Unqualified Offerings

By Thoreau

I have noted before that the right’s libertarian-sounding dog whistles were never really aimed at genuinely libertarian and libertarian-leaning types (where “genuinely” means, at least for my purposes, “Interested in civil liberties at least as much as taxes, and interested in getting The Man off the backs of people of all genders, economic classes, and ethnic backgrounds).  Those dog whistles serve two purposes, one which I have noted before and will summarize, and one which just occurred to me:

1) It’s nice-sounding packaging for their basic stance.  You take a cultural issue like gun ownership, a mix of cultural and economic opposition to some lefty rules that you don’t like, and general apologias for the rich, and you package them as being about freedom.  Except it’s only about freedom to the extent that any of those stances happen to promote freedom for some subset of the population in some particular range of cases.  It’s never really about freedom as a general notion.  But it sounds better to call it freedom.  All of this I have said before.

2) The new point:  It’s a way of saying “Nuh uh!” to libruls.  See, the state can grab and crush with an iron first, and it can also do gentle things with a velvet glove.  Sometimes the velvet glove is used benevolently, and sometimes as a mask or servant for the iron fist, and other times just plain inefficiently.  Sometimes the iron fist is actually used appropriately (e.g. to go after violent criminals) and often it is used harmfully.  Most lefty policy proposals emphasize the velvet glove aspect.  Maybe they’re just masking the iron fist, or maybe not.  Maybe they are mistaken to think it will be all that velvety, or maybe not.  But whatever you believe the case to be, it is beyond question that the packaging is about the velvet glove, no the iron fist.

Adopting libertarian rhetoric about iron fists is often a sophisticated-sounding way to say “Nuh uh!” to the guy talking about velvet gloves.

As for me, I think that somebody ought to ask why that team is so obsessed with iron fists.  Does it say something about how they might react to having power?  Of course, while we’re at it, we might want to ask why the other team is so insistent that we just focus on the velvet glove.  Are they hiding something?