I have been traveling the last few days so no blogging and no internet. I brought a number of laptops so I could have if I wanted, but I wanted to take a break. Like everyone else, being on-line is such a big part of my daily life, it is a strange experience to unplug for a few days. For me at least, the strangeness comes mostly from the realization that I could easily unplug for good and never miss it. What we regard as the civic life of the republic is mostly nonsense. There really is no reason to pay attention to any of it.
When I was a kid, I worked for a congressman as a part-time job. An article of faith among the political class was that the typical American was not paying attention. That was regarded as a good thing by old timers. They saw it as a sign that American was psychologically healthy. The new breed of political animal saw it as a defect that needed to be remedied. I suspect the old hands had it right. The quality of the state is inversely proportional to its desires to gain the attention of the citizens…
I used to think libertarians were just nutty ideologues, but I’ve come around to the idea that most are just cowardly conservatives. Politics in America has always been about morality, not ideology. That cold civil war, as John Derbyshire calls it, is just a fight over what is going to be the prevailing morality. Moral arguments are messy and not about right answers, but about what people want. The morality of a people is simply what they people want to be true about themselves and the world around them.
As a practical matter, it means telling the Left you don’t want gay Boy Scout masters because you don’t like homosexuality. Defending normalcy is hard because it requires saying tough things and using tough language. Instead, you can avoid it all and claim to be a libertarian. You’re not for or against gay marriage or against abortion. You’re not for or against religious liberty. The libertarian avoids the culture war entirely and instead does battle with straw men on issues like legalizing weed and tax policy…
Even if you take libertarians seriously, it’s clear they suffer from the same problem you see on the Left. They assume things about people that are not true. For example, walk through an airport. Government does a terrible job running airports. It is as if they are trying to make air travel as inefficient as possible. The TSA people I encountered were universally surly and unpleasant. Airport staff acts like they are doing you a favor if they recognize you. The main reason for this is they deal with the public.
Some fraction of the traveling public is simply ignorant of the rules, written and unwritten, and need firm direction. Another fraction thinks they are special little snowflakes and try to prove it by bucking the rules. On one of the plane rides, I watched a women tell people the middle seat was taken. She just wanted extra room. Eventually, the staff had to threaten the old women so that the seat could be used. It’s a good reminder that order has to be imposed on some portion of the public. Libertarians can’t grasp this…
My first year at college, they had some sort of carnival, so all the campus freaks could perform in public. The student groups got to setup tables and recruit to their organization, sell food to raise money and so forth. One of the weirder tables was one by a group extolling the glories of Albania. I knew nothing of Albania, so I took their literature. The national symbol was a fascist looking black eagle on a red background. The women pitching me on Albania seemed so earnest about the place.
This was before the internet so I had to go to the library to learn about Albania. I learned that the leader, Enver Hoxha was a brutal dictator and the intellectual father of anti-revisionist Marxism–Leninism, which basically meant he rejected the deviationists that followed Stalin. Hoxha was not very influential in left-wing circles, but there was a sub-culture that was deeply loyal to his ideas. His ideology was Stalinism with an extreme form isolationism. Albania was a hermit kingdom during the Cold War.
Anyway, I was reminded of that when talking with some liberal friends. The gluten thing is the food fad of the Left. They all have it. One person believes this stuff so deeply she is starving herself. She beliefs she has suddenly developed an allergy to all food. I’ve known this person for thirty years. I have cooked for her dozens of times and I know she ate all sorts of things. Yet she suddenly thinks she has had this malady that makes her allergic to food. She reminded me of that woman handing out Albanian literature…
The New England Yankee has many ways to signal their righteousness. That is an inheritance from colonial times. In a world of communal salvation, showing you are on the side of the righteous is very important. Today that means signally good whiteness versus bad whiteness. They will mock Larry the Cable Guy, but claim to love Louis CK. They love Whole Foods, but think Walmart is evil. Males think it important to follow the English Premiere League, despite never having been to England.
This is not all them. NASCAR has a big track in New Hampshire. It’s not there because no one in New England follows car racing. It falls along a spectrum, where some people, the hard Left, make a big deal of signaling their good whiteness. At the other end are townies and regular people who just like the same stuff as everyone else. Most people fall in between, but it is the Left that sets the tone. It is a good reminder that the left in America grew out of a spiritual movement and retains that quality today…
