PJ sent me a link to a piece by J.M. Bernstein about the tea party movement. The title, "The Very Angry Tea Party," gives an idea as to his take. The central flaw with his article, as with many similar articles written on this subject, is that it assumes that the tea partiers must have something which unites them. In a sense this is true; every movement must have some common thread or it will divide into two or more movements. But, so far as I can tell, the only thing that unites the tea party is a sometimes vague and often contradictory notion that government has gotten too big and must be reduced in size. There is certainly anger, but Bernstein downplays the extent to which this may be justified, while at the same time he sees little else in the movement. This is a mistake because, whether or not we support its goals--which remain ill defined--we would do well to understand it.
As readers of the blog well know, I'm an ardent supporter of Ron Paul. As a result, I've been aware of the tea party movement for a very long time. Like the snobbish indie rocker, I was into tea parties before they were cool--only I was never really into them. I supported Paul's campaign to educate the American people about the importance of liberty, sound money and a humble foreign policy, but meet up groups and political rallies aren't my cup of--well, you know. I prefer to read economic treatises and bore my friends with discussions of Austrian business cycle theory.
Two things surprised me about the tea party: first, that they became a big deal; second, that the movement has staying power. Somewhere between the first and the second surprise something happened: the establishment caught on and tried to join the movement. Suddenly, Sean Hannity was pimping for the partiers. This helped raise visibility, but it hurt the movement in the long run. Sean does a grand job of firing up the base about the evil of the democratic party, which is a laudable goal. But he's AWOL when it comes to abuses on behalf of his beloved republicans. He might say some nasty things about Arlen Specter, but Bush can grow government as much as he wants without earning a rebuke from Sean. In other words, Hannity is a partisan hack.
Hannity's tea party is sometimes the one Bernstein discusses:
When it comes to the Tea Party’s concrete policy proposals, things get fuzzier and more contradictory: keep the government out of health care, but leave Medicare alone; balance the budget, but don’t raise taxes; let individuals take care of themselves, but leave Social Security alone.
It's fair to point out the contradictions here because they're rather noticeable. On the other hand, it's nothing new, either. As I once wrote: "[T]he folly of conservatism lies in its defensive nature; it can mitigate the damage done by the forces of liberalism, but it can never prevent their longterm success." Hannity's tea party is fighting against things he will be supporting in twenty years.
I use Hannity to denote the faction of the tea party with which I am in least sympathy, but Palin is the actual leader. As this poll demonstrates, tea partiers are split between Ron Paul and Sarah Palin. Moreover, despite the movement they ostensibly share, supporters of one are not likely to care for the other. This is an important aspect of the movement--one which gets too little attention.
Naturally, I side with the Paul people. I do so for two main reasons. First, Paul advocates a sensible and moral foreign policy. While Palin and company want government to be small, they want defense to be huge. This is problematic because the armed forces are more dangerous to life and liberty than any other aspect of the government--of which, I hesitate to remind Palin, defense surely is a part. It's absurd, too, because the annals of history fail to recommend a single example of an empire--such as we possess--with an insignificant bureaucracy. You want a big army, you have to take the big bureaucracy.
The second reason I side with Paul is that his understanding of the nature of government is so much more complete and consistent. Human beings are capable of exchanging goods and services for mutual benefit. Such exchanges are inherently just because they are voluntary. Contrariwise, the State is force. Its subjects are not allowed to opt out voluntarily; at most, they may move to another State. Instead, they must fight in its wars, or at least pay for them. They must use its currency--which is constantly being debased so as to siphon funds to State coffers. They must give up a large percentage of their income, so as to pay for services they may or may not wish to receive. As the great Ludwig von Mises observed, "Government is essentially the negation of liberty." Hence libertarians do what we can to resist it.
In discussing this resistance, Bernstein's piece insinuates that the tea partiers may become violent:
In truth, there is nothing that the Tea Party movement wants; terrifyingly, it wants nothing. Lilla calls the Tea Party “Jacobins”; I would urge that they are nihilists. To date, the Tea Party has committed only the minor, almost atmospheric violences of propagating falsehoods, calumny and the disruption of the occasions for political speech — the last already to great and distorting effect. But if their nihilistic rage is deprived of interrupting political meetings as an outlet, where might it now go? With such rage driving the Tea Party, might we anticipate this atmospheric violence becoming actual violence, becoming what Hegel called, referring to the original Jacobins’ fantasy of total freedom, “a fury of destruction”? There is indeed something not just disturbing, but frightening, in the anger of the Tea Party.
I cannot speak for the Palin crowd, but the Paulians are not a violent bunch. Philosophically, the opposition to government stems from its opposition to force. To use the State's means against it would be to acknowledge that aggressive force has a place in society, something the libertarian rejects. Instead, we patiently bide our time, educating those among us who are open to the message of liberty. We will also be ready to offer a peaceful alternative when the State strikes out violently against those who are reluctant to abide by its might.
Bernstein has one other point that he offers which I wish to address:
My hypothesis is that what all the events precipitating the Tea Party movement share is that they demonstrated, emphatically and unconditionally, the depths of the absolute dependence of us all on government action, and in so doing they undermined the deeply held fiction of individual autonomy and self-sufficiency that are intrinsic parts of Americans’ collective self-understanding.
This is correct, but it is also misleading. We are dependent because the government compels us to be. We use its currency, and suffer inflation because of it. We must work to pay for two senseless, losing wars. We thus have less money to feed our families, and with which we may strengthen non-compulsory institutions, none of which is more important than the family itself.
Bernstein hints that the tea party may be revolutionary. It is far more likely that it will utterly fail to do much of anything. The American people don't actually hate government. Sure, some of us do, but we're idiosyncratic. The success of Ron Paul's End the Fed notwithstanding, obsessions with monetary policy are signs that you may belong to the remnant of which Albert Jay Nock wrote. Most people will tolerate the government until it oversteps its bounds to the point where the deleterious consequences of governmental interference can no longer be ignored.
This is what we've witnessed recently, and it's a point that we must not forget. Yes, conservatives like Hannity are hypocritical for supporting the State as long as their guy was running it. But this doesn't detract from the fact that the State violates our liberties with impunity, and is patently responsible for the impoverishment of millions of Americans.
Consider what has occurred in the last three or four years. Mainstream economists, pundits and politicians insisted that the economy was doing well. The Austrian school knew better of course. When it was no longer possible to pretend that there was a problem, both major presidential candidates helped transfer billions of dollars, enough money to pay off almost every mortgage in the country, to bail out rich bankers--who then took home huge bonuses. The same buffoons who didn't recognize the housing bubble insisted that the stimulus would fix the economy. They then used meaningless metrics to prove that the recession was over. This happened while unemployment continued to climb. Meanwhile, the State picked up the slack by hiring more people to interfere in the lives of free citizens. We also found out that private sector employees are suckers, who make far less than those who work for the State.
This had the tendency to make people angry. Should we be surprised? Instead of being concerned with the anger of the tea party, I think Bernstein should ask himself why he fails to share their emotions. It's ripping him off, too.
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5 comments:
Eric: The central flaw with his article, as with many similar articles written on this subject, is that it assumes that the tea partiers must have something which unites them. [....S]o far as I can tell, the only thing that unites the tea party is a sometimes vague and often contradictory notion that government has gotten too big and must be reduced in size.
PJ: Are you saying that the tea party doesn't have to have a coherent platform because they're justifiably angry, and this is all that matters, e.g., let's all agree that there are too many taxes and then worry about putting together a coherent vision for a government that doesn't tax us so highly? Or are you saying that the anger is already enough of a platform and these people ought to be elected to office? The first claim strikes me as defensible (though I disagree); the second, much less so.
Eric: You want a big army, you have to take the big bureaucracy.
PJ: So too with highways, public utilities, law enforcement, universally available education--the list of goods goes on-and-on...
Eric: Human beings are capable of exchanging goods and services for mutual benefit. Such exchanges are inherently just because they are voluntary. Contrariwise, the State is force. Its subjects are not allowed to opt out voluntarily; at most, they may move to another State.
PJ: Market exchanges that are genuinely voluntary under conditions of mutual transparency are just. But sometimes one party has an unfair position and deceives the other, trading him something he would not want if he knew better what it was. Worse yet, sometimes the whole institutional context of the exchange distorts the understanding of both parties, so that everyone ends up in a state none of them wanted.
As to state, the crucial issue is not whether it must have the authority to exercise force -- this, I believe, is unavoidable -- but rather the conditions in which we must recognize that force as legitimate. This is something we should pay attention to in the contract theorists we're reading.
Eric: We are dependent because the government compels us to be. We use its currency, and suffer inflation because of it. We must work to pay for two senseless, losing wars. We thus have less money to feed our families, and with which we may strengthen non-compulsory institutions, none of which is more important than the family itself.
Eric: Family would have to keep pretty close. Lack of travel infrastructure would make it rather difficult to go more than a few miles from home--though I suppose lack of law-enforcement would make the prospect of leaving the house rather dangerous in any case. You'd have to be on the good side of ruling gang. And I bet their violent and extortive practices would cast the giant bureaucracy of a democratic republic in a decidedly more favorable light...
In any case, below are the two paragraphs that I take to contain the core of his objection to the Tea Party and libertarianism, though I suppose it would take a whole lot more detail to make a truly compelling case for either of the alternatives he lays out.
"But even this way of expressing the issue of dependence is too weak, too merely political; after all, although recent events have revealed the breadth and depths of our dependencies on institutions and practices over which we have little or no control, not all of us have responded with such galvanizing anger and rage. Tea Party anger is, at bottom, metaphysical, not political: what has been undone by the economic crisis is the belief that each individual is metaphysically self-sufficient, that one’s very standing and being as a rational agent owes nothing to other individuals or institutions. The opposing metaphysical claim, the one I take to be true, is that the very idea of the autonomous subject is an institution, an artifact created by the practices of modern life: the intimate family, the market economy, the liberal state. Each of these social arrangements articulate and express the value and the authority of the individual; they give to the individual a standing she would not have without them."
"Of course, if you are a libertarian or even a certain kind of liberal, you will object that these practices do not manufacture anything; they simply give individuality its due. The issue here is a central one in modern philosophy: is individual autonomy an irreducible metaphysical given or a social creation? Descartes famously argued that self or subject, the “I think,” was metaphysically basic, while Hegel argued that we only become self-determining agents through being recognized as such by others who we recognize in turn. It is by recognizing one another as autonomous subjects through the institutions of family, civil society and the state that we become such subjects; those practices are how we recognize and so bestow on one another the title and powers of being free individuals."
Are you saying that the tea party doesn't have to have a coherent platform because they're justifiably angry, and this is all that matters, e.g., let's all agree that there are too many taxes and then worry about putting together a coherent vision for a government that doesn't tax us so highly? Or are you saying that the anger is already enough of a platform and these people ought to be elected to office? The first claim strikes me as defensible (though I disagree); the second, much less so.
I'm saying that the tea party isn't a monolithic block. I find the tea party fascinating because it shows the widening gap between our leaders and the people, but in a sense the group is largely irrelevant. The tea party might be able to scare politicians away from passing any more significant spending bills, but they'll prove powerless to do anything about already bloated entitlement programs. It's end game for the Republic either way.
So too with highways, public utilities, law enforcement, universally available education--the list of goods goes on-and-on...
Definitely. This is why I'm sympathetic to the anarcho-capitalist position. Theorists like Walter Block write whole books about the necessity of privatizing roads. I'm amenable to movement in that direction.
As to state, the crucial issue is not whether it must have the authority to exercise force -- this, I believe, is unavoidable -- but rather the conditions in which we must recognize that force as legitimate. This is something we should pay attention to in the contract theorists we're reading.
Agreed. I do not consider myself an anarchist, though I have sympathies with people, like Block, who are. Still, one thing the libertarians have right, I think, is that voluntary exchange is an ideal. It may be necessary to compel people now and again, but it is up to the State--and its defenders-- to explain why voluntary exchange is not suitable in this particular situation. In our society, it often seems the reverse.
Family would have to keep pretty close. Lack of travel infrastructure would make it rather difficult to go more than a few miles from home--though I suppose lack of law-enforcement would make the prospect of leaving the house rather dangerous in any case. You'd have to be on the good side of ruling gang.
Libertarian theorists have devoted a good deal of time and thought to these problems. I need to do some more reading, but it seems clear to me that if something is desirable--roads for instance--a non-violent means can be used to procure them.
A similar case could be made for defense. The police, when not openly corrupt, often respond too late anyway. This is why personal protection is advisable, and part of the reason why I own a handgun. When you look at the history of violent action by the State, often against its own citizens, it seems to me that the case for defensive provision by the State is less than clear. To whom do you appeal when the State behaves wrongly in its effort to protect us? To the State itself?
As to your quotation of Bernstein, I think it's important to take into consideration institutions. But institutions themselves are made up of individuals. And the Judeo-Christian tradition is clear that the individual has his own soul, is made in the image of God, and therefore he has value in and of himself. Hopefully, this leads us to see the value in others as well. In any event, I'm leery of the notion that individuality is a social creation.
Eric: Definitely. This is why I'm sympathetic to the anarcho-capitalist position. Theorists like Walter Block write whole books about the necessity of privatizing roads. I'm amenable to movement in that direction.
PJ: I'm skeptical. How about privatizing air traffic control? The army? But I'm glad that you agree there is an important issue here that needs to be addressed for your position to be politically viable.
Eric: Still, one thing the libertarians have right, I think, is that voluntary exchange is an ideal. It may be necessary to compel people now and again, but it is up to the State--and its defenders-- to explain why voluntary exchange is not suitable in this particular situation. In our society, it often seems the reverse.
PJ: You have this in common with all of the social contract theorists we'll be reading. I guess sometime we'll have to do something in the Hegelian-Marxist tradition to examine the powerful critiques leveled against their individualistic assumptions. I think most people (exempting Stalinists, etc.) support voluntary exchange. Hegel had a tremendous amount of respect for Smith's economic writings, for instance, and the critical theory that has been developed out of this tradition can be borderline hysterical about the need to defend individuality. The complications they introduce have to do with the social conditions in which genuine autonomy, and hence truly voluntary action, can be achieved--not under capitalism, some argue.
Eric: I need to do some more reading, but it seems clear to me that if something is desirable--roads for instance--a non-violent means can be used to procure them.
PJ: As you know, I don't think that the the taxes leveled by a democratic government can be rightly considered a form of violence.
Eric: When you look at the history of violent action by the State, often against its own citizens, it seems to me that the case for defensive provision by the State is less than clear. To whom do you appeal when the State behaves wrongly in its effort to protect us? To the State itself?
PJ: The case for violent action, both deliberate and accidental, by civilians with firearms is also pretty terrible. I trust you've at least undergone proper instruction. As to appeals, you appeal to the state in public via the citizens that it is supposed to represent.
Eric: As to your quotation of Bernstein, I think it's important to take into consideration institutions. But institutions themselves are made up of individuals.
PJ: Right, there is a complex and historically mediated sort of interdependence between individuals and social institutions. But this is too big of a question to properly debate without a lot more reading and time...
Cheers,
PJ
Hegel had a tremendous amount of respect for Smith's economic writings, for instance, and the critical theory that has been developed out of this tradition can be borderline hysterical about the need to defend individuality.
That's intriguing. Murray Rothbard, the famous Austrian economist and libertarian, blames Smith for providing the erroneous labor theory of value which later did significant damage in the hands of Marx.
I put Copleston aside for a bit, but Volume VII deals with Hegel. I'd be up for reading a bit of him once I've done a little more homework.
As you know, I don't think that the the taxes leveled by a democratic government can be rightly considered a form of violence.
Do you have the option of refusing to pay? Say you oppose the foreign policy of the U.S., and only desire to give consent to spending which doesn't go to murder foreigners. Can you refuse consent in this particular area? Or will the Feds come drag you away for refusing to go along?
Unless a tax is voluntary, it is backed by an at least implicit threat of violence. That the State knows people will not pay the money necessary for the services it provides should cause us to think long and hard about the value of these services.
The case for violent action, both deliberate and accidental, by civilians with firearms is also pretty terrible.
I oppose aggression in all its forms. But when someone aggresses against you, you are within your rights--according to Locke, Thomas, and a host of others--to use proportional force to check that aggression. Most of the time, the mere presence of a gun is enough to convince the aggressor that escalation is not worth it.
Economist John Lott has done some good work in correcting many of the myths surrounding guns. His books are valuable even if his empirical case is of less importance than the ethical case for self-preservation and defense.
As to appeals, you appeal to the state in public via the citizens that it is supposed to represent.
This is worth delving into, though possibly at a different time, especially as we are reading Locke. For a fascinating look at the pitfalls of the democratic system, I suggest Hans-Hermann Hoppe's Democracy: The God That Failed.
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