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47 pointsdnetesn14 comments

"millenarian" politics. Nice.

I'm not a fan of SV culture myself, but I found this banal and unoriginal.

Potential tangent, but it annoys and amazes me in equal measure how self professed liberals always seemingly have an axe to grind about libertarianism. This also relates to people accusing the actions of someone else as "ideological" as if their own are not.

Ultimately things like this remind me of Matt Stone's "I hate conservatives, but I really fucking hate liberals."

Since I left the Democratic party 5 years ago, and ceased considering myself a "liberal" about 3-4 years ago, I've become increasingly aware at how exclusionist and provincial most liberals -- particularly liberal Democrats -- are about other political ideologies. I find it very interesting that even though many libertarians have more in common with civil libertarian liberals than they do with big government conservatives, only the former treat libertarians as an anathama to humanity, and stereotype every libertarian as some kind of Ayn Rand acolyte (few of the libertarians I know care much for Ayn Rand).

Ultimately, that kind of failure to find common bonds holds back political progress for us all. But it's become pretty clear to me that liberals are more interested in supporting their "team" than in making political progress for the average struggling American.

And yes, I know this rant doesn't belong on HN. I'll take my lumps without complaint.

I'm a fervent leftist--I don't know if "liberal" is the right word--and I've long since abandoned the notion that US Democratic party is a group that speaks on behalf of my interests.

If it helps, I cherish this clip of Ron Paul and Ralph Nader discussing their similarities: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9J3-YoVPckk

That it's on CNN and Wolf Blitzer is just an inconsiderate ass is just the cherry on top to the larger point: you can have people from "different groups" that share some strong ideas. Personally I'd love it if both groups of people concentrated on their similarities over their differences to topple the status quo. After that we can quibble on the smaller issues. A single regime for a considerable length of time is rarely, if ever, a good idea.

I'm not sure why that's surprising to you.

One characteristic that's common to both mainstream conservatives and mainstream liberals, though heavily more emphasized in the latter, is the deeply-held belief that government exists not just to create and enforce laws, but to establish and enforce social norms. Of course, one side wants to promote social norms discouraging racism and sexism, and the other side wants to promote social norms discouraging drug use, but they are on the same page about whether it's legitimate for government to be getting involved in any of that.

Libertarians almost universally reject the idea that government should be in the business of promoting social norms, which is distressing to liberals and conservatives alike. Conservatives, however, tend to get along with libertarians to the extent that even if they disagree on the function of government, they often desire the same ends. Lower taxes, less business regulation, etc.

Liberals, on the other hand, don't even share common ends with libertarians, with the exception of a few niche issues like civil liberties. Libertarians don't have a recipe for how limited government will end sexism in corporate America or fix the educational gap between black and white children. Worse of all, libertarians attack the very principles underling cherished liberal policies.

Take, for example, the Civil Rights Act. I imagine very few libertarians would disagree with the goal of eliminating racism in commerce, but the means Congress used to achieve it was pretty anti-libertarian: sweeping interpretation of the Commerce Power to regulate very personal sorts of private conduct. If you own a restaurant, and so much as a potato traded in interstate commerce end up in your soup, Congress gets to tell you who you have to invite into your private establishment.[1]

[1] Libertarians and liberals alike cite with disdain Gonzales v. Raich, where the Supreme Court held that growing marijuana fell within the Commerce Power because the drug trade involves interstate commerce. Nobody mentions Daniel v. Paul, a case where the Supreme Court held that a recreational park in Little Rock (located about as far from an interstate border as you can get in Arkansas), had to serve black people because, among other things, "three of the four food items sold at the snack bar contain ingredients originating outside of the State."

Of course, one side wants to promote social norms discouraging racism and sexism, and the other side wants to promote social norms discouraging drug use

I don't think it's at all fair to call racism and sexism, which have actual victims, "social norms" of the same category as opposition to (or support of) drug use.

Drug addicts leave a path of destruction in their wake. In modern America it is a larger problem than racism and sexism. But the War on Drugs doesn't solve the problem.

I think what I was trying to say is that "social norm" is too mild a term for all three. When I hear "social norm" I think of things like elevator etiquette and telephone greetings.

A social norm is something that gets people to behave a certain way because of conscious and unconscious social expectations and pressure. Elevator etiquette and telephone greetings are etiquette, which is narrower than social norms.

Take something like domestic violence. It happens in western countries, but is much less common than it is in say the subcontinent. Why? It's illegal in both places, after all, and the probability of the police doing anything about it if a victim complains is close to nil. What's different is the social norm. In the west, you're raised to believe you're a really bad, evil, guy if you hit your spouse. In many other countries, it's considered something you shouldn't do, but doesn't rise to the level of a black mark on your character.

If you think about it, the only rational explanation for the criminal justice system is the establishment of social norms. Criminal punishment is almost always retrospective, and in that regard is always a net loss to society. Putting a murder in prison for life doesn't bring the victim back, and costs a lot of money on top of that. And as the drug war shows, the deterrent effect from the threat of punishment, by itself, isn't really significant.

So why do we have this vast apparatus of law and criminal justice anyway? Arguably, the reason is the establishment of social norms. When the robber thinks of breaking into someone's house, we don't just want them to weigh the potential take against the cost of prison discounted by the probability of not getting caught. We want them to think that they're a bad, evil, person for doing what they are thinking of doing.

So, I'm relatively young; at 22, I've been old enough to halfway understand politics for at most a decade. Nevertheless, I did a double take at "more emphasized in the latter", and perhaps there is an advantage to looking at the short term. In that time span, in terms of big mainstream issues, on Democrats' side in favor of less government control of social norms (for its own sake rather than to effect another policy), we have:

- gay marriage legalization - not that the ideology has had much to do with the role of government, but treating would-be spouses equally gets the government out of the picture

- abortion - quite explicitly with "women's bodies" rhetoric

- stem cell research

- marijuana legalization

- immigration, sort of, in the sense that acceptance of illegal immigrants is a social issue in addition to an issue of laws

- euthanasia (not a big issue)

On the Republicans' side we have:

- opposition to affirmative action

- opposition to education centralization - but No Child Left Behind was signed by Bush

- gun rights - gun violence, obviously, directly hurts other people, in contrast to most of the issues on the other side, but the proper role of guns also a social issue

Maybe I just have a bad memory, but the first list has a lot more in the way of hot-button and clear-cut issues than the second.

Those issues incidentally happen to involve getting rid of particular laws--there is no ideological opposition to involving government. For example, many liberals aren't happy with the idea of getting government out of marriage entirely, they want the normalization of gay relationships that comes with accomodating gay marriage within the existing government sanctioned framework. Also, many liberals support laws against discriminating against gays. Many liberals want active government support of stem cell research. With regards to immigration, the liberal position isn't "get the government out of immigration." I.e. They're not in favor of open borders. What they really want is normalization of existing undocumented immigrants, so they can access government services.

It really annoyed me after the Michael Brown shooting. That got a huge amount of libertarian attention right from the start, and then a day or two later a whole bunch of left-wing liberals found out about it and immediately accused libertarians - who, remember, had been yelling their heads off about it - of not talking about the shooting, arguing that this proved libertarians were really just racists who didn't care about government violence at all. In some cases this was literally the first thing they said about it; they cared more about attacking libertarians for supposedly not caring about the shooting than they did the shooting itself.

Yup, libertarians have being saying for years that there is an unequal distribution of "justice" towards those with brown skin and that the militarization of local police is dangerous territory. People, especially on the left, mischaracterize libertarians as racists who don't want to pay taxes and then the right thinks we're tin foil hat wearing pacifists ready to surrender to the jihadists.

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