Malcolm X: Hero of American Conservatism?

Forget the works of Richard Weaver or Whittaker Chambers: “The Autobiography of Malcolm X” may very well be the touchstone of modern conservative politics in the United States

“Yes, I will pull off that liberal’s halo that he spends such efforts cultivating! The North’s liberals have been for so long pointing accusing fingers at the South and getting away with it that they have fits when they are exposed as the world’s worst hypocrites.”

-- Malcolm X,

“The Autobiography of Malcolm X” (1965)

P. 276

For the longest time, I refused to watch “Do the Right Thing,” the critically-revered 1989 film that put Spike Lee on the proverbial Hollywood map. For the most part, I postponed viewing it, because in my mind, I had an idea of what I thought the film would be like -- in essence, just a bunch of whitey-blaming while one-dimensional honky stereotypes do racist things to innocent, 100 percent conscientious black folks for two hours straight.

Eventually, I ended up watching the film, in its entirety, one particularly uninspiring afternoon. And when I finally gave it a shot, it absolutely blow me -- and my preconceived notions -- away. Instead of being a reverse racist film that violently condemned those rascally white devils, the film was a shockingly unbiased glimpse into just how uneasy we still are as a nation about race relations. Perhaps the film’s most iconic scene -- a montage of people, of various ethnic groups, saying various insensitive things about other ethnic groups -- demonstrates this best.

The undeniable beauty of “Do the Right Thing,” to me, was the fact that Spike Lee didn’t even attempt to tell us what the titular “right thing” was supposed to be. The film concludes with an incinerated pizza parlor and young black man choked to death by the police, and the only commentary the film feels necessary to send us home with are two completely contradictory quotes from Martin Luther King, Jr. and Malcolm X. In a world desperate for easy answers, I had to applaud Mr. Lee for having the testicular fortitude to come right out and say that there aren’t any real answers -- it’s that unashamed, and shockingly unemotional, honesty that quickly catapulted “Do the Right Thing” into my pantheon of all-time favorite movies.

I believe it was for those very same reasons listed above that I was so reluctant to pick up “The Autobiography of Malcolm X,” the 1965 book penned by “Roots” author Alex Haley. For years, I had heard about the book, and although I hadn’t seen the 1992 film adaptation (coincidentally, directed by Spike Lee himself, and perhaps just a bit ironically, spun-off from a screenplay penned by Jewish playwright Arnold Perl), I certainly recall the controversy surrounding the film when it was originally released -- by the way, I was just six-years-old at the time, and proud to say that much of my worldview had been shaped by that great 1990s institution, “In Living Color.”

As an elementary schooler, I remember spending half of February each year listening to my teachers drone on and on about MLK and Rosa Parks -- almost always giving us the sanitized, fit-for-mainstream consumption version of their respective life stories, of course; meanwhile, Malcolm X’s name was mentioned only in passing, if it all. In middle school, “Letters from Birmingham Jail” was required reading, but I’m not even sure my library even had X’s autobiography on the shelves. By the time I was in high school, the narrative passed down to me was that Malcolm X was basically the Magneto to MLK’s Charles Xavier, and the former’s autobiography was nothing more than hate-filled, antagonizing anti-white propaganda for the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants. Even in college, the multicultural, inclusiveness uber alles experience it was, not once did I hear a lecture on Malcolm X, or even faint words of praise for his works, from even my most liberal of professors.

I was oblivious to the fact that so many people didn’t seem to want me to read the damn book (almost always a sign that the contents therein are generally worth reading) until I was almost 30, and when I finally decided to pick up a copy and read it for myself, I had yet another “Do the Right Thing”-like reaction. Not only was the book not what I expected it to be, it was almost the complete night-and-day opposite.

I always wondered why white folks -- in particular, the super-liberal and super-guilty types -- championed Martin Luther King Jr. and always seemed to pretend that Malcolm X never existed. I always kind of assumed it was because of that whole “By Any Means Necessary” stuff, but as it turns out, their peculiar aversion to Malcolm X most likely stems from altogether different political reasons. Simply put, modern liberals don’t shun X because he “encouraged violence,” but simply because he called them out on their bullshit and backed political remedies to urban black plight that sound dangerously close to conservative talking points.

The not-quite-socialistic-but-definitely-not-capitalistic perspective of Martin Luther King, Jr. seems a perfect ideological foil to Malcolm X’s socioeconomic doctrine, which at times, seems to both condemn government entitlements and vaunt private sector wealth generation. Indeed, the entire civil rights discussion seems to ignore the reality that Martin Luther King Jr. was born into an already-wealthy family, an individual who, in every sense of the word, was about 100 times more “privileged” socioeconomically than a majority of white folks in the southeast. While King lived a relatively pampered existence -- hardly fraught with any of the adversities most regional blacks had to face at the time -- Malcolm Little was clearly a man of the soil, a poor kid from Michigan who grew up eating dandelion weeds while King cosplayed as a migrant worker in Connecticut and was told he was too good to marry a white lunch lady. By all traditional liberal measurements, it seems as if the school-of-hard-knocks trained, self-made X would be the progressive poster boy of the Civil Rights era, but wouldn’t you know it, lefties for half a century have instead been championing a man who refused to leave a will to his own family [*].

[*] To be far, neither did Malcolm X, but considering all of the money MLK made/inherited during his lifetime, X’s “oath of poverty” excuse, I surmise, is just a tad more defensible than King’s. 

The story of Malcolm X is really a permutation of two time-tested tales; the ascension of the unlikely and the classical Greek tragedy. The tragedy part is quite evident, even to X himself, who many times throughout his own autobiography, predicts his own imminent, violent early death; that he saw this coming from a mile away only heightens the inherent tragicomedy -- with the ultimate swerve, of course, being that his death came not at the hands of the vile “white devils” he spent literally his entire life railing against, but the very Nation of Islam “brothers” that he once said he would die for himself.

Malcolm Little has inconspicuous roots. He grew up in abject poverty, with a mentally ill mother, whom more than likely, was driven insane by her husband’s grisly murder at the hands of racist whites. From a young age, Little was aware of “white oppression,” but he saw it as something a little more abstract than obvious displays, such as cross burning vigils and lynchings. You see, in Little’s eyes -- and remember, these are the thoughts of a relatively young child -- white oppression wasn’t just a tangible social edict, it was a psychological state. The society itself, he thought, was responsible for fostering in the American Black a sense of inferiority, which the black community itself mindlessly propagated through criminal enterprise shortcuts, drug running, vapid materialism (then it was conks and zoot suits, today its iPhones and hair extensions) and playing the “numbers” game. Whitey had imposed his superiority upon the blacks, and the blacks responded by immersing themselves in a culture that -- inadvertently -- proved the points of racist whites. When confronted with prejudiced allegations of laziness, shiftlessness and moral impieties, Little saw a black society that responded with greater investments in drinking, gambling and other vices; ever the astute youngster, Little also observed how Christianity was being used as a literal deus ex machina for blacks to self pardon themselves for their excesses and general aimlessness.

And so, Malcolm Little lived the life he was expected to live: he became a porter in New York and Boston, spending his weekends at clubs in Harlem and buddying up with numbers runners and cat burglars. Funnily, Little’s escapades in home invasions is manifested in a sardonic safety tip; if you want to keep would-be robbers out of your house, try leaving the bathroom light on all day and night.

And so, Little continues to smoke reefers and drink heavily and run afoul of some particularly nefarious crime folks. All the while, his hatred for the white devil increases, especially after he comes into contact with New York’s underground sex trade; bet you didn’t think diaper fetishism would be a prominent plot point in his autobiography, did you? And then, Little’s luck runs out, and he’s sent to the slammer for about a decade; according to himself, the extra time was tacked on because of his “unofficial” crime of hanging out with white women.

In prison, Malcolm Little makes a statement fairly similar to Mike Tyson in his autobiography, saying that his time in the clink was more or less his equivalent of attending college. After converting to Elijah Muhammad’s super racist version of Islam, Little starts reading like a motherfucker, and begins having scholarly debates with his cellmates. Given time to think, Malcolm Little more or less read his way to intellectual -- and eventually, physical -- freedom.

The communiqué between X and Muhammad reminded me a lot of the camaraderie between Philip Seymour Hoffman and River Phoenix’s brother in “The Master” -- albeit, with Malcolm X serving as a much more lucid and cognizant protégé than Joaquin's character. In hindsight, you kind of have to wonder how X was unable to see just how full of shit Muhammad was, but then again, X’s story is a tragic ascension; he needed Muhammad’s eventual betrayal to goad him into realizing the abject racism -- not to mention the batshit madness -- of the Nation of Islam, and why it wouldn’t be until he rejected the Man-God he formulated for himself that he would be able to truly grasp the “reality” he had sought since elementary school.

Oh, there’s some irony to be found here, of course. For one, Malcolm X himself acknowledges that if it hadn’t been for the white devil produced “The Hate that Hate Produced,” he never would have taken off as a national spokesman. Similarly, it was the financial contribution of the white devils in academia and the press that eventually allowed X to travel to Mecca, and keep him from becoming insolvent after being blacklisted from the Nation. Still, that didn’t prevent X from criticizing MLK for his own collusion with liberal whites, at one point referring to the March on Washington as an orchestration of the white devils themselves. Alas, many today seem to overlook the veracity of X’s “by any means necessary” call-to-arms; while the peaceful demonstration and integration policies praised by King worked, we tend to overlook the fact that those policies worked only because the maestros behind them were a.) wealthy as fuck, and b.) already had backing from the political elites. What X promoted, then, was a policy for the truly downtrodden black American: that, in the absence of socioeconomic political power, the only just response to externalized force until that socioeconomic political power was obtained was to physically defend oneself. In that, X’s highly-criticized “By Any Means” platform was actually a ways to a means, and not the intended destination point at all.

Throughout the book, it’s quite obvious that Malcolm’s disdain of the white man stemmed from perpetual cultural indoctrination. Daddy Little was a faithful adherent of segregationist pioneer Marcus Garvey -- so profound an influence on Malcolm’s upbringing, Garvey’s name is mentioned literally on the first page of his autobiography. That ideology ultimately led to Malcolm developing an intense hatred of all whites, which was effectively sublimated into the unabashedly racist teachings of Elijah Muhammad -- and thus, kick-starting X’s own career as a political firebrand. Of course, Muhammad’s jealousy would lead to X being ousted from his own social movement, and later on, be the catalyst for his own death; peculiarly, it wasn’t until X traveled to Mecca that, like a ton of proverbial bricks, the error of his whitey-hating ways bopped him on the head:

“I believed in [Muhammad] not only as a leader in the ordinary human sense, but also I believed in him as a divine leader. I believed he had no human weaknesses or faults, and that, therefore, he could make no mistakes, and that he could do no wrong. There on a Holy World hilltop, I realized how very dangerous it is for people to hold any human being in such esteem, especially to consider anyone some sort of “divinely guided” and “protected” person.” (P. 327)

Funny how today, on both sides of the political spectrum, hardly anyone at all has taken X’s advice against blindly following personalities and other social movements to heart, no?

One of the thing that X keys in on in his autobiography, and its something Ossie Davis somewhat rephrases in the paperback’s epilogue, is that the most insidious form of racism imaginable isn’t blatant prejudice, clearly visible in social policies and folkways, but rather, institutionalized paternalism, in which the whites reiterate their “superiority” over the black man by preventing them from becoming self-sufficient. Indeed, X’s own cries for voluntary segregation was less an attempt to escape racial hostilities than it was an attempt to allow the black man to build his own society, create his own industries and businesses to generate his own income, and become a self-made man without the constant oversight of white bureaucrats. Segregation, per X (at one point in time, anyway), was the only viable alternative to permanent dependency upon “the man.” Indeed, X called the efforts of Northern Freedom Riders to “rescue” imperiled blacks in the south a “ridiculous” endeavor:

“…their own Northern ghettos, right at home, had enough rats and roaches to kill to keep all of the Freedom Riders busy. I said that ultra-liberal New York had more integration problems than Mississippi. If the Northern Freedom Riders wanted more to do, they could work on the roots of such ghetto evils as the little children out in the streets at midnight, with apartment keys on strings around their necks to let themselves in, and their mothers and fathers drunk, drug addicts, thieves, prostitutes. Or the Northern Freedom Riders could light some fires under Northern city halls, unions  and major industries to give more jobs to Negroes to remove so many of them from the relief and welfare rolls, which created laziness, and which deteriorated the ghettos into steadily worse places for humans to live.” (P. 276)

If all of this sounds eerily similar to the perpetual anti-welfare tirades from the right, it’s because, fundamentally, X is espousing the exact same ideological premise. Indeed, he even touches upon Goldwater-era conservatism as a far superior alternative to LBJ’s sprawling social services reform:

“‘Conservatism’ in America’s politics means ‘Let’s keep the niggers in their place.’ And ‘liberalism’ means ‘Let’s keep the knee-grows in their place -- but tell them we’ll treat them a little better, let’s fool them more, with more promises.”  (P. 380-381)

Granted, it’s not exactly great praise heaped upon contemporary conservatives, but just a few sentences later, X drops this little atom bomb on us…

“Goldwater as a man, I respected for speaking out his true convictions -- something rarely done in politics today. He wasn’t whispering to racists and smiling at integrationists. I felt Goldwater wouldn’t have risked his unpopular stand without conviction. He flatly told black men he wasn’t for them -- and there is this to consider: always, the black people have advanced further when they seen they had to rise up against a system that they clearly saw was outright against them. Under the steady lullabies sung by foxy liberals, the Northern Negro became a beggar. But the Southern Negro, facing the honestly snarling white man, rose up to battle that white man for his freedom -- long before it happened in the North.” (P. 381) 

In the eyes of X, even the most brutal forms of southern-conservative racism was less oppressive than the liberal policies imposed upon the black community; indeed, whereas the empty promises and token gestures of northern liberals merely cemented African-Americans into poverty, the unabashedly aggressive policies of the southern conservative forced the black community into taking action and seeking self-sufficiency. At the end of the day, Malcolm X’s big call to political arms within his autobiography is really no different than the central thesis of the work of someone as far right as Charles Murray: it’s not until the black man is economically independent and capable of living his life without the assistance of the government and other paternalistic whites that he can call himself truly free.

Of course, it’s a hard sell to most arguing Malcolm X as a modern conservative pioneer -- especially to Tea Party contemporaries, who would almost certainly blackball him on grounds of being a “moose-limb” alone -- but even then, it seems as if X has more in common with modern neo-cons than today’s leftists. Even as a Muslim, X’s religion mandates a vaunting of asceticism, the traditional family construct and considerably conservative-sounding fiscal principles, which are all near anathema to the Democratic Party’s current platform. And hell, X is a clear cut ally of the NRA if there ever was one, and as an appeal to the conspiratorial libertarian crowd, he also seemed to have a thing against Jews and the Freemasons, too.

While “The Autobiography of Malcolm X” may not exactly be “Atlas Shrugged” or “Road to Serfdom,” there’s no denying the unexpected similarities between X’s sociopolitical values and those of Red State America. Of course, X himself would probably hate the ever-loving shit of today’s hardcore conservatives, but odds are? He would probably hate today’s hardcore liberals even more…which, to some degree, probably explains why his autobiography remains one of the nation’s most celebrated -- yet seemingly unread -- nonfiction works to this very day.

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Explaining Right Wing Ideology in the United States

On the surface, the conservative mentality seems more than a little delusional, but is there actually a method to their madness? 

Thanks to some dude named Tom Morris for the above!

If you were to ask me what the primary difference was between right wing ideologues and left wingers (which, in the States, are actually centrists compared to liberal parties elsewhere), I would say it’s a matter of inspiration.

Simply put, conservatives are FUELED by their hatred of liberals. A conservative isn’t so much an adherent to neoliberalism and supply side ethics is he or she is an opponent of the Democratic Party, a human being whose very identity is enveloped in a fuming, inexhaustible miasma of hatred toward leftists. Try listening to an AM radio conservative show sometimes; instead of discussing solutions or policy ideas -- or, pragmatically, how to achieve desirable outcomes pending current resources -- it’s a safe bet that what you will hear is three or four hours of NONSTOP demonization of liberals. Even back in the mid-2000s, when Republicans virtually owned all three branches of government, programs of the type were almost entirely anchored around attacks to whatever  puny resistance movements were mounted on the left. At a time when Democratic clout was underpowered in D.C., the Right still found enemies to perpetually lash out against in the form of entertainment and social activists like Michael Moore and Cindy Sheehan -- sometimes, it feels like this need to berate left-wing opposition is more important to right wingers than actually, you know, implementing and monitoring their own social and economic policies.

In that, anti-liberal rancor is to the American conservative what hydrocarbons are to modern industry -- shut off the fuel supply, and everything just comes to a dead stop.

Liberals, it seems, are ALWAYS on the defensive, while Republicans are always on the offensive. Democrats like Wilson, FDR and LBJ tried to implement new economic and social models -- which, of course, were fought tooth and nail by Republican resistors -- so that by the time those policies come to pass, they’d been largely defanged or neutralized as effective programs. Clearly, this is something you are seeing with the Obama presidency -- alike The United Nations, Social Security and Medicaid before it, it’s almost certain that an Affordable Care Act-like overhaul will be necessary at some point in the nation’s future. And I’d be willing to bet my bottom dollar that, alike Social Security and Medicaid (ironically, two liberally-implemented programs that senior Republicans now deem as necessary social entitlements) the aged neo-cons of 50 years will be screaming to keep ObamaCare models in place when the next great Democratic social reformer comes along with some kooky, crazy idea that might just have the audacity to think more than two years into the future.

And with all of that in mind, you know something? Despite being vilified and constantly obstructed, liberals still don’t hate conservatives with as much soul-consuming hatred as the right wingers hate them. In fact, a lot of times, leftists don’t hate right wingers AT ALL -- it’s just that, alike that one deranged uncle that hears voices in his head telling him to put metal things in the microwave to appease Jesus -- liberals feel like it’s their duty to keep rightists from burning down the retirement home. If liberals are the nurturing, common-sense employing mothers of America -- who just want to see their children grow up as prosperous, civil individuals -- then conservatives are the beer-chugging, deer-killing, job-hating absentee fathers that don’t give a shit what you do when you’re 18, just as long as you keep your radio in your room turned down and you’re home before 11. And heaven help you if they find out you’re dating a black person…

Of course, there’s a wide chasm between what liberals generally think and what conservatives generally think. Leftists believe in collectivism and constant restructuring of social policies -- preferably, with individual economic improvement via secularized, civic-focused structures casting as wide a social security net as possible -- while rightists believe “The Lord of the Flies” is a pretty good document to found an entire sociopolitical ideology upon. Making money is good, government sucks and the government taking your money (and gasp, perhaps using it on social programs that benefit less fortunate people) is the worst atrocity imaginable -- no matter what variety of conservatism you dig, if you believe the above three to be self-evident (alongside a contentious fourth pillar we’ll discuss shortly),  than congratulations, you’ve been invited to the boys’ club.

The fact of the matter is, right wing ideology in the United States covers a lot more territory than some would initially think -- in fact, it covers ground so large that it happens to push completely antithetical sub-ideologies together, as individual values and mores secondary to the much larger values stated above become unlikely bedmates.

As you can see in the figure above, the right wing spectrum runs all the way from God-fearing, drug-hating theocratic prohibitionists -- the sort of Victorian prudes that place religious conviction over personal liberty -- all the way up to market anarchists -- godless, amoral hyper-capitalists that not only believe man is without redemption, but actually EMBRACE humanity’s Hobbesian vileness as financial virtue. Clearly, these folks ought not to be part of the same team, but since they share similar fundamental moral values -- and much more importantly, a common enemy -- they can, theoretically, put their differences aside and declare the same jihad on liberalism.

There are some differences between the two poles, of course, the largest (at first glance, anyway) being the divisive issue of religion. The reality is, outside of their economic convictions, the bookends of modern conservatism -- the Sarah Palin loving, illegal immigrant-despising and Judeo-Christian God worshipping Tea Party side and the Ron Paul celebrating, weed legalizing Reddit atheist Libertarian side -- have almost dialectically opposite social policy beliefs. While the Tea Party side tends to have your “traditional” Republican values, the social policy values favored by Libertarians are not only closely aligned to the social policy values of those dastardly liberals, but in some cases, even more extreme.

Looking at core beliefs, there isn’t a whole lot of common ground between Tea Party conservatives and Libertarian conservatives. While the Michelle Bachmann-followers of America foster a profound hatred of abortion, secularization and drug legalization, the Gary Johnson-ites of America are usually staunch defenders of those same ideals. Two of the more understated, albeit contentious, issues among the Sunni and Shiite Republicans involves military support and the topic of illegal immigration; while most Tea Partiers are damn-damn-damn opposed to comprehensive immigration reform, there’s a large contingency of Libertarian Republicans that are in favor of it. Similarly, while a near majority of Tea Partiers celebrate the military with utmost zeal, a large number of Libertarians are anti-war and would like to see defense spending on the downturn…a sharp contrast to the ideology of Tea Partiers, who believe that the military is the ONLY aspect of big government that’s worthy of funding.

The only omnipresent, hot button issues it seems as if the two poles of conservatism can agree upon are less taxation (obviously) and gun control -- that being, there shouldn’t be any of the latter whatsoever. As a social policy, gun ownership/celebration/worship appears to be the ONLY core cultural value, outside of economic beliefs, that the two wildly divergent camps can agree upon -- in fact, it’s an ideological fixture secured so tightly in both camps that one could make the argument that “gun ownership is completely unquestionable as a civil right” constitutes an unofficial “fourth pillar” of modern U.S. conservatism.

So there’s this concept called “cognitive dissonance.” It postulates that people, by our very nature, are incapable of holding two contradictory ideas in our collective heads at the same time, so as a means of relieving such mental stress, we try to find ways to push out one idea and embrace its opposite. When you look at this modern conservative coalition, however, it quickly becomes apparent that it’s an alliance COMPLETELY anchored around cherished, antithetical ideas -- in other words, an ideological system that not only rejects the whole cognitive dissonance theorem, but completely embraces it’s polar opposite (“cognitive harmony,” would you call it?)

And as such, being a conservative in this day and age entails a necessary investment in contradictory ideals.

As you can see by the examples above, “logical incongruity” isn’t necessarily a problem for modern U.S. conservatives. While one act supposedly celebrating individual liberty and right can be championed as virtue, another individual act of liberty and right can be construed as a socially negative imposition that MUST be corrected by state intervention. Thusly, the logic of “outlawing guns WON’T reduce gun violence” reigns supreme in many conservative circles, where the virtually identical supposition -- “outlawing abortions WON’T reduce women seeking abortions” is completely disregarded. The same can be said of conservative views regarding governmental powers; while federal decrees are largely seen as unfair impositions on states, most conservatives never seem to trudge up that state and local powers are often guilty of imposing FAR more impositions on the citizenry, in much more direct -- and consequential -- ways. Por exemple? Despite federal laws making abortions and adult novelties legal across the land, states like North Dakota and Alabama have decided that “state rights” matter more than federal decree, and have thus levied seriously unconstitutional impositions on its citizens. So if you’re wondering why so many sheriffs in Red State America keep yammering on an on about how they don’t have to follow national policy because of the Constitution -- you know, the same document that has the goddamned Supremacy Clause in it -- I reckon it’s just that inherent conservative cognitive harmonization in full effect.

From an ideological standpoint, democratic liberalism is a much more consistent philosophy than democratic conservatism -- mostly because liberalism anticipates and incorporates societal changes into policy ideals INSTEAD of railing against them like Don Quixote threshing at a windmill. The problem -- which, peculiarly, has become U.S. conservatism’s greatest characteristic in the modern age -- is that it’s attempting to serve two masters: unfettered personal liberty WITH unfettered economic liberty, an order where the market reigns supreme, the government limits social safeguards, and everybody is free(r) to do as they wish. The rub -- as the Great Depression and the post-Gilded Age taught us -- was that a super-unregulated market, sans government interaction, doesn’t necessarily lead to a citizenry becoming wealthier or more civil. In fact, the only times economic growth seems to happen in the U.S. is when federal impositions are placed upon an unfettered market and social safeguards are established for a citizenry…as proven here after the New Deal, here after the erection of the Great Society and holy shit, even right now, as apparent by the nation’s Consumer Price Index, which is at its highest plateau ever. And as far as civility and liberalism goes, look no further than this chart, which saw the nation’s homicide rate plummet underneath FDR, bottom out with Johnson and then decrease dramatically by the end of Clinton’s second term (after reaching its highest levels in modern history during the Reagan Administration.)

According to modern science, underdeveloped anterior cingulate cortexes are probably responsible for the existence of Sarah Palin. 

Not only does it seem as if social security programming correlates with economic upticks, golly gee, it sure seems like such investments tend to have a beneficial effect on general civility, too. But alas, that’s contra to the modern conservative mentality, which says the exact opposite of what empirical data indicates -- that less market intervention and less social services investments result in both economic and social improvements.

It’s not that modern conservative ideology seems impossibly fragmented and ignorant of real world data -- it actually IS impossibly fragmented and ignorant of real world data. Now, to what extent we can pin all of the ideology’s faults and foibles on the “cognitive harmony” theory above is debatable, but it sure seems to cover all of the bases as a potential explanation for why right wing thinking seems so…well, delusional.

And so, it may be disheartening to realize that a good half of the U.S. population subscribes to a political ethos that rejects the notion of cognitive dissonance as a mental practice, with unabashed hatred of the political other serving as the sole adhesive the glues together two utterly impossible ideological pillars together, but on the bright side? Only half of their kind want to take over the nation via an armed uprising, thankfully.

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Propaganda Review: “Trickle Up Poverty” by Michael Savage (2010)

In which a gay-bashing Mexican-hater suggests the only way to defeat make-believe despotism is to counter it with ACTUAL fascist policies

I didn’t really know all that much about Michael Savage until I read “Trickle Up Poverty: Stopping Obama’s Attack on Our Borders, Economy and Security.” After completing Savage’s gargantuan, hate-filled manifesto, I took it upon myself to learn as much about this “Savage” character as I could.

After all, I’d hate to write about one of the worst pieces of shit I’ve ever read without knowing as much as I could about the even bigger piece of shit that wrote it. (And throughout this review, I’ll drop some periodic facts about the book’s author. They’re all 100 percent true, even though you’ll be praying to whatever deity you elect to follow that I was making them up.)

The big problem with “Trickle Up Poverty” -- an already dated, Tea Party-flavored piece of 2010 agitprop that I picked up for approximately one/twenty-fourth its original MSRP -- is that it’s loud. As in, voluble, ear-splitting and shrieking. You may not think that its physically possible for a book to give one a cochlea-ache, but trust me, after churning through all 316 pages of Savage’s spite-spewing opus, you’ll feel like you just returned home from a Slayer show, too. “Trickle Up Poverty” is an apoplectic, vein-stretching, spit-scattering, insane diatribe the likes of which is rarely seen outside of mental wards; once you finish off the tome, you’ll feel less like you just read something than you had your ear canal raped by a coked-up Glenn Beck.

My, where to begin on this one? Before I begin analyzing Savage’s wildebeest-on-angel-dust-like tirade about how everything even remotely associated with Obama is part of a Satanic communist ploy to overthrow America, I guess I should start off by stating my opinion on this Barack fellow. (Side note: just how long do we have to wait before Spell Checker accepts “Barack” as an official pronoun, anyway?)

On Obama, I’m fairly neutral. I can’t say that I’m a big fan of all of his practices, and pretty much all of that stuff he said he was going to do back in 2008 never came to fruition, but on the whole, I admire the guy for being able to put up with so much bullshit from the radical right contingency (and also, I kinda like the cut of his jib when it comes to healthcare, military and telling Wayne LaPierre to shut his face hole policies, but those are merely asides, I suppose.)

While it is true that W. caught a lot of flak during his presidency, at least the things people accused him of doing were, you know, based on actual things, like Iraq, Katrina and all of that suspicious market deregulation nobody on the right ever seems to bring up when discussing today’s contemporary economic unpleasantness. What Obama deals with, however, is something completely different -- as in, large throngs of people thinking he’s an impossible Marxist Communist Muslim Socialist Black Panther from Kenya that may or may not have killed his gay lover in a cocaine-fueled rage and/or teleported to Mars before. When tens of millions of people genuinely believe the logic-defying, lunatic rancor that neo-conservative blowhards like Savage puke over the airwaves, I think it’s next to impossible to NOT feel a little bit of sympathy towards this Barry chap.

MICHAEL SAVAGE FUN FACT:

A Russian Jew that grew up in New York, Michael Savage (born Michael Weiner…seriously) frequently criticizes leftist academics, despite the fact that he holds a Ph.D. (in ethnomedicine, of all things) from one of the nation’s foremost leftist academic hotbeds.

In the introduction to the tome, Savage wastes no time at all before mercilessly deriding Obama, slandering him as “The Destroyer” of American exceptionalism, the “traitor-in-chief” and a “reverse Robin Hood” that steals from the middle class and redistributes to the wealthy. Of course, Savage never really makes an effort to explain what constitutes “middle class” in America, but hey, who needs to elaborate on what class divisions are in order to refute the existence of class divisions, anyway?

As Savage continues to barf out his fingertips -- spreading the vitriolic upchuck through his keypad and into an electronic document, no doubt through some sort of nutritional science black magic he picked up at Berkeley -- he accuses Obama of attempting to forge a two-class society (the “U.S.S.A.,” as he nicknames it), which is part of some greater Pan-Leninist movement that the author never really elaborates upon. Which is probably for the best: the last thing this already backbreaking literary cinder block needs is a couple of  more irate pages on the European welfare state. He writes that the American “sheeple” (a term which he uses more frequently in the book than punctuation marks) are tired of Obama’s (at-the-time) one year reign, and cheers the then-emerging (and now practically mummified) Tea Party Movement as a citizens revolt against communist tyranny or some other buck wild bull shit that don’t make any sense.

MICHAEL SAVAGE FUN FACT:

Savage is the author of more than 35 books (some of which, it is worth noting, aren’t even written in crayon.) Among his illustrious literary forays? Books with such affable monikers as “The Death of the White Male,” “Liberalism is a Mental Disorder,” a book where he spends 200 pages comparing political figures to various zoo animals and no less than TWENTY tracts about homeopathic medicine (including 1984’s superb “Getting Off Cocaine,” which considering the palpable author slobber all over this book, is probably something Savage never actually did)

Chapter one begins with Savage referring to Obama as a “red diaper doper baby,” which must really sting if you’re in the first grade. His tendency to constantly use rhyming patterns as sentence glue becomes apparent quite early on in the manifesto -- at one point, equating “science” with the utterly nonsensical “lie-ence,” because that really gets the message across. For all you communication majors out there, you might note Savage’s logorrhea, tachylogia and cluttered speech as symptoms of “flight of ideas” syndrome -- a brain-to-mouth disorder that’s generally indicative of ADHD, schizophrenia or abuse of psycho stimulants. Not that this dude is a self-professed expert on cocaine, or anything.

More nerve-popping, schizoid rage follows, as he accuses Obama of appointing Maoist land grabbers to cabinet positions. He drones on some more about the redistribution of middle class wealth (once again, without giving us a number to demarcate WHO is middle class) and praises the proven to be Astroturf tea-party movement as a genuine grassroots phenomenon. He brings up Dale Robertson’s 15 Tea Party demands (a not at all fascist laundry list that defines gun ownership as a divine right and that once and for all, this here country belongs to Jesus and nobody else) and considers them a good start to mass reform. He then said that Obamacare is actually a thinly veiled reparations program, and that America’s entitlement programs are being exploited by “parasites from a different country of origin.” Citing a Tax Foundation study, he said that 60 percent of U.S. citizens take more from the government than they pay in taxes. You know, because all of those disabled people, senior citizens and children? Just eff them, man, just eff them. Taking a detour into some magical fantasy land where Reagan’s supply side policies created “trickle up affluence” (historical note: it did the exact opposite), he then segues into chapter two, which is more or less a putrid character assassination attempt that starts off with the author referring to Medicaid as nothing more than “socialized medicine for welfare recipients.”

Cue that old chestnut about Obama being trained by commies like Frank M. Davis and Bill Ayers, and some utterly imaginary chatter about the president going on a global “apology tour” to various world leaders. Then, Savage describes Obama as both a communist AND an anarchist, because shit, it’s apparently possible to be two completely antithetical things at the same time now. He calls Van Jones a thug (remember: to all right wingers, any black dude taller than Webster and more muscular than Urkel HAS to be a street criminal) and says Obama will do whatever he can to censor negative portrayals of him in the media, which fully explains how Savage has been able to successfully mass market half a dozen books accusing the President of being a Moslem Marxist that wants to destroy America without any difficulties.

Direct quote time: “Without question, Obama and his minions are out to do nothing less than imprison us in a totalitarian socialist system in which the federal government usurps our God-given right to make decisions for ourselves. That’s what his socialist redistribution of our earning through confiscatory tax policies and legislative initiatives is all about. He’s assuring that trickle up poverty becomes institutionalized in America.” Anyway, imagine that blowhard, grandiose bullshit being reshuffled over and over for 300 pages, and you pretty much have the entire book right in front of you.

Savage asks why Obama hasn’t released his college records yet. Apparently, despite having a PhD and spending all those years in post-secondary education, nobody told the author what FERPA was. He says that the primary reason liberals exist is to bring about the downfall of Western capitalist democracies (yep) and then rounds out the chapter by illustrating the fact that he has no idea what the differences are between Trotskyism, socialism and Leninism.

MICHAEL SAVAGE FUN FACT:

Savage, an ardent critic of homosexuality, was fired from MSNBC in 2006 after telling a gay listener to “only get AIDS and die.” Interestingly, Savage’s only “non-fiction” work, a 1984 book titled “Vital Signs,” was about a secretly homosexual, middle aged Jewish herbalist with a father complex that liked to hook up with ethnic prostitutes and say things like “Inner voice screaming at me for years, first rational, then crazy, telling me to do mad things. Every form of relief tried, painting, psychotherapy, running, diet, vitamins, etc., etc. Almost uncontrollable now. Impulses to stab children, strangers, wife, self with scissors.”

Chapter three is all about Savage’s anti-communist upbringing in New York, which includes a passage on how Marx was a deadbeat hippie (probably one of the few statements in the book that has any historical merit to it whatsoever.) He goes on a couple of more tirades against Lenin, Stalin and Saul Alinksy (as in, that guy that all neo-cons perpetually demonize, even though the entire Tea Party organizational structure and outreach model were patterned after “Reveille” and “Rules for Radicals”) and he says some shit about how Boeing is so much better than Airbus because Boeing wasn’t receiving government subsidies (even though they were - in the form of about $5 billion in illegal state aid.) Also, the irony meter almost breaks when Savage quotes J. Edgar Hoover -- the liberty-torching mastermind behind the Gestapo-esque COINTELPRO program of the 1950s -- on the subject of how precious freedom is.

With chapter four, things start getting REALLY kooky, with Savage stating that the Great Recession was actually engineered by George Soros through manipulation of his hedge fund management firm. Of course, Savage never explains WHY multi-billionaires would want a socialist-regime in place, before halfway (and by halfway, I mean not even remotely) explaining it by way of the BILDERBERG/NEW WORLD ORDER conspiracy. And how exactly bitter market/ideological rivals like Eric Schmidt and Bill Gates and Rupert Murdoch and Diane Feinstein can furtively work together to bring about Armageddon is thoroughly explained by…not being explained, in any way, shape or form, by Savage.

He said that auto union and SEIU employees were Nazis, and says that government employees, by way of benefits, make more money than private sector employees (or do they?) And of course, during Savage’s phlegm spraying spiel about the market meltdown, not once does the word “deregulation” appear as a potential (read: the actual) culprit behind the economic downturn.

The healthcare chapter begins with Savage telling a story about how he was an unlicensed pharmacist in his youth, and how he felt there was nothing at all wrong about  middle schoolers chopping up and distributing prescription drugs to members of the community. After making a reference to the “Jerk-it Court in San Fran-sicko,” Savage goes on a warpath about the Ready Reserve Corps and the Independent Medicare Advisory Board, stating that such ACA components are PROOF that death panels are real. He then starts referring to liberal adversaries as “demoncats” (which sounds like the name of an awesome 1980s cartoon, by the way), calls Dennis Kucinich a “whore,” and says Nancy Pelosi “desecrated” God by holding an ACA vote on Sunday. He rounds out the chapter by saying that everybody should just claim a religious exemption from Obamacare, citing Schechter Poultry Corps v. United States as a basis for “defeating” the Affordable Care Act.

Chapters six, seven and eight can be summarized as such: climate change is a pseudoscience (unlike herbal medicine) that will lead to $7 a gallon gas and the government forcing us to own electric cars, illegal immigrants cost us $4.3 billion a year in health costs (while pumping in about $1.4 trillion in total economic expenditures, but shh!) and are spreading DENGUE FEVER all over the place and that the ACORN scandal that wasn’t really a scandal at all is proof that Obama hates Israel because he’s a “Marxist Islamist.” And as to how someone can be a radical adherent of Allah while simultaneously being a radical adherent of a necessarily godless socioeconomic policy…well, uh….

MICHAEL SAVAGE FUN FACT:

A few health tips from Savage’s ethnomedicine bibliography: to kick a coke habit, try doing Sudafed and giving yourself black coffee enemas instead; you can cure AIDS by taking lots of Vitamin C; and southeast Asian migrants are KNOWINGLY bringing tuberculosis into America. By the way, did you know that notorious gay-hater Savage once posed nude with hyper-homosexual Allen Ginsberg?

Right after saying that the Obama regime is trying to create a “permanently disadvantaged underclass” of uneducated and uncultured Americans (which, last time I checked, is already a plurality in the nation), Savage said that the House Un-Americans Committee ought to be brought back to root out “Marxists” like Thomas Friedman from media occupations. He talks about how leftists gutlessly compared Bush to Hitler, yet sees not a shred of hypocrisy in the fact that he just spent the last 200 pages of his book comparing Obama to everybody from Stalin to Pol Pot. He said that the NEA had been infiltrated by communists (calling Rod Paige a “terrorist” in the process) and accuses D.C. of having the world’s worst public school system -- yes, even worse than those schools down south that teach kids dinosaurs and humans once coexisted. After attacking Air America, “Avatar,” Wolf Blitzer and Keith Olbermann, he said that Canada is the most restrictive non-Arab nation on the planet -- even though our neighbors to the north posted identical scores to the U.S. in the four leading freedom indices in 2013.)

The book’s penultimate chapter starts off with Savage recounting his childhood love of the local freak show, which segues into a passage about how AWFUL it is that the U.S. ratified a new START agreement in 2010. Being anti-nuclear war, you see, is actually being a “radical Marxist,” he explains. While the privatization of virtually everything else in America doesn’t draw a peep from Savage and his neocon kin, the fact that NASA outsourced some of its bids to private contractors draws the full ire of the author, who goes on to champion the racial profiling of Muslims and claiming to be “a pacifist,” even though he routinely promotes the idea of executing liberal opponents and gunning down civil rights proponents on his syndicated radio program.

The final chapter of “Trickle Up Poverty” is basically Savage parroting the “Contract from America” demands, alongside a few more suggestions to “improve” American life. Among the executive orders President Savage would issue, if he could: militarize the U.S/Mexico border (which is clearly something a self-proclaimed “pacifist” would lobby for), cut government spending across the board (except for the military: we need to increase that shit), INCREASE tensions with Iran, place Japan-like tariffs on China, give government subsidies to heterosexual couples to combat gay marriage, outlaw abortions, force welfare recipients into mandatory community service and MAKE women on welfare take birth control (nothing freedom-squelching about government-endorsed druggings and indentured servitude!) and establish a “contract with the Judeo-Christian god.” His final advice for the reader is that leaders should operate America like a business instead of an empire: because as we all know, tyrannical, centrally-planned businesses, with clear class divides and open exploitation of cheap labor, are, never, EVER successful. Ever.

I only spent one dollar on Savage’s potboiler, and I already find it a much worse waste of 100 pennies than that time I bought a supposed spider prop for Halloween that was just a garbage bag and a couple of twist-ties. The Internet is prone to hyperbole, but I am 100 percent sincere when I say that successfully completing Michael Savage’s 2010 tome is one of the worst experiences of my life. I’m not sure how many hours I put into that hardback turd, but it’s probably enough to make me question the decency of my soul. Why would I invest so much time and energy and effort into such a black hole of ideological hatred? All in all, I think I had more fun reading my mother’s obituary than I did “Trickle Up Poverty.”

There’s absolutely nothing here of intellectual nutrition. Unless your idea of “enlightenment” is having some narcissistic, self-loathing wannabe-shaman yell permutations of “commie” at you and blame America’s poorest citizens for the downfall of the nation for 300 pages, I’d highly suggest you steer clear of this mental toxic waste. A rebuttal to its contents and claims isn’t even necessary: the greatest criticism you can lob at the book -- and Savage’s outlook as a whole -- is to simply restate what he says, take a step back, and marvel at the insanity of his comments. The fact that there are people out there that legitimately share this dude’s perspective (which I believe is, mostly, played up for the hayseeds and mega-nationalists) is not only depressing, but pretty damn frightening, too.

Only to bulimics would I consider “Trickle Up Poverty” a worthy investment. For if you’re in
in the mood to feel the core of your humanity vomit, this stuff acts as the literary equivalent of syrup of ipecac.

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"The Morality of Capitalism"

A Review of Libertarian Propaganda

If you thought the social ramifications of free-market ideals on the human experience COULDN'T be fully addressed in 122 pages. . .yeah, you were pretty much right. 

I’ve written about libertarianism a couple of times before, and the feedback always seems to come in two varieties: it’s either hate mail from lunk-headed college kids that consider themselves in the upper tax bracket even though they work at Starbucks, or it’s quasi-well thought out (if not someone surprised) reciprocal praise from blue stater slackers that actually know what the heck (to a certain, degree, anyway) they’re talking about.

Honestly, I don’t really like criticizing libertarianism, primarily because there’s just so much to renounce. Do I begin with the hypocritical, egotistical libertarian tank-thinkers that consider themselves monopolists on issues like reason and logic, or do I go after the fact that one of their canonized philosophers is the absolute worst science fiction hack this side of L. Ron Hubbard? How about Ron Paul and his grandiose visions of reverting back to a double eagle-dependent economy, or how about all of those basement-dwelling ne’er-do-wells that blame the Federal Reserve Board for the fact that they can’t get laid? Just skimming the surface of libertarianism is like running your finger down the slimy curtains of a campground shower, and actually getting into their “literature” is akin to taking a swan dive into a septic tank: you know you’re dealing with crap from a mile away, and when you get knee-deep in it, the only thing more overpowering than the stench of intestinal butter is the repugnant stench of hypocrisy.

I’ve always considered libertarianism to be an illogical, anti-philosophy. For guys that go on and on about the merits of “rationality” and “common sense,” isn’t it just mildly ironic that they’re ideology is fundamentally BUILT open a heap of contradictions and double standards? Reading libertarian propaganda is filled with more paradoxes than a freaking cyberpunk novel: inconsistent terms like “creative destruction,” spontaneous order,” and “compete-to-control” litter the libertarian lexicon with the same sort of casualness and regularity that normal folk say “hello” and “good day.” Try counting up the contradictions and examples of charlatanry in the standard libertarian rant, and there’s a pretty high probability that you’re calculator will run out of battery power before you can add that final +1 to the tabulation.

A couple of weeks ago, I noticed that someone was leaving a bunch of free copies of an “intro to libertarianism” rag all around campus, so being the masochist that I am, I decided to swoop up a copy and give it a good look-see. At first, I was just going to skim through it and scribble down a couple of turd-tastic quotes here and there, but after pushing myself through all 120-something pages of the pamphlet sized manifesto, I decided the abomination of nature/waste of printing press lubricant deserved a thorough, chapter by chapter lambasting on this very blog. Believe you me, some of this stuff is downright AMAZING.

To begin with, the “book” itself is called “The Morality of Capitalism: What Your Professors Won’t Tell You.” The cover of the book looks like something Desktop Publisher puked out, with a dove carrying a Benjamin and a Yuan in its clutches while nose diving into a globe that consists of ONLY the United States and China. The tome, edited by a fellow named Tom G. Palmer (don’t worry, there’s more rabblerousing from him later on), is basically a collection of super-brief essays on why capitalism is great and poor people deserve to be poor. You know, the standard nonsense we’ve been hearing for years and years. Apparently, the book was published by an organization known as the Atlas Network  (boy, I wonder what that could be referencing?) and looks like it has funding from a number of organizations, including the Cato Institute’s version of the Hitler Youth (just remember kids: if you spew out cockamamie drivel about the free market and “the morality of value exchange” in YOUR school newspaper, you might just win yourself $500 from a bunch of nerds, ding-dongs and crater-faced  dweebs that think student loans are a form of Trotskyism.)

At first, you kind of think to yourself, “how bad can this really be?” and before you get past PAGE ONE of the introduction, you’re already on the verge of punching a hole in the nearest wall/face you encounter. Palmer begins the tract by stating that capitalism is a “system of innovation, wealth creation and social change” that has “brought billions of people to prosperity” - which, of course, explains why a good 33 million people in the United States are jobless while another 48 million are incapable of securing anything above part time labor. From there, Palmer goes on a euphemism spree, discussing libertarian ideals like elitism (“careers open to talent”) while championing inherently faulty concepts like “voluntary process of market exchange” - you know, because it’s totally our CHOICE to be involved in the economic cycle. If Palmer had a hard-on for biology, he’d probably lecture us on the “voluntary process of breathing,” as well.

 Nothing says "marketplace efficiency" quite like having to GIVE away your product to get people to consume it...

 

He then goes off on a tangent about “state imposed monopolies,” concluding that capitalism has resulted in a system in which people can “commonly become wealthy without becoming criminals.” Well, considering the number of Wall Street crooks and swindlers that get busted for insider trading, book cooking and tax evasion (not to mention all of the human rights violations most of them get away with like overseas sweatshop labor and rug-swept D.O.L. infringements), perhaps it’s just that we wait until we already make our fortune before we let all of those antisocial traits flare up. Palmer spends a couple of pages going after Marx and Werner Sombart (yeah, you tell those long-dead socialist scribes what-for!) and he concludes his introductory spiel by advocating an economic system based on “choice and consent” instead of “birth or status,” saying that we can only get rid of “poverty” via “wealth creation.” Apparently, nobody clued Palmer in on the fact that despite being the wealthiest nation on Earth, we actually have a pretty sizable homeless population here in the States: maybe if we cut property taxes by one percent, all of those makeshift hobo towns in New Jersey will magically dissipate, huh?

Up next, we have a real treat as Palmer interviews Whole Foods Market founder John Mackey; and much like his diabetes-flavored comestibles, his diatribe is sure to have you lunging towards the commode in a hurry.

According to Mackey, there’s a false dichotomy between altruism and selfishness (Translation: “I really, really, really like having money and the fact that the guy next door is starving makes it even better.”) Mackey thinks that capitalism has been the greatest source of good for the world over the last 300 years - so if you’re a slave, a displaced indigent, or a four year old working in a Nike factory in Manila, just remember your ON THE SIDE OF GOOD, AMIGO. He says that he supports creating a culture that supports purpose, stakeholders and leadership, meaning, of course, that he supports creating a culture that’s more profitable for him and his company shareholders. And no, he actually DOES say that in the book. To reiterate the point that the free market is great and totally without fault, he says that only 20 percent of the world population is currently living on less than one U.S. dollar per day. He refrains from mentioning that means 2 billion people across the globe are living in so much abject poverty as to be considered economically invisible, nor does he bring up the fact that about HALF of the planet makes less than three U.S. dollars a day - or heck, even the fact that in several major metropolitan areas in the U.S., gargantuan portions of the populace make less then three dollars a day right here in freaking America. Mackey does some more cheerleading for the free market, saying it made us “a prosperous, authentically rich country,” and with it, “everybody ultimately rises over time,“ - you know, more claptrap that makes it sound like rampant poverty is a petty, trivial issue compared to the MASS suffering of these conglomerates and subordinate creepozoids that think cutting mental health facility and adult literacy programs are a “good start” to the rebirth of American industrialization. It should really come as no surprise that Mackey concludes his segment with praise of Ronald Reagan, claiming that deregulation is THE artifact that led to American prosperity (which may or may not have also led to an economic implosion twenty five years later, but really, who cares about something that insignificant, huh?) I guess Mackey didn’t pick up the newspaper when the Gipper gave S&L billions in government bail bonds, or take note that while Reagan crusaded for a Constitutional Amendment to “balance the budget,” the two-faced wad did more deficit spending than any administration in history. Then again, it is sort of a fitting conclusion, with one hypocrite paying ode to his hypocritical forerunners. 

Because you have the individual freedom. . .to develop type 2 diabetes before you're in middle school.

We follow that up with an essay by Deirdre McCloskey. There really isn’t too much to talk about here; according to her, the Industrial Revolution is one of mankind’s greatest moral paradigms (well, after you discount the slave wages, black lung, daily dismemberments and child endangerment, I suppose you can consider it that), notes that the average capitalist citizen makes OR consumes $100 a day (without a source detailing where she got such an estimate, of course) and calls the fact that there has been a 2,900 percent increase in food production, travel and educational development since 1700 the “Great Fact of History.” Of course, by that same token, you can say that the SAME production levels just prior to the Industrial Revolution were about 2,900 percent higher than they were in 1400, which had 2,900 percent higher production levels of 1100. Feasibly (and using McCloskey’s exact same line of logic), you can say that mercantilism and the Crusades produced the same increase in production levels as did the Industrial Revolution, but COME ON! That’s just plain crazy talk about arbitrarily selecting points in history and gauging lineal progression as  unfounded, presumed-to-be-direct outcomes of those same points, isn’t it?

David Boaz decides to stroke Adam Smith’s long dead ego in the next essay, stating that a “Great Society” is based upon “self-interest, limited generosity and resource scarcity” - essentially, three different ways of justifying the fact that you’re acting like a self-absorbed putz. Boaz says that state associations are instinctively “coercive” while every other possible form of association is both natural and voluntary. Because as we ALL know, private industry and civic organizations NEVER, EVER use force or fear to motivate people. Like I said, NEVER.

Parker then returns with an essay entitled For Profit Medicine. Basically, he’s giving us the same argument Thomas Szasz gave us in The Myth of Mental Illness - “in a free market economy, the profit motive may be but another name for the compassion motive,” he declares. Well, I think we can all agree upon that, since it’s a common facet of knowledge that ALL businesses EVERYWHERE act with the best interests of their clients and customers in mind AT ALL CONCEIVABLE TIMES.

From there, Mao Yushi gives us The Paradox of Morality, which includes, among others, these cheery quips:

“Looking out for the interests of others, it is a breeding ground for vile characters.”

“If humankind were to directly and exclusively seek the benefit of others, no ideals would be realized.”

“Those who act contrarily to their own self interests during the course of an exchange suffer from an incoherence of motives.”

Needless to say, Christmastime at the Yushis has to be all kinds of awkward, I’m guessing.

And from cynical egotists of the Chinese variety, we get a look at the same love of self and moolah from Leonid Nikoniv. “Economic freedom,” Nikoniv states, “that is, equal standards of justice and equal respect for the rights of all to produce and to exchange, is the right standard of justice for moral beings.” Now, such a definition certainly can be applied to non-capitalist systems, as text book socialism attempts to create just such an equality based on moral justices, too, but . . uh, well, Nikoniv never really explains why capitalism is inherently a better means of achieving said equality and justice, but it’s not like you have to make valid points to win an argument or anything, right? Nikoniv then goes off on a long tirade about the evils of “forced redistribution”, and I think you could get about as much as insight out of an unplugged air conditioner as you would the sputtering rhetoric about “deontic modality” and how the Pythagoreans gave gender traits to certain numbers.

There’s an essay about Adam Smith up next. The only really noteworthy thing about it is the line “markets make possibility the charity of the charitable” as a universal defense for promoting one’s financial self-interests over the well-being of others. Of course, the counter-argument is that such greed-oriented business policies ultimately end up costing others their livelihoods, which results in formerly self-sustained individuals becoming dependent on redistribution because. . .DING-DING! The freaking market put them out on their keisters to begin with. In that, the statement that the market makes charity possible is an inadvertently truthful one in well more ways than one. 

As we all know, your stance on the legality of black tar heroin makes you either a champion of freedom or the modern day equivalent of Joey Stalin. 
 

As an added bonus, the pamphlet came with two complimentary political quizzes, which were provided by some self-government advocacy group (which I guess explains the why and how of how the darn books ended up on campus, anyway). Needless to say, the quizzes themselves are pretty biased and steered towards generating a “gee whiz, I’m a Libertarian!” answer. The quiz asks you such vague questions as “are you in favor of a national identification card?”, which, somehow, determines your rank and file in the political system. Not that there’s a lot of room for analysis with these things as it is,  but I find even the questions asked here to be prone to false positives. Isn’t a “driver’s license” and a “passport” basically a “national I.D.,” anyway?

The real centerpiece of the book is an essay by David Kelley entitled “Ayn Rand and Capitalism: The Moral Revolution.” Kelley gets off to a good start, noting the tried-and-true-trifecta of things that made the modern world great (liberalism, “spontaneous order” capitalism and the Industrial Revolution) before heading into the Randian platitude that altruism as self-sacrifice OR “submersion of self into the collective” is B-A-D. Welfarism? BAD. Egalitarianism? BAD. Egotism? BAD, not because it hurts other people, but because it may inadvertently be bad for the individual. The only social good we have going for us, per Kelley, is the system of “voluntary trade,” and if you’re poor, he has the following for you to chew on:

“There is no ground in justice for holding the poor or the meek in any special esteem or regarding their needs as primary.”

Kelley concludes his essay by saying that if given the choice between a “free” society and a society in which people did not starve, “the free one is the moral choice.” Obviously, Kelley’s proposition is a false dichotomy so massive that if you peer out your window, you might just be able to see it over the horizon, as it doesn’t even attempt to define the parameters of what a free society is, nor does it even remotely consider the reality that a society can have capitalistic markets and still have soaring poverty rates (Hint: if you’re reading this in America, try taking a stroll outside sometime for empirical refutation of Kelley’s assertion.) Kelley’s kicker is that he believes that privatized “charities” outside the market should be in charge of non-state-funded welfare and public assistance programs - basically, the social service equivalent of equipping firefighters with squirt guns instead of fire hoses.

After that we have a long string of micro-essays. Ludwig Lachmann’s essay is the only entry in the compilation that recognizes the whole idea of “inherited wealth,” even if he (from a rhetorical standpoint, wisely) refuses to discuss it at length in promoting the free market as “socially equitable” and all that jazz. Temba A. Nolutshungu says that “economic wellbeing is a consequence of freedom,” and that capitalism ensures “trade without force or fraud”. . .which is, well, yeah. According to Julie Arunga voluntary exchange is a “natural act” and that a free market somehow off puts monopolies and collusion in society. . .which is, well, also kind of yeah. Drawing upon the framework of noteworthy black person hater David Hume, Vernon Smith says that we have “nothing to fear” from outsourcing, stating that it worked just fine and dandy for textile mills in the southeast in the 1960s (up until the factories were shipped off to Thailand thirty years later, anyway) and that from 1999-2003, that good old “creative destruction” created two million more “service sector” jobs than it destroyed in the United States. Of course, Smith doesn’t say what exactly “constitutes” a service sector job, nor does he state whether or not technically American jobs outsourced to international personnel “counted” in his findings. In defense of multinationalists, he says that for every dollar a Fortune 500 company invests in foreign markets, they typically invest around three dollars in the U.S. market. The thing is, the market of which he speaks consists of the multinationals themselves and not the American public, many of whom have had their jobs (and in some extreme cases, entire career fields) whisked away to Southeast Asia so that their ex-employer can preemptively save a dime or two on forecasted losses.

  A photograph of the elusive Tom G. Palmer. . .who looks so much like that cigarette-smoking dude from The X-Files that it HAS TO MAKE YOU WONDER.

The grand finale for the tome is a reprint of Mario Vargas Llosa’s January 2001 essay “The Culture of Liberty,” and boy, did they ever save the best for last here. To begin with, Llosa wants us to know that we all have the terminology wrong - it’s not globalization, it’s modernism, and we’d all have to be a bunch of buffoons to reject modernity, wouldn’t we? Per Llosa, cultural identity is dangerous, and no form of cultural identity is more dangerous than nationalism, which Llosa says creates a dominant culture which is forcibly imposed upon local ones. “Globalism must be welcomed,” Llosa writes, “because it notably expands the horizon of individual liberty.” But, for all of you traditionalists out there, don’t worry, because according to Llosa, globalism will usher in a grand, new era in which “all that is valuable and worthy of survival in local cultures will find fertile ground in which to bloom. This is something, Llosa states, “we must be happy about.”

I think Llosa’s essay pretty much sums up why libertarianism is at best mendacious and at worst flat out schizophrenic as a philosophy. Let’s count up the contradictions here, shall we?

For starters, Llosa says that national identity is bad because it imposes culture on local populations. However, Llosa doesn’t say a dadgum thing about how local identity imposes culture on individuals within that locality. Speaking of impositions, how many times did Llosa say that we had to embrace globalism? For a philosophy that supposedly espouses human choice, Llosa has no interest in giving us, well, a human choice regarding the matter - alike a “vegetarian” chomping down on a steak and chicken quesadilla, we’re getting a severely mixed message here. Ultimately, my biggest complaint with Llosa’s argument is my biggest complaint about libertarianism in general: just what the hell constitutes “liberty” to begin with? Surely, you are not in favor of complete and utter freedom, but it’s next to impossible to gage the parameters of liberty we’re talking about here. At one point does individual liberty become a negative? Is total and complete liberty, abolishment of any regulation from another human being, the eventual goal of such an ethos? Since we have no control over the economic system we’re born into, doesn’t that make capitalism itself an imposition upon the individual? Surely, we can’t choose which economic system we want to partake of in a given society, so what gives? The libertarian folk seem to want both individual rights and unfettered capitalism, and you don’t need me to tell you that those AREN’T ideologies that go firmly knuckle-through-knuckle. As a result, and “The Morality of Capitalism” demonstrates this to a big, fat “T”, libertarianism is a system that thrives on contradictions and obfuscation through euphemisms, because, hey, that’s the ONLY way this [expletive deleted] racket can get off the ground at all.

A decentralized government? Great, now let’s replace it with centralized industry. Promotion of civil knowledge and understanding? Let’s get started, but first, let’s starve off all of those undesirables in the trailer park and barrios. A better world can be created, but only if “the capitalist elite” are the ones calling all of the shots. Most libertarians think that industry should supplant government as the main overseer of the peoples, and to me, that’s about the most ­absurd thing I can dare fathom, for as much as the government sucks, at least they never went out of business before. All libertarianism is is exchanging a spork for a foon. . .and it’s a way worse foon than the spork we’re currently using.

The last page of the book includes and ordering form for copies of the tome. “This book will give you that power,” it promises would be bulk-purchasers. And then, after yelling and moaning and complaining and bellyaching and raising cane about “wealth redistribution,” you know what the final sentence in the book is?

“Illinois residents, please add 6.5% sales tax.”

If you ever wanted a primer on what libertarianism is all about, that’s pretty much all you need to know about it right there. 

Just remember: The Morality of Capitalism is cheaper than toilet paper (although nowhere near as readable.)

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