Ideology

The original mitrailleuse

(The German Emperor William is declared…in the great palace of the Kings of France)

ADDED: “Nous sommes dans un pot de chambre, et nous y serons emmerdes.” Gen. Ducrot, Sedan, France, Aug. 31, 1870.

As we come to the close of the year I’d like to again thank Meister Bloom for the opportunity to write here, and recognize the wealth of talent and intelligence gathered on this most excellent blog.

I hope that reader either knows, or has taken the time to learn, what a mitrailleuse is:

Montigny_Mitrailleuse

One of the earliest successful “machine guns”, this excellent and ingenious weapon was developed by the French in the 1860s, just in time to be deployed in the so-called “Franco-Prussian” War of 1870-1; the result of which, for the French, was one of the greatest military defeats in history (eerily repeated in 1940, but let’s take it one war at a time).

I’ve been rereading Michael Howard’s superb The Franco-Prussian War: The German Invasion of France 1870-1871 and was struck by this passage:

The Emperor [Napoleon III]…also had the mitrailleuse. With this he had been experimenting since 1860, and production had begun under conditions of great secrecy in 1866. In appearance it resembled the fasces of the Roman Lictors: a bundle of twenty-five barrels, each detonated in turn by turning a handle. It had a range of nearly 2,000 yards and a rate of fire of nearly 150 rounds per minute…but such secrecy surrounded its manufacture that training in its use was almost out of the question, and no useful discussion was possible about how it should be employed.

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It’s not worth abolishing the Senate for direct democracy

There is a reason why many notable conservative thinkers hold the concept of ideology in low regard. Often times, ideologues, so married to their ideas of right and wrong, make grand propositions to showcase their intellectual superiority and flair for dramatics. The ideologue’s job is rarely the search for truth but instead to turn philosophy into a dazzling light show.

At least that’s my take on a recent screed in the Jacobin titled simply “Abolish the Senate.” Given that the piece appears in one of the most radical leftist periodicals in America, I expected hyperbole. But the article, written by journalist Daniel Lazare, surprises in its lack of thoughtfulness and overuse of dog whistles meant to inspire base anger in progressive readers.

So what exactly is wrong with abolishing the Senate, an institution 225 years of age? As a Nockian, I’m inclined to endorse the sentiment. Representative democracy on a large scale is hogwash and deserves a good axing. Unfortunately, history warns against such radicalism, and shows us that revolutionary calls to action are often sown with the seeds of complete societal upheaval. That’s not exactly my cup of tea. Hence I’m not so keen on pushing the proverbial button and abolishing the much-maligned state in one fell swoop, including the Senate. Perhaps one day we’ll get there, though it’s doubtful.

Back to the piece, Lazare is adamant about tossing out what Washington called the saucer that cools the populist longings of the House of Representatives. His reasoning is simple: the current United States Senate is “one of the world’s most undemocratic legislatures.” How so? The men and women who make up the legislative body are disproportionately representative of the country. The millions who live in New York City essentially have the same amount of votes as the half-million hicks that reside in Wyoming. And that just ain’t fair.

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Gamergate revisited

A piece I wrote on Gamergate back in September went viral. It called the defeat of Gamergate inevitable because of the forces of cultural inertia stacked against it. The actual outcome was in some ways predictable, but otherwise quite surprising.

Gamergate didn’t win – but it didn’t lose

I attributed Gamergate losing to a phenomenon that in fact did come to pass. The groovy media intelligentsia did everything in its power to paint Gamergate as a simultaneously laughable yet dangerous hate movement that exposed male geeks as crypto-Nazis. To any normally socialized and status-conscious type of person, the media gambit would have led to the spiral of silence that I foresaw. The important factor here is that geeks, by definition, are not normally socialized and status-conscious people. This is particularly true when speaking ex cathedra from their identity as geeks; the threat of looking uncool doesn’t work because they are already uncool. They are already pariahs with ‘lame’ hobbies. Media elites and uncool nerds are two fundamentally different types of people.

Every single dominant cultural institution was stacked against Gamergate. Nobody had the intellectual bravery to side with a movement that was apparently just bitter nerds being prejudiced. Gamergate was rapidly becoming a dirty word in the mouths of anyone concerned with looking sensitive and enlightened. Thousands upon thousands, armed with roughly zero information on the controversy, were tripping over each other to signal their righteous “socially aware” status. “Misogynerds” were in the crosshairs.

And to their credit, the geeks came out pretty unscathed. Only through their tenacity and lack of concern with their image did Gamergate not get nuked from the chic heights of media that stooped to notice it. The desperately fashionable media displayed its contempt for nerds for “not being with the program.” The problem is that they only had a little less contempt before this fiasco. This is just another example of the people in media, entertainment and academia having a values dissonance with pretty much everyone else. That’s what a cultural elite is – a set of people with values not necessarily shared by the general public, but with a near-monopoly on cultural soapboxes to promulgate their ideas.

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You wouldn’t like ‘what democracy looks like’

Latest at TheDC:

… the dirty little secret is that the elites and the protesters operate like a protection racket against a common enemy: America’s middle class. In Ferguson, mobs smash and burn middle-class businesses, while the organs of elite media advise in columns and editorials that you’d better give them what they’re asking for.

With that in mind, protesters should beware that the middle class will only stomach so many delayed commutes. And “direct democracy,” from their perspective, would mean running the protesters over with a truck.

The latest satanic panic — rape

Fredrik deBoer gainsays Adam Kotsko‘s assertion that the left‘s response to the right‘s outrage against Lena Dunham‘s supposed molestation of her sister is a symptom of an irresolvable intra-progressive problem. Here’s what deBoer quoted from Kotsko:

I have started to notice how often politically-charged online memes open out onto a “no-win vortex.” Take the example of the cat-calling video. On the one hand, it calls attention to street harrassment, which is a very real problem. On the other hand, it was edited in a racist way in the service of a gentrification campaign. How does one respond? It seems that no matter which direction you go, someone loses — you either wind up downplaying the destructiveness of racism and gentrification or dismissing the seriousness of the atmosphere of harrassment that women have to navigate.

The same goes for the Lena Dunham affair. On the one hand, I’m shocked that anyone on the left would buy into the framing of a right-wing smear campaign that is structurally identical to the “moral panics” that legitimate homophobia (and, even worse, that trivializes real child sexual abuse). On the other hand, though, I don’t want to dismiss black women’s very justified critique of white feminists who claim to speak for all women while ignoring black women’s very existence. They may be jumping on this because they previously disliked and distrusted Lena Dunham — but we can’t ignore that they had excellent, indisputable reasons to dislike and distrust her. And much of what they’ve said about how Dunham gets the benefit of the doubt while a black child would be painted as a monster is sadly true. Simply responding that no child should be painted as a monster seems a little too easy.

I have genuine progressive sympathies. It’s pretty easy to miss – progressivism is hip and I love playing the devil’s advocate. Just like progressives, I want to live in a more just, more inclusive world where less people get hurt and more  people see a rise in quality of life. The distinction between myself and progressives is the is a distinction between things that lead to good results, the truth, and things that sound good, the narrative.

Being a white male sends deBoer into that kind of nebbish, sweaty hand-wringing. He points out the folly of white male social justice types:

But we also have the hammer, and it’s pretty much the only one people like Kotsko have to wield: my opponents are White Dudes! Now, the shrewd type might point out that, contrary to the cultural expectation in the Grand Progressive Mutual Admiration Society in the Cloud, saying “you don’t have the credibility to argue that” is not actually an example of rebutting that argument. And a really observant soul might notice that Kotsko himself is a White Dude. (I would actually increase the number of capitals for Kotsko, like, WhItE DUde, personally.) Ah, but you see, when Kotsko critiques White Dudeism, he does so from the premise that he is exempt from that critique. He is writing about Those Other White Dudes. Actually, it goes further than that: he is critiquing white dudes precisely because, in so doing, he sets himself outside of that group. It’s an act of pure preemption. The same old question applies: if engaging in these political discourses didn’t end up with you positioned as the righteous exception to the immoral rule, would you bother? If your arguments didn’t amount to a wriggling out of the very critique that you’re making, would you still make them?

Seems about right. There is bound to be endemic grandstanding in the circle that is the confluence of radical chic, academia, and Hollywood. With no apparent self-awareness, deBoer, who just spent one thousand words slamming Kotsko for playing that tired progressive signaling game, is now doing the exact same thing. He uses the term “white dude” in various ways, all of which are supposed to appear endearing, so as to signal that he is higher in the progressive pecking order because of just how savvy he is of the “white dudeness” of others and himself. Where normally the best move would be stating a good progressive opinion, the winning move here is to not play. By recusing himself from weighing in on certain issues that white dudes shouldn’t be allowed to weigh in on, he separates himself from Those Other White Dudes that don’t know when to shut the hell up. Winning points has nothing to do with dialogue. It has everything to do with the shutting down of dialogue.

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Bursting my bubble

Yesterday was the first meeting for the first Students for Liberty club in Honduras.  I spoke briefly about the Zonas de Empleo y Desarollo Economico (ZEDEs).  There followed a wide ranging discussion about the advantages and pitfalls of the ZEDEs.  While the students seemed to grasp the potential, they feared the political process would corrupt the outcome, worrying that the ZEDEs might end up being used to enrich politicians at the expense of everyone else.

Afterwards I had a few drinks with Christian Betancort, a SFL representative from San Pedro Sula who had also been present at the talk.  It was my first extended discussion with a libertarian in Honduras and helped clarify my thoughts about the different social dynamics in moving to Honduras.

To put it bluntly, the culture shock of leaving the DC libertarian bubble has been far greater than the culture shock of living in Honduras.  Libertarians, as I imagine most social groups, have their own assumptions about knowledge, and even language, that is particular to them.  For a basic example, libertarians have a fairly particular definition of freedom.

I realized what has been most difficult for me socially is shifting out of the libertarian mindset.  Most foreigners in Honduras work for NGOs or teach.  Competition and commerce is not immediately assumed to be good.  Public choice problems are not implicit in discussions of government.  Cultural reference points for libertarians, and even DC residents in general, don’t exist.  People don’t know what a think tank does.

While I have spent most of my adult life in the libertarian bubble, I realized it was a bubble.  What I didn’t realize is how differently it functioned from other social organizations.  I had assumed other societies had similar bubbles.  There would be a progressive bubble, a Silicon Valley bubble, etc.  What I now realize is that such well defined bubble are the aberration, not the norm.  The NGO bubble is far less clearly defined than the libertarian bubble.  The sense of shared ideas and mission are weaker.  The social bonds function in a different, weaker, way.

I am not sure why this is.  It could be a testament to the power of libertarian ideas.  It could be due to libertarian organizations.  To some extent, it is probably due to both, though it is unclear why libertarians should have advantages in over other goal oriented social groups.  I would have expected development workers to have a similar canon of books, a similar private language, a similar sense of shared mission.

I now believe the libertarian movement is more unique than I did before.  Its social organization seems superior.  I am very excited to help extend this circle to Tegucigalpa and beyond.