Never let it be said that the gang at National Review are just partisan hacks. Here, for example, Andy McCarthy slams the Bush administration for demonstrating insufficient zeal in the use of the criminal justice system to intimidate reporters. There's something rather grimly fascinating about the strong grassroots support for authoritarianism out there on the American right.
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Independent Thinking
23 May 2007 10:43 am
Comments (43)
"There's something rather grimly fascinating about the strong grassroots support for authoritarianism out there on the American right."
Indeed. I would have thought, six or seven years ago, that people would be embarassed to say the sort of stuff they routinely spout over at The Corner. But America in 2000 seems like a different country, now....
What scares the hell out of me about Andy McCarthy is that he used to be a prosecutor. He's not just some Derbyshire pumping this stuff out.
In theory, I'm all for tough prosecutions, especially in high crime areas. But in reality, prosecutors tend toward hostile, suspicious, fact-free Andy McCarthyism.
"There's something rather grimly fascinating about the strong grassroots support for authoritarianism out there on the American right."
True, and the statement is still true when you replace "right" with "left."
"There's something rather grimly fascinating about the strong grassroots support for authoritarianism out there on the American right."
Umm, this is a fairly old concern, isn't it? This has been a feature of right-wing politics forever. It's been the specific labeled thing to fear from the right forever. What's fascinating about it? Or does this mean you didn't really believe it when people said that the wingnuts liked authoritarianism?
Yeah, I remember at the Democratic presidential debates when one frontrunner said he thought that torture was super, and the other one said he wanted to double the size of a completely lawless institution in which we hold citizens without charges or lawyers, both to resounding applause. And then there was all that grassroots support for those statements from the lefty blogs and Moveon. Right, Zagnut?
What's even scarier is how the right is becoming more and more nationalist/authoritarian (i.e. fascist) the more their policies are proven to be bad - calling for coups, etc.
It just goes to show that neither Christian theocratism nor small-government libertarianism was really ever the true intellectual foundation of the right. Fascism was always just beneath the surface.
Don't worry -- his opinion on the subject of arbitrary executive power will swing 180 degrees the day that a Democratic president is sworn into office.
"Yeah, I remember at the Democratic presidential debates when one frontrunner said he thought that torture was super, and the other one said he wanted to double the size of a completely lawless institution in which we hold citizens without charges or lawyers, both to resounding applause. And then there was all that grassroots support for those statements from the lefty blogs and Moveon. Right, Zagnut?"
The contemporary American left and right are authoritarian on different issues.
I may not legally smoke in bars in D.C. due to the efforts of the left, not the right, for instance. "Hate speech" laws, laws against consuming trans fats, anti-gun ownership laws, mandated racial hiring quotas, and so on ad nauseam. The radical left would shred the Constitution as quickly as you justifiably fear the right would.
Our wise federal government will spend almost 3 trillion dollars this year, from a total GNP of about 14 trillion. A dollar is a decision, so that's about 22% of decisions about our lives and world being made by a tiny, tiny handful of Republican and Democratic operatives in my hellhole home of D.C.
That means a lot of money to tell people what to do and enforce it if they don't. Hence the authoritarianism you decry on the right and overlook, or perhaps forgive, on the left.
How about moving to, say, Iraq, Afghanistan, Sudan or the Democratic Republic of Congo then, Zagnut?
If you got money, weapons and/or connections, you can do almost anything there, with no pesky government annoying you. Well, until you run into somebody with more money, weapons and/or connections. I personally prefer my collectivist European hellhole.
I would say that the only one of those there is "strong grassroots support" for is smoking bans. Maybe gun control in some urban areas. Pardon me if I find it completely laughable if a direct assault on the body of the constitution (Habeas) and the 8th Amendment (torture) is a little more terrifying than requiring licenses for automatic weapons in major cities and asking you not to smoke in bars where sometimes up to a quarter of the population is asthmatic. But listen to me, I sound just like the radicals on the right who want to intern Muslim Americans, don't I?
Yikes, my editing skills are apparently as bad as Matthew's. But you get the point.
"How about moving to, say, Iraq, Afghanistan, Sudan or the Democratic Republic of Congo then, Zagnut?"
So what you're saying is, "love it or leave it"?
"If the Department of Justice continues to fail in its national security obligation to enforce the laws against leaking classified information..."
Just be clear. This is what Andrew opposes. By making fun of him, you disagree, -you think laws against leaking classified information should not be enforced. Am I correct on your view?
Sk
Surely, novakant old chum, one can wish for a scaling back of the American naughty-nanny state (it's that perverted!) without his only other choice being a series of third-world failed-state shitholes. And Europe is indeed lovely and civilized, but it would be so with or without socialism.
If we scaled the 3 trillion dollar budget down to around 1.50 trillion, I'd consider that a solid start and be willing to reassess plans for future cuts. Not kidding one bit! If you all knew the personal, pointless reasons hundreds of millions of dollars are routinely spent on indefensible waste projects -- a congressman doesn't want to lose face, e.g. -- you'd be on my side!
By the way, that last question was for MY and all the bobbleheads in the comment section.
Sk
... libertarians. Always a let down when one of them starts talking.
Anyway, to go to a point made earlier by SomeCallMeTim. He asks what's so new and fascinating about the right's already well-known authoritarian streak. The difference from earlier times, I'd guess, is that we get to read a lot more of what conservatives have to say. Because of the Internet, we can listen in as they chatter about their hopes and fears.
The Internet has also revealed just how much time and energy some citizens are willng to put into defending imperial war aims and abuse of the Constitution. Unlike Andy McCarthy, most of the other chatterers are unpaid. A volunteer, grassroots propaganda arm of the regime. For me, that's very unsettling.
So what you're saying is, "love it or leave it"?
What I'm saying is: a libertarian state is a contradictio in adjecto. Consequently, libertarianism, while sometimes correctly pointing out specific problems, is not even an ism.
I'm no scholar on libertarianism, but I think you're getting it confused with something called "anarchism," novakant.
Sammy escribe:
"Pardon me if I find it completely laughable if a direct assault on the body of the constitution (Habeas) and the 8th Amendment (torture) is a little more terrifying than requiring licenses for automatic weapons in major cities and asking you not to smoke in bars where sometimes up to a quarter of the population is asthmatic."
They don't "requir[e] licenses for automatic weapons" here in D.C., Sam -- they have banned handguns for the past thirty years. And they don't "ask" you not to smoke in bars, it's the law. Threats to the Second Amendment don't seem to bother you nearly as much as threats to the Eighth -- indeed, they hardly seem to bother you at all.
There are dozens more examples of authoritarian tendencies on the Left; the Left and Right scare me in roughly equal proportions. They scare you in different proportions, I'll hazard, because you agree ideologically with what one side is attempting to enforce, and don't see legal enforcement of views you yourself happen to hold as authoritarianism.
{pompous Latin reference coming in 3, 2, 1...NOW}
As Seneca wrote, "We see a flea on another, but not a tick on ourselves."
I don't consider scaling the U.S. Treasury's take of America's GNP from $3 trillion to $1.5 trillion as libertarian, I see it as common sense, considering how much of that $3 trillion is simply squandered. You don't need an -ism to not want to waste money for no good reason.
InSaNe SoCiEtY aLeRt! My rational position is labeled radical, and your radical position is labeled mainstream.
the Left and Right scare me in roughly equal proportions.
This is what we in "the biz" call a "false equivalence."
I'm sure you're equally concerned about illegal wiretapping as you are about the prospect of collectivizing the means of production.
No, I'm not, too many steves. As I was hinting at by mentioning failed states, the power vacuum created by massively scaling back the government will be filled in no time by other forces: these might range from Afghani warlords to western business cartels, but what they all have in common is that they are not democratically accountable, are based on raw power and trample the rights of individuals that libertarians pretend to be so fond of.
While I appreciate the points made about the "nanny state," its adherents are unlikely to beat me up, arrest me, and then incarcerate me for an indefinate period of time for lighting up a death stick or eating a bag of potato chips. Some voices on the wingnut right just want to suppress disagreement and probably WOULD take a tire iron to my face because I figure that jumping into the abyss with our beloved chief executive is a bad idea.
Let's see, John Edwards says we ought to consider reinstituting slavery (he calls it "national service" but who's he kidding) and the lefties are complaining about the RIGHT'S authoritarianism??? Please.
The left is now, and always has been, far more authoritarian in this country than the right.
Pop quiz: do you support universal single payer health care? If you answered yes, congrats, you are vastly more authoritarian than Bush ever hoped to be.
I guess if we redefine "authoritarian" to mean something else we can completely derail the discussion, eh?
I think it is funny that people think that wiretapping phone calls to al Qaeda members in other countries is a bigger threat to civil liberties than the nanny state imposotions of the left. I mean, how many total people got wiretapped - a couple thousand tops? Something like the smoking ban affects millions and millions of people.
Why, of course, SK. It's obviously infinitely more important to use classification laws to zap leakers (and the reporters who quote them) than it is to prevent high-level government officials from using such classification laws to cover up their large-scale lies. Let's hear it for an American Official Secrets Act! (Before his death, Daniel P. Moynihan had many an interesting thing to say about governments' routinely excessive use of classification laws to cover up their misdeeds.)
And, regarding Zifnut and Al: Obviously anyone who favors tax-financed universal health care, or laws against smoking in bars or carrying handguns freely in cities, is more authoritarian than someone who favors giving the president unilateral power to throw people permanently and secretly in jail, and torture them, entirely on his individual decision. Why didn't I see it before?
Some of these people have GOT to be spoofs.
Steve writes:
I guess if we redefine "authoritarian" to mean something else we can completely derail the discussion, eh?
Let's go to the dictionary:
"authoritarian: believing in, relating to, characterized by, or enforcing unquestioning obedience to authority, rather than individual freedom of judgment and action." (emphasis Zagnut's)
Such as some who favors taking money from people by force to enact and enforce "tax-financed universal health care, or laws against smoking in bars or carrying handguns freely in cities."
Look, the federal government alone, not counting state and local, will spend 22% of all the money earning in the U.S. this year. That's a lot of authority concentrated in one place, much more than is healthy.
I share people's deep concerns about this administration's assaults on the Constitution, but I don't pick and choose which assaults on the Constitution concern me. The First Amendment, for example, has been under more serious assault from the Left than from the Right for a couple of decades.
Looking for common ground, I will concede that in Matt's original statement, the authoritarian tendencies of the right may be more of a grassroots nature, while what I impudently label the authoritarianism of the left probably comes from the richest tenth or so of the Democratic side.
Asymmetric authoritarianism, then, but roughly equal. So sez El Zagnut!
I think it is funny that people think that wiretapping phone calls to al Qaeda members in other countries is a bigger threat to civil liberties than the nanny state imposotions of the left.
I call shenanigans: the real Al's not this stupid. Irritating and evil, but not stupid.
smoking bans are stupid. wiretapping u.s. citizens is nefarious.
It's so very troubling that both liberals and conservatives are dangerously authoritarian. On the one hand, conservatives support torture, extralegal renditions, secret prisons, ending all judicial and congressional oversight of the White House, jailing reporters, stripping habeas corpus rights, and bombing half a dozen countries on a regular basis. On the other hand, liberals want to mandate child safety seats and ban smoking in restaurants.
THEY'RE EQUALLY TOTALITARIAN, I TELLS YA! A PLAGUE ON BOTH THEIR TYRANNICAL HOUSES!!!!1!
Shorter Z: remember to take on the best arguments the other side has, or you're not getting us any closer to truth.
well zagnut, if the best argument you've got is that you think government spending is, by definition, authoritarian, and if your second best argument is the old reliable, that taxes are collected by "force," then we're going to have to look elsewhere to find someone presenting us a good argument as to why the right's hatred of civil liberties is perfectly and symetrically balanced by the existence of income taxes.
if the best argument you've got is that you think government spending is, by definition, authoritarian, and if your second best argument is the old reliable, that taxes are collected by "force,"
Not *all* government spending is what I'd label authoritarian, but we're far beyond legitimate functions of government. Taking 22% of the GNP by force and squandering huge amounts of it for stupid reasons, yes that's authoritarian.
If you think taxes aren't taken by force, then don't pay yours and see what happens. Eventually someone will show up to demand payment, and if you keep refusing eventually one of them will have handcuffs and a gun.
For an example of what I consider to be a "stupid" squandering of money taken by force, look at the Dept. of Education. Do you know its history? Carter created it, but reluctantly -- didn't think it'd be a good idea. The Republican minority in congress was strongly against it. The Democratic majority in congress was *also* against it -- no one thought adding a layer of federal bureaucracy to American education would improve it.
So why did it pass? Because Carter had promised the NEA a Dept. of Education, which the NEA wanted so it could lobby from inside the system. So, in a (vain, as it turned out) attempt to win votes in the 1980 election and make good on a 1976 campaign promise, Carter created the DOE, with help from a reluctant Dem-controlled congress that didn't want to make Carter look bad. And next year, that dept. that nobody wanted (and which doesn't do squat, it's a job bank for education phds, I know many of them in DC and this opinion is based on discussions with these people who know very well what it is) will spend $200 for every American man, woman and child. And the next year it will spend more than that, because people in DC rise when they know how to increase their budgets.
Bizarre, but that's how D.C. works -- closer to randomness than mere inefficiency. Which is why the federal budget should be halved, at least.
The thing is, Z, there's a political consensus in favor of many aspects of big government, which is why 12 years of Republican control accomplished virtually nothing in terms of dismantling the Department of Education and the like. So while you may be right about the history, you really can't blame the left any more without missing the big picture. By the same token, you can't exclusively blame the right for our annual military budget, since it's not like the Democrats are trying very hard to downscale things massively.
I'm not saying your opinions are wrong; simply that you're outnumbered, as I'm sure you understand. But the fact is, while Republicans may generally want taxes a little lower and Democrats may generally want them a little higher, we're talking about a matter of a couple percentage points here. Neither party wants to significantly change the status quo, so you can't blame liberals for being the party of Big Government when Republicans aren't anywhere close to adopting your proposal to slash everything in half.
there's a political consensus in favor of many aspects of big government
No there's not, it's just that government is run by a small cadre of smart people who have a huge vested interest in keeping and increasing their budgets, and any given American person has only a small interest in reining in spending (diffuse vs. concentrated interest). Plus our mainstream media is generally sympathetic to big govt. and so don't educate the American people on the waste (not to mention that political writers in DC understand that if the budget were $1 trillion instead of $3 trillion, they or some of their friends might be out of work).
The govt. types know how to play the game because a) they're smart and b) it's what they do all day, and often what they go to school to learn how to do. All the tricks used to manipulate the populace -- the lawyerly fine-printing in legislation, the gradual increases in getting people to rely on govt. for ever-wider ranges of things, the playing up or down of stories during key legislation times, with the media's help (see the flood of aren't-illegal-immigrants great stories in the washington post this week, what a coincidence!), the spin and bogus studies -- it's all smart people coaxing more decision-making power into their own hands.
Two cliches: if you like sausages and legislation, don't watch either being made; and if people knew what went on in DC they'd revolt. Both are true.
one wonders how these Scandinavian countries manage to produce such content citizens - my guess, they just haven't seen the light yet...
The pseudo-intellectual shock jocks at the Corner are intent with their relentless ideological extreme authoritarian polemics --an ideology formerly known as fascism-- seem somehow respectable and mainstream.
At least their Nazi gas bag colleagues like Rush and Ann are forthright and call a spade a spade, or a Negro, or a fagot. Come on you bad boys and girls, the anti-PC thing... been there done that, a good twenty or so years ago.
Any constructive or civilized ideas in your hate filled, toxic minds? Seems Romney is the most desperate candidate to earn their good graces and be tapped into their way cool naughty-fascist club.
Well, I at least tried to explain it. I have no problem with someone who wants to get rid of the Department of Education, but it's kind of sad to see someone deny that there's a broad political consensus in favor of keeping it.
Comments closed June 06, 2007.
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Heads in the Sand
I'm sure Andy McCarthy was just this zealous about getting to the bottom of the Plame leak.
Posted by Christmas | May 23, 2007 10:52 AM