Chill Hill
The problem with Senator Hillary Clinton isn’t just that she tacks starboard but that her rightward gestures are in the direction of the worst kind of “conservative,” the militaristic and moralistic kind. She’s an ambidextrous busybody. It’s as if a Republican politico tried to generalize his appeal by calling for a fat tax and mandatory diversity counseling for bowling leagues. If it involves telling other people what to do, especially with gun in hand, Hillary Clinton is for it.
Ironically, the liberal grumbling over her Senatorial career meshes with the libertarian critique of her in the 1990s. (I mean the political/philosophical critique as exemplified in PJ O’Rourke’s review of It Takes a Village, not all the nutbar stuff about her incompossible lesbian affair with Vincent Foster.)
Pingback by Heretical Ideas » THE WORST OF BOTH WORLDS —
May 9, 2006 @ 7:38 am
[...] E WORST OF BOTH WORLDS by Alex Knapp
Jim Henley explains in a nutshell what’s wrong with Hillary Clinton. The problem with Senator Hillary Clinton i [...]
Comment by Lynn Gazis-Sax —
May 9, 2006 @ 10:10 am
That’s about my feeling. As a liberal rather than a libertarian, I’m not necessarily in favor of tacking starboard on economic issues, but I’m not eager to vote for more foreign wars in the hope that I might just get some useful programs on poverty to go along with them.
If only so many so-called libertarians hadn’t also decided to opt for militarism.
Comment by Jim Henley —
May 9, 2006 @ 10:13 am
That’s my regret too, Lynne, but it’s not as if libertarians were uniquely prey to this. The impulse toward militarism seems almost anterior to conventional ideology. I’d confess that libertarians, of all people, should have known better, though.
Comment by Steve —
May 9, 2006 @ 10:43 am
Jim, there seems to be something deeper than that, but I haven’t quite put my finger on what it is. Something seems to be going on — on a social, if not a theoretical, level — that links right libertarianism with jingoism and reverence for martial virtue (and maybe even engineering techno-optimism, as an interesting Crooked Timber thread argued a while back). I’m hesitant to say that it’s all Heinlein’s fault, but he would seem to be the ideal example of the tendancy.
Comment by Barry —
May 9, 2006 @ 12:43 pm
At the risk of sounding tedious – IMHO, it’s because 90% of ’libertarians’ are simply false-flag right-wingers. Go to a blog or group where ’libertarians’ hang out under two ID’s – one supporting the GOP, the other supporting the Democratic Party. See which gathers more opposition. The ’orthogonality’ of libertarianism has been strongly pro-GOP/anti-Dem for as long as I’ve been hanging out on the net.
Even among people who are disgusted with the GOP’s current behavior, voting Democratic is extreme unpleasant.
Comment by Avram —
May 9, 2006 @ 1:30 pm
A huge chunk of the people calling themselves ”libertarians” are actually just seeking a license for callousness.
Comment by Neel Krishnaswami —
May 9, 2006 @ 1:49 pm
Alas, my villainy is exposed! Avram, what gave away my cruel and spiteful malice towards all mankind?
Comment by Jim Henley —
May 9, 2006 @ 2:03 pm
I know a LOT of libertarians. None of them fit Avram’s description. Meanwhile, Steve and Barry, surely the party of Richard Cohen and Peter Beinart won’t be throwing the first stone about another ideology being especially prey to militarism?
I think people may draw too many conclusions from the blog success of people like Glenn Reynolds when it comes to ”libertarianism” per se.
Comment by Jaybird —
May 9, 2006 @ 2:03 pm
My biggest problem with both parties is that neither one really wants to allow me to exercise my right to go to Hell after I die.
They have two separate lists of Venial and Mortal Sins, to be sure, but neither party is willing to trust my soul into my own hands.
And that pisses me off.
Comment by Barry —
May 9, 2006 @ 3:16 pm
Neel, Jim, you’re both confusing ’a lot of X are actually not X’ with ’there are no X’. Please don’t do that.
As to Beinart, many Democratic politicians are pro-war – opposing the majority of their constituency. And if it weren’t for the GOP using war as an issue, I imagine that that the number of Democratic politicians who support wars would fall like a rock.
As to Richard ’oppose the Democrats’ Cohen, I don’t see why you bring that up. His party, the GOP, is pro-war, politicians, presstitutes and constituency alike. Heck, Richard is a classic false-flager – he claims to be liberal, but always seems to end up helping out the GOP.
Comment by bryan —
May 9, 2006 @ 3:50 pm
well that a lot of conservatives call themselves libertarians when they are not has been evident for a while, it seems to me though, of short historical memory that I am, there was not a split between the actual libertarian and the libertarian by virtue of self-labeling.
Comment by Neel Krishnaswami —
May 9, 2006 @ 4:14 pm
Sorry, Barry, no can do.
As a general rule, when someone uses the formulation ”Most X are some bad thing Y”, they are constructing a two-step rhetorical device to make a passive-aggressive insult. The insult comes from the ”X are bad thing Y”, and the passive-aggressiveness comes from the ”most”, which the writer uses to avoid taking responsibility when they are called on their aggression — ”but you’re part of the small ’good’ minority”.
Google the phrase ” most liberals are” for a vivid demonstration of this point, but only if your blood pressure is well under control.
The rhetorical structure of my response was to deny that I was part of the minority, precisely to make the attack plain. I tried to couch it in humor, for two reasons. First, I didn’t want to counterattack, because that would start a flamewar and that’s just going to bum me out.
Second, and more importantly, Avram had just fallen into one of those inevitable traps that come with being human. It’s perfectly normal and natural to lump everyone who disagrees with you into an amorphous Them, and it takes conscious, deliberate effort to relate to them as real people. And an attack on Them doesn’t set off the moral alarms the way that an attack on a person does, so all I wanted to do is remind him that hey, there’s a person on the other side of the computer screen.
Sooner or later, I’m going to make the same mistake — seeing as how I’m human too — and I’d rather get a gentle correction than a harsh one.
Comment by Nell —
May 9, 2006 @ 5:25 pm
On the main topic: please, please, PLEASE, all of you who aren’t long-term Dem voters — take part in the primaries in your states and back somebody else but Hillary Clinton. It’s really going to be the pits if she gets the nomination.
Comment by Barry —
May 9, 2006 @ 6:29 pm
Well, Neel, what did happen?
Comment by Leonard —
May 9, 2006 @ 8:36 pm
Since the thread is largely hijacked away from the Village Queen, I’ll just throw out some thoughts on the libertarianism-militarism axis.
Libertarianism is a minority political tendancy. It appeals to certain kinds of people preferentially: high-IQ, male, and related to at least the second of those, geeks. Less social people. Which is not to say that we are sociopaths, but it is to say that libertarians are comfortable to saying ”no” as a political thing. As in, when someone says ”I feel I’m entitled to your income because I need it for X”, we say, ”No”. Which can be just a bit cold when X is ”my starving baby”, even if it is morally correct. Most people won’t go there. We will.
So, what do smart male geeks have in common? Lots of things – computers and the Net are obvious enough – but another is bookishness and a wide reading of topics interesting to young men. Another: growing up playing D&D (or for my set, TFT); and also, wargames of the Avalon Hill variety (my gen), or these days, all sorts of networked computer games. Fascination with the military, with the male-female difference more broadly, and with the structure of society being in part a construct of male violence.
One thing that is clear from history is that force works. That is what you get from reading all those Heinlein novels: Mr Dubois lecturing you on morality. And you realize he’s right: raw force has decided a lot of things, and to think otherwise may be nice, but not realistic. Unrealism, even if nice, is kryptonite to these guys.
All that leads up to a group of people fascinated with the military who can maintain unpopular political positions, especially when those are backed by clean logic. (For example, that rent controls are a senseless, immoral, and wasteful policy.) But it’s a lot less clear for a lot of guys when it comes to peace and war. As a libertarian (as opposed to pacifist) you’re allowed ”defensive” force, and to a lot of the lesser intellects among us that includes Iraq. I don’t buy it, but I think for a lot of guys the love of things military overrides ideological purity when things get at all grey.
The other thing I’d like to mention in this context is that while libertarianism (and anarchism, for that matter) are for some people fully developed moral systems, for many people, this is not the case. Rather, to them – the vast majority of libertarians, I’d expect – libertarianism is merely a political tendancy, a general disposition. They’d like to be left alone more by the state and they don’t see any reason why other people similar to themselves should not be similarly unmolested. But terrorists – more generally, evildoers – are not similar. They are categorically different. Reynolds is of this ilk; you might get him to agree that rent controls are a bad idea, but to him the idea of ”defense” as he’d see it against the Evil Ones is just plain common sense. You’ve got no moral system there to latch onto to debate him with.
For these libertarians, to understand them you have to understand the broader currents of American political thought. Or perhaps ”thought” is more appropriate, since they largely reflect cultural tendancies that are generations old. What we’re basically looking at here are Jacksonians, to use David Hackett Fischers’s ”folkways”. You’ll find few Puritan libertarians, nor Cavaliers. These are probably not even possible combinations. But a large minority of us have Quaker tendancies, with all that connotes. It’s no surprise it’s a minority of us because the Quaker folkway was always a minority tendancy in America. Still is.
Comment by Steve —
May 9, 2006 @ 9:27 pm
Jim, for what it’s worth, I’ve never been a registered Democrat (although I consider myself a liberal, and I vote for the Democratic candidate most of the time), and in 2004 during the primaries I adopted a personal motto of ”Libertarian before Lieberman”. (Nell, I don’t live in a state with an important primary, but I’m considering registering as a Democrat so I can vote for Feingold, Warner, Clark, whoever. Another ”Anyone But Hillary” voter for many of the reasons that Jim and Matthew Yglesias have been laying out.) While HRC certainly, from my point of view, couldn’t do much worse than the GWB regime (she’d implement a more sensible health care policy, for one), she hardly represents a political strain that I want to see encouraged. Press gotchaism and rival candidates ready to make hay whenever someone expresses any doubts about the wisdom of making Tehran glow in the dark surely won’t help anyone do the right thing, but it’s nice to dream.
It’s off-topic, and I apologize, but I really think Leonard is onto something, the same something that I was groping towards. Obviously this is not meant to apply to you — for all I know, you’ve never touched Avalon Hill, sticking to sissy stuff like Everway — nor to the real body of anti-interventionist libertarians, but it’s struck me as weird for a long time and I thought yr. comment #3 was a nice springboard. Please feel free to skip this comment and talk about Hillary’s cattle futures trading or something.
That said, let me back up slightly — ignoring the corporatist, globalist right (which, military-industrial complex aside, I actually think is neutral to negative on actually projecting American force, although gung ho on big fighter plane contracts), it’s not surprising that Republicans are down with military interventionism. I don’t know that I consider it that surprising that the Democrats are in favor of military interventionism, either, for both crass political reasons and an underlying belief in the transformational power of government shading neatly into the Wilsonian belief in the power of America to lead a more unified world (by force if necessary, Wilson’s example in Haiti be damned).
What is surprising to me is the libertarian strain. Is it necessarily obvious that the group of Americans most likely to understand that, ”I’m from the government and I’m here to help” is a punch line is going to feel ideological kinship with America’s biggest, baddest government agency? Are sociological explanations really the best basis? I’m not well read in such political philosophy as might be said to unify American libertarians, but I certainly don’t remember anything in The Road to Serfdom (or even The Fountainhead) that might have led me to expect this result.
Pingback by Massive Government Freedom § Unqualified Offerings —
May 9, 2006 @ 10:40 pm
[...]
| Main | May 9, 2006 Massive Government Freedom Lots of excellent discussion downblog. Let me excerpt a question from Steve, because it turns out I wrote about it [...]
Comment by Avram —
May 9, 2006 @ 11:19 pm
Neel, Jim — Not you, and not Bruce Baugh, and not Nancy Lebovitz, and not Greg Costikyan, and not a bunch of other libertarians I’m happy to call friends. (Actually, I don’t know Neel well enough to say one way or the other, but I’ve seen no reason to put him in the callous box.) But a whole bunch of self-described libertarians who don’t deserve the name, most of whom I know only online, but a few I know in person (but don’t associate with anymore), yeah, you betcha. I don’t know if they’re in the majority or not (among libertarians, that is, who are already a small minority out in the real world), but there are plenty of them.
I’m sorry if ”a huge chunk” looked like ”all” or ”most” or ”enough that we can ignore the remainder”. Maybe it’s not as huge a chunk as it seems to me, sitting outside libertarian circles.
Comment by Noam —
May 10, 2006 @ 1:30 am
http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Protected/Articles/000/000/007/809ijipa.asp
You can read this full review at the above link, with login: tws, password: media
Tell ’em Noam Chomsky sent you.
Comment by Avram —
May 10, 2006 @ 7:58 am
In fact, now that I’ve slept on it and thought it over in the shower, the thoughtful libertarians I can put names to outnumber the kneejerk callous ones two or three to one, so ”huge” was ill-chosen on my part.
I still have a hard time believing that you’ve met none of the callous ones, Jim. Hell, I almost was one, and you’ve met me.
Comment by Uncle Kvetch —
May 10, 2006 @ 9:07 am
On the main topic: please, please, PLEASE, all of you who aren’t long-term Dem voters — take part in the primaries in your states and back somebody else but Hillary Clinton.
Those of us here in NY State have a chance to get our non-Hillary* mojo working THIS YEAR:
http://www.tasinifornewyork.org
Yes, it’s tilting at windmills; she’s a lock. But I’d love to see a good chunk of her ”natural” constituency express its fed-upedness in November.
*I almost wrote ”anti-Hillary,” but I think that term is trademarked by folks at a very different point on the political spectrum.
Comment by Barry —
May 10, 2006 @ 10:21 am
Again, I’m unable to post – the calendar sits over most of the comment window, and block the button. I’m typing half-blind, and hitting ’return’ to see if I can post.
Comment by Barry —
May 10, 2006 @ 11:26 am
As I understand it, the topic is what defines libertarianism, as opposed to a right-wing politics which might advocated a free-market approach when convenient. For example, the Heinleinian ’force has solved more problems…’ statement – true. But there should be at two major difference between a right-winger and a libertarian’s interpretation of this – first, that force is not a moral method, in many cases, and second, that the use of force has serious side-effects (e.g., the organization to use force tends to keep going, and to survive by the use of more force).
Comment by Neel Krishnaswami —
May 10, 2006 @ 1:33 pm
Hi Barry, I think Leonard’s brilliant distinction between political philosophy and political tendency illuminates what’s going on.
Everyone has, basically, three moral spheres. The inner sphere are the people you know personally — kith and kin. We feel the strongest moral obligations to these people, including a positive duty of care. The second sphere are people who are in your community, but who you don’t have personal ties to. These people have moral standing, but don’t have a moral claim on us.
The difference between the first and second spheres is the difference between a random junkie and a junkie who’s your sister. You’re going to take in your sister and pay for her rehab, even if it hurts and messes up your own life. For the random junkie, you support clean needle programs and an end to the War on Drugs, but aren’t going to let him into your apartment. You will get outraged if the police brutalize the random junkie, though.
The third sphere are the people who are outsiders. They don’t figure in your moral calculus, and don’t register at all except transiently and intermittently. You know how maybe the majority of Americans don’t care about Abu Ghraib? That’s because Iraqis aren’t part of their moral accounting.
The defining trait of a liberal political philosophy is that it is cosmopolitan — it tells you that the third sphere is empty. Absolutely everyone deserves at least the rights of the second sphere, whether you’re a Rawlsian social democrat or a Nozick-esque libertarian.
You can have people with a liberal tendency, but who don’t have a liberal philosophy. They have a nonempty third sphere, even if the policies they want for the second sphere are the same as some liberal philosophy indicates. Here’s where you find the people who worry about police abuse of civil forfeiture at home, but can’t be bothered about the torture centers in Iraq. (For that matter, here’s where you also find people like old time racist New Dealers.)
Comment by Jim Henley —
May 10, 2006 @ 1:41 pm
Wow, Neel. Just, wow.
Comment by Barry —
May 10, 2006 @ 2:58 pm
That is a good analysis.
Comment by Bruce Baugh —
May 11, 2006 @ 4:16 am
There is a problem with callousness among a fair number of the libertarians I’ve known, but I don’t think it has anything to do with libertarian views. I’ve told this story before, but not for a while…
I grew up with a lot of friends from exotic places. Pasadena, California, is a very ethnically diverse place, for a variety of idiosyncratic reasons. Among my good friends for a bunch of years was Joe Riskallah, whose parents were Palestinian Protestants. It’s hard to describe just how thoroughly outsider that made them back home, Arab in a Jewish state, Christian among Muslims, not the best-regarded flavor among Christians. And I remember the kinds of discussions that the older members of the family would be having with their fellow believers while Joe and I played with model trains and such.
Their approach to their faith was very highly intellectualized, very concerned with individual interior outlook and with the rituals and activities that one can perform covertly . They were intensely prone to factional feuding, with factions coming and going like so many Coke bottles loaded with ideological Mentos, and to both obsession with and blindness to the past, as it might serve the argument of the moment.
In college, when I encountered serious pagans for the first time, I realized that I’d seen all these sociological elements before, linked to an entirely different creed. And then of course libertarians offered it up all over again.
Callousness is a problem in every minority philosophy where large-scale practice is unlikely. When all you have is opportunities for local exercise, or at least that’s all you can count on, it’s just a very easy temptation. You put too much weight on individuals’ interior lives and their personal achievements because sometimes it’s better than the endless ache of wishing for things you’d like to see but won’t on larger scales. You get tempted to the same stupid glorification of dissent and rebellion for their own sake that Milton gave such great voice to, forgetting that rebellion is just a fact, not a virtue.
We all have moments like that. Being a person of any consistent principle means you face it sometime, and these days more than most – every decent moderal, liberal, left-winger, socialist, right-winter, conservative, you pick it, is sometimes going to feel it under this administration. When you’ve had enough of hurting over a world you don’t seem able to save, it can be mighty comfortable to turn inward. And we generally don’t have God giving us the visible counter-argument that He gave Jonah when Jonah said ”let ’em burn”.
Basically, there aren’t many sins specific to individual worldviews, as nearly as I can tell. There are some, to be sure. But a very great many of them come from the position the view and its holders have in society. Show me someone with a vision of a significantly different world, particularly if they’re ever subject to harassment by the powers what am when they get uppity, and I will show you a whole lot of these flaws in common.