Politics

America needs to get back to religion, no matter what libertarians say

Here’s a quick lesson for young, self-styled libertarians: Nick Gillespie’s punk-rock stylings and irreverent attitude are not a formula for success.

Admittedly, few in the budding millennial libertarian “generation” will believe me. They are busy celebrating pot freedom and the right to marry whoever they want. Clearly, somewhere along the line between Leonard Read and the New York Times-dubbed “libertarian moment,” freedom turned into blissful sodomy and getting stoned. Should the trend continue, libertarianism will wither, and rightly so.

Gillespie, who is a thought leader in the trendy libertine-leaning freedom movement, is championing the decline. From his soapbox at Reason magazine, he preaches the principles of free association and non-aggression. Much of his work is laudable; his wittiness is a great tool showing how foolish the warmongers in Congress are. But even the wisest jokester is not immune to stupidity. Gillespie’s attitude, anti-authoritarian as it is, is a road map of the perilous direction that libertarianism is trending.

In a recent diatribe, the black jacketed sermonizer attempts to correct Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal on a topic of high importance: God and America. The governor, who is a convert to Catholicism, recently told a group of Christians and Jewish leaders the country has drifted away from God. This path is dangerous for America, he averred. As a possible 2016 presidential candidate looking to court social conservatives, Jindal was unambiguous about his warning, telling the crowd, “We have tried everything and now it is time to turn back to God.”

This is all wrong according to Gillespie. Issues of public policy, spending and debt, entitlement programs, civil liberties, and militarization are not matters of spiritual conviction. When it comes to politics, he maintains, “God has nothing to do with any of that.”

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Introducing The Sensorium of B.H. Obama

I suppose it’s a rarity for someone to get two posts in a row on here, but this is a fine reason to break rules. Cross-posted from FPR:

Pete Davis made his debut on this blog [ed — that blog] this week, with an essay on the poisonous politics of The West Wing. But he’s not just a writer or community reformer. Today he has released The Sensorium of B.H. Obama, written by Davis and Paul VanKoughnett. I had the pleasure of seeing it at a private screening last weekend, and even my right-wing companions enjoyed the heck out of it. For a short description, we’ll let the creators speak for themselves:

In the early months of 2015, a young United States President named Barack Obama made a fateful decision. Frustrated by the endless pressures of his thankless, dead-end, white-collar job, Obama delivered his State of the Union speech and disappeared– to America’s heartland – Lawrence, Kansas – where he began the great work of which he’d always dreamed. But with the lamestream media and the forces of Washington politics-as-usual hot on his tail, could this plucky POTUS deliver the change he believed in?

It’s a wonderfully original, creative movie with a heart of gold and a Joe Biden impersonator. Without further ado:

(Check out their production company here and here)

Pete Davis on the West Wing mentality and how it’s ruined Washington’s Millennial politicos

Over on the porch:

The act of “engaging” with national politics has come to resemble more and more the act of watching The West Wing, as political media – from MSNBC to POLITICO – focuses in on the internal dramas of the Beltway kings’ courts. After you have watched all the episodes where Josh Lyman wheels and deals his way to another win, you can turn on the real news and watch talking heads discuss how Mitch McConnell’s or Valerie Jarrett’s next move might give their team a win, too. It’s no surprise that political statistician Nate Silver joined ESPN last year: his meteoric rise over the past elections was the final keystone in the complete ESPNification – with its wins and losses, points and scorecards – of American political journalism.

Viewing hundreds of millions of Americans who are not Washington insiders as useful only for votes and campaign donations is not an idiosyncrasy of Jim Messina and his fictional counterparts on The West Wing— it’s endemic to Beltway politicos. As Theda Skocpol pointed out in her wonderful book Democracy Diminished, we have moved from a “membership democracy” to a “management democracy” in the past century. A once-thriving national network of participatory federated societies – which involved routine local activities in small town chapters which cascaded bottom-up into member-driven state conventions and influential national offices – gave way to a politics where we send our checks in to D.C. managers, who engage in democracy for us. The West Wing will be a perfect historical artifact of this age of political management.

Go read the piece, it’s great.

Review of The End of Power

The End of Power by Moises Naim is the most interesting book I have read in a while.  It advances the simple thesis that power, defined as “the ability to direct or prevent the current or future actions of other groups or individuals”, is declining.  The way I prefer to put it, the choice set of our leaders has become more constrained.

Naim argues that power, not just political power, but corporate and military power is declining.  A thought experiment can be as follows.  Compare Barack Obama to a 13th century king.  While Obama undoubtedly commands more resources, his choice set is fairly limited.  There is constant pressure applied by various interest groups which constrain him.  A 13th century king, on the other hand, has a wider choice set.  He likely has a few advisors, but is largely free to act in any way he so chooses.

Naims thesis can be interpreted as a generalized form of the trend toward political decentralization that some have documented.  In fact, Naim discusses such political decentralization, both arguing for and admitting the inevitable political innovation.  He puts his thesis in grandiose terms, comparing the coming innovation to the Greek city state democracies and the French Revolution.

What Naim didn’t include was an explanation of why power is ending or a judgement of whether such an end is a good thing.  I’ll try to provide a brief account of both.  First, the world can be imagined as a series of networks representing the relationships between people.  The further intertwined the networks are, the less power individuals have.  They are constrained to follow the rules put in place by those in their networks.  In other words, the decline of power is inevitable as the world becomes more interconnected.  This is a good thing because making actions predictable is a necessary, though not sufficient, step for long term planning and economic development.

Naims book is also interesting because he represents the power elite.  He was both a former executive director of the World Bank as well as editor in chief of Foreign Policy.  The book has a blurb by Bill Clinton on the front.  Other reviews include The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, and George Soros.

I highly recommend this book to anyone interested in changing forms of governance and politics more generally.

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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An airing of grievances

Here’s my first post for Front Porch Republic. Happy Festivus!

As I’m sitting in an office on K Street, emptied for Christmas, wondering how to introduce myself to you all, it occurs to me that I owe you an explanation. It sounds like a bad joke, that a editor at a DC political website would want anything to do with a website dedicated to place and peace.

There was a big story out last week, by James Carden and Jacob Heilbrunn about my city paper, and how its editorial page is America’s biggest “megaphone for unrepentant warrior intellectuals.” That’s got something to do with it.