Trump, Trumpism and the structural case for libertarianism/classical liberalism

 A few weeks back, I wrote one of my science fiction posts on a rather irritating libertarian screed, in science fiction form:  The Probability Broach, by L. Neil Smith.  I commented that there is a strange, utopian streak in libertarian writing, which is problematic in itself, and a demonstration of the flaws common in the thinking of many libertarians.  I don't describe myself as a libertarian, nor really as anything other than "idiosyncratic."  Yet, I am sympathetic to many of the arguments of libertarianism, or at least of classical liberalism.  And yes, I will lecture you this morning on the definition of "liberalism," which even many scholars seem willfully unwilling to understand.  However, I'm-a-gonna ramble.  Fair warning.

Anyway, I will not dwell for too long on the point of Donald Trump, the person.  My disdain for him is hardly a secret.  Fortunately, he won't be president for much longer, and even his allies on the Supreme Court are exhausted with him.  Yup.  I got that wrong.  So, the likelihood of me being dragged off to some re-education camp for my ramblin's here is going from "very low" to "zero."  Yay.  Many things in politics are debatable.  Historically, most things, I think.  At least, most things in the recent history of politics.  What is the proper tax rate?  What is a morally appropriate level of redistribution, given that taxation is, quite literally, someone pointing a gun at my head and demanding my money?  And I detest people who misuse the word, "literally."  Yeah, there are real guns involved.  Don't believe me?  Try not paying your taxes.  Forever.  Eventually, you'll get arrested by people with guns.  (Unless your name is "Trump.")  Both sides of abortion consider their positions to be unassailably morally right, yet I see it as quintessentially contestable.  When does a clump of organic material become a human being?  At that point, abortion becomes murder.  Hence, the policy question is inseparable, in my mind, from a philosophical/biological question of "the beginning of human life," and yet peoples' opinions on the logically following policy question are somehow statistically correlated with their opinions on tax redistribution.  'Cuz... 'cuz... um... because politics are weird.  All of these are contestable issues.  Tell me you want taxes raised or lowered, and that says nothing to me about you, as a human being.  Presuming you are a human, and not some Russian bot, scouring the internet for a web site to spam with ads, which is why I have moderation blocking a bunch of random shit from appearing as comments on my posts.  (You don't want to know what those ads say.  Start a blog or web site, and get a strange view of the world.)

Donald Trump is different.  He is different in many ways, but let's just point out the blindingly obvious, as a simple point for today.  He lies.  Constantly.  Democracy is currently being threatened by his attempt to lie his way to a second term, after losing the 2020 election.  He'll fail.  The Supreme Court just told him to go fuck himself, and he appointed a third of them, but he's still trying, in multiple senses of the word.  And he is lying, as he always lies.  I refer to Donald Trump as "the lying-est liar who ever lied a lie," and I have compared him to the Jon Lovitz character, Tommy Flanagan, the pathological liar from Saturday Night Live, because he's not just a liar.  He's an obvious liar.  So here's the thing.  Donald Trump is a very obvious liar.

So, one of two things is the case for Trump supporters:  either a) they can see through Trump's constant lying, but they support him anyway, or b) they actually believe him.

For Type (a) Trump supporters, the problem is one of lack of integrity.  We all have our rankings of moral offenses, but lying is pretty big for me.  The Hobbesian state of nature never has existed, and never will exist.  State of nature theory is bullshit, by its very nature.  See what I did there?  Yet that doesn't mean there isn't variation in predation.  What allows humanity to achieve a level of civilization in which we operate above a level of pure predation?  Words.  Yet words have no meaning without truth.  Lying undercuts the entirety of civilization.  There's no safety without truth, and hence you can't even hide behind the central premise of the Leviathan.  I hate lies, and I hate liars.  And those who look the other way on Trump's constant lying... I got a big problem with them.

Then there are Type (b) Trump supporters.

I shall not mince words for you this morning.  These people are what Rex Tillerson called Trump himself.  OK, you can make a British meat pie out of those words.  Fine.  Suemedon'tsueme.  Anyone who cannot see through a Trump lie may lack the capacity to parse such a statement.  Or... you know, read.  Simply put, Trump is the most obvious liar I have ever seen, and anyone who can't see through him lacks critical thinking skills.  As an educator, I should probably blame myself.

I could have addressed Trump's child separation policy,* or any other of a plethora of indefensible aspects of the man, but I'm going with the lies.  Because the lying really bothers me.  It undercuts democracy, and civilization itself.  And regardless of whether we are talking about Type a Trump supporters, or Type b Trump supporters, I have a big problem.  I don't accept the premise that such people have a legitimate role making decisions that control my life.

Disputes over the philosophy of redistribution are both legitimate and unavoidable.  Taxation is a necessary evil.  It is both.  Necessary, and evil.  Hence, disputes over it are the legitimate realm of political debate, and we cannot rule a position to be outside the realm of acceptability, purely on its own terms.  Hence, we cannot rule a set of people unfit to participate in governance, purely for the positions they take on taxation.

You will not get the fiscal policy you want.  Why not?  Others disagree with you.  Tough.  Deal.  Ain't no other way.

However, the people who either can't see through Trump's lies, or don't care how much he lies... I have a big problem with them.  And I don't want to give them power over me.

So now it's time for a review of terminology.  I wish I didn't have to do this, but even some "educators" get this wrong.  Let's review the meaning of the word, "liberal."  Its root is "liberty," so the ideological category of liberalism is a category of ideologies, plural, which place the concepts, plural, of liberty at their core.

What we call classical liberalism goes back to theorists from the old dudes, like John Locke up through John Stuart Mill and lots of other people you hopefully read at some point in your lives.  Liberty, to such theorists, meant simply not having others intervene in your life.  Political liberty means that the government ain't tellin' you what to do.  You are free if your freedom is not being actively limited by government.  It exists by default, until it is limited by external action, and the goal is to preserve it to the degree possible for utilitarian purposes, in Mill's more complete theory.  I live my life, you live your life, and we're all happier that way.  And if that sounds like libertarianism, that's because libertarianism is not too far removed from classical liberalism.

This is the true ideology of small government.  This is not conservatism, which is an ideology that includes active government intervention in the social realm to regulate the bedroom, drugs, and lots of other things that make libertarians and classical liberals say, "get the fuck out of my life, asshole, this is not small government."

Stop saying that conservatism is an ideology of small government.  Stop letting them get away with that lie.

Anyway, words change over time.  This annoys me, but it is a fact of the world.  What happened to the word, "liberal?"  Basically, the Great Depression, FDR and the New Deal.  What is "liberty?"  Consider the following aphorism.  Both a wealthy person and a poor person are "free" to sleep under a bridge, but only a wealthy person is truly free to sleep in a fancy hotel.  This notion is at the core of the distinction between "positive" liberty and "negative" liberty, which is the theoretical distinction drawn by Isaiah Berlin, which I nearly type as Irving Berlin nearly every time because I'm a music geek in addition to a political science professor, and I still do this, decades later.  No, this one is Isaiah.  Negative liberty, according to Isaiah, is liberty that exists in the absence of government infringement.  Positive liberty, though, requires the means to act.

This gets confusing for people who study British politics, history, or just refuse to learn (and alas, there are a lot of people in that latter category, even in academia, or perhaps, especially in academia), but when Franklin Roosevelt began to push New Deal policies in response to the Great Depression, this dramatic change in political debate-- this change in political ideology-- changed how the word, "liberal," was used in American politics, such that the word branched off in its usage in the United States.  The word, liberal, began to refer to an ideology built around a positive conception of liberty, rather than the more classical, negative conception of liberty, creating a distinction between how the word is used in the US, and how it is used in Europe.

The word didn't stop changing, because ultimately, an ideology is still just a coalition and a bundle of policies rather than a logical belief system, thank you very much, Phil Converse.  It would be nicer if ideologies were logically consistent, but they aren't.  Not in practice.  They are socially constructed, and the process of that social construction doesn't stop.  So, the meanings keep changing.  However, the word, liberal, started to apply to a positive conception of liberty around the New Deal.

And then Reagan started using the word as an epithet, and American liberals got squirrelly, and started slowly changing to, "progressive," not having any clue what the Progressive Movement was, because they're all historically illiterate, but that's a lecture for another day.

My point was merely to clarify my terms while griping about a tendency among people who should know better to misuse their terms.  Classical liberalism, libertarianism... whatever.

As we conventionally think of these ideas, the arguments have been posed in moral terms.  Mill, for example, made a case for the social value of liberty.  Following from Jeremy Bentham, he argued essentially that you maximize happiness for the most people by letting people live their lives.

Yet, there is a very different argument for "small government," or at least, structural limitations on what government is permitted to do, based more on the rather elitist attitudes of the framers.  And that's where I'm going here.

You probably "know" that Senate/saucer/coffee story, right?  It's likely bullshit.  Yet, there are enough actual documents in which the framers wrote of their fears of the "fickleness and passion," and yadda-yadda-yadda.  The framers were elitists, they didn't trust the masses, and they wanted to create a system that balanced the need to prevent tyranny with the desire to prevent a bunch of illiterate rabble from getting their way when they are... um... illiterate rabble motivated by fickleness and passion.

Literacy rates are rather higher now.  As in, people can read, if barely.  Alas, they don't.  Unless you count tweets, FaceBook posts, and other garbage, and a lot of that consists of lies.  My problem being something similar to Madison's.  The modern rabble are no more competent than 18th Century rabble.  They can't see through obvious lies.  They read the lies, and large portions of them are too credulous to discount those lies.

So I return to an observation I have made many times about the concept of the vote.  A vote is not merely the power of self-determination.  When you vote, you are exercising power over me.  Why?  That thing that I call "the principle of voter interdependence," which is annoying jargon I coined in my first book.  When I choose to buy fancy, fair trade coffee like a hipster douchebag, I get my fancy coffee.  If you want Dunkin' or Starbucks or even some freeze-dried crap... you can have it.  I get good coffee, and you get whatever came out of a civet's ass, except that apparently whatever a civet shits is absurdly expensive, and no, I've never consumed it, and fuck you for asking.

Do I look like the kind of hipster who would drink something that came out of a civet's ass?

Don't answer that.

Where was I?  Oh, right.  The principle of voter interdependence.  You get your Starbucks, I get my fancy stuff.  Democracy doesn't work that way.  I vote for a sane, competent, experienced candidate, even if I have major problems with her, and the only way I get to live under that candidate's policies and governance is if enough others do likewise.  If enough yokels vote for a psychopathic, idiot child, I have to live under the governance and policies of a psychopathic, idiot child, a quarter million people die so far in a pandemic, and we're still living semi-quarantined in a collapsed economy.  I could go on, but I got shit to do today.

And the thing is, this was avoidable.  But... this was also kind of a best case scenario!  Like, seriously.  If you had asked me what scared me when Trump won, I was thinking of way worse stuff than this.  He was talking about using fuckin' nukes.  Had his lawyers done their jobs and prepared a real case, he actually may have pulled off an electoral theft.  As bad as this is, it really could have been worse.

But it shouldn't have happened at all.  Because back in 2016, and even 2015 during the GOP primaries, it should have been obvious to everyone that every word out of Donald Trump's mouth was a lie.

And anyone who either couldn't figure that out, or didn't care...

I object to such people governing my life.  See above.

This country has a fraught history, so to speak, with qualifications for the right to vote.  Literacy tests, I mean.  Yet, one can understand the motivation.  On general principle, the idea that the electorate should be informed is a good one, and it is difficult, although not impossible, to be informed if one is illiterate.  Jason Brennan has an interesting take on this in Against Democracy, arguing instead for what he calls, "epistocracy."  Complex and controversial.  I'll leave it at that.  The actual history of literacy tests in this country, of course, is inseparable from race, which is why they ain't never comin' back.

Yet, one can understand the abstract appeal.  And simply put, people who cannot see through Trump's lies have something wrong with their heads.  They're voting for Tommy Flanagan.

This isn't policy.  This is about the concept of truth.  I have never written nor said this kind of thing about any American politician before.  Trump really is different.

I can't tell these people: "you can't vote.  You're too stupid."  If you are getting the sense that I kinda wanna... um...

The framers, though, were really smart.  And oh, how proud they were of it.  The structure of government was designed to do nothing.  To be limited.  To make it hard to pass laws.  Checks and balances were once a thing, until the Republicans decided that King Donald must be allowed to reign supreme because of the unwritten and non-existent clause in Article II, which only King Donald can see, giving him the power to do whatever he wants.  Then, there's my second-favorite amendment.  The ninth amendment.  The amendment that says you have way more rights than the Constitution enumerates.

With a mouth like mine, I really do need to lean hard on the first amendment.  Number 9 is pretty cool, though.  If I had my druthers, constitutional interpretation would lean harder on it.

All of this is to say that the framers constructed a system that was intended to make governance hard.  To a significant extent, this was because they didn't trust the masses, and they didn't want a bunch of rabble doing stupid shit.  So, if you make everything hard to do, you make it hard for the rabble to do stupid shit.

That's not quite philosophical libertarianism.  That's structural libertarianism.  The absence of government because the process is too onerous to let the rabble do what they want to do.  Idiots that they are.  You can't disenfranchise them just for being rabble.  You can defang them when they get hold of the reins of government.

And I really, really want to defang the kind of people who can't see through Trump's lies.

And if you are reading a Trump-bashing professor's blog, I'm going to bet you do too.

Of course, there are tradeoffs.  There are always tradeoffs.  If government is empowered to hurt, it is empowered to help.  If it is empowered to help, it is empowered to hurt.  Separating them is really difficult.  And right now, during a pandemic which would be very difficult to manage in L. Neil Smith's fantasy-- although I'm sure he'd tell us about how his anarchist utopia would have beaten COVID in a day!-- we see this in stark relief.

Take a moment to think seriously about the challenges being brought by businesses and religious organizations to requirements that they close during the pandemic.  Right now, we are seeing what I think are clearly good-faith efforts to manage a pandemic, challenged by people who often believe bullshit conspiracy theories.  Yet, could the power being exercised now be misused?  Yeah, it could.  This is why we think in terms of principle, not the specifics of a case.

COVID is a big challenge.  Many state and local governments have made valiant, and to varying degrees, successful efforts.  And we'd do a lot better with effective governance at the federal level, but alas... Trump.  But that brings us to the paradox.  Trump is there because a bunch of idiots put him there.  To empower the federal government is to empower the idiots who put him there.

Those cages...

The basic economics behind government intervention are that it becomes important in the context of managing externalities and public goods.  Yet, empowering government to manage externalities and public goods creates the risk of some pretty horrendous shit.  Because the people who wind up in that position will have been put there by the kind of unwashed masses who can't see through the obvious lies of a psychopathic, idiot child.

And at the end of the day, this is why we must reject utopianism.  The streak of utopianism running through libertarianism is baffling in the context of the framers' common arguments that government must simply be limited to prevent the fickle passions of the unwashed masses from coming to fruition and doing horrendous damage.  And we've seen that, haven't we?  Yet at the same time, the economics of externalities and public goods show a place for government unrecognized by self-identified libertarians, and the challenge of striking any kind of balance is a challenge to which I cannot rise.

I'm simply observing that a lot of bad stuff has happened over the last four years.  And if you don't like it, go back and read The Federalist Papers, and all that good stuff.  Find comfort in sneering elitism.  Structural limitations on government put a check on the ability of those who cannot see through Trump to impose themselves on the rest of us.

Oh, and once COVID is done, we're screwed anyway.  Climate change.

*As a side note on The Probability Broach, the libertarian paradise alternate universe makes a showing of being completely open to immigration from the fascist hellscape of the big government universe, because an actual small government universe would be an open-borders universe.