an idea surely all but dead after a couple years of Obama spending), not whether their efforts linguistically disqualify them as libertarians (and I should note I routinely use the scare quotes on that term not to suggest that it is absurd but simply to increase the odds that a casual reader will notice that it’s not simply the word “libertarian”). Let me take a moment to thank the “liberaltarians” for making an outreach effort, in fact — and even to thank Kerry Howley for talking to feminists so that I don’t have to.

•••

The only thing that irks me — and it irks me when an Objectivist or a paleolibertarian does it as much as when a “liberaltarian” does it — is when those quirky apostates try to read all the rest of us out of the movement (or claim the rest of us are being inconsistent, whereas you should at least give anarcho-capitalists huge points for consistency, if nothing else), as if the apostates have the authority to declare people clear-cut non-libertarians for, say, being hawks or not sharing the liberal culture agenda or what have you, even if we’re staunch property rights adherents and that position seems to settle at least 99% of libertarian-vs.-non-libertarian policy disputes, from what I’ve seen over two decades of following the movement.

Careful observers will note that I don’t read people out of the movement even when I strongly disagree with them, so long as they are mostly sticking to some version of the core principles, some version that usually results in the same sorts of answers the strict property adherents arrive at. I’d be comfortable with open borders, but far be it from me to tell the vast number of anti-illegal-immigration folks who’ve entered the movement in the past three years that they aren’t libertarians. I can still think they’re wrong on that issue — or at least that it’s ambiguous — without denying that they want to abolish most of the government, shore up property rights, let the market decide things, etc. They’re libertarians, even if they’re not just like me (almost no one is).

Sidenote: The “libertarian socialists” on that About.com list are a special case — they aren’t really raising any tribal boundary questions at all, since they’re simply using the word “libertarian” in the European, Marxist sense, making it a mere homonym with the movement I’m part of — albeit with some real historical ties, if you go back to nineteenth-century anarchists, who all hated the aristocracy and in most cases (especially among Georgists) landlords. Either English-speaking or Continental-style libertarians could rightly say they wish the other group would stop using the word, but they aren’t really fighting for the soul of a single philosophical movement.

In philosophy class (my model for how everything should work, alas), if two people get bogged down in an argument over two different possible meanings of a term, they don’t just keep screaming at each other, they eventually define their terms more clearly and use conventions such as referring to one position as, say, “utility 1” and the other as “utility 2.” Solves a lot of problems — but some people would rather find out if semantic battles can be fought to the death.

(And speaking of utilitarianism, my underlying moral philosophy, I keep thinking that there are declining marginal returns to infighting — not to mention battles over where to eat that take so long that everyone would have been happier going to that first Chinese place we passed, etc.)

•••

Anyone tempted to excommunicate everyone else should keep in mind that even if every free-market fan and center-right activist on the planet were working in concert, we might still be outnumbered by statists and might still lose this fight. With populist/popular versions of the libertarian impulse breaking out, such as the Tea Party movement, with the inevitable mutations/simplifications in the philosophy that entails, now is no time to tell everyone that they should shut up and return to their homes unless, say, they’re 100% pro-cloning.

We need all hands on deck, much sooner than I’d anticipated. I was content with gradualism and (paradoxical as it may sound) with picky infighting when it seemed like the final showdown between markets and unsustainable welfare states was decades or even centuries in the future. But it looks like the final battle may be right now, and it’s no time to excommunicate the guy in the trench next to you, be he Republican, feminist, copyright-abolisher, evangelical, single-taxer, or “Rawlsekian.”

(That word, as awkward as “liberaltarian” and used by the same crowd, may actually apply to me, ironically, since I’d be comfortable with “conditional” laws that decreed a Hayek-style free market except in the event that there was an unattended-to crisis among the worst-off, such as starvation not handled by charity, in which case, perhaps, a temporary tax and public food provision kicked in — indeed, that would surely be an easier sell than the come-Hell-or-high-water approach, and the conditional taxes, I hope, would never prove necessary. We are not so different, really.)

P.S. For us libertarians, it was fun to see both a Reason guy (Weigel) and a Mises Institute guy (William Grigg, writing about cops tasering an eighty-six year-old woman) linked on Drudge yesterday, whatever the circumstances.