Letters to the Editor
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The role of the religious right in weakening our reputation
The religious right is a significant factor in the decline of America's standing in the world. With the religious right's influence on the Republican Party--beginning in the 1970's, growing over a course of years, and still strong today--anti-intellectualism, provincialism, biblical and even messianic rhetoric, and American exceptionalism all grew stronger within the GOP, and with the election of George W. Bush, became to much of the rest of the globe all but synonymous with American values.
The Bush administration's foreign policy has been marked by not just arrogance and mismanagement, but specifically by a pro-Israel-right-or-wrong stance, numerous rejections of international agreements and courts, a distain for science, including medical science (as demonstrated by the administration's resistance to condom distribution and the funding of safe-sex education in the developing world). All of these things directly reflect the emphases and obsessions of the religious right since the late 1970's and early 1980's--emphases and obsessions usually justified by specific interpretations of biblical passages about "End Times"--including notions such as (to name just one of them) the Antichrist using multi-national organizations, like the United Nations or even a united Europe, to dominate a world eager and ready (thanks to secularism, of course).
On the domestic front, the rolling back of women's reproductive rights, the resurgence of advocacy for forms of Creationism, the attempts to halt or rollback gay civil rights, and outpouring of federal funds to faith-based organizations and "services," also reflect obsessions of the religious right--not just those mentioned above, but also obsessions with the myth of the republic's Founding Fathers being effectively evangelical Christians desiring an officially Christian state. (Hence the acceptability of faith-based, gov't-funded services.)
In not only the rhetoric of many Republicans, but in their policies, especially those of the Republicans of the Bush administration, there have been for several years and continue to be both words and deeds enough--many reflecting the agenda of the religious right--to alienate a wide range of differing nations and cultures.
We cannot let the horrible legacy of the post-2000 United State be pinned to George W. Bush alone, as if he was a suddenly-arriving aberration, isolated on a timeline; we must also make clear the role of the religious right in creating the modern Republican Party and helping bring about this disastrous administration.
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Fireworks
There I was, wrestling with my metaphor-heavy post on my own blog, and I come over here to find that Glenn's been doing the same thing in his far-more-authoritative fashion.
But I'll just put my thoughts in as to what's changed:
The biggest thing is that everybody knew that the US had no more comparable opponents. For the first time since it became a global power, it was unopposed--and, I think, the world looked on in fear--and, for about a decade, sneaking hope.
Then George W Bush came along, and all the apprehensions were confirmed. Somebody had snatched the reins who just looooved that global power.
And he also set about destroying the principles that, as Glenn said, partly redeemed us, because they are the hope of the world, even if we vanish.
And we re-elected the orc.
But, just one thing--we're still in the middle of it: He's still there, we're still in Iraq--and God help us, he still may bomb Iran.
A lot of my friends have started to think this way--looking beyond 2009, trying to see the future. And we're reinforced by bush's 26% rating. And we're tired of it.
But from the outside, it isn't over. The Decepticons are still stomping across the skyline. And most of the rest of the world doesn't share pir sense of inevitability.
Because we re-elected him.
It's going to be interesting to see how it all shakes out when it's over--but it's not anywhere near over. And there could be worse to come.
I remember how my heartt stopped when Nixon, close to his resignation, launched a global military alert.
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Thank you, asshole
Q: How dumb is LWM?
A: LWM is so dumb he still believes in socialism.
--Anonymous
Thank you for putting me in such august company as George Orwell and Noam Chomsky.
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Mona's libertarian shit don't stink.
@RealName re: Boortz
Well, I cannot stand Neal Boortz, and he and I pissed at each other in a particular forum back in the CompuServe days. His "libertarianism," as with that of Glenn Reynolds, morphed into authoritarianism in the wake of 9/11, the fear-mongering of the Bush GOP, and the neocons.
But no, libertarians most decidedly are not "rednecks who want to smoke dope." That's an absurd -- and ignorant as well as offensive -- characterization of me, the libertarians I blog with (Thoreau is a newly minted professor of physics teaching in the U of California system), the Reason crowd, the Cato Institute, F.A. Hayek, Milton Freidman & etc. Glenn has repeatedly cited Cato papers with strong approval, and I really doubt redneck potheads would be authoring anything Glenn would find worthwhile.
-- -Mona
You crack me up, Mona.
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Paul R- Not a vulgar libertarian
Like Mona and her crowd of imbeciles (newly minted with Ph.D.s in fizzicks!) at Reason and Cato...
Yes, Virginia, Libertarians Are Loony As The Year Is Long
Note: Not, of course "libertarians" as the converse of "authoritarians." In that sense, I'm as libertarian as they come. (-11,-11 on Political Compass, dude!) But in the ordinary vernacular meaninig of the word....
Despite all the lies to the contrary, the state is not the source of all evil, and everyone wise who ever lived was not a libertarian.
In particular, John Locke was not a libertarian. His social contract theory was a bottom-up, secular justification of the limited state, in opposition to the top-down theocratic (divine right of kings) justification of the absolute state. He had no problem, generally, with the police powers doctrine, which is to say, the state's right to regulate (police) social behavior for the common good, so long as it is exercised prudently.
And "limited government" does not mean the libertarian wet-dream state. It means the contrary of the absolute, unliimited state. It means the state of Lockean theory, or some rough analogue, constrained by the recognition of indivudal rights, separation of powers, and protections of due process, at a bare minimum.
Furthermore, libertarian "laissez-faire" economics is an unmitigated disaster. See, for example, the novels of Charles Dickens, the Panics of 1873 and 1893, the Great Depression, and the overall worldwide development disaster of the post 1980- neoliberal era.
True, there has never been a "true free market." That's because it's impossible. But whenever we get close, things go to hell in a handbasket. Which ought to tell you something, if you're not loony as shit.
Just because I generally find the libertarian loons who flock here too ludicrous to waste time on does not for a minute mean I think they have a lick of sense.
-- Paul Rosenberg
First, a note on what vulgar libertarianism is. The term, coined as far as I know by yours truly, alludes both to the "vulgar Marxism" of twentieth century Marxoids, and to what Marx called the "vulgar political economy" of the generation after Ricardo and Mill. The defining feature of vulgar political economy, as Marx described it, was that it had ceased to be an attempt at the scientific explication of the laws of economics, and had become a hired prize-fighter on behalf of plutocratic interests. Classical political economy was a revolutionary creed that threatened the interests of the landed oligarchy and the mercantilists. And it was amenable to even more revolutionary uses, as evidenced by the Ricardian socialists. The most famous socialist treatment of Ricardo, of course, is that of Marx. But the socialist development of classical political economy also included free marketers like Thomas Hodgskin (the most preeminent of Ricardian socialists), the mutualist and individualist anarchists from Warren to Tucker and Spooner, and many Georgists. My own work falls within this latter array of petty bourgeois deviationationists. But with the triumph of the industrial owning classes in 1830s Britain, the focus of political economy shifted from scientific investigation and a radical challenge to the power of the Old Regime, to an apology for the status quo.
I described vulgar libertarianism as an ideology in the opening section of Chapter Four of my Studies in Mutualist Political Economy. Since that passage is as coherent a description as I am likely to write, rather than reinvent the wheel I'll just take the lazy man's way out and paste in the relevant paragraphs:
"This school of libertarianism has inscribed on its banner the reactionary watchword: "Them pore ole bosses need all the help they can get." For every imaginable policy issue, the good guys and bad guys can be predicted with ease, by simply inverting the slogan of Animal Farm: "Two legs good, four legs baaaad." In every case, the good guys, the sacrificial victims of the Progressive State, are the rich and powerful. The bad guys are the consumer and the worker, acting to enrich themselves from the public treasury. As one of the most egregious examples of this tendency, consider Ayn Rand's characterization of big business as an "oppressed minority," and of the Military-Industrial Complex as a "myth or worse."
The ideal "free market" society of such people, it seems, is simply actually existing capitalism, minus the regulatory and welfare state: a hyper-thyroidal version of nineteenth century robber baron capitalism, perhaps; or better yet, a society "reformed" by the likes of Pinochet, the Dionysius to whom Milton Friedman and the Chicago Boys played Aristotle.
Vulgar libertarian apologists for capitalism use the term "free market" in an equivocal sense: they seem to have trouble remembering, from one moment to the next, whether they’re defending actually existing capitalism or free market principles. So we get the standard boilerplate article in The Freeman arguing that the rich can’t get rich at the expense of the poor, because "that’s not how the free market works"--implicitly assuming that this is a free market. When prodded, they’ll grudgingly admit that the present system is not a free market, and that it includes a lot of state intervention on behalf of the rich. But as soon as they think they can get away with it, they go right back to defending the wealth of existing corporations on the basis of "free market principles."
http://mutualist.blogspot.com/2005/01/vulgar-libertarianism-watch-part-1.html