At Cafe Hayek, Don Boudreaux sent a letter to the editor in response to an obituary for Howard Zinn. Don accused Zinn of being inconsistent for having a low opinion of the government when it engaged in foreign policy but a high opinion for its domestic policies. I replied that Zinn was actually an anarchist and that Don had misrepresented him, presumably out of ignorance and assumptions about what a leftist must believe. I ended up having a long conversation with the commenter vidyohs, which I don’t feel like copying all of here. If I had been aware of Gary Chartier’s post on how libertarians should view Zinn, I would have linked to it when I engaged in that discussion.
I left a comment at Will Wilkinson’s that has been held up for review. Just the sort of thing which justifies having a blog of your own. Here is what it said:
Are those two mistakes created equal? Does the respect given to soldiers outweigh the murder they participate in?
Personally, I side with Steve Walt on the issue even though I see even less value in U.S primacy. I want the most competent possible (leaving aside comparative advantage) military even when it engages in pointless destruction. If the hapless foreigners we attack for no reason can be reduced to abject surrender before we waste more time in their countries, all the better. But to take a pluralist-over-rationalist perspective, I’d recommend it be implemented through delegation. Gays apparently are disproportionately found in some sectors of the military (medical, translators). The commanders of those units probably don’t like losing personnel, so they could elect to allow the practice, others complaining about how no pointy-headed liberal is going to be trying out social experiments in the goddamn military can continue with DADT, and the President would duck some political backlash. Everybody wins, except for moralists who hate compromise.
Will replied:
Right, it doesn’t matter to gays whether or not they are accorded equal status by the laws they live under. I suppose it doesn’t really matter to blacks or women either. That’s just something that bothers moralists who hate compromise.
I responded:
Women are currently not treated equally by the military. They are not eligible for the draft, and I believe are not placed in combat positions (except as aircraft pilots). The last person I recall complaining about that was Mel Feit, who is not a woman though he sometimes wears a dress. Blacks don’t have equal status under other laws: there are certain set-asides only they qualify for. I don’t think many are too upset by that, so divergence from equality per se doesn’t do it.
Another opportunity for de facto integration amidst du jure discrimination: I recall hearing that the majority of people kicked out under DADT were actually women. Assuming that’s true, then if the rule was specified to only apply to men, conservatives could retain their officially fairie-free man’s zone while avoiding most of the actual effects of the rule. My guess is also that there’s more animus to gay men than women broadly speaking and that women are more interested in marriage, so we could also allow gay marriage for women only.
February 4, 2010 at 3:08 pm
I saw those comments at Wilkinson’s. I liked your point. What does “held up for review” mean here?
Blacks don’t have equal status under other laws: there are certain set-asides only they qualify for. I don’t think many are too upset by that, so divergence from equality per se doesn’t do it.
I think that proponents of affirmative action believe set-asides help equalize conditions, but then that just goes to show that the way equality manifests itself can mean permissible inequality before the law. If everyone save for redheads were barred from joining the military because it is a murderous organization, the goal of equality for unknown foreigners would be better served at the expense of domestic demographic proportionality – i.e. equality. Change cultural conditions and the concomittant reference points for who is deserving of “equality” and the concept of equality is blown wide open for just about any ideology (except perhaps those too other-wordly oriented and so too remote from an even vaguely liberal political theory).
February 4, 2010 at 4:07 pm
I just noticed that it said “flagged” for review, and underneath each Disqus comment is a “Flag” option, so some random reader could have done it.
Equality of outcomes in the context of representation in the military would require a draft/conscription. Hell, equality of outcomes in the context of representation of pretty much anything would require something like that to avoid self-selection.
I left another comment in reply there that has apparently disappeared in its entirety. It went as follows:
Hey, elsewhere I was going to link to my comment about abject surrender above. I notice it’s flagged for review. I suppose it might be offensive (to moralists), but I can’t see how it’s more offensive than my reply an hour later. Meanwhile, you’re leaving up replies to it absent their context. That just seems poor netiquette. It’s your blog and your prerogative to wipe out comments with extreme prejudice (assuming it was you and not some wordpress/Disqus authority), so I’ll host it here.
Also, I should thank Robin Hanson for inspiration. Tetlock deserves a nod as well.
February 4, 2010 at 7:34 pm
Will Wilkinson is a libertarian in the same sense that Zinn was an anarchist – none.
According to your Liberal Law link;
“[Zinn]opposed war and imperial violence. He rejected corporate privilege. He highlighted the absurdity and injustice of telling the story of a society from the vantage point of the people atop its pyramid of power”
And this is different from a garden variety communist how?
“He seems to have exhibited some of the same naïveté about some political regimes as the great libertarian hero, Karl Hess (who was, for instance, surprisingly sanguine about Mao’s China in the mid-’70s). Despite being an anarchist, he seems to have affirmed the New Deal, which represented a dramatic increase in statism and corporatism.”
It’s not very surprising if you accepet the fact that Zinn was not an anarchist. Evidence for his being an “anarchist” seems to consist of his sayng so a few times.
Noam Chomsky, that defender of the Khmer Rouge, calls himself a “libertarian socialist”. People sometimes lie about themselves, and left-wing people especially are known for this.
February 4, 2010 at 8:05 pm
Howard Zinn: > “I think what lies beyond the nation states is a world without national boundaries, but also with people organized. But not organized as nations, but people organized as groups, as collectives, without national and any kind of boundaries. Without any kind of borders, passports, visas. None of that! Of collectives of different sizes, depending on the function of the collective, having contacts with one another. You cannot have self-sufficient little collectives, because these collectives have different resources available to them. This is something anarchist theory has not worked out and maybe cannot possibly work out in advance, because it would have to work itself out in practice.”
We need a name for these collectives. I know, what about “communes”?
Anarchist, my eye.
More Zinn: >”If you work through the existing structures you are going to be corrupted. By working through political system that poisons the atmosphere, even the progressive organizations, you can see it even now in the US, where people on the “Left” are all caught in the electoral campaign and get into fierce arguments about should we support this third party candidate or that third party candidate. This is a sort of little piece of evidence that suggests that when you get into working through electoral politics you begin to corrupt your ideals. So I think a way to behave is to think not in terms of representative government, not in terms of voting, not in terms of electoral politics, but thinking in terms of organizing social movements, organizing in the work place, organizing in the neighborhood, organizing collectives that can become strong enough to eventually take over — first to become strong enough to resist what has been done to them by authority, and second, later, to become strong enough to actually take over the institutions.”
It could not be more clear that this guy was a simon-pure Olde Tyme Communist if he wrote it in letters of fire aross the sky.
Much of the modern libertarian movement (so-called) is motivated by an intense hostility towards representative government. This makes them willing to lie down with all sorts of dogs who share similar views. So we see the seemingly bizzare spectacle of a love affair between libertarians and communists.
February 5, 2010 at 9:49 am
The Byzantine legal code punished various serious infractions by sewing offenders into sacks with cocks, apes and asps to represent their respective transgressions.
For his thought crime of rank stupidity in defense of egalitarianism, Wilkinson should be yoked to a plow with a woman, a homosexual, and possibly an ox. The learning experience would be priceless.
February 5, 2010 at 5:28 pm
I recall the New Deal being the only major US government action that Zinn seemed to support in his People’s History.
February 6, 2010 at 3:12 pm
Murray Rothbard was an anarcho-capitalist and said some similarly odd things during his time with the New Left. I’d say his support for the New Deal would be the hardest to reconcile with anarchism (I haven’t read his books, so I’d be interested in what others said about it). I don’t actually know if an orthodox communist should have supported it, the German communist party of that time hated the “social fascists” and their bourgeois parliamentary reformism.
We need a name for these collectives. I know, what about “communes”?
Even better, did you see the episode of South Park where hippies invade and Stan points out that their vision of utopia sounds a lot like the status quo?
Savrola:
Are you saying that it is stupid to defend egalitarianism, or that Wilkinson’s particular defense of it was stupid for its own particular reasons?
February 6, 2010 at 7:49 pm
…. I don’t actually know if an orthodox communist should have supported it, the German communist party of that time hated the “social fascists” and their bourgeois parliamentary reformism.
There were plenty of Communists in the New Deal. See, most famously, Whittaker Chambers’ autobiography, Witness.
The “social fascist” stuff came from Moscow, not the KPD. It was part of the language of the Comintern’s “Third Period”- when the Soviets thought that Communist revolution in the West was imminent. After they realized that Hitler was going nowhere
Moscow gave up the revolutionary fantasies and became advocates of the “Popular Front”.
February 8, 2010 at 10:35 am
I think there was particularly bad blood between the two in Germany because the SPD government had killed a lot of the communist leaders during the post-war revolts.