My Presidential Litmus Test

Anti-Statism
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“Anthony Gregory has a lot of litmus tests.” I believe Scott Horton said that about me on the air. Well, here’s one of my rules of thumb to see if someone is even close to being a real libertarian. It’s a three-part rule. You have to satisfy each condition. Then we can get into other issues—taxes, schools, drugs, etc.

1) Are you anti-Obama? He’s the most powerful man in the world. You have to hate the guy in power. But more important, you have to hate him for the right reasons. Obama being a social democrat and police statist are fine reasons. But first and foremost, you should hate him because he kills innocent people in large numbers.

2) Are you anti-Bush? Lots of people hate Obama, but have a soft spot for George W. Bush. Others hated Bush and like Obama. They are 95% alike. Any libertarian should of course dislike both presidents vehemently, and find them both to be among the worst in modern times. Bush started the worst war since Vietnam. If you are OK with that guy, you’re obviously not any kind of libertarian.

3) Do you hate Harry Truman more than Obama and Bush combined? Even though he’s long been dead, Truman should always be remembered as one of the very worst heads of state in the 20th century and one of the very worst presidents. I’m OK with people who think FDR, Wilson, or Lincoln were worse. We can agree to disagree. But what I don’t like is this idea that Obama or Bush is the “worst president ever.” I got that a lot during Bush—liberals claiming he was the worst president ever—and now I hear conservatives say the same about Obama. It’s not true. Both are awful. But neither compares to Truman.

Truman ended WWII by committing the worst terrorist acts in world history, bombing Tokyo after Nagasaki just for the heck of it, and assisting Stalin in the roundup of refugees to be sent back to the Gulags. After helping Stalin murder tons of people, he used Communism as an excuse to launch the Cold War. He intervened in the Mediterranean and waged an undeclared “police action” in Korea where he used napalm and strategic bombing to kill a million civilians. Even the worst Obama actions concerning the economy were foreshadowed in Truman’s Defense Production Act of 1950.

Caveat: I know principled libertarians who might find a plausible good reason not to hate Truman more than Bush and Obama combined. So this litmus test merely has the rebuttable presumption of soundness. One thing I do know, however, is that anyone who reads this and thinks it’s way out there is probably not a radical libertarian.

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Should We Celebrate the American Revolution?

History
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Libertarians often insist Independence Day is really our holiday, which statists have no right to celebrate with a straight face. But perhaps this whole approach is misguided. Maybe the lovers of freedom should be the ones loath to bring out the fireworks.

Surely, conservatives who cherish the Fourth of July while cheering today’s wars have a high tolerance for cognitive dissonance. The American Revolution was, at best, a revolt against empire. The taxes at issue were being used to finance Britain’s national security state. The colonial rebels didn’t “support the troops” – they resented them. And they resented Britain’s status as the hypocritical world power, which closely resembled the modern United States – an empire claiming the mantle of liberty while smashing its colonial subjects. Today’s conservatives would have likely been partisans of King George. In our own time, true independence would mean Washington, DC, releasing control of its satellites and colonies worldwide.

We could also find it hilarious that Obama Democrats celebrate Independence Day, as though liberty of the old American sort has anything to do with their agenda. They have an implacable thirst for an expansive federal government whose depredations dwarf those of eighteenth-century England.

Indeed, the American Revolution had a distinctive libertarian flavor. The liberal values of anti-imperialism and anti-taxation were central. The grand ideals of legal equality for women, anti-slavery, and religious toleration began to flourish, thanks to the revolutionary spirit in the air. The colonial Americans inspired a philosophical revolution of global significance whose wonderful effects continue to this day. Although no nation has a monopoly over the universal principles of liberty, there are elements in American independence that should give hope to all who hold freedom dear.

But from a libertarian standpoint, the American Revolution has a very dark side. There is also nuance lost in the common narrative. It wasn’t a simple tax revolt, at least not as conventionally limned. For one thing, Americans had resented the 1764 Revenue Act’s reduction of the 1733 Molasses Act tax rate, despising the enforcement mechanism and efficiency of the new law more than the tax itself. Even less understood is the 1773 Boston Tea Party, a revolt against a tax cut – a reduction in British taxes on East India tea, designed to undercut the price of smuggled Dutch tea. Monopoly privileges over the cheaper tea were also involved, but as Charles Adams has written, the Boston Tea Party “was a wanton destruction of private property in an age when private property was held in great esteem . . . [which] was not well received in the colonies. . . . [Benjamin] Franklin was shocked and acknowledged that full restitution should be paid at once to the owners of the tea. Most Americans believed this way, but unfortunately the majority of Americans were to feel the heel of the British boot.” After the rebellion against tea began to spread, with boycotts emerging elsewhere and Boston merchants finally rejecting all tea just in case it was English, the Crown responded with the Coercive Acts. They were implemented by a bolstered presence of the military police state – another reminder to modern Tea Party activists that they should be especially concerned about the law enforcement arm of the state.

The entire uprising against Britain entailed no small dose of hypocrisy, at least on the part of the American leaders. Most everyday colonists who fought and died had a true interest in liberty, having resented the taxes and military presence that naturally resulted from the British war against France in the late 1750s and early 1760s. The first major battle in that war, the Battle of Jumonville Glen, was an ambush of French Canadians spearheaded by George Washington. This siege cascaded into the Seven Years War, a world conflict involving Britain, France, Prussia, Hanover, Portugal, the Iroquois Confederacy, Austria, Russia, Spain, Sweden, Saxony, and another half-dozen countries – a war that lasted three years after hostilities ceased in North America. When the colonists faced the lingering price of this international war, powerful Americans led a revolt against their king, sending poor colonists to die in a war that mostly served the interests of the few, much as they had done a generation earlier to advance the interests of the American elite and British empire, including in the takeover of Canada and Florida.

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Leftist Taxonomy Under Obama

Anti-Statism, Statism, The Left
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There seems to be some debate about whether the left has “sold out” under Obama, or whether leftists have remained principled and critical in light of the president’s continuation of his predecessor’s policies. To explain it the way I see it, I’d like first to outline my views of leftist taxonomy.

What passes for the American left today is a wide spectrum. It reaches from principled radicals to those barely on the left side of the fascist establishment center. I see at least several categories, each of which has a diverse membership but sharp distinctions from other groups, and they all respond to partisan concerns differently. Some individuals and organizations have a foot in more than one camp. Nevertheless, here is my simplified sketch of the breakdown of modern leftism.

Communists and Pinkos: This is a rather diverse but small bunch. For better or worse, they are principled in their opposition to American capitalism as they define it. They are usually reliable on questions of U.S. empire, but not always so, and even though they will never have power in this country, it is probably good that they won’t. Their critiques of American power, corporatism, the war machine, and the prison-industrial complex are sometimes invaluable, but as we know, state socialists are horrible in power, not infrequently the worst. Their isolation from the U.S. power elite is a saving grace, and the Marxist intellectuals among them write good history. Because they follow the money and see politics as a class struggle, much of what people in this group say is more on target than anything heard among the moderates.

Anti-Authoritarian Radicals: I’m thinking of folks like those at Counterpunch. These AAR have an anarchist streak and are more numerous (and in ways more reliable) than the smaller clique of self-proclaimed “anarchists” we typically see on the left. These are some of my favorite leftists. They are very reliable on war if not perfect pacifists. They are great on police state issues and corporatism and recognize that the regulatory state is not our best friend. They have a soft spot for some welfare programs. They are often lefty culture warriors but are much more nuanced than those fellow leftists to their right, knowing cultural bias against cultural rightists can be a weapon of state power. I’m thinking of Alex Cockburn’s excellent take on the Waco massacre. These people are not perfect, but I will take them over 99% of conservatives and probably a third of libertarians.

Civil Libertarian Liberals: Glenn Greenwald is the paradigm case, although he is unusually magnificent. These folks consider themselves liberals on the left, although their radical allies would never use the word “liberal” for themselves. The CLL are principled on civil liberties and often on many questions of foreign policy, transparency, and fairness. They are rarely partisan and have decent priorities. For better or worse, they are less anti-capitalist than the AAR and certainly less so than the pinkos. They are therefore less enraged about questions like intellectual property and less inclined to see public schools as a product of mercantilism—which is bad—but they are more likely to see the modern market, however skewed, as not an enemy in and of itself. Unlike some to their left, they understand you cannot abolish money or private property and expect to feed the population. None of them suffer the illusion that the USSR was preferable to America or that Mao’s Workers’ State was anything short of a totalitarian hellhole. Whereas the commies and even some of the AAR sometimes have a soft spot for foreign regimes but are reliably critical of the US, the CCL are sometimes too tame on the US but are more grounded on the problems of “far-left” statism.

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Is Obama Worse than Bush?

Corporatism, Education, History, Imperialism, Police Statism, War
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The two are definitely in the same league, in absolute terms. Maybe Obama is Nixon to Bush’s LBJ, in that he is continuing and expanding upon his predecessor’s foreign and domestic enormities, deserving special ire for ramping them up, but with the president before still deserving special hatred for having started so many horrible policies.

Of course, it is unfair to compare Obama to Bush just yet, since Bush had eight years of destruction and Obama has only had a little over two. Nevertheless, let’s remember what Bush had done by this point in his presidency, mid-March 2003. Just over two years into his presidency, Bush had:

  • Invaded and occupied Afghanistan
  • Invaded Iraq
  • Rounded up and detained hundreds of aliens right after 9/11
  • Established a policy of indefinite detention and torture
  • Created a prison camp at Guantanamo
  • Signed the Patriot Act, including major assaults on free speech (National Security Letters) and a near total annihilation of the Fourth Amendment
  • Created the Transportation Security Administration
  • Created the Department of Homeland Security
  • Instituted “Project Safe Neighborhoods” and overseen a vast increase in firearms prosecutions by the Justice Department
  • Signed No Child Left Behind
  • Rammed through Medicare Part D, adding $20 trillion in unfunded liabilities, the largest expansion of the welfare state in about 35 years
  • Rammed through Sarbanes-Oxley, the largest expansion of the corporate regulatory state perhaps since the New Deal, which has devastated the economy
  • Signed protectionist steel tariffs
  • Expanded farm subsidies
  • Made “free-speech zones” a commonplace
  • Directed the NSA (a branch of the military) to warrantlessly wiretap the American people
  • Accelerated the subsidization (directly and indirectly) of home ownership by minorities and others who couldn’t really afford houses, sowing the seeds for a housing bubble to replace the Nasdaq bubble, culminating in the crash of ’08

Obama has done a staggering amount of damage in just over two years, but I submit that Bush might still have him beat in terms of destruction unleashed in so short a time. Also, the war in Iraq has long-term consequences in foreign relations that are yet to be seen. Bush could very well be the Woodrow Wilson of the 21st century, having set in motion a series of devastating events humanity will suffer from for a century.

Obama is definitely no sort of relief from the Bush years. But never let it be forgotten how completely terrible his predecessor was, right off the bat.

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Waco and Oklahoma City Links

Police Statism, Political Correctness, Private Crime
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Today is April 19, the anniversary of the FBI’s finishing off the Branch Davidians at Waco and, two years later, the Oklahoma City incident, which Timothy McVeigh called payback for Waco. Every year since 2003 I’ve written on at least one of these events. Today at LRC I have “Waco and the New Brown Scare.” Also see my Waco archives, which includes my undergraduate history thesis from 2003. A good book on Waco is Carol Moore’s the Davidian Massacre, all online. As she points out, it was not until 2007 that the survivors from Waco were finally freed. And all libertarians should watch Waco: Rules of Engagement. The video is online.

As for the Oklahoma City bombing, Lew links to the classic piece by Gore Vidal—one of the few leftists who was not enamored of the left-establishment’s 1990s militia scare or blinded to the Clinton regime’s injustices at Waco and abroad. And see Scott Horton’s interview of Jesse Trentadue, “They Are Lying to You About the Oklahoma City Bombing.”

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