Today's lesson in Rightwing Dog Whistle code is
Libertarian
Believer in the right to do anything that does not harm anybody else of any importance in any way that matters
How do we know that this is code? Because it is crystal-clear that self-proclaimed Libertarians want freedoms for themselves that they deny to many others, and that they dismiss many of the unfortunate effects of their desired activities as insignificant. I'll give you examples from Ayn Rand, Milton Friedman, Alan Greenspan, and Ron and Rand Paul below the jump. And we'll take a look at Glenn Beck, too.
Jon Stewart channels Glenn Beck
We have to get this out of the way before the serious discussion starts. On March 18, 2010, Jon Stewart played a clip of Glenn Beck saying, "I'm not a journalist, I am a Conservative, I am much more of a Libertarian...", and then used Beck's own methods and style to destroy him. Stewart's blackboard dissection of "CONSERVATIVE" and "LIBERTARIAN" is classic. Even Beck said it was funny in his lame counterattack.
Anyway, Beck is no Libertarian. He's more of a Dominionist Christian wackadoodle demagogue. But here is what he means by Libertarianism: Liberals have no right to do anything. Even exist. Our mere presence is harmful to all right-thinking Real Americans. It interferes with their right to drive this great country, even the entire world, right into George W. Bush's ditch. Because that won't harm anyone at all! And you know why we interfere with their righteous plans? Because we're evil, that's why. We're out to get them. It's all deliberate. We're racist, Fascist followers of—Him.
The Roots of Libertarianism
The term "Libertarian" covers a multitude of sins. It was first used in the 18th century to refer to believers in Free Will as opposed to Calvinist or Augustinian Predestination or pre-Quantum Indeterminacy scientific determinism, and then in the 19th century, in the form Libertarian Communism, aka Anarchist Communism. This amusing circumstance has nothing to do with later Libertarianism, but is worth a moment's digression. The following comes from an exiled group of Russian anarchists in 1926.
It is very significant that, in spite of the strength and incontestably positive character of libertarian ideas, and in spite of the forthrightness and integrity of anarchist positions in the facing up to the social revolution, and finally the heroism and innumerable sacrifices borne by the anarchists in the struggle for libertarian communism, the anarchist movement remains weak despite everything, and has appeared, very often, in the history of working class struggles as a small event, an episode, and not an important factor.
This contradiction between the positive and incontestable substance of libertarian ideas, and the miserable state in which the anarchist movement vegetates, has its explanation in a number of causes, of which the most important, the principal, is the absence of organisational principles and practices [emphasis added] in the anarchist movement.
The Organizational Platform of the Libertarian Communists
Says it all, really. It's all downhill from there.
In the 1950s, some Classical Liberals defined by claimed belief in
- limited government
- liberty of individuals including freedom of religion, speech, press, assembly
- free markets
started calling themselves Libertarians, and took to calling New Dealers Liberals. This is very confusing to the rest of the world, where Liberal is still a synonym for Free Marketer. To add to the confusion, Noam Chomsky and others call themselves Libertarian Socialists.
In what follows, we will only be concerned with the heirs of the Classical Liberal Libertarians, who have forcefully taken over the name in the public discourse.
The essential fact about almost all of these Libertarians is that their absolute, unwavering principles only apply when they want them to. Government is to be limited to permit them the maximum freedom of action in politics and business, but is to prevent actions by such Enemies of the State as the renamed Liberal New Dealers. Freedom of religion, speech, press, and assembly is of course to be provided to them and other such Real Americans in the fullest possible measure, but we're not so sure about you, particularly if you happen to be a Liberal hippie atheist Pinko terrorist Muslim sympathizer. And much more so if you are Black, Latino, Arab, or whoever else is on the list today. As for free markets, that just means Socialism for the rich, and Social Darwinism for everyone else.
There are a few utterly consistent, utterly doctrinaire Libertarians like Ron Paul. They just value certain freedoms more than others, and by some strange coincidence, that happens to be the freedom of the wealthy, that is, property rights. You're on your own, and the government shouldn't try to help you, no matter how badly you are treated. Because their property rights are far more important than your human rights.
But how did they get that way? We don't know much about that. Certainly we know about Thoreau's "men of one idea, like a hen with one chick, and that a duckling." And we know about selfishness in general, and about self-delusion, such as Cognitive Dissonance. But that isn't a sufficient explanation, and it certainly doesn't tell us how we can get through to them. Well, probably not them, but their followers. What are people like this open to, if anything?
I and many others have documented the racism and bigotry of the Right, going back to slavery. Much of this Libertarian doctrine is actually the longstanding Southern claim that the tyrannical Yankee-infested Federal government can't tell them how to treat their N*****s. But that way of speaking went out of fashion during the Civil Rights era, and had to be replaced by coded speech with coded justifications. "Limited government" for "cutting social programs that help Blacks in particular and the poor in general". "Human rights" for "our right to take away their rights". "Free markets" for "kleptocracy".
The association with kleptocracy is rooted in the founding of the Republican party as a business-friendly party, backed by the Northern factory/free labor interests against the slaveowning plantation South. (Also, Lincoln was a railroad lawyer a lot of the time.) But Lincoln clearly did not foresee the coming Robber Baron period, the Gilded Age, and all that has followed since. The application of Fourteenth Amendment rights of freed slaves to corporations by a hyper-activist Supreme Court in 1886 gave us the foundation of modern corporate libertarianism, that is, of regarding corporations as more equal than people.
Ayn Rand
To begin with, I wish to associate myself with this sentiment.
Atlas Shrugged is not a book to be tossed aside lightly. It should be thrown, with great force.
Dorothy Parker
Others have had much worse to say about Rand. In effect,
Shorter Atlas Shrugged: Get yours, and the Devil take the hindmost.
Ayn Rand was not a Libertarian, and didn't like the Libertarians she knew of, calling them anarchist hippies.
But many of them liked her work, and incorporated their understanding of Ayn Rand Objectivism into their Libertarianism.
They are not defenders of capitalism. They’re a group of publicity seekers... most of them are my enemies... I’ve read nothing by a Libertarian (when I read them, in the early years) that wasn’t my ideas badly mishandled—i.e., had the teeth pulled out of them—with no credit given.
They are perhaps the worst political group today, because they can do the most harm to capitalism, by making it disreputable.
"Ayn Rand’s Q & A on Libertarianism", Ayn Rand Institute
The Ayn Rand institute now works fairly closely with the non-hippie-anarchist Libertarians, that is with the corporate Capitalist Laissez-Faire Libertarians whom I characterize as kleptocrats.
What ideas did they take from Rand? Leaving out her theories of art and of objective knowledge of reality (contradicting our scientific understanding, and problematic for Evangelical Christians also), and the rest of her tendentious novels,
... that the proper moral purpose of one's life is the pursuit of one's own happiness or rational self-interest, that the only social system consistent with this morality is full respect for individual rights, embodied in pure laissez faire capitalism...
Rational self-interest is one of the shibboleths of the Chicago School of Economics, the purest apostles of Laissez-Faire, so there you go. The only right that matters is the right to make money any way you can, with no government interference, and there is no other goal in life.
Milton Friedman
The founder of the modern Chicago School, sometimes known as Market Fundamentalism, Milton Friedman started out as a brilliant Keynesian, New Deal mathematical economist. Later in life he was awarded the The Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel 1976 "for his achievements in the fields of consumption analysis, monetary history and theory and for his demonstration of the complexity of stabilization policy". (The Official Website of the Nobel Prize)
In the 1950s Friedman decided that he had found a fundamental error in Keynes and became the most ardent and most influential opponent of government stimulus spending during recessions, recommending the exclusive use of monetary policy instead (changing Federal Reserve interest rates, primarily).
Friedman started out his most influential book, Capitalism and Freedom, with an idea from F. A. Hayek's The Road to Serfdom.
Advocacy of "democratic socialism" by many...who are persuaded that it is possible for a country to adopt the essential features of Russian economic arrangements and yet to ensure individual freedom through political arrangements...is a delusion.
(Hayek was opposed to both Social Democracy and Conservatism, which left him little wiggle room in 20th-century politics, but has since become the darling of Conservatives who do not read him. They only remember that he equated Social Democracy with complete central economic planning, and thus with Soviet Communism, as Republicans and Tea Partiers still do reflexively.)
In explaining the Starve the Beast concept, former Reagan and Bush official Bruce Bartlett, now working for Ron Paul, wrote
University of Chicago economist Milton Friedman considered the deficits that might arise from a reduction in taxes without a concomitant cut in spending. He argued that the deficit is essentially meaningless; what matters is government spending. Thus, a cut in taxes, even without accompanying spending cuts, was not a matter of concern for conservatives. As he wrote,
There is an important point that needs to be stressed to those who regard themselves as fiscal conservatives. By concentrating on the wrong thing, the deficit, instead of the right thing, total government spending, fiscal conservatives have been the unwitting handmaidens of the big spenders. The typical historical process is that the spenders put through laws which increase government spending. A deficit emerges. The fiscal conservatives scratch their heads and say, "My God, that’s terrible; we have got to do something about that deficit." So they cooperate with the big spenders in getting taxes imposed. As soon as the new taxes are imposed and passed, the big spenders are off again, and there is another burst in government spending and another deficit.
In a column in Newsweek magazine, Friedman made his point more succinctly:
I have concluded that the only effective way to restrain government spending is by limiting government’s explicit tax revenue—just as a limited income is the only effective restraint on any individual’s or family’s spending.
Ronald Reagan turned this into, "Deficits don't matter." So you can see how today's Republicans can argue with a straight face that we don't have to offset the Bush tax cuts with spending cuts, but we have to offset unemployment benefits. It's an Article of Faith. Similarly for Tea Party tax cuts to prevent the tyranny of social spending. They still say so explicitly when it comes to funding family planning in general, and abortion in particular. They still say so explicitly about "illegal aliens", which functions as code for all immigrants, and even for Hispanics whose ancestors were in this land before we stole it from Mexico. They still feel safe attacking women. But they usually know better than to say it about Blacks, in public anyway.
Friedman was by far the most doctrinaire Free Market Libertarian. He proclaimed endlessly that almost every government agency infringed on personal liberty and was also not needed for its stated purpose, including the FDA and EPA.
Joseph Stiglitz, also a Nobel Prize winner in Economics, has written several books complaining about Friedmanite Market Fundamentalism in the form of the Washington Consensus at the US Treasury Department, the World Bank, and the IMF. He argued that they destroyed the economies of developing and developed countries alike, starting with The Roaring Nineties, and continuing most recently with Freefall. Nothing but ideology supports such policies, which are contradicted by every disastrous attempt to follow them in the real world, and equally by all of the countries that dealt successfully with economic crises by doing exactly the opposite of what the Washington Consensus demanded, starting with slashing government spending. This is still going on in Greece and more generally in the EU today.
Alan Greenspan
Greenspan, a self-proclaimed Ayn Rand Objectivist/Libertarian, was widely praised as Chairman of the Federal Reserve for keeping inflation in check. Unfortunately, his definition of inflation included any sign of rising wages, which indeed did not happen on his watch.
The Labor Pool: Why Greenspan Is Worried, December 6, 1999
The Fed's big fear is that managers are making this inflation rate a benchmark for future compensation. Consumer surveys carried out by the University of Michigan show expectations for inflation over the next year have indeed risen--although the five- to 10-year outlook has not.
So far, wage gains have been tame, given the jobs market and higher inflation in the second half of the year. But Greenspan, you can be sure, is keeping his eye on compensation of all kinds. One gauge is the quarterly productivity statistics compiled by the Labor Dept. Unlike the employment cost index and average hourly earnings data, it tries to count the value of exercised stock options and other flexible pay arrangements. According to this measure, which is not adjusted for inflation, compensation rose 4.6% between the third quarter of 1998 and the third quarter this year, vs. a 4.9% hike between the second quarters.
To try to divine where wages and inflation are headed, Greenspan also focuses closely on corporate profits. Here too, the news has been good. Corporate profits climbed sharply in the third quarter, indicating that companies are still wringing enough efficiencies out of their operations to offset higher labor costs.
Indeed, most of the numbers still seem to say that the Fed can relax. But Greenspan will continue to keep his eye on that labor pool for any sign that the new workforce is producing new inflation.
Equally unfortunately, he did not consider either the Clinton Dot-Com bubble or the Bush housing bubble as a serious form of inflation, although he did mumble authoritatively on one occasion about "irrational exuberance", at a time when Warren Buffett was warning everybody who would listen to get out of stocks. How was Greenspan to know?
"Those of us who have looked to the self-interest of lending institutions to protect shareholders’ equity, myself included, are in a state of shocked disbelief," he told the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform.
Greenspan Concedes Error on Regulation
The problem was that the institutional incentive to survive was not as strong as the managerial incentive to increase bonuses. AIG, for example, ignored its actuaries when they pointed out the likelihood of bankruptcy.
But coming back to the basic point, let's hear from Bruce Bartlett, again:
At a hearing of the Senate Finance Committee on July 14, 1978, Alan Greenspan, who had lately been chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers (CEA) under Ford, endorsed the Kemp-Roth bill with this explanation:
Let us remember that the basic purpose of any tax cut program in today’s environment is to reduce the momentum of expenditure growth by restraining the amount of revenues available and trust that there is a political limit to deficit spending.
Senate Finance Committee, 1978
That is a sterling example of Greenspan's "mumbling with great authority" on economic matters. In decoded English, it says
We are cutting taxes in order to cut social spending
in accordance with the Republican Southern Strategy of racism that we don't talk about in public.
Ron Paul
Are we there, yet? Ah, yes, Texas Rep. Ron Paul, the darling of the Tea Parties.
By one measure, Paul has the most conservative voting record of any member of Congress since 1937.
That is, he ranks 3320 out of 3320.
In addition to his Libertarianism, he will not vote for any measure unless he sees an explicit grant of power to Congress for it in the Constitution.
Now, he's not all bad. Solidly against the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, aid to Israel, threatening Iran, the embargo on Cuba, the PATRIOT Act, denying Habeas Corpus, and the War on Drugs. But he opposes both the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, most government agencies, and any form of government regulation of business.
According to newsletters with his name on them, he is virulently racist, homophobic, and antisemitic. Paul claims that the articles were ghostwritten, and do not reflect his opinions. However, in the past he has defended them as "taken out of context". I don't know what context that could be, and neither does anybody else who has read them.
Rand Paul
Ron Paul's son, now the Republican candidate for Senator from Kentucky, formed his own licensing board to license himself as an ophthalmologist. He most famously got into political hot water by opposing the 1964 Civil Rights bill, on the grounds that it violated property rights, in an interview on The Rachel Maddow Show. He said, specifically, that he is absolutely opposed to discrimination, but even more opposed to the federal government telling a private business whom it must serve, and unwilling to weigh the harms to those discriminated against against that absolute property right. He himself, he continued, would never patronize a segregated business.
This is a curious opinion, because in the segregated Jim Crow South there were no desegregated businesses. So: no restaurants for Rand, no public water fountains, no busses, no movie theaters,...Wait a minute! Where would he send his children to school?! Up North? Out of the country? Does he think that he would have been allowed to open an integrated private school? In Jim Crow Texas, before Brown v. Board of Education? Or anywhere else in the South?
That dawg won't hunt.