Secession lagniappe

Several more Northern California counties plan secession votes:

Voters in Del Norte and Tehama, with a combined population of about 91,000, will decide June 3 on an advisory measure that asks each county’s board of supervisors to join a wider effort to form a 51st state named Jefferson.

Elected officials in Glenn, Modoc, Siskiyou and Yuba counties already voted to join the movement. Supervisors in Butte County will vote June 10, while local bodies in other northern counties are awaiting the June 3 ballot results before deciding what to do.

A similar but unrelated question on the primary ballot in Siskiyou County asks voters to rename that county the Republic of Jefferson.

“We have 11 counties up here that share one state senator,” compared to 20 for the greater Los Angeles area and 10 for the San Francisco Bay Area, said Aaron Funk of Crescent City, a coastal town in Del Norte County near the Oregon border. “Essentially, we have no representation whatsoever.”

More here.

Frank Bryan, the legendary historian of Vermont town meeting politics, has a new essay in Green Mountain Noise, the Second Vermont Republic’s magazine, about decentralism and human-scale government:

Within the chaos of incompetency lies the great danger to our Republic. A proliferation of unseen, unaccountable and thus uncontrollable nodes of influence have arisen to deal with the complexity of governing a continental enterprise from the center.   The result is what political scientists have traditionally called the “politics of muddling through.” Accordingly, any serious notion of “democratic accountability” has long since vanished.

Those who face the daunting challenge of reinstating a truly democratic America should see this as an opportunity. The tide of history is with us. We are not challenging a healthy, robust and competent democracy. We are challenging a tired democracy and therefore a weak democracy; a splendid achievement in the history collective human behavior that unfortunately has been hobbled by its inability to reign in its natural appetite for aggrandizing authority — even though the cost of this authority was paid in terms of democratic legitimacy. …

In 1789, we created the framework for a continental, federal enterprise, dividing authority between the states and the central government.  More importantly we trumped any chance of coherent central enterprise (one thinks of Canada) by setting our national institutions against one another. …

The structure of our democracy is currently out of whack. Power to the states and within the states, power to the towns and within the towns, power to the individual and within each individual the awareness that it is in the small community alone that true distinctiveness can be accurately perceived, assessed, and rewarded – where authentic individualism is possible.

We live in a democratic moment and place. Let us behave accordingly.

Read the whole thing. These essays in the same issue about Burlington’s drug culture aren’t bad either.

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The alt-con divide

Jason Joseph notices a split between Peter Lawler’s postmodern conservatives and the crowd of lovable modernity-rejecting hobbits at Front Porch Republic. Patrick Deneen, porcher capo, on the divide:

This debate pits the anti-consumerist, CSA-loving, small town-adoring, pro-hand working, suburb-loathing, bourbon-sipping denizens of the “Front Porch Republic” against the McDonald’s loving, Starbucks slurping, dentistry-adoring, Wal-Mart shopping adherents of Postmodern Conservatism.

I think I’m going to have to invite one of our goons to take on one of theirs. Let’s have a knock-down, drag-out, fight-to-the-finish, winner-take-all, one-man-standing, n0-holds-barred, take-no-prisoners debate. You, know – Jets vs. Sharks, and all that. As long as we can have drinks afterwards. Let’s find out once and for all whether there’s a place on the porch for the PoMo Cons, or whether there’s a place for the Front Porchers in post-modernity.

And with a word from Lawler, the battle is joined:

Dr. Patrick Deneen has gotten all uppity and wants some kind of showdown at one of his people’s corrals between the Postmodern Conservatives and the “Front Porch Republicans” (none of whom would be caught dead doing something REALLY conservative like voting REPUBLICAN).

Let me lay down a marker and predict the differences will get more dramatic now that the Postmodern Conservative blog has moved from First Things to NRO.

Lawler has sort of covered this territory before. I like PoMoCon, but they are prone to hipsterish hair-splitting on some of these issues that seems more about social positioning — like Carl Scott’s pre-view of “Copperhead” he wrote without seeing it.

The Mitrailleuse maintains no official position on the porcher-pomo schism, but I’ll tell you who I’d rather read.

Update: The whole 2009 discussion, rounded up.

Update II: Also Russell Arben Fox, June 4:

So I come back, once again, to Norman Mailer’s “left conservative” formulation: to “think in the style of Karl Marx in order to attain certain values suggested by Edmund Burke.” Porcherism can’t be friendly to the present global liberal regime, as much as we may pragmatically work with it, because we see it premised upon the valuation of states and corporations and individuals who build their webs of connection in anything but Burkean, organic ways. The state, the corporation, even the sovereign individual all have their intellectual place in our accounting of the present world, and may be defended in better or worse ways. But absent a real communitarian context–a liveable, sustainable, historical one–they will follow paths that can never truly privilege place, and all too often will instead undermine it. That’s a fairly grand conclusion to come to about an online, ideological debate, I know. But for those few of us who have found an intellectual home in the combination of traditionalism with radicalism, it’s an important one to never forget either.

The gods of America

Shot:

Chaser: Shocking video shows how members of the public intervene when they see man attacking his girlfriend… but stand by and LAUGH when the roles are reversed

As an artist, I take it as read that traditional forms of art presuppose reactionary ideas and most easily transmit them. Poetry with traditional structures (rhyme, meter, fixed forms) is included here. It is not impossible for revolutionary forms to be bootstrapped in, but it is always with difficulty and feels forced. Lyricists who move beyond the Ke$ha level of rhythmic innuendo spiced with imperfect rhyme will run into the essential problem that revolutionary ideas sound silly, trite, or ironic if presented in ballad form. A proper tragedy however almost begs for verse, even a highly structured and stylized verse. The amusing part about a musician such as Mozart or Beethoven is that inasmuch as they were trying to push revolutionary ideas, their art form worked against them; despite their feeling for revolutionary ideas (consider The Marriage of Figaro or The Magic Flute) their works have become inextricably conservative, existing in a tension between the reactionary harshness inherent in the formal style and the liberalism of their intellectual ideals.

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A review of Peter Leeson’s ‘Anarchy Unbound’

Anarchy Unbound by Peter Leeson is the newest addition to the academic anarcho-capitalist literature, books and articles that attempt to engage mainstream academia on the topic of anarchism. He begins by setting an admittedly low bar, why anarchism works better than you think. Then he takes you on historical examples to show how self-governance can produce better outcomes than governments.

I strongly recommend this book. It is the clearest exposition of the George Mason approach to anarchism. That being said, reading it, I can more clearly identify a growing gap between popular anarchism, exemplified by attendees of Porcfest, and academic anarchism.

Popular anarchism is a social program, an argument that a stateless society today can lead to better outcomes than most countries. Snapping ones fingers and replacing the state with Friedmanesque, non-territorial, dispute resolution agencies would improve social outcomes. Transitioning is, or course, tricky, but can be ignored for the current discussion.

The primary critique of anarchism is that it is unstable. If a state is inevitable, than anarchism as a social program is, at best, an unachievable ideal. Unfortunately, Leeson never investigates the inevitability of states. As such, I do not think his book has much value for those interested in the possibility of actually enacting of a modern stateless society.

The most recent research suggests the state emerges whenever there is a surplus of wealth that can be expropriated. Raul Sanchez de la Sierra studies villages in Congo, a country whose central government can barely project power outside the capital. He finds pseudo-states emerge in these villages when the price of cobalt rises. On the other hand, nothing of the sort happens when the price of gold rises, as gold is easy to conceal.

This suggests a different research path for those interested in the possibility of a modern anarchist society than Leeson has followed. Rather than investigating stateless societies, anarchists should examine the emergence and growth of states. Under what condition are states inevitable? Do those conditions still exist? Responsible advocacy of anarchism requires answers to these questions. Unfortunately, few are currently considering them.

Kill enough people and become a governor

I found a new favorite blog. It is dedicated to popularizing North, Wallis, and Weingast’s (hereafter NWW) framework of violence and social orders. The argument is that the natural type of government is vicious and predatory. It is what we see in the third world today. Modern liberal governments only really emerged in the 18th century and are still largely restricted to Europe.

A main contribution of NWW is changing the frame of reference for government action. Good governance is not the norm, but the exception. In much of the world, local tyrants are rewarded with power, rather than punished. This post details David Yau Yau, who, having lost an election, decided the best way to keep his rents was to start low-scale warfare:

On again off again since 2010, he’s led one of the most vicious, mindlessly murderous little tribal guerrilla wars you’ve never heard of for control of his home region in Jonglei State’s Pibor County, just near Ethiopia.

For his troubles, he was appointed governor of the area he terrorized. While this offends basic notions of justice, it is probably better than the alternative. Theft by governments is far less socially damaging than raiding villages and murdering their inhabitants.

Leaks and the rule of law

Conor Friedersdorf has a new piece critiquing the liberal moderate critics of Greenwald and Snowden, most recently George Packer in the Prospect. Below is an excerpt, but I recommend you read the whole thing, it is excellent:

Stepping back, notice that in the same passage, Packer contrasts the wrongs of Greenwald with the Obama Administration – the people who’ve persecuted whistleblowers, presided over domestic spying on Muslims and launched drone strikes that kill Americans without due process – yet it is Greenwald who, according to Packer, doesn’t understand that “the rule of law has to protect people regardless of politics.”

I think Friedersdorf doesn’t go far enough in his critique of how writers equivocate regarding Greenwald versus the NSA’s respect for the the rule of law. A simple interpretation of the rule of law is that the laws that apply to people also apply to government officials. The important part of the equation is government officials. No one doubts laws apply to the average citizen, it is how they constrain government officials that matters. Arguing that the actions of private individuals violates the rule of law fundamentally misconstrues the rule of law itself, as a constraint on government action.