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Four American Anti-Imperialisms

A useful taxonomy from the introduction of David Mayers’ excellent Dissenting Voices in America’s Rise To Power:

Four strands of dissent are discernible amid the personalities, competing ideas, and rival interests that shaped debate on foreign affairs from Louisiana to Korea. These strands can be labeled as prophetic, republican, nationalist, and cosmopolitan. They interlaced even as they wove through the deeper fabrics of American society and polity: capitalist economy, technological change, population growth, racial-ethnic-religious diversity, class stratification, party competition, and regional tugging.

The prophetic is the most venerable of the four strands. It was nourished by the religious temper and puritan core of the colonial/early independence period. More precisely, this orientation originated in the outlook of seventeenth-century New England theocrats such as John Winthrop. Themselves dissenters — from Anglican ecclesiolatry — they feared God’s wrath at creatures who strayed from His edicts or purpose. Pronounced still in the nineteenth century, before the popular success of Charles Darwin’s biology, the prophetic strand stemmed from belief in God (often depicted in anthropomorphic terms) who judges nations no less than individual souls. A number of dissenters, mainly reared in Protestant tradition, accepted in earnest this idea once expressed by the religiously unconventional Jefferson. This deist said (referring to slavery): “I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just; that his justice cannot sleep forever.” From such anxiety, resolve could follow to put matters right, evident in voices opposed to enlarging the slave zone via the Louisiana acquisition, evicting Native Americans from their lands, or attacking Mexico in 1846. The idea that God reflexively enlisted on America’s side constituted theological error — blasphemy — for the prophetically minded recusant.

The republican strand sprang from the country’s democratic ethos and distrust of empire, inherited from the 1776 rebellion. This strand of dissent has manifested most frequently and vividly. It gained rhetorical power and influence from America’s being a self-conscious republic — fed by the idea, as self-evident, that representative institutions and liberal values were superior to, also incompatible with, overweening power. In this case, the United States should not substitute the sham of imperium for estimable virtues. Possession of immense power was thought to be disorienting, even disabling. Americans must not lose their way in hubris or worship of imperial idols, against which the 1776 generation had properly mutinied. Republican-minded dissenters thus objected to Louisiana empire, the 1848 Mexican cession, the buying of Alaska, Filipino occupation after the Spanish-American war, and subsequent bids for hegemony. This preference did not recommend national introversion and eschewed sulky isolationism; republican dissenters emphasized instead the power of US example — accountable government, domestic tranquility — as a guarantor of Washington’s influence abroad.

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Sacred Harp 82t: ‘Bound For Canaan’

Oh when shall I see Jesus
And reign with Him above,
And from the flowing fountain
Drink everlasting love?

I’m on my way to Canaan, (x3)
To the new Jerusalem.

When shall I be delivered
From this vain world of sin,
And with my blessed Jesus
Drink endless pleasures in?

But now I am a soldier,
My Captain’s gone before;
He’s given me my orders,
And bids me not give o’er.

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Violence as a matter of scale

It’s interesting what happens when you see two nations, diverse and distinct as they can be, interact. A minor hostile interaction can tend to escalate very quickly if you let it. When all you have is emotions and pure instinct to go by, a slight can become a fistfight very quickly. That goes with people. Communities. Nations.

Conflict takes a lot to inspire these days, but it’s far easier to incite it as the number of people you need to provoke grows ever smaller. It’s made all the more so when you see the other as not just some other person, but as something else. If you think that Other person isn’t respecting you and your space in that moment, what do you do? Are you calm enough to let it slide? Do you run away, as some would argue here? Or do you fight?

It’s admittedly strange to compare violent conflicts of recent, especially because the reasons and methods are so diverse, and because sounds so simplistic. But applying the economics of scale, you become more appreciative of what is happening from a holistic perspective, even you don’t have a complete understanding of things. In two such conflicts, the lack of clarity makes a comparison apt. When you have two distinct groupings, clarity is beyond important when a mistake is made in interaction. Sometimes, that requires patience.

Three teenagers kidnapped and killed. Or maybe they were killed already, and the butchers had made a large mess in the clear-up. Or maybe they were kidnapped and accidentally killed. The killers are (not) state-mandated terrorists. Or they’re (not) militants associated with the government. Or they’re (not) just a bunch of morons with AK-47s and some unabashed sense of righteousness. Or the leadership admitted their (non) role in the situation.

A teenager is shot and killed. Maybe he was (not) a suspect in a robbery. Maybe he was (not) reaching for a cop’s a gun. Maybe he was (not) picking a fight. Maybe he just said (did not say) “fuck off, pig” with his hands up. The cop’s a rookie. The cop’s a veteran. The cop is (not) hiding something. The cop is (not) hiding. There are (no) death threats.

All this information is as much a jumble as the items found in a trash can. Yet we seek to answer this slight as fast we can. Why? Why bother asking? We demand justice, revenge, blood. Screw the first two words, we’ve always wanted blood. It’s one of the few things we yearn for more than sex.

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Adaptationism: A better architectural analogy for Jeffrey Tucker’s brutalists

The conversation surrounding Jeffrey Tucker’s Freeman article “Against Libertarian Brutalism” resurfaced once again recently, this time from Wendy McElroy in a piece entitled “Relationship of Politics to Morality.”

In Tucker’s article, published back in March, he divides libertarians into two main groups: humanitarians and brutalists — good people and bad people. Humanitarians “seek the well-being of the human person and the flourishing of society in all its complexity” whereas brutalists are “rooted in the pure theory of the rights of individuals to live their values whatever they may be.” If we were to go off of these descriptions alone, Tucker’s dichotomy would be merely laughable since benevolent and rights-based justifications for liberty are hardly mutually exclusive. Unfortunately, he takes the distinction a step further by attaching opposing moral and aesthetic visions to the two invented camps, with far more troubling implications.

Tucker pinpoints the supposed tension between the two groups by explaining that humanitarians stress the “beauty, complexity, service to others, community, the gradual emergence of cultural norms, and the spontaneous development of extended orders of commercial and private relationships” that develops in a free society while brutalists advocate for liberty because it “allows people to assert their individual preferences, to form homogeneous tribes, to work out their biases in action, to ostracize people based on ‘politically incorrect’ standards, to hate to their heart’s content so long as no violence is used…to be openly racist and sexist.”

He uses the label “brutalist” to identify this nefarious cabal of (unnamed!) libertarians because of the parallels he draws between their supposedly uncivilized ideological underpinnings and the brutalist architectural style of the 1950s through the 1970s which, according to Tucker, emphasized “large concrete structures unrefined by concerns over style and grace.” Brutalists, says Tucker, “valued inelegance, a lack of pretense, and the raw practicality of the building’s use” because they “reject beauty on principle.”

If it seems odd to you that he characterizes those with reactionary views with a modern architectural style, you’re already overthinking it. This taxonomy is more about making a break with views Tucker was formerly associated with and would now like to distance himself from. It’s entirely a matter of marketing. Those who acknowledge the question of scale are brutalists; to say a libertarian order necessarily permits a certain amount of evil to exist rather than tolerate the power required to eradicate it is now a suspect idea — the cardinal sin of a humanitarian libertarian is suggesting things may not work out in the end. In contrast, Tucker’s brave new humanitarian world is a cornucopia of blog posts about structural oppression and hosannas to the conveniences of consumer culture. Surely you can’t be against that!

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Review of Liberal Archipelago

I recently read Liberal Archipelago by Chandran Kukathas. It is the best academic defense of exit as a moral principle, articulating a vision of society as a large number of sub-societies where people have the choice of which sub-society to join. I highly recommend it to to anyone interested in exit.

Kukathas bases his argument on freedom of association, choosing to jettison the traditional liberal focus on justice as the foundational principle of society. He bases his defense of freedom of association on the fact that different groups of people tend to have different conceptions of justice. The way to ensure these groups can live together without conflict, is to allow them to live under their different moral institutions, so long as individuals in such groups are free to leave and join other groups as they wish.

One implication of his views is the possibility of the proliferation of “illiberal” societies, such as the Amish, or more ugly, ethnic nationalist groups. However, under Kukathas’ conception, such a meta-society would be liberal so long as individuals were free to leave their group.

On interesting thing to note is his preface. He was influenced by libertarians, thanking both IHS and Liberty Fund, as well as a number of libertarian scholars. He also acknowledges the influence of both Hayek and Oakeshott on his work. That being said, Liberal Archipelago is squarely in the liberal tradition, with his libertarian influences having a much more subtle influence on his thoughts.

Trotsky was a rockist

“Boredom is just a slumber one can be roused from”

A piece of mine was published in The American Interest yesterday, in which I play the Tory anarchist music critic, reviewing Bob Stanley’s Yeah! Yeah! Yeah!:

If you’ve ever seen the Jim Jarmusch film Mystery Train(1989), you’ve witnessed the whole of pop music criticism in microcosm, in the form of two Japanese tourists spending a night in Memphis while on a pilgrimage devoted to the King of Rock ’n’ Roll. Mitsuko shows her boyfriend the “important discoveries” in her notebook, pictures of the Statue of Liberty and Madonna; like a parody of the stuffy, tenured Americanist and his archetypes, they all look like Elvis. In another scene they share a cigarette and Jun interrupts her musing about the King by declaring Carl Perkins better.

At the risk of vindicating one side or the other by comparison, the dynamic in this lovers’ quarrel is exactly the same in the contemporary version of this debate: the endless conversation between “rockists” and ”poptimists,” between deriders and defenders of commercial pop music. The latter lines up neatly with a modern culture at war with the notion of guilt or shame of any kind, even that incurred by something as small as a love of the lowbrow—a culture that encourages pride in philistinism. The former consists of people who suggest things like, “if you feel so guilty about it, maybe there’s a good reason.” Not for lack of honest critics trying to kill it, this dichotomy refuses to die, and as of April is still the subject of NPR features. As ever, it’s less about any particular artist than a proxy fight over opposing cultural and ideological commitments.

In a certain sense, the opposite of poptimism is what Trotsky called, the “protest against reality.” Elvis is still the model here, though where his various later iterations fall—like Eddie Cochran, Billy Fury, or Chris Isaak, who I’m sure are all in Mitsuko’s scrapbook and are well-covered by Stanley—is, I suppose, a matter of debate. And on down, too; Stanley identifies psychedelic music as the moment pop became about something other than dancing, or acid house, or punk as a class protest. One could make the case that all of them were “protests against reality” to some extent.

The trouble is that protests against reality have never been very difficult to sell, as Adorno and Horkheimer discovered six years after Trotsky wrote that. And today, now that economic conditions have caused the industry itself to register a sort of protest against reality—by advocating intellectual property regimes that would harm privacy and probably just wouldn’t work, among other things—we appear to have run into some serious confusion.

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