Monthly Archives: October 2013

Why Legal Weed Is Not So Easy

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When most people think about libertarians, the thing that comes to mind is their obsession with legalizing drugs. Since the 80’s, every conversation with a libertarian always turns into a debate about legalizing drugs. The right-libertarians are less berserk about it, but there are far fewer of them than the left-libertarians. The former are more like traditional conservatives, while the latter are just low-tax liberals. Drug normalization used to be a standard item on the Progressive agenda until the 1990’s.

While libertarians are right about many of the consequences of the drug war, they are unrealistic about the consequences of legalization. The easiest way to see this is to think about a mother driving down the road with her pre-teen kids. On the radio is a splashy ad about the weed sale at WalMart. In a society that has banned cigarette ads, it seems unlikely that we would tolerate the open sale of drugs, even mild ones like weed. In other words, libertarianism sounds great in the lab, but it would never hold up in the wild.

Even if you can work out a convenient lie like “medical marijuana” so you can have legal weed that exists on the fringe of society, there are other problems. This is a good example. If these two coaches were at a bar getting hammered, they would maybe face some sort of reprimand or a trip to a phony counselor. That’s never going to happen with smoking weed, like these idiots were apparently doing. The public may be willing to legalize weed to a limited extent, they will never embrace it like beer.

Punishing employees for doing that which is perfectly legal will also be problematic. The public, faced with a choice between banning weed or allowing their kid’s teachers to do bong hits in the teacher’s lounge will prefer prohibition. When you get to things like drug testing air traffic controllers, heavy equipment operators and law enforcement people, even legalizing weed creates all sorts of new problems. Again, people can tolerate a pilot who likes a beer after his shift. They won’t tolerate a pilot doing bong hits.

Whenever this is pointed out, libertarians always come back with “Well, what’s the difference between drinking beer and smoking weed.” It’s a form of tactical ignorance, whereby they demand you prove something that is obvious. A person can have a beer and beer completely functional. Most beer drinkers don’t get hammered. The whole point of smoking weed is to get wasted. The same is true of most street drugs. The proper use must lead to a mental state that makes the user incapable of rational behavior.

Anyway, it is the central problem with libertarianism and liberalism. Both make assumptions about humans that are not based in reality. Humans are not moist robots. We have prejudices and preferences that are not always rational from a distance. More important, American is a multi-ethnic and multi-racial society. Blacks have different social behavior than whites. What would work fine for middle-class whites living in the suburbs, is never going to work for blacks anywhere. This is a fundamental reality of life.

Even if the biodiversity scares you, consider the cultural things. People in New England are obviously different in their attitudes and behavior from people in Appalachia. Travel around this country and note how many different tribes of whites. The Founders got this, which is why the designed a federations. America is a land of nations. Universalist secular religions like libertarianism and Progressivism start by pretending these differences are superficial and meaningless, despite all the evidence to the contrary.

The point is, even under ideal conditions, like a white middle-class suburb, libertarianism is a non-starter, because people are not rational. They have tastes and preferences that are not rational. They don’t want weed being sold in the open. They don’t want cigarettes sold to kids or porn on daytime television. More important, they expect their government to make sure these things don’t happen. Therefore, legalizing drugs will almost certainly result in all sorts of new laws to make sure weed remains a marginalized item.

That said, it’s never been clear that libertarians are serious about any of their arguments, so this could just be a pose. After all, libertarians don’t seem to care about the war on smoking. Banning them from advertising seems like a serious breech of free speech rights, yet libertarians can’t be bothered to address it. The reason is that would get them in trouble with the Left. A big part of libertarianism is avoiding any issue that is important to the Left, unless of course they agree with the Left, then they are enthusiastic.

Banned From National Review

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It took a while, but they finally banned me from posting at National Review. It seems my accurate portrayal of the execrable Ramesh Ponnuru finally did it. I called him Rich Lowry’s house boy, which must have finally forced their hand. The fact is, all of these people are just hired pens. Ponnuru is a hack who gets paid because he is willing to lick the boots of whoever pays him. Lowry keeps him around mostly for color. If Ramesh were a white guy named Smith he would be waxing Lowry’s car, not writing for his magazine.

But, that’s how it goes with the managerial class these days. It is all appearances and gestures. The fact that an empty suit like Lowry is in charge of National Review shows how pointless it is to support these organizations. To quote Eric Hoffer, “all movements become a business and then a racket.” National Review is now just a money raising racket for managerial class mediocrities. It’s why they are so ineffective. It’s all a long con on ordinary people, who just want to have a normal country.

It will be interesting to see how long National Review stays afloat. Buckley bankrolled the thing as it never made money, even when it actually stood for something. Well, that’s what he allowed people to believe. In reality, he was a great hustler who got rich people to not only finance the magazine, but his extravagant lifestyle. Buckley’s family was very wealthy, but old Bill had expensive tastes. Regardless, he’s gone now and the people in charge of his magazine lack his connections and media skill.

Rich Lowry has no money of his own and limited ability to raise it from rich donors. Maybe Buckley set things up before he croaked so they could carry on, but that never stops the next generation from screwing it up in time. Their recent fundraisers have been disasters, forcing them to extend their deadlines. The quality of the product has also declined sharply as they have purged anyone curious or insightful. Kevin Williamson is the best they have, but he is a gold-plated phony. That will eventually be his undoing.

I will wear my banishment as a badge of honor. In the years ahead, I have no doubt I will be banned from many other platforms. The people who rule over us assumed the internet was going to be an amen chorus praising them. Now that they see the opposite, they will move to shut down speech on-line. First it will be the comment sections and then social media. Anything that contradicts the secular religion will be treated as blasphemy.

President Mugabe

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Martin Luther King is treated like a saint these days. According to popular mythology, he was the Progressive version of Jesus, sent to cleanse the sins of the white man. The truth is, he was far from a saint. By most accounts, King was a lot like Al Sharpton. He was personally corrupt and a degenerate. His great gift was a talent for manipulating upper middle-class whites, while at the same time appearing to oppose them on behalf of the blacks. Whites believed they could deal with him and blacks trusted him.

King had was a sixth sense about the ruling class whites. He knew that they lacked the appetite for confrontation and were generally in favor of dismantling segregation. Northern whites wanted it gone because they hated southern whites, but upper class southerners wanted it gone too. These whites wanted to be accepted in the national elite and saw segregation as an obstacle. King understood this and played on that divide as you can see in his Letter From Birmingham Jail.

The subtle point, made in the context of the events that got him locked up, was that whites had a choice. They could negotiate with him or fight with the brothers on the street. At the same time, the message to northern whites was that blacks would not submit, so it was safe to back them against southern whites. This two cushion bank shot had the desired effect of weakening the resolve of southern elites, who were put in the same impossible position as South African whites a generation later.

In the end, King’s great gift was not his ability to rally and uplift blacks, but his ability to pit one groups of whites against another. The faction willing to fight would be abandoned and used as a scapegoat. Later, guys like Jackson and Sharpton turned this trick into a racket. They would threaten to riot outside a corporate headquarters until they got paid. Jackson became a millionaire shaking down large companies. Sharpton is less rich, but he certainly lives well scaring white liberals into paying his way.

In post-Colonial Africa, there was a similar phenomena, but in a different context. The white colonials were looking to put a black face on their possessions and went looking for the best and brightest Africans. The Brits went so far as to send them back to England for training and education. Eventually, some rose up and took control as the colonials withdrew. The story over and over with the new African leaders was they all possessed an ability to sooth the fears of the whites, while appearing as authentic Africans.

Time after time, the colonials were lead to believe that these guys were more like them than the typical African. They held no ill will toward them and would continue on the policies established by the whites. Ian Smith of Rhodesia, a skeptic of British policy, was even won over eventually. Once they gained power, however, the new black rulers set about slaughtering anyone they thought was a threat. Eventually, that meant turning on the white farmers and administrators and eventually genocide.

We are seeing something similar with Barak Obama. It turns out that his only real skill is the ability to make upper-middle class white liberals do stuff for him. Otherwise, the guy is incompetent. You see it in this story from the LA Times, of all places.  This is the basic stuff of governance. Governments spy on one another. They get caught. They are always prepared for both so as not to look foolish. Yet, this administration is incapable of this basic duty. This is statecraft 101 and the administration can’t master it.

As an aside, a trouble pattern seems to be emerging with regards to the use of the intelligence services in this administration. They seem to have a flagrant disregard for the normal protocols. The reason those protocols exist is to avoid these sorts of diplomatic blunders. The story makes quite clear that the White House deliberately broke the rules in order to spy on European leaders. That suggests a cavalier attitude toward the limits of the state. Who else are they spying on and what other rules are they breaking?

Anyway, pick an item and the only thing Obama has been able to do well is rally upper-middle class white liberals to defend him from his critics. Everything else has been a mess. He had an opportunity to radically alter government in his first two years and blundered so badly little was accomplished. Even his most slavish fans grumble about the blown opportunities. It turns out that replacing whites with non-whites has a real impact on the basic functioning of western-style governments.

Americans are now getting see up close why Africa has failed. We elected the Robert Mugabe of America politics as President. He’s not threatening genocide, at least not yet, but there are trouble signs that his administration is about to unleash a torrent of anti-white rhetoric. His talk about going “Bullworth” is all about taking the gloves off with regards to race. The last thing America needs is race talk from the mulatto president. That could very well be the price of incompetence. A simmering race war.

Back From The Memory Hole

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Drudge had this linked this morning. It says a lot about this age that so many things get deliberately erased from the official record, only to pop back up later. It speaks to the new power of the media, thanks to the communication revolution, but also to their vulnerability, due to the communication revolution. They have these huge megaphones they can use to obscure stories they don’t like, by trumpeting the stories they do like. On the other hand, the internet never forgets, so even the obscure can be found.

In this case, it was well known at the time that the crime was not what the New York Times claimed. They massaged the facts to fit the prevailing worldview among their readership. They may have even believed their own nonsense, as these people are true believers. They had all the bogeymen right there in the story – rednecks, flyover country, western outfits. Shepherd, of course, had the right look. Liberals prefer their homosexuals to be of the twink variety, not the bear variety and white, of course.

It all made sense to the hive mind of the New York Times readership. When skeptics questioned the veracity of their claims, it was easy for them to dismiss the critics as right-wing homerphobes. The stock of words that means “heretic” is useful in allowing the Left to dismiss anyone who questions their claims. One of the benefits of moral certainty is when you get push back from non-believers, it feels like confirmation. The Left believed the fiction version of this story and got the spiritual hit they crave.

Now there is a book from a professional homosexual challenging all of the claims made by the Progressive media. The evidence is pretty clear that the three men knew one another and they were drug addicts. They certainly did drugs together and maybe sold drugs together. One of them was certainly gay or at least bisexual. The murder was the result of the same stupid stuff we see every day from the lower classes. Drugs, money and sex are almost always the reason someone ends up dead in the ghetto.

In this case it looks like a combination of drugs and sex. Three druggies that may have been homosexuals, with one another or separately, got into a dispute involving drugs and one of them ended up dead. In other words, remove the homosexuality from the mix and no one cares about this story. The fact that the victim was probably a gay gives the Left license to filling the official narrative with facts about this case. It’s an great example of how the news is just agit-prop, with very little connection to reality.

President Blunders

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The Saudis are an odious bunch, but they are the main power broker in the Middle East, after the Israelis. As is often the case in foreign affairs, you have to team up with terrible people sometimes to thwart other terrible people. Saving the French from the Nazis was unpleasant, but they were less odious than the Nazis. If it had been the Italians who sacked Paris, maybe the choice is not so clear.

That’s the way it is with the Saudis. They will cause trouble, but a different sort of trouble than other players in the region. The Bush family took this too far and acted like sock puppets for the Saudi Royal Family, but what Obama is doing is quite dumb. He really thinks he can align with the Iranians and toss over the Saudis. This is so dumb that no one wants to be around him. The Iranians think he and his team are too dumb to pull off such an alignment and the Saudis think he is too dumb to trust.

In unusually blunt public remarks, Prince Turki al-Faisal called Obama’s policies in Syria ‘lamentable’ and ridiculed a U.S.-Russian deal to eliminate Assad’s chemical weapons. He suggested it was a ruse to let Obama avoid military action in Syria.

‘The current charade of international control over Bashar’s chemical arsenal would be funny if it were not so blatantly perfidious. And designed not only to give Mr. Obama an opportunity to back down (from military strikes), but also to help Assad to butcher his people,’ said Prince Turki, a member of the Saudi royal family and former director of Saudi intelligence.

Diplomats are not going to say Obama is a moron and they want nothing to do with him, but that’s what they are telling people. America may be a clumsy, oafish giant, but it is still a giant that can wield incredible economic and military pressure. The lesson the world learned from Iraq is that American mistakes get Arabs killed by the tens of thousands, so the Arab world is careful to not get on the wrong side the Americans.

It is one thing to have a bad policy. It is one thing to poorly execute a policy. Mistakes happen and we get stuff wrong all the time. The incompetence in the White House is a different issue. They have no understanding of the world, but they think of themselves a worldly statesman. The result is a feckless and unpredictable foreign policy. The one thing diplomats fear most is unpredictability. Nations with erratic leaders find themselves alone.

Of course, the larger issue is that Obama had a unique opportunity to get the US out of the region entirely. He did pull troops from Iraq, but that was just to spite the Bush people and the war party in Washington. It was not part of a larger strategy to unwind the war machine he inherited from Bush. It looks like he is committed to Afghanistan forever, which makes less sense than keeping troops in Iraq. At least Iraq has oil.

True Believers

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Belief is one of those things that people instinctively recognize when they see it, but struggle to describe. The person operating from a deeply held belief may come to the same conclusion as someone working from facts and reason, but that not the purpose. In other words, the believer gets the right answer because it happens to confirm their beliefs, while the rational person gets the right answer, because it’s the right answer.

The true believer is never dissuaded, while the rational can change their mind when presented with new information. No one is a pure logic machine, but the concept is a good way to understand the mind of the believer. Belief operates in the world where confirmation is always the goal. Empiricism operates in the realm where accuracy is the goal. if they are ends of a spectrum, then most people lie somewhere in between.

Dedicated and loyal Catholics, for example, are convinced that each new Pope will revive their church. The pages of National Review, for example, are filled with glowing stories about the new Pope, despite the fact he is probably a communist and wants to take the Catholic Church down the same road as the Protestant faiths. The true believer is always sure that just around the corner, their dreams will come true.

In modern America, the most active religion is Progressivism. We tend not to think of it as a religion or a belief system, but that’s what it is. It is a secular religion that seeks to fill the role of Christianity in the West. It serves to explain natural phenomenon, often by way of supernatural forces. it has a set of moral codes and, most important, it provides a justification for the powerful to impose those moral codes on the rest of us.

The different between secular religions and those reliant on the supernatural is the source of legitimacy and authority. Instead of an omniscient god the Progressive puts his faith in what he determines to be the general will. There’s no written text to spell this out, of course, so the general will is whatever the hive mind of the American Left determines it to be at any given movement. Progressivism is occasionalism.

They are also far out on the fanatical end of the scale. Failure is always greeted by a doubling down, a determination that the only response to disconfirmation is to go even further to the extreme. This is a feature of all radicalism. The radical mind thinks that if a little is good, a lot must be better. On the other hand, if a little is not enough, then the answer is even more. There’s no limiting principle in Progressivism.

A great example is the hilariously incompetent ObamaCare exchanges. Simple math said all along they could never work as promised. Perhaps some people will benefit, but the majority will be screwed. As the evidence pours in showing just how bad this disaster will be, the Left keeps insisting it is a dream come true. Never mind that Sally Kohn is probably a liar. She and her coreligionists will not be swayed by evidence.

It’s is why it is pointless to engage with the Left. It’s not that they are liars or that they don’t argue in good faith. Those things are true, for sure, but the reason it is pointless is they are true believers. That’s what motivates them to lie, dissemble and exaggerate. They really do believe their own nonsense. Trying to convince them to renounce their faith is about as sensible as trying to talk Muslims out of their faith.

Now, there are elements of the Left who are motivated by other things. They wear the skin of true believers like Sally Kohn, because it is good cover. There are opportunists in every religion. There are always subversives who use the cover of social movements to undermine the majority. That’s all true, but the bulk of Progressives, the white ones at least, really do believe this stuff. They are the truest of true believers.

Post Reality

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In his last podcast, John Derbyshire mentions Sam Francis with regards to the Tea Party movement and similar spasms of Middle Americans Radicalism. Francis was a brilliant observer of America and first rate political thinker. The reason he is largely forgotten now is he ran afoul of the ruling elite. More specifically, he was a blasphemer on the issue of race, which can never be tolerated. Anti-racism is how the elite define themselves, so they see anything that can be described as racist to be a personal insult.

There should always be a wide space between what the culture rules out of bounds and that which the elites would like to silence. Elites will always want to silence critics, but in an open society this must be tolerated. The elites can point and sputter, but they should not be willing or able to condemn their critics, outside of extreme cases. If the ruling class becomes the arbiter of what is tolerable on moral grounds, the result will be something closer to a theocracy, rather than liberal democracy.

That said, it’s not wrong to say that guys like Sam Francis harmed themselves by deliberately violating public morality. Public discourse should be raucous and rude, but you have to know when to pull your punches too. You’re not getting very far by offending people, especially when you seem to enjoy being offensive. It makes the target sympathetic. When that target is the elite, that means they have license to swing the hammer at you. In other words, you’re asking for it.

Despite being a fan of John Derbyshire, I would say he had it coming when he was un-personed over this column. He was intentionally provocative. He could have pulled his punches a bit and made all the same point, but he wanted to provoke a response and he got his wish. To his great credit, he has never complained about it, so he did what he did fully prepared to take his medicine. There’s a place for that, for sure, but there is a place for those willing to use esoteric language and euphemisms too.

Anyway, the reason for this post is that Derb’s mention of Francis got me to re-read some old old Sam Francis essays. The man was not only brilliant, but he was right about a lot of things. In fact, the paleocons were right about an amazing number of things. Pat Buchanan was right about immigration, trade and the economy. Joe Sobran was mostly right about the culture and capitalism. John Derbyshire has been right about things like immigration, the culture war and the human sciences.

I could go on, but the point is, they were all mainstream voices in their day. They were contrarians, for sure, but no one thought of them has crazy or dangerous. Eventually, they were all driven from the stage. Those that have died have been erased from the collective memory. Those still alive have been forced to live in their shed, brought out once in a while for a struggle session. In other words, they were punished just as much for being right as for being at odds with public morality on the issues of race and culture.

Mark Steyn coined the term I’m using as a title. The elites of America are feverishly insulating themselves from reality. It is perfectly sensible for elites to insulate themselves from the physical reality of life. The King knew the peasants lived in filth. he did not have to see it every day. That’s not what is happening in modern America. Our royalty is walling themselves off from reality and demanding the rest of us accept their imaginary world as our reality. We have to play make believe with them.

The obvious question that arises from this is how long can such a condition go on before reality simply refuses to stay out of sight? At some point the differences is human potential have to be accepted. Are we really going to try and run and army with girls in combat units and transvestites in the command staff? Are we going to fill Congress with the quality of people we see on the Baltimore city council? Even if this is possible, how long could it endure? What happens when even the elites learn it is impossible?

Appeasing The Gods

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At various times in the 19th and early 20 century, drought would threaten to wipe out whole towns, even states. The Dust Bowl is the most famous to modern Americans, as it drove tens of thousands from the land and to the west coast, looking for a new life. Of course, people often look for reasons beyond the natural, so many of the people who stayed, hoping for a miracle, looked for all sorts of ways to make it rain. That, in turn, made them easy prey for con men and charlatans promising to bring relief from the drought.

It seems rather primitive, looking back from this vantage point. Droughts still happen, but a big complicated technological country like America can work around it. The idea of some guy showing up promising to make it rains sounds nutty. It was not that long ago. In fact, there are plenty of people living today who knew Okies. Many old folks in California were the children of Okies, maybe even having made the trip as small children. The point is that it was not so long ago that appealing to nature or the gods was no considered crazy.

Anyway, that came to mind when reading this strange story from the UK. The Europeans have a primitive fear of nature these days. The Brits are leading the charge on ”climate change” which is just a modern form of nature worship. Watch BBC America and the shows always have some mention of green this or earth friendly that. The car shows are most humorous because they always stop at some point and provide a lecture to the viewers about recycling your oil or coolant at the “council dump.”

The fact that they are spending money to ward off a cataclysm that will never come is a reminder that we have not advanced as far as we think. The rituals and magic of 100 years ago just have new names today. There is a veneer of science to this stuff now, but at its core, it is the old fear of the super natural. Modern people worry that they are somehow at odds with nature and at some point, nature will get mad about it. The fact that the science is beyond anyone’s comprehension makes it more scary.

The religious angle to climate change is easy to see for those who have read the Hebrew Bible or had some religious training. We stopped teaching religion in public schools and church attendance has been dropping for years, so most modern people are ignorant to the religious aspects to climate change. Al Gore, for example, had some sort of nervous breakdown in the 2000 campaign. After a trip into the wilderness, he recovered and returned as the Prophet Al to warn the public about God’s pending wrath.

If you had read the Old Testament, you saw it right away. No one in our ruling elites attends mass or has religious training so it was lost on them. Gore went to divinity school, so  he may have done this on purpose, but it is entirely possible he does not know he is playing the role of Old Testament prophet. The fact that he made a few hundred million from this crusade suggests it is an act, but Gore never showed himself to be a grifter in the past. He’s always been a fanatic and he happened to hit it big this time.

What the Europeans are doing is a bit different. They abandoned Christianity a long time ago. Instead they threw their lot in with secular religions that promised earthly salvation, without the sacrifice demanded by the supernatural. Communism, fascism and socialism are nothing more than attempts to immanentize the eschaton. That is, arrange things in such a way to bring about plenty and relieve suffering. They still believed. It’s just a question of what they believe. Now it is a modern form of nature worship.

Of course, people who think the planet is plotting against them are not optimistic about the future. That’s why fertility rates have plummeted all over Europe. Many countries are actively recruiting Muslims to settle in their lands and wipe out their culture. of course, there is the endless quest to make materialism fill the void where Christianity once existed in the hearts of Europeans. The result is a vicious cycle, where the more they embrace neo-pagan religions, the more they dread the future and hate their past.

These new gods will not be appeased.

The End of Black Colleges

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The seemingly endless reshuffling of the college football conferences is usually explained as a function of money. Football is the big revenue sport, with men’s basketball a distant second in college athletics. Everything else is way down the list and therefore not all that important to the decision makers. Therefore, whatever promises to increase football revenue is done, even if it harms the other sports. As a result, the major football schools have been consolidating their hold on TV money by creating super-conferences.

Steve Sailer suggests there may be a different issue at play, one no one is allowed to discuss, even though everyone knows it exists. Colleges are reorganizing to corner the market on smart black athletes, which helps them boost their diversity. Put another way, the demand for smart black guys, who can play a revenue sport is expanding due to the quest for diversity. This is the driving up the price for black athletes, so the schools are consolidating their hold on the market by realigning.

That increase in price is reflected in the cost of maintaining high level sports programs, so while the pie gets bigger, the number of slices get smaller, as the big schools take bigger slices of the pie. It is certainly true that the pool of qualified applicants keeps growing, but the pool of the preferred applicants is not growing, at least not organically. It’s why elite colleges love African students. Barak Obama was highly sought after by elite schools, despite being mediocre, because he ticked a lot of important boxes.

It is an interesting observation and not entirely false, but if the best athletes were Chinese, the conferences would still be consolidating. The main reason is the cable monopolies are state sanctioned tax farmers. They get to tax people though their cable bill. Those revenues get directed to approved things and the big state colleges have figured out to get a taste of the skim. Federal grant money also plays a role as these colleges get billions in federal grants. By pooling together they increase their grasping power.

That said, the demand for competent black athletes is an example of how diversity has changed the college business. The historically black colleges used to field competitive sports teams and attract the talented ten percent of black youth. Once sports integrated, the best black players went to the big state programs. High IQ black athletes would end up at programs like Notre Dame, Boston College and Northwestern. As a result, the great black programs like Grambling and Southern have fallen on hard times.

That still left room for a Spellman and Morehouse to be the Black Ivies, but now the Ivies and “new Ivies” are desperate for black students. A smart black kid whose parents and grandparents went to Howard, for example, is getting offers from all of the elite colleges, so he has no reason to attend an historically black college. Just as American is skimming the best and brightest from the undeveloped world via immigration, the top colleges are skimming the best out of the historically black colleges and prep schools.

Inevitably, this will be reflected in the administration. As the quality of student declines, the quality of administrator will decline. Condoleezza Rice is not teaching at one of these colleges when she can work at Stanford. Talented black administrators follow the talented students, often working in the same schools from which they graduated. Ironically, the celebration of non-whites, as a vehicle to expand diversity, is killing off one of the better parts of black culture in America. The historically black college is dying.

Fake Libertarians

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Way back in the olden thymes, my liberal friends would occasionally claim to be libertarian or “mostly libertarian.” They would usually bust that out whenever I was making sport of their hive mentality. When Bill Clinton was raping interns, it was great fun to mock the feminists who somehow managed to get past the rape business to support Clinton against those prudish inquisitors. That’s when they would suddenly discover their inner libertarian and say that what adults did on the floor of the oval office was no one’s business.

It was the Clinton years when I began to look at liberalism as a cult. Cult leaders always end up indulging in deviant behavior that their followers manage to overlook. It’s as if the charismatic leader crosses some threshold, where his strength of personality becomes more of a factor than his ideas. The proof of that is how his followers rationalize their leader doing things he allegedly opposes. Those who can do this become more committed, while those who can’t are boiled off and join some other cult.

Of course, one reason liberals think they may be “slightly libertarian” is they are in favor of legalizing weed. Liberals are the modern Roundheads so to them, this feels like a huge concession toward personal liberty. Their movement has been stamping out smoking, eating, sex, sloth and everything else that seems like fun for so long, they think it is radical to oppose the drug war. Those Puritan instincts tell them that even the most private of behavior must come under public scrutiny, so being OK with weed feels radical.

That and they obsess over their crotch. For whatever reason, the Left has an obsession with lady parts to the point of distraction. It’s an odd obsession that is in part a need to be vulgar. They associate probity with middle-class white culture, which they oppose, so being vulgar feels like rebellion to them. Therefore, indulging in sexual degeneracy, which would seem at odds with other aspects of their secular religion, is acceptable because it offends an enemy of their movement. It’s an exception that supports the cause.

I was thinking about this the other day when looking at the Lion of the Blogosphere’s latest pro-abortion rant. He has an obsession with cultural conservatives and therefore he dwells on abortion, thinking it is the opposite of decency. He is a guy who will occasionally try to pass himself off as libertarian which is a bit ridiculous. The HBD guys like him and they tend not to be liberal, but there’s no reason to think one excludes the other. In fact, an oblique form of race realism has always been at the heart of American radicalism.

Still, I wonder why it is some on the Left feel the need to play the libertarian card. It could simply be a part of their natural tendency to deflect. People are attracted to secular religions out of self-loathing. They seek to swap their hated self, for the identity of the group. Therefore they are always trying to avoid discussion of themselves, because that requires facing up to their nature. Playing the libertarian card is a lure to draw attention away from them onto something else, anything else.

Alternatively, we see conservatives in Progressive enclaves using the libertarian ruse to avoid conflict. Anyone who has lived in Massachusetts knows that child molesters get better treatment than conservatives. If you are at a social event and say something that violates one of their many taboos, you can be sure the screech owls from the local feminist coven will be trying to rip your flesh from your bones. For reasons I’ll get into another day, the Left does not view libertarians as a threat.

Of course, this suggests that libertarianism is not a real ideology or a real social movement, but rather a way station of sorts. Left-libertarians can code-switch between liberalism and libertarianism, depending upon their situation. Right-libertarians can do something similar, in order to avoid the wrath of lefty. That means as the divide grows, libertarianism will collapse, as it will be impossible to exist in both camps. That’s a topic for another day, but it means libertarianism is not a real thing.