John Holbo

… so here’s something, part 2 of my ongoing boxing series, apparently.

Other fun stuff. While I await my copy of Kim Deitch’s new book, The Search for Smilin’ Ed [amazon], his dad’s first animated film was re-discovered a couple months ago: “Howdy Doody and His Magic Hat”.

And a good story to go with:

The catch to this opportunity was that all of us bright young hotshot UPA stars absolutely hated the Howdy Doody show, and felt that the puppet itself was gross—a ten on a kitsch scale of one to ten. We determined to “improve” the Howdy Doody character to the level of our hallowed UPA design standard. After all, we were already the toast of New York animation, raking in the prizes and publicity. We simply couldn’t lower ourselves to something so crude, even if the client was paying us to do just that. So we just blithely went ahead with transforming Howdy Doody in our own image.

Unfortunately, this God-like endeavor went down in flames. Kagran paid for the film, but “Buffalo Bob” Smith, Howdy Doody’s Daddy, hated what we had wrought, and ordered the negative destroyed. Our little pride and joy experiment was never shown publicly, and was never properly listed on the International Motion Picture Database. In plain language, it simply did not exist.

So far as I’m concerned, that’s the heart of liberalism: you take some red-blooded red state icon like Howdy Doody and you succumb to the unbearable temptation to ‘make it more like Europe’ – all ‘modern’, New York stiff and flat. And you emphasize that – hey, it’s just a hat. (Thus does the liberal strike at the heart of American exceptionalism.)

At any rate, I’d rather look at Howdy Doody (even without ears) than Glenn Reynolds.

Rick Perlstein showed up in comments to my “Liberals In the Mist” thread – after I sort of roped him into it all – providing thoughts on his anthropological interest in conservatism and a confession of longstanding interest in primatology.

And over at the Corner K-Lo links to an interview with Andrew McCarthy on the Bill Bennett show, about McCarthy’s new book – Grand Jihad: How Islam and the Left Sabotage America. Round about minute 10 Bennett asks a ‘quick question’: “Does Barack Obama want the imposition of Sharia Law?” (Tough, but fair.) [click to continue…]

Jonah Goldberg makes an interesting point, but I’m not sure it was quite supposed to come out the way it did. Namely, there is a recognizable sub-genre of liberal-progressive journo-punditry that might be termed ‘conservatives in the mist’. [click to continue…]

Conor Friedersdorf showed up promptly in comments to my last post, which was a response to his post, which was welcome. Dialogue! Unfortunately, we weren’t prompt in welcoming him. I think he got stuck in the queue for the longest time. Either that or I just missed him sitting up there at the top. Anyway, his response deserved something better than a 100-comments-late comment afterthought from me, when at last it came to my attention. So here goes. [click to continue…]

This post is theme-and-variations on my previous one. The issue: Barry Goldwater is lionized as an icon of conservative high principle and true philosophy. But his signature domestic issue was opposition to integration and civil rights legislation. If – like Rand Paul a week ago – you think his opposition was philosophically and Constitutionally correct and admirable, then bully for you. But if – like Rand Paul today, like most conservatives – you think Goldwater was wrong to oppose integration and civil rights legislation, then you need to explain how Goldwater’s conservative conscience failed him so utterly and comprehensively. One possibility: he was personally just a racist or opportunist, and that overrode his principles. But no, this answer is not accepted (by conservatives). Well then: either 1) he espoused wrong principles, or 2) he mis/over-applied them in some way. [click to continue…]

The Rand Paul vs. Civil Rights Act business has been fascinating.

I have particularly enjoyed attempts by Paul defenders to brush off the significance of his initial comments as ‘merely philosophical’ – as college bull-session irrelevancy, for which he is being unfairly held accountable. When, of course, the whole Tea Party point of Rand Paul’s candidacy is his libertarian-conservative philosophy, and his promise to stay true to the implications of it, as a legislator. (So the whole thing has been like this American Elf strip, but substitute ‘philosophy’ for ‘costume’.)

In walking this stuff back – in saying he would have voted for the Civil Rights Act, after all – Paul is walking back his longstanding, core philosophical commitments. So now we know: he is willing to vote for things things that, by his own lights, go against the Constitution and reduce individual liberty, in the most essential sense (freedom = unencumbered enjoyment of private property rights). This retreat really ought to be worse than out-and-out liberalism, again by Paul’s own lights, because liberals at least have the decency to be confused about what the Constitution says, having hallucinated commerce clause penumbrae that make it all ok. And liberals don’t value freedom all that highly, supposedly, so it’s not surprising that they are perfectly willing to chuck liberty into the fiery maw of the Moloch of ‘social justice’. At least there’s a failed god of socialism that they are doing it for. What’s Paul’s philosophical excuse? Why aren’t conservative-libertarians up in arms, complaining about this cowardly betrayal of Paul’s whole philosophy, after he got the nomination on the strength of his philosophy? Is no one willing to shout from the rooftops that Jim Crow – privately and informally enforced! – is the price we should be willing to pay for freedom? What’s the point of equating liberty with private property rights if you aren’t going to equate liberty with private property rights? Why are Paul’s defenders scrambling to make out how, plausibly, libertarianism should eliminate informal/social Jim Crow, once you clear away all legal, institutional, governmental forms of it? The essential point should be: even if it doesn’t, that’s not so important, because it’s not unjust. (Why would you be a propertarian sort of libertarian if you didn’t think so?)

Indeed, isn’t all this what Jonah Goldberg derides as ‘sherpa conservatism‘ – that is, the canard that conservatism is only acceptable as a more sure-footed means to liberal ends? So libertarian-conservatism is only acceptable if it conduces to a ‘nice’, racially-harmonious, integrated, multi-culti, ‘socially just’ society? When will libertarian-conservatives finally be willing to stand up for what their principles imply? Healthy civil society is based on bedrock respect for individual property rights. Period. [UPDATE: And formally equal political rights, true. But that doesn’t really change the equation.] It’s invidious to insinuate that a ‘nice’, integrated, racially harmonious, multi-culti, ‘socially just’ society must be our sole model of healthy civil society. (Yes, all that’s fine. But it’s not required, in principle, so you shouldn’t sacrifice principle for the sake of it. Sheesh. Barry Goldwater is spinning in his grave.)

Let’s consider David Bernstein’s latest post. [click to continue…]

I just found this one on Flickr. It’s pretty great.

Via Yglesias, Dave Weigel takes a look at the new Maine GOP platform, which ain’t exactly Olympia Snowe all over. But neither of them mentions how the authors of this document take the text of the Preamble to the Constitution and wrench it around in ways contrary to an originalist reading of the text. Example: in order “to insure Domestic tranquility”, the Maine GOP prescribes “a. Promote family values. i. marriage is an institution between a man and a woman. ii. Parents, not government, are responsible for making decisions in the best interest of their children, whether disciplinary, educational, or medical. iii. We recognize the sanctity of life, which includes the unborn.”

Here I was, thinking the Framers were worried about Shays’ Rebellion-type stuff.

Igor Volsky rounded up some conservative muttering. This bit seems to me a bit off, however:

But the GOP can’t ask Kagan to be both a constitutional originalist and an opponent of the new health care law. In fact, given the long-standing Supreme Court precedent surrounding the federal government’s ability to regulate interstate commerce, should Kagan agree with Republicans’ claims that the lawsuits violate the 10th amendment, she would be seen as a judicial activist.

The point, rather, should be that conservatives can’t ask Kagan to be a constitutional originalist – and decide the health care case in the negative on that basis – without highlighting the fact that originalism gives no weight to precedent and is not an attitude of deference to the legislative branch. There’s no guarantee the original meaning was what precedent has long said it is. It would not exactly be a surprise if legislators today are doing things the framers didn’t have in mind.

‘Let justice be done, though the heavens fall’ is supposed to be the motto of the judicial activist advocate of a ‘living constitution’; but the more usual sort of ‘living constitution’ attitude is slightly backwards-looking Burkeanism: respect precedent. Rule out the former, you rule out the latter. ‘Let a 200-year old conception of justice be done, though the heavens fall’ is not a better way to keep the heavens from falling and is, in fact, plausibly more likely to let them fall. (It isn’t all that preposterous that strict originalism would rule out paper money, after all. There are a lot of words you might use to describe the court unilaterally ruling that all US dollars are not legal tender, but ‘restrained’ is not high on that list.) If what you want most is judicial restraint, and no activist judges, originalism is near to the worst of all possible judicial philosophies.

This is not to say that originalists can’t find ingenious ways to square the circle, making space for precedent by adding sophisticated additional premises and superfine epicycles to their philosophies. Scalia has done so: “I’m a conservative, I’m a textualist, I’m an originalist, but I’m not a nut.”

Originalism is a philosophy of fiery revolution, wrapped in a rhetorical shell of keeping everything the same. (That’s what American conservatism is, too, in a nutshell. That’s why Americans are philosophical conservatives but operational liberals, come to think of it. But maybe that’s too much for one post.)

I don’t want to take this Mario Kart socialism complaint too seriously, but it does seem worth mentioning that the feature of the kart peloton the author objects to as socialistic is also a feature of any peleton in the actually existing physical universe: namely, it can be smart to let some other sucker take the lead.

But it is gross injustice for the universe to burden natural leaders with higher rates of physical taxation, as it were. Abolish the draft! (No wonder the damn Europeans love cycling so much.)

Every six months or so I pose an amateur copyright puzzle, so here goes. Is there settled law, or substantial precedent, for dealing with the fact that copyright terms differ in different jurisdictions, as a result of which many works are in copyright in the US but public domain elsewhere, and vice versa? Project Gutenberg, for example, passes the legal burden onto its users. Many of its offerings bear notices to the effect: “Not copyrighted in the United States. If you live elsewhere check the laws of your country before downloading this ebook.” I take it this works, otherwise they would have been sued into the ground. But what if you want to publish a new paper edition of – oh, say, Russell’s The Problems of Philosophy. It’s in the public domain in the US, so if you are a US publisher, go to. But Russell was a tough old bird and only passed on in 1970, so it will be decades before it’s in the clear in the UK – or Singapore (which has UK-style copyright). But if you sell your book on Amazon, someone might order it from the UK, or Singapore. And even if you only sell your book in the US – hell, it might be printed in Singapore. What about selling ebooks, as opposed to giving them away, Gutenberg-style? Is there any case of a non-US rights holder bringing successful suit against a US publisher for overstepping the geographical bounds of the US public domain (or, vice versa, for a US rights holder)? It seems as though, in this webbed-together world, there would have to be a settled way of dealing with such cases. But maybe there isn’t.

[UPDATE: One of the CAP authors, John Halpin, showed up in comments to complain – very reasonably – that I linked to the wrong part of their three part series, and failed to make clear it was part of a series. (I copied it from Goldberg, in composing the post! Why would I assume that anything he does is right?) Anyway, here is Halprin’s response to my post, with links. Halprin also argues that he and his co-author handled some of the stuff I wanted included in part 3. I admit that I had only read parts 1 & 2 before writing the post – I though part 3 was still forthcoming – but it doesn’t seem to me that the material from part 3 he quotes is quite forceful or extensive enough to do the job, even given that it must be done briefly.]

Jonah Goldberg links, approvingly, to a Damon Root post at Reason, complaining about a new Center For American Progress paper entitled “The Progressive Intellectual Tradition In America” (PDF). Root’s complaint is fair, but only up to a point. Here’s the fair bit: the CAP paper is a feel-good affair. Nothing about uglier aspects or excesses of American Progressivism: specifically, racism and sexism, hence eugenics. (And imperialism, but let’s just stick with eugenics for this post.) Of course the obvious objection to that is that there was nothing distinctively Progressive about racism and sexism. It’s just that we are talking about the late 19th/early 20th Centuries here. Still, if you combine eugenics – even if it’s only average for the era – with political philosophy and policy you sure can get bad results. There’s no reason whatsoever to paste this ugly history on every single contemporary formulation of progressive political philosophy. If Barack Obama is giving a stump speech, and he delivers some applause line about progressive ideals, there is no reason for him to pause and add a pedantic footnote about eugenics and how some Progressives, and some people some Progressives admired as scientific authorities, believed ugly stuff a hundred years ago. But if you are writing a history, the presumption is that you want people to learn from history, and some of the major lessons of the Progressive Era are cautionary ones, philosophically and in terms of policy. I doubt the authors of these papers would deny this, so including a ‘cautionary lessons’ subsection would have been a better scheme. (If I had to guess, they’re thinking tactically. ‘If we mention this stuff, being careful to get all the necessary nuance in, someone like Jonah Goldberg will find it and quote it, carving out the nuance, and it will sound like even CAP admits that Progressivism = Eugenics.’ Still, if you are damned if you do, damned if you don’t, you should do the right thing and be damned.)

Now we get to the unfair bit. Root and Goldberg seem to think that if you are advocating progressivism today – rather than writing history – there is some vital need to self-lacerate, early and often, over the whole eugenics-a-hundred-years-ago business. The Goldberg rule seems to be this: if some Progressive believed in eugenics – or if some really major, central figure of the Progressive movement admired someone who was a major proponent of eugenics – then Progressives have to “own up” to this. Goldberg (from the post linked above): [click to continue…]

OK, I’m going to try to raise the philosophical tone of this whole libertarian thing. It’s the least I can do. Snarking is a base motive, after all.

Jacob Levy has earnestly maintained in comments that it is unfair to judge libertarianism by the standard of Bryan Caplan‘s attempts to turn the Gilded Age into a Golden Age of ladyfreedom, and I would just like to say that, in a sense, Jacob is perfectly correct. Let me make this first point briefly (because lord knows this post is going to be long enough). Sometimes people distinguish ‘thin’ and ‘thick’. ‘Thin’ is the kind of ‘propertarian’ libertarian that Caplan can’t be because the whole inability to make contracts/own your own property thing is a straight-up deal-breaker. ‘Thick’ is the kind of libertarian Caplan can’t be because of all the Mill stuff in my previous post: can’t let society play the tyrant. It’s perfectly reasonable for Jacob to maintain that if you are going to pillory libertarianism, in a theoretical sense, you should pick one or the other of these two sorts – or both. But Caplan is neither, in his arguments about women’s freedom under coverture. What is Caplan really? I dunno. I suppose he’s a momentarily strayed ‘propertarian’, although I’m happy for him to speak for himself on this point.

But Brad DeLong and others fire back that it’s reasonable to hold libertarianism to account for the bad company that keeps it. Well, I dunno. I agree that it calls for diagnosis, but you still want to keep the theoretical point separate. Maybe that will even help with the diagnosis. [click to continue…]

Having made one non-libertarian-related post, I can now say, with a good conscience, that Bryan Caplan has responded to his critics. It is a wonder to behold.

I will make two notes. (No doubt you yourself will come to have your own favorite moments.) First, a lot of the trouble here obviously rotates around the issue of systematic social oppression. Caplan barrels straight through like so: “there’s a fundamental human right to non-violently pressure and refuse to associate with others.” That hardly speaks to real concerns about violence. But beyond that Caplan doesn’t notice that, even if he’s right about this fundamental human right, he’s no longer even defending the proposition that women were more free in the 1880’s, never mind successfully defending it. He’s defending the proposition that there is a fundamental right, which can be exercised, systematically, to make women much less free, that was better protected in the 1880’s. So if women value this libertarian right more than freedom, they might rationally prefer that sort of society. But even so, they should hardly regard themselves as more free, for enjoying this right. Rather, they should regard themselves as (rationally) sacrificing liberty, a lesser value, for love of libertarianism, a higher value and separate jar of pickles altogether

J.S. Mill had some things to say on the subject. From On Liberty:

Like other tyrannies, the tyranny of the majority was at first, and is still vulgarly, held in dread, chiefly as operating through the acts of the public authorities. But reflecting persons perceived that when society is itself the tyrant – society collectively, over the separate individuals who compose it – its means of tyrannizing are not restricted to the acts which it may do by the hands of its political functionaries. Society can and does execute its own mandates: and if it issues wrong mandates instead of right, or any mandates at all in things with which it ought not to meddle, it practises a social tyranny more formidable than many kinds of political oppression, since, though not usually upheld by such extreme penalties, it leaves fewer means of escape, penetrating much more deeply into the details of life, and enslaving the soul itself. Protection, therefore, against the tyranny of the magistrate is not enough; there needs protection also against the tyranny of the prevailing opinion and feeling; against the tendency of society to impose, by other means than civil penalties, its own ideas and practices as rules of conduct on those who dissent from them; to fetter the development, and, if possible, prevent the formation, of any individuality not in harmony with its ways, and compel all characters to fashion themselves upon the model of its own. There is a limit to the legitimate interference of collective opinion with individual independence; and to find that limit, and maintain it against encroachment, is as indispensable to a good condition of human affairs, as protection against political despotism.

It is possible to object – I take it Caplan would – that limiting people’s rights to ‘act the tyrant’ in a collective, social sense, is illegitimate. But that is not to say that Mill is wrong about the ‘fewer means of escape, penetrating much more deeply’ bits. He obviously isn’t.

Now of course Caplan does dispute the ‘fewer means of escape’ bit, and in the most delightful way. “Market forces have a strong tendency to weed out discrimination.” It’s like the old cartoon with the two economists. “Hey look, $20.” “If that were really there, someone would have found it by now.” In this case: “Hey look, oppressed women in 1880.” Post title writes itself. As a method of doing empirical history, this leaves a lot to be desired, I should think.