July 2004

If you’re reading this, then you already know, or can’t go, but Blogorama is tonight. Rendevous Lounge. 18th & Kalorama. Starting in about 20 minutes. Hugs.

I’m happy and flattered to see that Randy Barnett of The Volokh Conspiracy has linked to and quoted approvingly from my TCS piece.

Judging from the comments thread at TCS, it seems that I failed to adequately convey that political libertarianism is by no means an amoral theory. Political libertarianism assumes that a peaceful, stable, fair, extended social network of mutually advantageous cooperation — liberal order — is, if not morally good in itself, at least good as a means to other moral ends. The point, however, is that people with different commitments can support a liberal order, and can account for the moral value of the order in different ways. When you live in a large, incredibly pluralistic society like ours, the problem of how we all can live together, despite our differences, is a serious problem no matter what you happen to believe. A minimal set of social principles that accomodates the broadest array of commitments and worldviews can be seen by all sorts of people as the best solution to that problem.

This also does not imply that comprehensive justificatory strategies are false. Suppose, say, Ayn Rand is right. Then Ayn Rand is right. But the probability that everyone comes to agree with Ayn Rand is, well, zero, give or take. (The probability that the people who claim to agree with Ayn Rand will come to agree with each other is probably no better.) Whatever the correct comprehensive theory is, it’s probably never going to be the case that everyone believes it. An authoritarian order can probably coerce agreement, to an extent, by restricting freedom of thought, speech, and inquiry. But that’s not the kind of society we want. And a small, homogenous community, a group of Hutterhites, for example, might share a common conception of the good. But we’re talking about a huge, diverse society.

So, one might arrive at the one true theory of the good, and even do a bang up job of spreading the word, but still be swamped by Babelian pluralism. The problem simply isn’t how to get everyone to agree on fundamentals, because it’s a problem that won’t get solved in a big, free society. What we’re left with is a sort of engineering problem. What terms of association, what social principles, can accomodate all these people, and all these diverse commitments, in a manner (almost) everyone has reason to affirm. The hypothesis is that political libertarianism is the best solution to the engineering problem.

Now, I’m by no means sure that this hypothesis is correct, or even exactly what political libertarianism entails (and thus what the hypothesis really is). I think I’d just want to call my own view liberal minimalism. I’m receptive to the idea that some small-scale redistribution might be a condition for stable liberal order, putting me in the company of Hayek, Milton Friedman, and Loren Lomasky. While people tend to identify these thinkers as libertarian, people also tend to think libertarianism by nature rules out redistribution. So I’m not quite sure what to call myself, not that it matters much.

It seems that I’m constantly getting into arguments–arguments that don’t even interest me that much–about whether moral behavior is even possible if people don’t believe in God, or Aristotelian natural ends, or natural rights, or whatever. It’s boring because, well, it’s just plain as an Amish girl that you don’t need to believe in anything special to do the right thing. Nevertheless, I often hear arguments that go something like this:

“If people don’t believe in God, then we won’t be afraid to do terrible things, and won’t have any motivation to do good things, and then there’ll just be CHAOS, which would be horrifying.”

To which I usually sit with a stunned and expectant look on my face. Because the next step seems perfectly obvious to me. If chaos is so terrible, isn’t that reason enough for people to, you know, avoid it. No one much wants to step over corpses on the way to Starbucks, or hose the blood off the sidewalks each morning. We’ll all be much better off if we constrain ourselves in certain ways, and if we exert a little extra effort in certain cases.

So isn’t this all we need to believe: that being good is a net winner over baby-raping anarchy? God, natural rights, or whatever, don’t seem to get you anything extra. The horribleness of immorality does a pretty good job of making morality look pretty good without any special help. So why all the insistence on overdetermination? Insurance?

I found Brian Leiter’s explanation of the intellectual relationship of Marx to the Critical Legal Studies movement pretty interesting.

Matt Welch’s convention rant had me literally pumping my fists in the air and yelling “Yeah!!!”

I’ll stop linking to little Reason pieces as soon as they stop being so choice.

When there aren’t many good ads to show you, Gmail instead serves up helpful links to “Related Pages” - that is, related to the text of the email thread you currently have open. Well, in a set of emails to the editor of TCS regarding my piece in TCS, Google gives me this related page:

How freakin’ cool is that?

Check out my rejoinder to Ed Feser’s trainwreck of an anti-libertarian essay at Tech Central Station, which Julian so ably thrashed last week.

The convention provides a welcome occasion to reflect on the ways in which politics distorts our identity, sours our relations to others, and makes our lives generally lousier. Brian Doherty’s lovely essay sounds a lot of themes I’ve been harping on. I especially like the point of the opportunity costs of political activism. Since electoral political activity has almost zero impact, why not spend that time just trying to live the way you think everyone ought to? The point of thinking you know how you ought to live is that you live that way, not that you waste your life trying to get other people to live that way, since wasting your time telling other people how to live probably isn’t part of what it is you think you know about how to live.

Peter Northrup at Crescat makes the important point about the fact that Norwegians don’t go to work a lot.

(Couldn’t find a picture of a viking in a hammock.)

Rob Light, who I guess likes to sends me stuff he knows will aggravate me, sent me a little sermon Harvey Mansfield delivered at Harvard and published in the Summer 2004 Claremont Review of Books. It’s reproduced after the jump, for those who want to get a bit clearer on what Mansfield is really saying about science: it should be religion’s bitch.
[click to continue...]

Nick Gillespie drops mad Star Trek scientifics in his argument for the essential similarity of Bush and Kerry. On other “The Election Matters Not So Much” fronts, Anton Sherwood in the comments delivers this link to a lovely first-person account of bureaucratic autonomy.

I will not be blogging the Democratic National Convention in Boston, Massachusetts. I will be denigrating Harvey Mansfield, in addition to tackling sundry other non-convention topics. I am a fount of information about what it is like to have nothing whatsoever to do with the convention. Please direct press inquiries to the comments section.

The Big Trunk from Power Line posts an excerpt from Harvey Mansfield’s Weekly Standard review of Stephen Rhoad’s Taking Sex Differences Seriously. Let me tell you what I think of this bit:

What evolutionists think is the closest we usually get to the notion of nature these days. But it is not close enough. For evolution sees everything as organized for survival and cannot recognize our better, higher nature. Thus it sees no difference in rank between the male desire for an active sex life and the male interest in being married, or between the promptings of desire and the instruction of reason. What kind of seriousness is this?

Right back atcha Mansfield. What kind of seriousness is this? You know, I’ve heard this stuff about “seriousness” before from Strausseans. It’s really got to be said that Mansfield and his posse are masters of “seriousness,” which is a kind of painfully earnest self-congratulating pose. But he apparently cares very little about seriousness, which is involved in things like finding out what nature is like, as opposed to jacking off over Machiavelli.

Anyway, get this: “What evolutionists think is the closest we usually get to the notion of nature these days. But it’s not close enough.” Wow. I think I just shit my pants. Seriously (not “seriously”), who does this guy think he is? Sure, sure: William R. Kenan Professor of Government at Harvard University. But where does the Kenan Professor of Government get off announcing that what evolutionists, people who study nature in a systematic and methodical way for a living, aren’t close enough, to the “notion of nature?”

Apparently Mansfield, master of the classics, knows nature. Mansfield knows, a priori from the well-appointed comfort of his study, that a sufficient approximation to the “notion of nature” includes a satisfactory account of our “better, higher nature.” What is this exactly?, you may find yourself asking. Better than what? Higher than what? Well, whatever it is, I guess an account of it is a constraint on any theory of nature. Somebody call the biology department! Call MIT! Does Steven Pinker know?

If by “better, higher nature,” Mansfield means our capacity for benevolence, sacrifice, sense of honor, dignity, spirituality, integrity, loyalty, love, friendship, longing for transcendence, etc., then the evolutionist has exactly zero problem recognizing our better, higher nature. It’s data. It is something to be explained.

Mansfield’s beef is this: actual factual mind-independent nature, the thing that people who specialize in studying nature, like evolutionists, specialize in studying, that thing, out there, is not normative just all by itself, and thus lacks “ranks” and differences thereof.

Disappointingly, an evolutionary (or any naturalistic) explanation of our longing for transcendence, for example, will not be an account of the existence of a transcendent reality in which we as beings are finally made whole through reunification with our creator. An explanation of love is going to say something about pair bonding, babymaking, oxytocin, vasopressin, credible commitment in a high stakes cooperative game, and so forth, and NOT, that we were all once roly-polys ripped asunder by Zeus’s lightning bolts and left longing for our lost halves. Or whatever. That is, an account of our nature that has something to do with truth, i.e., correspondence with the world, and not “Truth,” i.e., a certain profound feeling of affirmation and enlightenment, will be an explanation that is not built from within the first-personal moral-psychological conceptual scheme.

Now, most of us understand the difference in rank between a desire for an active sex life, which is clearly sensible, moral and good, and the desire to become married, which tends to be a disastrous mypopic choice stemming from a desperate desire to avoid confronting one’s own panicked emptiness. And we all know about the promptings of the desire to heed the insructions of reason and the instruction of reason to heed the promptings of desire, and which is better than which. So the problem isn’t that we don’t perfectly well know how to rank things.

The point is that ranking things is something that we do, not something that nature does. We have hopes and dreams and all sorts of “higher” emotions that play into the way we represent and engage with the world. If we were built differently, and we held the rest of nature constant,–if we had other needs, a different kind of psychology,a different set of emotions–then we’d ranks things differently, and we’d be right to do it.

In any case, Mansfield, like most Straussians, is a rhetorician, not a philosopher. So he is not, strictly speaking, arguing. He is exhorting us to imagine his moral opinions as lines in the book of nature. I decline. It’s a good book as it is. Take a look Harvey!

[Note: Thanks to Robert Light for the link. The picture is Samuel Wilberforce, Bishop of Oxford.]

I love his blog. He make me want to be an anthropologist!

Almost everybody thinks elections are events of immense importance. I think this is evidence that almost nobody understands how we are in fact governed (or ruled). The distinction between the government and the state is simple enough, but it seems that nobody really really gets it.

The point is that if Kerry wins, just suppose, then we’ll get a new slate of political appointees in the agencies of the executive branch. But the overall turnover will be negligible. Now, political appointees matter, but not THAT much. The lifers rule.

When Congress passes a law, it’s out of their hands. It’s up to the bureacracy to interpret it, which they can do faithfully or perversely, and to enforce it, which they may choose not to do at all.

I once went on a date with an EPA lawyer. (Yay Nerve.com!) I said to her, more or less, this is my guess about what you do. . . A new environmental law is passed. The EPA people decide whether they like it or not. If they like it, they enforce it. If they don’t like it, they think, “What would we like the law to mean?” They then try to find a way of interpreting the language to reflect their, rather than congress’s preferences. The lawyers then think about who will sue them if they interpret the law this way, and whether they would win the suit. If they can’t win, they reinterpret it in a way that maybe doesn’t reflect their preferences as much, but which is more likely to stand up in court. Once they’ve got a winner, they implement, and prepare for the likey suit.

She said, “That’s almost exactly what I do.”

I wanted to know whether she, a good liberal, considered this anti-democratic. She didn’t. Not at all. Democracy is beautiful! It’s just that the representatives of the people tend not to know their elbows from their assholes, are subject to all sorts of distorting electoral pressures, and so pass laws contrary to what they would pass if they knew more and were directly motivated by a desire to promote the commonweal. So democracy is great, except when it’s not, due to ignorance and bad motivation, which is almost always, in which case the bureaucracy, who really do know what they’re doing, has to fix things.

Now, I found this to be an astonishing . . . tension. (No, we never went out again.) In any case, I’m quite glad things work this way. You may never hear another libertarian say this, so listen up: I think the United States of America has an absolutely wonderful bureaucracy! That is, wonderful relative to most actually existing bureacracies in the world, which should be the relevant comparison class, not the Meinongian bureacracies of our dreams.

Anyway, we elect the government, not the state. Governments comes and go. The state persists. We should count ourselves lucky to have a decent state that is pretty much competent, and does a fairly good job of undermining democracy in a generally salutary fashion.

That said, when a President tells the Army to go invade a country, they go. A president that didn’t do this might be nice.

Can someone please explain to me what ‘geechy’ means? Thank you.

Does the DEA know that oxytocin is addictive?

934 Westminster is so having a cuddle party! The rules:

1. Pajamas stay on the whole time.

2. No SEX. (Yep, you read that right.)

3. Ask for permission to kiss or nuzzle anyone. Make sure you can handle getting a no before you invite or request anyone to cuddle or kiss.

4. If you’re a yes, say yes. If you’re a no, say no.

5. If you’re a maybe, say NO.

6. You are encouraged to change your mind from a yes to a no, no to a yes anytime you want.

7. NO DRY HUMPING!

8. Communicate, communicate, communicate.

9. If you’re in a relationship, communicate and set your boundaries and agreements BEFORE you go to the Cuddle Party. Don’t re-negotiate those agreements/boundaries during the Cuddle Party. (Trust us on this one.)

10. Get your Cuddle Life Guard On Duty or Cuddle Caddy if there’s a concern, problem, or question or should you feel unsafe or need assistance with anything during the Cuddle Party.

11. Crying and giggling are both welcomed and encouraged.

12. Outside of your personal relationships, it’s nobody’s business who you cuddle, so please be respectful of other people’s privacy when sharing with the outside world about Cuddle Parties.

13. Arrive on time.

14. Be hygienically savvy.

15. Clean up after yourself.

16. Always say thank you and practice good Cuddle Manners.

My guess is that any party where you have to emphatically proscribe dry humping is a party in which there will be some dry humping.

Objectivist bonus: CuddleParty.com is apparently the copyright of an entity named “Atlas Spooned.” Which makes me think: If Rearden would have just taken some of his seeting psychosexual frustration and just cuddled with Dagny . . . I mean, jammies stay on, and they just spoon. I think our Promethean giants of industry might have been a lot less stressed out about all the parasites, moochers, and whim-worhsipping second handers, and everything would have turned out a lot nicer for everybody. Rural Colorado gets pretty boring after awhile.

Want to know some words I learned from Ayn Rand: bromide; instransigent.

[Link from Gene, who I think could use a good cuddle.]

A friend (who may or may not want to be named) points to this WebMD article summarizing the economic value of sexual activity. It turns out that extra money doesn’t make us that much happier, but sex makes us quite a lot happier, so if we’re putting a money value on units of happiness, sex is worth a lot of money.

After analyzing data on the self-reported levels of sexual activity and happiness of 16,000 people, Dartmouth College economist David Blachflower and Andrew Oswald of the University of Warwick in England report that sex “enters so strongly (and) positively in happiness equations” that they estimate increasing intercourse from once a month to once a week is equivalent to the amount of happiness generated by getting an additional $50,000 in income for the average American.

My first reaction to this is that prostitutes are undercharging. My second reaction is pretty much the same as my correspondent, who writes:

There should be a tax on all that undeclared income! — after all, all those people are getting the benefit of that money, isn’t that the same as actually having the money? How can that $50,000-equivalent benefit be redistributed so that everyone can benefit ‘equally’?

It seems like a good joke, but it really is more than a joke from the perspective of distributive justice. Take a similar case. Those of us who prefer leisure over money, once we’ve passed a fairly low threshold of money, gain all the benefits of society without paying much in through taxes.

Suppose that after $15,000 annual, the marginal value of a dollar for me plummets sharply, while the value of an hour of leisure remains very high. If I could be working 40 hours a week, and making sixty big a year, but I’d rather have the leisure after working only 10 a week, then those extra hours are worth at least forty five grand to me. So I buy a lot of leisure for the price of my opporunity cost. But, unlike the guy who likes owning a Cris Craft and a high-end stereo more than reading library books, taking long walks, and writing poetry, the value of my leisure can’t be taxed. But this seems patently unfair. People who happen to have leisurely preferences just luck out.

How to rectify this? Well, we could just force people who like leisure to work and give the proceeds to the state, but that makes us sort of uncomfortable, as we’re then caused to think a little too hard about what taxes really amount to.

Well, I guess it turns out that getting a weekly rather than a monthly is worth about $50G. And it also turns out that having more money doesn’t get you more laid. So, suppose I like leisure, as above, AND I like sex as much as most people do. (Suppose.) If I manage to fit a weekly into my fairly relaxed schedule, then I’m looking at the equivalent of close to $100G in non-taxable income. This is clearly the way to go! People who work sixty hours a week to make $100G taxable, and as a consequence of all that time working and all that stress, only manage a monthly… well, those people are suckas! They’re paying like 30-ish% of their income, and while I’m not literally rollin’ in the Benjamins, I’m rolling in the endorphins, which is just as good.

This isn’t fair! Maybe I have some control over my preference for leisure. Maybe I cultivated it by reading Marcus Aurelius or something. But my ability to swing a weekly? Well. Suppose (counterfactually, of course) that I’m ruddy and good looking, and the ladies are just irresistably drawn to my animal charisma. Well, I didn’t do anything to deserve my mojo. By babe magneticity turns out simply to be an unredistributable resource. Nice for me! But hardly fair.

Maybe because I won’t be so depressed, which we also find (also, that ladies ought to consider that OrthoTri-cyclen is cheaper than Prozac and condoms), it’ll turn out that I contribute to the surplus of social cooperation by means of my sunny attitude. Everyone likes a guy with a spring in his step. But really, the folks paying for all those public goods, which I happily enjoy, with their labor and their lousy sex lives are certainly getting a raw deal. Notice that if they state provides things like health insurance, and so forth, then I’m really kicking it, and things have gotten even more unfair.

Seriously though, what do egalitarians think about this? Should we legalize prostitution and give people vouchers? Should we have mandatory national sexual service? Or can we just ignore certain deep kinds of inequality if the detection and enforcement costs are too high? That would be interesting.

I’m sure I’ve gotten ahead of myself here, but, you know, good times.

Has anyone considered that this may be an inclusive disjunction?

Meanwhile, P. Diddy is attempting to stir the nation’s youth to action with his “Vote or Die” campaign. Now, Diddy, being a master logician, has had the foresight to pick a disjunction that is certainly true, if only contingently so. Everyone will eventually die, while it is perfectly possible (because actual) to neither choose nor lose.

Now it may be that Diddy intends an exclusive disjunction. (Either one or the other, but not both.) But I don’t think he really wants to say that people who die didn’t vote. He only wants to say that if you don’t vote, then you’ll die. Right? Well, we do know that only about half of the registered voters, to say nothing of eligible voters, failed to exercise their rights of citizenship in the last election. But Diddy’s conditional entails that the non-dead voted, yet many non-dead non-voters are among us. So that can’t be right. So he must be saying that if you don’t vote, the probability of dying will increase. How about that? Well, we can check the death rates among voters and non-voters from the last election. My hunch is that the rate of death among voters is probably higher than among non-voters, since the elderly vote more reliably than the young, and the elderly tend to die more. So what is Mr. Combs trying to say?

Wonkette, takes it as a threat, “Vote or I’ll wave a gun in your face in a midtown nightclub,” which is frightening, but can’t quite capture it, because waving a gun in someone’s face doesn’t entail their death. So it needs to be a bit stronger: Vote or I’ll make you dead (whether with a pistol, a machete, a tank of water and a cinder block, a mortally frightening clown, whatever). I don’t think this is the intended message, however.

Perhaps it is something like “There is someone such that if you don’t vote, they will make you dead.” This is a good possibility. But who could “someone” be? An avenging Democracy Fairy who slays non-voters? Well, the Democracy Fairy would have to be new, since we guessed that voters are in fact more likely to die than non-voters. Maybe the intention instead is “In a contest between A and B, if you don’t vote, then A or B will make you dead.” I think we’re getting very close, and that this is entailed by the correct interpretation. I think it’s more like, “In a contest between A and B, if A wins, then A will not make you dead, and if B wins, then B will make you dead, and if you vote, then you vote for A, and A wins, and if you don’t vote, then B wins.”

I wonder if Puffy knows something we don’t. For my part, I suspect that B is . . . Michael Badnarik!

Or that the Diddy is subversively highlighting the majoritarian coercion implicit in democracy.

Koch Fellow Rachel Balsham has a smart post over at Obernews on the adaptation of the market to the prevalent distaste for the market. After a number of interesting examples, she predicts that

given the prevalence of vague anti-market preferences among bobos, the rise of bobo culture will bring about more creative ways to be capitalist without the aftertaste of oppression. And eventually, maybe private enterprise won’t taste so bad to the cultural elite.

I think this raises all sorts of interesting questions, few of which I will raise here.

I will say that Balsham’s Conjecture strikes me as containing a deep tension between the expression of preference in the market and in the voting booth. If enough people have anti-market preferences, then the market will, soon enough, begin providing goods and services packaged in a manner that appeals to those preferences. And if enough people have anti-market preferences, they will vote for anti-market policy. They are in effect buying the same thing in both cases: self-narrative coherence.

Rachel seems to think that once the market starts giving anti-market folks products that flatter their ideological self-conceptions, the edges will begin to rub off the classic anti-market tropes, and anti-market commitments will soften. But this might be backwards. The market may gratify anti-market preferences by selling products that affirm and entrench classic anti-market tropes, thus cementing or even sharpening anti-market preferences. These preferences, expressed electorally, are bad for the market.

As the Marxists were fond of saying, “The capitalist will sell you the rope with which to hang him.” Or something like that. What we have, then, if we turn Balsham’s Conjecture on its head, is a sort of ideological tragedy of the commons, where entrepreneurs race to profit from products that undermine the cultural conditions of entrepreneurship.

Oh, the contradictions of capitalism!

Check out the newish blog from the Drug Policy Alliance (Reason! Compassion!! Justice!!!) written by Baylen Linnekin. Baylen was at an IHS seminar I stage-managed a few years ago, and I had the good fortune of running into him a couple months ago after some AFF thing. Baylen’s a good guy. The blog is a very useful compendium of drug-related stories and entertainingly written. Go look.

Wonkette is disappointed at her pathetically failed attempt at libertarian-baiting. She complains:

We’re sort of befuddled that our jab at the prospects for Libertarian sex-for-votes trading didn’t generate more indignant email from outraged Reason subscribers. These are people who can get a lively debate going about Schumpeter versus von Mises, but accuse them of not getting any and they’re suspiciously silent. Sure, they talk a good free love game, but where are the swinging Chicago school devotees when push comes to, uhm, shove? We’re not the only ones wondering. Noting that a special on A&E this week blares that “There may be as many as 50,000 people involved in polygamous relationships in Utah,” a libertarian livejournaler responds, “And you poly Objectivists think you’re all kinky and shit! Ha! You guys are being outfucked by MORMONS!”

Now, I’m not about to concede that little Ludwig and I don’t see much action, but I can gladly admit to being outfucked by Mormons without losing face. For Ana Marie and her livejournaler seem not to know that Mormonism, if about nothing is else, is about fucking!

Our “souls” are “spirit children,” which are the consequence of a good celestial rodgering. The aim of life is to become a god and fuck away the afterlife with one’s eternal spouse(s). A sexier theology is hardly imaginable.

According to some randomly Googled website (and I stand behind this account with the full weight of my experience as “Historic Interpreter” at the Joseph Smith Historic Center):

In Mormon theology, there are three levels of heaven, terrestial, tellestial, and celestial. It teaches that almost everyone will make it to the first level, terrestrial, but Mormons seek entrance to celestial heaven, because there they are exalted to godhood. Once a man is exalted to godhood, he and his wife will reproduce offspring for eternity. These spirit children will in turn inhabit physical bodies and have the opportunity to become gods as well. This privilege is reserved for those who go through the sacred marriage ceremony in the Temple and live in obedience to Mormon teachings.

The point is, there is no shame in being outfucked by Mormons. Fucking is what they do!

[Bonus! Click here for the words to "If I Could Hie to Kolob". Note: Kolob here is NOT a canyon in Utah!]

If you, or someone you know, is looking for a place to live in Washington, DC starting in September, there is a yet-unfilled vacancy at the Westminnie House. 934 Westminster is ONE (convoluted) block’s distance from the U St/Cardozo/African American Civil War Memorial metro stop. We’re within a leisurely five minute stroll of some of DC’s best music venues: 9:30, Black Cat, Velvet Lounge, DC9, Bohemian Caverns, and more. The restaurants and bars of a rapidly gentrifying U St are RIGHT THERE. Walk to DuPont: 15 minutes. Walk to Adams Morgan: 15 minutes. Walk Downtown: 15-20 minutes. Giant (ugh) and Whole Foods supermarkets are nearby.

Preferred roomates are 20-to-early-30-something young professional intellectual types (e.g., lettered in debate or quiz bowl). Your roommates would include two researchers at the Urban Institute and a UMD philosophy grad student.

Query in the comments, or to flybottle [[at]] willwilkinson [[dot]] net.

[Update: The vacancy has been filled. Thanks for your interest.]

I agree with almost the whole of Alina Stefanescu’s articulate and angry “apology.” Read it.

Alina’s essay reminds me of something I’ve been thinking a lot about lately. Consider Alina’s quote from Michnik:

Without free, self-respecting, and autonomous citizens, there can be no free and independent nations… a state that ignores the will and rights of its citizens can offer no guarantee that it will respect the will and rights of other peoples, nations, and states.

Do we have “free, self-respecting, and autonomous citizens”? I think: no.

The traditional Marxish theory of consumer culture is that the dark arts of marketing and advertising germinate within us “false” desires. A false desire is one whose satisfaction serves not one’s own “interests,” but the interests of those in the business of servicing (for a pretty penny!) the psychic “needs” that they themselves have planted. So we are supposed to be wary of Nike, Starbucks, etc. lest we surrender our autonomy to the cigar-chomping moneybags. No Logo!

This idea has never done much for me. I’m impressed with my own tendency to want only a surpassingly slim fraction of the things marketed to me, and my want seems best explained by its relation to longstanding projects and plans. The thing about the market is that it is SO fragmented, there are so many choices, and there are so many counterbalancing sales-pitches competing over my very small budget that it is most likely that my choices in the end reflect fairly “authentic” preferences. (Let’s say those are preferences that emerge more or less organically from my practical identity.) I’ve never seen the yogurt or cereal I eat advertised. I chose New Balance running shoes over Nike because I tried both and New Balance fit my feet better. I chose to start running again because I don’t want to be fat. (And I don’t want to be fat because, well, yes, the HHS’s wildly successful VERB: It’s what you do! campaign.)

However, I am beginning to find the Marxist critique quite pertinent to America’s duopolistic political system. Both libertarians and Greens insistently point out that the differences between the policies of the Ds and the Rs are mostly cosmetic, with a few substantive exceptions. The logic of the median voter theorem pushes politicians toward the middle with rhetorical concessions to the flanks.

What we end up with is a choice between policy-bundles as different from the other as Colgate from Crest. But in politics we have only Colgate and Crest. Some people will have a genuine preference for better whitening action, while others will genuinely prefer enhanced cavity protection. But mostly there is a riot of indifference.

Since the policy bundles we’re offered represent only a tiny slice of the possible range, they will only very improbably reflect most “authentic” combinations of political preferences. Most people would be unsatisfied with the choices, and ill-motivated to vote. So the parties must implant false desire. The parties and their stooges in the media mount massive marketing and advertising assaults to make you think that a certain kind of attractive person votes for their side, a certain kind of awful person votes for the other side, and that you, no doubt, are an attractive person.

It is said that red and blue is a state of mind. A “psychographic” in the marketer’s lingo. But I posit that these states of mind are ideological constructions, in the good old-fashioned Marxist sense. There is nothing deep in your identity that leads you organically to accept abortion, denounce the death penalty, oppose school vouchers, want to save the spotted titmouse, etc. (Or the counterparts to these views.) Yes, there is a story you tell yourself and others about how all this hangs together. Your sense of identity is bound up in it. But, ultimately, it’s a story that only passingly serves your own true interests. For the most part your muddle of preferences, your political identity, your political desire, is a tool for the satisfaction of the interests of one set of power-seeking narcissists over the interests of a mostly indistinguisable set of others.

I’ve got to say that it’s just sort of embarrassing to see the AdBusting, culture jamming, No-Logoites wandering my neighborhood armed with clipboards marching door-to-door plumping for John Forbes Kerry, as if Civilization Depends Upon It. The whole industry of pop leftism–Michael Moore, Al Franken, Thomas Frank, Move On, etc.–, turns out to be a device, among other things, for getting earnest kids superficially worried about autonomy and alienation to hit the sidewalk and maximize taps on the Diebold flatscreen for the greater glory of a self-infatuated millionaire blowhard whose policies suspiciously resemble the bumbling, Jesus-spouting halfwit they’ve learned to hate with a delicious half-mad zeal. They labor happily, bent to the will of the political class, animated by a comically absurd set of beliefs and desires that could not truly be their own.

I speak of the left, but do not think I lack pity for the poor souls fully convinced that a Democratic White House will lead to compulsory abortion, mandatory sodomy, and total capitulation to the Arab terror.

Living in DC, the “pick a team” ethos is almost overwhelming. People want to know whose side you’re on. Well, I say, be on the side of the free, self-respecting, and autonomous. The side of the angels. The hope of freedom. Alina said that the only worthwile wars of liberation are those you fight on your own. Yes. So reject the manufactured political identity. Resist the terms of the debate. Refuse to be used.

You do need to brush your teeth, but you don’t need to vote.