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Wednesday, March 03, 2010
Extinction Of Species
Fran here. I'm too exercised this morning to write in the Curmudgeon's Buckleyesque voice. I have a most serious political-discourse topic in mind, one which seems to me to be the foundation of the largest obstacle lovers of freedom currently face.
(And no, despite the title, this isn't about environmentalism in any form.)
Persuasion expert Michael Emerling, in his tape series The Essence of Political Persuasion, available from The Advocates for Self-Government, describes a rhetorical technique he calls "political cross-dressing." The first anecdote he tells to exemplify it is striking.
During an appearance on his 1976 campaign for the presidency as the nominee of the Libertarian Party, Roger McBride was challenged on his gun-rights position by a liberal in the audience. The objector asserted, apparently without supplementary argument, that "Saturday-night specials" -- cheap handguns -- simply must be against the law. McBride countered thus: poor blacks in crime-ridden ghettoes can't afford $300 handguns, yet these are the very people who need the means of self-defense most. "How can you defend a racist position like that?"
According to Emerling, the objector was shocked speechless. He found himself unable to reply to that liberal argument for a conservative policy position.
Emerling, one of the liberty movement's most penetrating analysts of outreach techniques, recommends political cross-dressing -- the use of "liberal arguments" to support "conservative policies" and "conservative arguments" to support "liberal policies" -- on the grounds that freedom serves both liberal and conservative motivations. Liberals' desire that the less-well-off and the oppressed be protected and uplifted can best be advanced by small, unintrusive government, free markets, respect for private property, the right to keep and bear arms, and so forth. Conservatives' desire for public decency and private virtue can best be advanced by requiring individuals to bear the full costs of their own decisions (NB: as long as their actions don't damage unconsenting others). The tactic is often more effective than other sorts of political rhetoric.
However, political cross-dressing is a weapon that can be used against freedom as well. The key to understanding this lies in what I've long termed connectedness problems.
Just this morning, Clayton Cramer has an article at Pajamas Media in which he argues against the decriminalization of marijuana. The thrust of his argument is that recent medical studies indicate that marijuana use increases the risks of certain mental diseases, including schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. That raises the issue of who shall bear the costs:
At this point, you may be saying: “Big deal! It’s my life! If I want to smoke pot and risk going crazy, that’s my choice!” I would concede that point, except that as of 2002, schizophrenia alone of the mental disorders was costing the United States $63 billion a year in medical costs and in disability payments. Much of that cost is directly governmental, since schizophrenics usually aren’t able to work and thus are reliant on the government.
This is a pure case of connectedness argumentation: Government bears much of the cost of schizophrenics' care; therefore government ought to be empowered to act against things and practices that can cause schizophrenia. Cramer has used a liberal policy misstep -- government assumption of responsibility for sick individuals' well-being -- as justification for a paternalist-conservative policy -- the criminalization of a specific intoxicant.
The argument is unsound on its face. One willing to question the premise -- Why, after all, should government assume financial responsibility for the care and treatment of schizophrenics? -- will see that at once. Actually, it's rather worse than that: since the studies Cramer cites state only that marijuana use increases the probability of contracting schizophrenia, he's arguing for prohibition based solely on a statement of risk, rather than a causally guaranteed outcome. (And by the way, what if those "studies" prove to be wrong?)
But connectedness problems frequently give rise to this sort of "liberal conservative" argument, often with the side observation that "we can't go back" to a time when individuals and charities dealt with such problems as schizophrenia-related incapacity, independent of State action.
Let's have a look at the reverse pattern: the "conservative liberal," who uses conservative missteps to justify liberal ones.
Liberals concerned with the plight of AIDS-ridden Third World countries constantly argue for the extension of American foreign aid to the nations where such sufferers are most numerous. Rather frequently, they cloak their compassion in conservative garb: After all, they say, we're concerned with fostering support for America and its foreign policies in other lands. Isn't that why we shovel billions of dollars toward dictators whose only virtue is that they're fighting the same enemies we fight? So let's buy even more support, and do some good works in the process, by helping Third World countries to fight AIDS!
Surely I don't have to draw your attention to why that argument is unsound. The whole practice of foreign aid with taxpayer money is wrong on principle. Worse, the money has buttressed some of the most oppressive regimes known to history. But as chessplayers like to say, "one lemon leads to another" -- in this case, to the support of a policy which, while it's done little if anything to alleviate AIDS or retard its propagation, has created an actual incentive for Third World regimes to over-report AIDS cases and fatalities, and to falsify causes of death for financial gain. Indeed, Michael Fumento reported in his book The Myth of Heterosexual AIDS one African physician's remark that because the funding is tied to AIDS statistics, "no one is allowed to die of anything else any more."
But "we can't go back" to a time when the United States kept its money to itself! That would be unthinkable! Wouldn't it?
"Liberal conservatism" and "conservative liberalism" are rhetorical cross-dressings in service to their respective ideologies. They're species of argumentation, possibly the most dangerous ones lovers of freedom must face. They must be destroyed. But they cannot be destroyed without confronting the array of connectedness problems Americans have already incurred by permitting unlimited government action.
The problem is in the premise, always. The premise is always that "we can't go back" -- that certain policies, and families of policies, are "here to stay." Ironically, that's a conservative argument, yet it's harnessed far more often to the service of liberal positions than to conservative ones.
But we can go back. In several cases, we must, or our past mistakes will doom the Republic: not merely through their own action, but by their use as precedents for ever widening and deepening governmental expropriations and intrusions on We the Formerly Free.
Political cross-dressing in service to freedom is usually sincerely meant. The proponent isn't just using liberal motives to support conservative positions or vice-versa; he actually applauds the motivations he enlists in his argument. Political cross-dressing to invade or destroy freedom is quite the opposite. The proponent's rhetoric is purely tactical; if he could, he'd undo the other side's "misstep," but he believes he can't, so he puts it to use in service to his preferred cause.
Insincerity in political argument is a double-edged blade. When uncovered for what it is, it's usually ruinous to him convicted of it. Ask the Dishonorable Chris Dodd. Ask the Dishonorable Charles Rangel.
For some years, I've labeled myself as a "libertarian conservative." I've tried to make the meaning of that label clear: Though I have a certain vision of The Good founded on traditional conceptions thereof, my political priority is freedom. I uphold certain standards of public decency and private virtue, but I condemn attempts to use governmental means to enforce them. First, such means require the violation of individuals' rights; second, they produce perverse incentives that lead to highly undesirable unintended consequences.
Man must be free, for nothing else can be. Every nonhuman good -- everything Man requires to survive and flourish, and every pleasure he seeks -- must be paid for with thought, sweat, and skill. That's natural law, written on the fabric of reality. So either God means for Man to be free, or He's the Supreme Sadist.
You know my position on the matter. I can't see Christ's commands "Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's, and unto God the things that are God's," and "Let him among you who is without sin cast the first stone" interpreted in any other way but that Man must be free, and responsible for the consequences of his own decisions and actions.
Where do you stand?
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