@BonnieKristian: "Libertarians are not properly part of the GOP coalition"

At The Week: "Libertarians are not properly part of the GOP coalition, if indeed we ever were. There is no libertarianism in the soul of the Trumpian Republican Party, and Republican partisans today are not libertarians. The limited government leg of the stool is broken. If libertarians accede Trump's demand of our permanent loyalty at the polls, the best we can expect is splinters."

I am not a libertarian -- I have too many hopes for what government can do for the people. But I respect a lot of libertarian people and their insights: Bonnie, for one, but also writers (and friends) like Rick Henderson and Steve Greenhut. (Radley Balko is not a friend, but he's another libertarian who was doing the hard work on police militarization long before it was popular.) We don't always agree on stuff (especially when Democrats are running things) but I appreciate their insights that what government can do for the people can also be stuff that government does to the people. They're also better attuned to the law of unintended consequences -- "do something" is not always the right answer when problems arise, though it almost always feels like it is. And beyond that, they aid me in seeing through my own bullshit.

I miss the days of liberaltarian possibility

Anyway, Bonnie's right: The folks in the Trumpist coalition who describe themselves as libertarians either want the big tax cuts that come with Republican governance and maybe don't care about the other stuff (like a willingness to use troops against Americans) that seem to count as unlibertarian. Or they're white folks who subscribe for a "libertarianism for me, but not for thee" approach to, well, everybody else. They see freedom in zero sum terms, and they want theirs.

So no libertarians are not properly part of the GOP coalition. I doubt they're ever properly part of any party coalition, at least not on a long-term basis. At their best, though, they're like prophets -- in society, yet apart from it, crying out warnings of what we're doing to ourselves.

There *is* a violence problem in Portland

I've been thinking about this all day. Apparently 200 marchers descended on the residential tower where Mayor Ted Wheeler lives ... and tried to set a fire on the ground floor. "The 16-story building contains 114 residences. The fire didn’t appear to spread and was quickly extinguished. Police used crowd-control munitions and released smoke into the air as they pushed the crowd west."

It's easy to throw words like "terrorism" around. But.

I keep thinking of people like Timothy McVeigh, who bombed the Murrah federal building in Oklahoma City -- even though there were a number of innocent children there. And the 9/11 highjackers, who killed thousands of innocent Americans in order to accomplish their political task.

Whoever set the fire in Portland was, at the very least, willing to risk the lives of all the residents in that residential tower just to make their ire known. I don't care if that ire was earned or not. What I do know is that what they did was wrong. I think it's fair, even, to call that terrorism. Certainly, we would have if the building had burned. Maybe we'll found out this was an act of right-wing provocateurs -- and I'm willing to correct and clarify if that's the case -- but at this point that's not what it looks like. 

I'm keeping this in perspective: Right-wing violence is the biggest danger we face at the moment. Listen to Elizabeth Neumann, a former DHS official under President Trump:

When Trump finally started using the term "domestic extremism" himself in the summer of 2020, it was in reference to the violence and looting that occurred during the protests across the country against police brutality targeting Black Americans, which the president attributed to "antifa." For Neumann, this was an obvious red herring. She says that the numbers don't bear out the idea that left-wing violence is as much of a problem as right-wing violence, and arrests during the summer's protests demonstrate that.

"If you look at the people that have been arrested for that, by and large, I mean, it's the boogaloo movement or it's an association with QAnon. It's the right side of the spectrum. It is not antifa." She's unequivocal about this: "The threat of domestic terrorism is not from antifa. It is from these right-wing movements."

That's the bigger picture. Two wrongs don't make a right, though. Threatening lives -- especially innocent lives -- is wrong. It's evil.

Foggy morning on the Kansas River

 

I kept expecting to see the Angel of Death emerge from the fog, standing at the prow of a longboat, ready to take me on a journey to Hades. 

Thanks, guys

I knew when I decided to go inactive on my longtime Twitter account and move to cultivating the blog instead, I was going to lose audience and a piece of the conversation. So I'm gratified that in the last day or so, more than 30 of you have decided to follow the Twitter account that is just a feed of this blog. That's roughly 1 percent of the number of followers I have at the old account, but hopefully I'm offering better and slightly more thoughtful content here. At the very least, I think, I am responding to actual stories and not just the headlines -- and I'm less tempted to offer knee-jerk takes when I have to go through the process of creating a blog post. It slows me down a bit. That matters, I think. I hope. 

Anyway, for those of you who have followed me here: Thanks.

The moral burdens of leaving Syria. (And why we should leave anyway.)

 Daniel Larison:

Andrew Bacevich recently commented on our government’s senseless policy in Syria: “So instead of a realistic policy defined by clear national interests, the United States drifts toward a confrontation with Russia in a place that virtually no American believes is worth dying for.” This “drift” is what happens when U.S. foreign policy operates as if on autopilot. Instead of deploying troops somewhere to achieve a specific end to advance an American interest, our policymakers come to see the deployments as ends in themselves. It doesn’t seem to matter whether the deployment serves a clear purpose or whether it is a wise use of resources. It evidently doesn’t matter whether it’s legal. Once the U.S. sends troops somewhere, it usually takes extraordinary effort to extract them later, and that has no effect on subsequent decisions to deploy them in new countries.

Correct. I'd add that deploying to countries like Syria creates a moral element to this flytrap effect: Once our troops are in a country and affecting the political landscape, we become morally responsible both for what happens while we are there -- and what happens as a result of our leaving. I think we should get out of Afghanistan, but I am distressed by what might happen to women in that country as a result. I think the U.S. has no business being in Syria, but it's also true that getting out screws the Kurds over. Those are lives lost and destroyed because we walked away. (I lost a friend, in fact, because I thought it correct to leave Syria -- he felt that doing so was a moral abomination because of the Kurds.)

The answer, as Larison suggests, is not to go to war in countries where American interests aren't all that clear in the first place. And I still think we should get out of Syria and Afghanistan. The advocates of a more humble foreign policy often find themselves having to justify the moral burden of non-interventionism in a way that hawks don't. But drifting toward a confrontation with Russia for no good reason could end up creating a higher moral cost -- in terms of shattered lives -- than leaving. Sometimes, when there are no good answers, the best answer is restraint.

The unnecessary death of Dijon Kizzee

 NYT report on the death of Dijon Kizzee, who was shot to death by sheriff's deputies in LA:

On Monday, Los Angeles County Sheriff’s officials said deputies tried to stop a Black man who was riding a bike in South Los Angeles. They said he was stopped for a code violation related to the bike, but wouldn’t elaborate on what the alleged violation was.

The sheriff's office said Kizzee fled and then "made a motion" toward a dropped gun. I think we've learned by now that such accounts should be viewed as provisional, at best, and possibly false. But even if completely true, I'm trying to imagine a "code violation related to the bike" that was so worth enforcing that this outcome was worth it.

We need laws for good order and civilization. But the libertarian side of me has come to believe that maybe we go overboard -- and that the result, sometimes, is a death sentence for selling loose cigarettes, or having a bike code violation. At the very least, it criminalizes people who are just trying to get through the day. And, disproportionately, those people are Black. I'm not saying anything new, here, I realize, but really: If a bike code violation was the reason Dijon Kizzee is dead, then he should be alive today. 

"Asking people to be hyper-conscious of race is likely to aggravate, not fix, racial injustice."

At Persuasion, Matt Lutz argues that "asking people to be hyper-conscious of race is likely to aggravate, not fix, racial injustice." 

Refusing to ascribe importance to something morally neutral is a virtue. And because colorblindness is a refusal to discriminate against others on the basis of their skin color, it remains the best remedy for old-fashioned racism that we have. 

But: 

The world is a much more peaceful place today than it was as recently as a century ago—largely because of attempts to emphasize our common humanity. If we focus on what unites us, our altruistic instincts take over and we become kinder and more trusting towards each other.

But our tendency to favor the ingroup can never be completely eradicated.

Perhaps the answer, then, isn't to embrace some unachievable notion of colorblindness, but A) to refuse to discriminate against others on the basis of their skin color, B) recognize that many people are discriminated against on the basis of their skin color, then C) act accordingly. Recognizing that people are and have been discriminated against and that this fundamentally transforms their relationship to ingroups and outgroups and groups of all sorts doesn't have to be "hyper-conscious." It just has to be conscious.