I have these little moments of clarity in which I think I understand everything. I’m having one now, so I have to keyboard fast before it fades.
In an essay at The Guardian, Madeleine Bunting writes,
This humbling evidence of our hopeless decision-making exposes consumer capitalism as not being about millions of independent decisions of individuals expressing unique identities, but about how social norms can be manipulated to create eager shoppers.
In a nutshell, why “libertarianism” doesn’t work.
I’ve long had a kind of anthropological interest in Reason magazine. Reason is a libertarian publication that has as its motto “Free Minds and Free Markets.” I had a free subscription for a while, and reading it always gave me an urge to put the lot of the staff on a couch, Ã la Freud, and ask them how they felt about their mothers.
The issue with the Reasonites is not intelligence. Some righties are just bag-of-hammers stupid, yes, but the writers of Reason are articulate and capable of showing insight as long as they aren’t writing about, you know, politics. Or economies. In those contexts, “free market” ideology has so shackled their brains that they can’t critically think their way out of a wet paper bag.
Take this article by Damon W. Root, which is one of the most stunningly wrong-headed things I’ve read on the Web in quite some time:
Chip Berlet, a senior researcher at the liberal think tank Political Research Associates, went even further than that, telling New America Media: “For over 100 years—more like 150, you’ve had these movements, and they came out of the Civil War. It is a backlash against social liberalism and it’s rooted in libertarian support for unregulated capitalism and white people holding onto power, and, if they see themselves losing it, trying to get it back.” …
… Perhaps Berlet should consider the career of South Carolina’s Benjamin “Pitchfork” Tillman (1847-1914), a leading progressive who railed against the sins of “unregulated capitalism” while preaching the salvation of white supremacy. An ally of the agrarian populist William Jennings Bryan, Tillman supported antitrust laws, railroad regulations, the free coinage of silver, and a host of other progressive panaceas. He first entered politics as a member of the Red Shirts, a Klan-like terror group that “came out of the Civil War” to menace African Americans during the early years of Reconstruction. When President Theodore Roosevelt entertained the black leader Booker T. Washington at the White House in 1901, Tillman served as a de facto spokesman for the Southern opposition, declaring: “The action of President Roosevelt in entertaining that nigger will necessitate our killing a thousand niggers in the South before they will learn their place again.” It’s hard to imagine a nastier threat of political violence than that—and Tillman is obviously nobody’s idea of a libertarian.
Jeez, where do I start — I’m not even going to address the crass intellectual dishonesty of defining “progressivism” purely in terms of regulation of capitalism, except that it’s a standard lie righties tell themselves to make the world a simpler place to understand. Sorting everything in into simple binary piles of good-bad, us-them, capitalists-everybody else, is a grand way to conserve cognitive resources, although it doesn’t tell you much about the real world.
Second, if you know anything at all about the antebellum South and the passions and ideas that inflamed into the American Civil War, you should know that 19th century southern whites were anti-capitalists. Indeed, you could define the secession movement of 1860 and 1861 as a libertarian revolt against capitalism. It would be a stretch, but not nearly as big a stretch as defining Benjamin “Pitchfork” Tillman as a “progressive.
By 1860, the northern states were well into the industrial revolution, while the South remained stuck in pre-industrial agrarian mode. More and more damnyankees were leaving the farms and making a living either by getting jobs in industry or starting a business. But the slave economy of the South did not allow capitalism to gain a foothold, because goods and services were either imported or performed by slaves.
The enormous majority of southern whites were illiterate dirt farmers (or “yeoman” farmers, in the vernacular of social historians), not plantation owners or slave owners. But these fellows largely bought into the southern ideal of being one’s own man (women not being full citizens yet) on one’s own property. The northern proclivity for getting jobs and working for someone else was sneered at as “wage slavery.”
So, 19th century Southern culture was thoroughly anti-capitalist. However, you could argue that it was very “libertarian” in that it also was anti-Big Government. The Confederate Constitution is one of the most libertarian political documents America every produced. The Confederate ideal was all about weakening the federal government in favor of states’ rights and neutering the power of government generally to interfere with what a man did on, and with, his own property. The election of Abraham Lincoln represented, to them, the ascendancy of big-government tyranny that would interfere with their freedom to live as they wished.
The hot issue of the 1860 wasn’t just slavery; it was slavery in the territories. The popularity of Uncle Tom’s Cabin notwithstanding, most white northerners really didn’t care if the southerners kept slaves, so long as slavery was kept out of their neighborhoods (which was an issue in the Dred Scott decision, which determined that a slave remained a slave even if he was taken into free territory). But northerners were passionate about keeping slavery out of the territories, which at that point was most of the country west of the Mississippi, because if slavery moved in, the possibilities of entrepreneurship would be canceled out.
Plantation owners, on the other hand, came to believe that if slavery couldn’t be spread into the territories it eventually would die out. So every time a new state was admitted into the Union, the whole nation would get into an uproar over whether the state would be “slave” or “free.” A very bloody mini-Civil War was fought over the admission of Kansas as a free state (finalized in January 1861), for example. There had been several compromises over the years that postponed civil war, but by 1860 the population of the U.S. was poised to spill over into the vast western plains and mountains in a big way, and a decision had to be made. Clearly, the country could not survive divided against itself, half slave and half free.
So the Civil War was fought, and two of the reasons the South lost was (1) lack of industrial resources, and (2) states’ rights. Jefferson Davis couldn’t get the state governments to work together to maximize federal resources as well as Lincoln could.
The bottom line is that for an old Confederate — and, later, a leading proponent of Jim Crow — like Tillman to be defined as a “progressive” because he didn’t mind some regulation of capitalism is beyond bag-of-hammers stupid. It reveals a deep delusion brought on by seeing everything through a thick fog of ideology. There are no “free minds” at Reason magazine.
The very fact that Tillman opposed Theodore Roosevelt should have been a clue, because in his domestic policy ideas TR was one of the most progressive presidents we ever had. Indeed, some of us see TR’s New Nationalism speech, delivered after he left the White House, as the foundation of American liberalism.
OK, so I got into the Civil War and almost forgot where I started. Going back to Madeleine Bunting, who is one of my favorite writers at Comment Is Free — she writes about new trends in psychological and sociological scholarship, which argue that we are not the free thinkers we think we are. We are all, in fact, programed by our culture and upbringing and easily manipulated by many forces within our societies. Intellectual autonomy is a delusion.
(In short, what the Buddha taught 25 centuries ago. Nice to see the West catching up.)
The libertarian/Randian argument that free people making independent and rational decisions about their own economic self-interest will naturally create self-sustaining, healthy market and community systems that need a minimal amount of government regulation. The empirical fact that such an ideal doesn’t work in the real world never sinks in. The fact is that few of us make genuinely independent and rational decisions, but rather stumble through life in a semi-awake state, being jerked around like puppets by many forces within and without. And it takes enormous effort to break through the fog and see that.
It’s so much more comfortable to cocoon yourself in a place where you are always right, because your ideological interface allows you to manipulate reality any way you like. But some of us don’t call that “freedom.”
