with friends like these...

"Back in New York City, you can feel the tremors in the social bedrock, if not in the earth’s crust, as T. J. Randall would have it. An online video game, designed recently by libertarians in Brooklyn, called “2011: Obama’s Coup Fails” imagines a scenario in which the Democrats lose seventeen of nineteen seats in the Senate and a hundred and seventy-eight in the House during the midterm elections, prompting the President to dissolve the Constitution and implement an emergency North American People’s Union, with help from Mexico’s Felipe Calderón, Canada’s Stephen Harper, and various civilian defense troops with names like the Black Tigers, the International Service Union Empire, and CORNY, or the Congress of Rejected and Neglected Youth. Lou Dobbs has gone missing, Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh turn up dead at a FEMA concentration camp, and you, a lone militiaman in a police state where private gun ownership has been outlawed, are charged with defeating the enemies of patriotism, one county at a time."

Read more: http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/02/01/100201fa_fact_mcgrath?currentPage=all#ixzz0eLRLEoTG

Very often I have to look at the political situation and wonder whether I am disenfranchised from it enough. And then I see stuff like that and I realize that apparently this is the closest thing most Americans have in their minds when they consider third party politics and arrangements. It isn't some philosophical assumptions that arrive them supporting a political party and system that doesn't exist anymore. It's more like a reactionary sentiment that is fueled by some sort of fear. The cynicism I have over the corporatism that influences and is influenced by Washington politics does not extend to spouting random conspiracy theories like those made popular in the X-Files during my youth, things like FEMA and the government is coming for your guns and NAFTA is there to sell us to the aliens in Mexico or Canada or whatever with some new North American government and secret black helicopters. X-Files is funny entertainment. It is not a coherent political message or agenda. When those are the sorts of people that people associate with "libertarianism", I have some serious reservations about my choices in political persuasions. Most of my own experiences within libertarian philosophy and its attending policy positions are with academics. Sometimes they propose things that look a little nutty or that will simply not happen. But they also don't sit around complaining about NAFTA and black helicopters and FEMA (except to say that usually private markets work better than the coordinated solutions of governments like FEMA).

I continue to look at the Tea Party movement as a joke, consisting largely of people engaged in a massive act of group therapy with an as yet incoherent political agenda or message. I would guess their diagnosis of the problems are boiled down to a simple "they're taking our country away" only it's unclear who the "they" is or which country they are talking about (it is abundantly clear that most of the people tending toward social conservatism within this movement haven't been anywhere outside their own intellectual bubbles to see what the rest of the country consists of). It does appear to have gotten its act together and figured out at least that all politics is local. It's not clear if it has figured out that voting against the other guy (which appears to be some of the motivations behind Scott Brown voters) is not a serious political movement. It will get some attention when it works, and when it fails (as in NY-23), but it will be difficult to take what is essentially a message about decentralization and create any sort of stable philosophy about the directions of government. This has been the problem of libertarianism as a general ideology for any party (especially the Libertarian Party) for decades. It will remain impossible if other attending demands again resurface as the economy continues its inevitable recoveries. It is pretty easy to get people of any stripes to coordinate their agitations when their jobs are threatened, or when the prospects for their children seem dimmer, because people are generally more pessimistic about the economy anyway than people who study it for a living. It will be much harder to govern based upon that agitation however.

What exactly do they want done for example? Even if it is "stop doing this, or that" rather than the alternatives of "pass health care reform" et al, you still need a way to enact a plan to stop doing this or that, from cutting the funding to voting against it. I haven't seen one to focus on what is one of the apparent primary concerns of tea partiers: the national debt and deficit spending. How do they plan to address the situation? We still don't know. Getting outside of the economic boxes, and into these bizarro worlds like gun control fears and conspiracy theories will not help. And that's basically inevitable. A country that gets its information filter primarily from google searches (that they themselves select where to go and what to look for) and muttering incoherent slogans about freedom is not very likely to have sensible ideas on the direction that that country is going in and how to arrest whatever problems they perceive.

A political movement like this appears to be gaining some sensibility and looks to be trying to kick Palin and other national figures to the curb. I think this is sensible, mostly because if Palin comes to be seen as "your" party or the voice of that movement, that whole movement is fucked. I think at its core much of the politics of the last 3 years or so suggests that many Americans have arrived at a conclusion that enough is enough and that the directions we have gone are incorrect, foolish, or dangerous. Some of that I would agree with. I don't see how Palin offers any hope to that, but to many disaffected people she does, by playing off their fears of elitism and technocratic decisions as are presently made. What they don't seem to realize is that she's basically the same tired agenda. She's not a fighter for some new agenda; she's the same agenda dressed up and calling it by a different name. I think this was true of Scott Brown and it appears, thus far, to be true of Obama. American voters are basically suckers and American politicians know this and profit by it, either by getting elected or by mouthing the words and getting paid directly (as Palin is doing). The difference I think between the tea partiers and me is that I look at Washington and don't ask how it got the way it did. I know how it gets that way: all you have to do if you live here is look in the damn mirror. You did this Americans. Take ownership of it. You demanded things and reacted when people promised them to you. You never started paying attention to see if they were followed up with. You caused the problem, not Washington bureaucracy and not Wall Street or Detroit's or the teacher's unions or anything else that seems now to be sleeping around in the political sense with each other.

Much of the libertarian philosophy relies on the idea that it is better not to give things too much central power and control, even supposedly rigid social morals, so that they can be flexible and adaptive, and so we can re-evaluate them when we need to change them. Social morals, like the complaints referenced in that piece about homosexuality for example, are thus better left not to politics and used to construct museums as testimonials to our beliefs (the better to allow them to be mocked and deconstructed by those that know how), but to individuals. I think this is usually offering some pretty consistent policies to governing. There are some exceptions, like public externalities, that require government or at least public interventions and negotiations to resolve. But you're better off leaving a lot of things to impersonal forces and not worrying too much when the country veers off in a direction you don't like. It may veer back later, or it may not matter very much to you personally. I don't understand social insistence on sexual conformity because nobody requires you to have sex with people you don't want to. I don't understand an insistence on religious observance for our political class because many people don't make such requirements in their daily lives and should know how hollow and fragile their commitments to their chosen faith really is. I don't understand resistance to ideas about the universe and its mechanisms for operation because these ideas have shown to be reasonably good interpretations of empirical evidence, but this is largely because I understand the empirical evidence as being reasonable and acknowledge its existence in the first place I suppose. To the extent that I worry about these things, it is not usually because there are lots of people who disagree with me on these points (that is admittedly troubling sometimes). It is because there are lots of people who disagree with me in the way of how to implement these things as public discourse and policies. I don't see why my kids, should I ever have any, should have to pray in school (if they don't want to, I don't plan on instructing kids about religion at all, if they want to I may ask some questions but that's about as far as I'm willing to go to frame their worldviews). Or why any friends who happen to be gay should have to conceal their sexuality and marry someone they do not love instead. Whose sensibilities are offended when these things happen? Nobody's. If you or your children are religious, you are welcome to instruct them to pray on their own time or to offer sanctimonious acknowledgments of the goodness or greatness of your personal god for your successes in public. If you aren't homosexual, you are welcome to find worthy and willing partners for your attempts at monogamous life-long happiness. You are not somehow altered into some demonic abomination or indecent power by allowing others to practice their freedoms (those that offer you and everyone you know no harms save some affront or offense, neither of which is a protected status under the law or at least, neither should be).

As a test of societies, I think it speaks much more highly when it is capable of tolerating its most outspoken ideas. I will admire the initiative of these anonymous weirdos in Brooklyn for building an imaginary land of fear and persecution for those who love their constitutional freedoms, much as X-Files was amusing. I'd prefer it if they didn't give others the impression that I was an ally in their cause by using a philosophy of classical liberalism as the title for their politics. But I am not one to squash their opinions and worldviews for suggesting that somehow ACORN is about to take over the US and put us on track for a super-country incorporating Mexico and Canada and so on. I think these opinions are dumb and unfounded. I don't know how to convince them that they are wrong. I've argued and tried using facts, but facts are ignored in a world where you can select your own. So it looks like the best option is to simply allow people to coordinate into their own groups and use decentralized sources of power. If they want to run a country or state or city on their basis, let them. I will find a place that will "run" it more to my liking instead.