Libertarians are Complicated Y'all

When I was 26 I was told (accurately) that I would eventually get over my "libertarian phase". I think it took longer than people expected and I took a different exit than most of my friends and family thought I would back in 2008 but they weren't wrong in assuming that my Libertarianism (yes I was a registered member of the Libertarian Party USA) wouldn't last. It is fairly rare for people to stay Libertarian, and I would argue that that is because American style Libertarianism is a a fundamentally contradictory political movement. 

But I want to talk about the Libertarians sociologically before I discuss the contradiction at the heart of their political philosophy.

The fact of the matter is that Libertarianism—both as a party and as a political philosophy—offers more individual liberty than either the GOP or the Democrats. The big caveat to this is that they are also sold out almost entirely to the idea that, in a perfectly free market—which they maintain has not yet really existed in the modern world—corporations and wealth would be entirely unable to impose any limits on individual liberty. Thus, on an economic level, Libertarians tend to be more radical than most Republicans, while on the level of social freedoms, libertarians are—on average—more radical than the majority of Democrats. It is worth noting that the Libertarian party supported same sex marriage and drug legalization long before the Democratic party did.  This is important because that radical nature of the Libertarian party plays a significant role in the operation of the LP as a transition ground. 

The long and short of this is that the Libertarian Party in the United States is probably best understood as a transitional structure. Said another way, to be a Libertarian in the US is usually to be on your way to something else, it is the rare libertarian who will end up as a lifelong registered member of the Libertarian Party. 

This is, I want to argue, an important way to think about libertarians—not only because it is the most accurate way to think about them—because pragmatically structuring libertarianism as a transitional political identity allows us to make sense of some of the contradictions within the party itself and also to interact with libertarians in a way which will allow for the greatest chances for conversion to healthier, more informed political positions. For the purpose of clarity lets therefore distinguish between Transitional Libertarians (TL)—those libertarians who will eventually transition to some other political affiliation—and Lifetime Libertarians (LL)—those libertarians whose Libertarian affiliation will last their lives—while acknowledging that in the present every Libertarian has to be granted the respect we would want if we were in that position. Nobody likes to be told that their political identity is "just a phase" and we will do no good by insisting on the point viz. any individual libertarian. My recommendation is therefore to add a third category, let's call them Schrodinger's Libertarians (SL)—people who identify as libertarian or libertarian-ish and but who will eventually resolve into either Transitional or Lifetime Libertarians. This category should allow us to maintain the realist awareness that many libertarians will ultimately transition to something else without requiring us to insult individuals who have chosen their politics in good faith and not intend to ever transition to some other politics.

With all of that structure in place, I want to look at the common doors out of Libertarian affiliation and make a few observations about the forces which seem most at play in determining which door will be chosen by any given SL.

The Democrat Door

I suspect that it is actually fairly uncommon for libertarians to transition directly into mainstream Democrats even when their views have shifted towards the left economically mostly because—and this is going to be a recurring theme—political edginess is a significant draw factor towards becoming a libertarian in the first place. Keep in mind that there are very few libertarian households in the country and so the number of children who are raised in libertarian families and unreflectively register as libertarians because "that's what my parents believe and its what I was raised with" is vanishingly small. My experience has been that most of the SL's who transition to mainline or progressive Democrats are Christians (often but not always of the ex-evangelical or ex-fundamentalist variety) for whom libertarianism ends up serving as an acceptable way out of being a Republican. In the Evangelical world, to announce that you are a Democrat is to invite significant social stigma if not outright religious hostility, whereas to announce that you are a Libertarian usually results in little more that being treated as a little eccentric. Certainly, this was my experience. While I did not end up taking the Democrat door out of libertarianism, I did come in through the Republican door and even in the Bible Belt I found that proclaiming my libertarian-ness did not meet with significant resistance. 

Now the some of reasons that libertarianism is acceptable in the southern Bible Belt are more than a little troubling including a history of Libertarian-Christian Nationalist alliances, and the opportunity to present an inclusive face to the world while working towards a state-run oppression (see the alt-right door below) as well as an application of the separation of church and state which is frankly more consistent than what is offered by the GOP. A good many of the Christians—and I again include myself here—who are now on the side of marriage equality took a first step in that direction based on the libertarian understanding that the a person's right to civil marriage should not be denied by the state. Christian Libertarians making that case in 2011 were often given a far more gracious hearing than Christian Democrats. 

When these folks leave libertarianism through the Democrat door—progressive or moderate—the shift is often contemporaneous with a "official" move out of White American Evangelicalism or Fundamentalism. 

The Alt-Right Door

I want to spend a little extra time on this door because I think it can be one of the hardest to understand, but is also one of the most important and influential insofar as this path through libertarianism is one which I take to be one of the broadest paths into American style fascism, particularly for Christians in the United States. It is, of course, rather ironic that libertarianism—a political ideology which prides itself on being a maximalist defender of individual rights over and against government—has turned out to be one of the best, most effective tools for American fascist recruitment over the last thirty to fifty years, but it makes sense once we understand the history of certain movements; the explanation is not so much logical as historical.

The Libertarian party was founded in 1971 as a party representing radically free market economics and as well as individual liberties. Essentially, at a time when Barry Goldwater and his new Republican Party were using the language and thinking of limited Austrian economics, the Libertarians went in for a double helping of what was, for the Republican party of the 70's, a political/economic seasoning. The big innovation of the Libertarian party was the addition of maximal individual liberty and anti-interventionism (views which put them at odds back then with the Goldwater/Nixon Republican ideology). While they don't love to be reminded of this, official Libertarian ideology exists as a mid-point between Goldwater republicanism and Anarchocapitalism.  What is important for our purposes is that Libertarians are, from a particular point of view, radicals who are really committed to the politics which Republicans mostly only pay lip service to. It is incorrect to think of them as extremist Republicans but, because so many actual Republicans think of them that way, it is also important to understand that Republicans who are looking to be more hard-core in their politics are likely to be drawn to Libertarianism specifically because it is less compromising on ideals which, for the GOP are usually pretexts for critique of Democrats rather than real values.

Then came the Christian Nationalists. The intellectual origins of the contemporary Christian Nationalist movement in this country largely go back to Paul Weyrich and R.J. Rushdoony. Of the two, Weyrich was the politician and Rushdoony was the academic. Both were evil, Machiavellian men and both were fond of libertarianism. Economically the hard-core free market views of the libertarians seems to have appealed to both Weyrich and Rushdoony, but Rushdoony also seems to have valued libertarianism because of it's hard core commitment to federalism and individual rights. 

It is a matter of his record from his own published books that Rushdoony was a huge booster of "lost cause" history, admired the mythos of the "genteel" confederacy and even believed that race-based slavery was a justified and Christian practice. He was also aware of the fact that these were views with little to no mainstream acceptance in the 70's and 80's. And here comes the key to understanding the appeal of libertarianism to American Fascists. In the context of a country which treats blatantly racist and fascist views as anathema and taboo, the ideology which will offer the most functional support for someone who holds those views is the party which, honestly, intellectually, and consistently, stands against federal authority, and against the suppression of views which even they find most abhorrent. Any Libertarian will be against federal guidelines around what should appear in history textbooks even if that means that history textbooks in southern states contain blatant falsehoods and misleading omissions on the subjects of slavery, the civil war, jim crow, and the civil rights movement. Any Libertarian will be against federal overreach including hate crimes law Any libertarian will be against restrictions on free speech, even restrictions on the public expression of racist, homophobic, sexist or transphobic incitement. Of course the flip side of this among Lifetime (genuine) Libertarians, is consistent support of Libertarians for very good causes (see the beginning of this post), but among Christian Nationalists and other fascist-leaning or full-fascist groups, Libertarianism provides a socially acceptable platform for opposing anti-fascist measures. Rushdoony recognized this and, knit his racist, Christo-fascist following (you will most often see them referred to as dominionists or theonomists these days) into Weyrich's moral majority as an anchor to the "libertarian-ish" wing of the Republican Party, with significant periodic spillover into the Libertarian party of the USA.

The upshot of all of this is that there are a significant number of Christo-fascists and other alt-right ghouls hanging around Libertarian spaces both using Libertarianism as a stalking horse for their authoritarian goals, or working to recruit folks who are radicals by temperament and who are inclined to feel that mainstream America is both too tepid and paradoxically too hostile towards their concerns. 

The Republican Door

This door is, I think, the most boring—though not the least used—primarily because it fits a common trope  in American political culture. The Republican door is the one that TL's mostly age out through. The standard American trope is that we mellow and grow more conservative as we age. While Millenials and, to some extent Gen-X—they got wierd—seem to be resisting this trend, the trope itself remains as a bit of conventional wisdom. and the fact remains that it is not that hard to find Republicans who will talk about having been libertarians when they were younger but who "realized it just wasn't that realistic" as they aged and moderated themselves into the Republican party. I know of a very few Democrats with this story but my time as a registered Libertarian introduced me to quite a few Republicans in this category. My own impression (and this is now entirely anecdotal) is that ex-libertarian Republicans who aged out the Republican door are likely to be more reasonable on social issues in general and tend to get uncomfortable around the alt-right crowd. Some have become #neverTrump Republicans but they are more likely to have stopped paying all that much attention to politics and "the culture war" leave their bank accounts alone and they aren't likely to interfere with the youth or the left so long as it doesn't interfere with their lives too much. 

The Weird Door

I am using this as a catch-all for the other politics people end up with as they transition out of Libertarianism. It includes a wide variety of Anarchists and communists, as well as a few Greens, and some religious non-particpants. In my own case, I left Libertarianism in a vaguely leftward direction and after a few years trying to figure things out, ended up a weird sort of overly political anarcho-pacifist. Obviously, there will be a lot of variety among these folks but I suspect that we have a few strong commonalities. I suspect that a lot of us who leave Libertarianism by this door entered through the GOP—which is by far the largest door into the Libertarian Party. In this we share a commonality with the Democrat door people insofar as libertarianism offers a socially acceptable alternative to a Republicanism which no longer fit. At the same time, like the fascists, we are drawn to libertarianism for its radicalism and its refusal to compromise in the face of GOP ideological torpidity. This is why those on the left who reach out and dialogue with SLs in good faith are doing good work insofar as they are interacting with someone who is already likely to be radicalized in some direction and who—if approached honestly and with robust and rigorous political and ethical debate—may well choose to focus that passion and energy on behalf of justice and the marginalized, but who is also supremely vulnerable to alt-right propaganda.

Conclusion

I am sure there are other doors (at a minimum, there are a percentage of SLs who turn out to be Lifetime Libertarians, but that gets beyond the scope of this post) which could be imagined and other taxonomies which might turn out to be more accurate and more helpful. The great strength of this analysis is, I hope, its capacity to help us relate to libertarians in a more helpful way. There is, on the left especially, a bit of a tendency to be dismissive of libertarians on the understandable but ultimately unjustified grounds that they are nearly all crypto-fascists. That is, the Left had a tendency to treat all libertarians as transitional libertarians who are inevitably going to choose the alt-right door. This belief can be self-fulfilling since a Schrodinger's Libertarian who is dismissed by the left and whose honest questions are—again understandably given the well established tactics of the alt-right—treated as bad faith trolling techniques, but who is treated with sympathy by the alt-right, is far more likely to ultimately leave through the alt-right door.  

My recommendation is that Libertarians ought be be granted a greater degree of the benefit of the doubt. I want to urge all non-libertarians to really consider adopting the Shrodinger's Libertarians category and beginning from that stance when interacting with people who claim a libertarian political identity. My only further caveat is that it is vitally important—for reasons of common decency as well as effective persuasion—to treat libertarians as serious political thinkers who are operating in good faith just as long as it is reasonable to do so. 

In the next installment in this series I hope to take a close look at what Libertarians actually believe and why I have concluded that there is a contradiction at the heart of libertarianism.

Post Script

If you haven't already done so, please watch the Innuendo Studios video How to Radicalize a Normie as it is one of the more important pieces of anti-fascist work I have encountered recently and has a significant impact on this topic.

On Becoming the Monster

Nietzsche is watching

I believe that Donald Trump's politics are best described as American fascism. Also—because apparently this has to be said these days—it is very bad thing to be a fascist because fascism is a very bad thing, has been a very bad thing for as long as it has been a thing, and will always be a very bad thing. For that reason it has been encouraging to watch the Democrats oppose Trump on grounds which are often (not always) both strong* and moral**.

That is not to say that the Democrats are, as a whole or as individuals, especially wonderful or especially moral. What it does say is that the President's behavior and speech has been so bad that his political opponents, opportunistic or ideologically pure, have been able to assume the moral and logical high ground for quite some time; with the concomitant result that they have enjoyed the alliance of moral and reasonable people from outside their own political party. They have, of course, also enjoyed the alliance of political opportunists from outside their own party, but that would have happened no matter who the president was.

As a result of all this, we find ourselves in a position where we don't really know the degree to which Democrats as a whole, and individually, really are proponents of reason and morality (and I want to state for the record that both of these categories can operate independently of a person's general politics). They may all be shining beacons of integrity an reason, or they may all be crummy opportunists who are only too eager to exploit the country. In all likelihood of course, the truth lies somewhere between those poles. Hypocrisy is, after all, the tax that vice pays to virtue which is why virtue often characterizes the preferred rhetoric and methodology of those politicians to whom it is available as a sufficiently powerful attack on their opponents.

All of this is well and good and is something I have kept in mind over the course of the Trump presidency. Recently, however, I have started to notice a few Democratic and anti-Trump figures arguing that "winning" in 2020 is going to require Democrats to "play dirty". I want to highlight that sentiment and place a giant warning circle around it. 

Ezra Klein over at Vox wrote what I think is the most insightful and accurate account of the Trumpification of white American Evangelicalsim and it is all about power. In the second paragraph of the piece (the entirety of which is well worth reading) Klein lays out the thesis:

Enter Donald Trump. Whatever Trump’s moral failings, he’s a street fighter suited for an era of political combat. Christian conservatives believe — rightly or wrongly — that they’ve been held back by their sense of righteousness, grace, and gentility, with disastrous results. Trump operates without restraint. He is the enemy they believe the secular deserve, and perhaps unfortunately, the champion they need. Understanding this dynamic is crucial to understanding the psychology that attracts establishment Republicans to Trump, and convinces them that his offense is their best defense.

This... happened

The choice which white Evangelicalism made in 2016, which has scandalized so many other US Christians and has played a significant role in alienating a portion of Gen X and Millennial Americans who grew up within US Evangelicalism is the choice to abandon "their sense of righteousness, grace, gentility"—in other words, to abandon strong moral arguments—in favor of what they euphemistically call "street fighter" tactics. There is a whole lot that could be said about this and Klein has already said much of it, but I want to focus here on the warning that this needs to be for those of us who are committed to actually working to build a better world, to standing against injustice, to being on the side of the oppressed and the marginalized. The great temptation is to descend.

It is vital that we not forget, that we not fail to notice, that white American Evangelicals have justified their embrace of a philandering, racist, misogynist, dirtbag by first concluding that evil (here I am referring specifically to the many actions and words of Trump which cause white American Evangelicals to squirm and say things like "we didn't elect a Sunday School teacher") is finally more powerful than good. Machiavelli's view that "the ends justify the means"—while a very great evil—remains relatively harmless against those who believe that good is more powerful than evil. It is only once we begin to believe that lies are more powerful than the truth, that subterfuge and misrepresentation is more powerful than integrity that Machiavelli's poison can begin to really infect our thinking.

I do not have a whole lot of use for Nietzsche but he was 100% on the ball when he warned "Beware that, when fighting monsters, you do not yourself become a monster." If we become that which we seek to defeat, only with a different hue, then in that same moment we have already lost the capacity to win. I am afraid that there is no help for it. Evil cannot be resisted on its own grounds of lies, deceit, bullying, and violence, evil gives way only to good and good will not prevail without faith. It is in the nature of good that it nearly always appears the weaker power at first. Good will prevail—it must prevail—but in the short term the Truth, Integrity, Nuance, Complexity, and Honesty, will always seem weaker and more fragile than the smarmy and swaggering oversimplified and obfuscating lies of evil.

Good ends will never be achieved through evil means, or put more directly, evil means will never succeed in achieving good ends—the means always entail then ends—and if we forget that, we are doomed to create our own Trump.

Footnotes:

*Strong grounds would be grounds which are, and should be, convincing to a rational, reasonable person.

**Moral grounds would be grounds which do, and should, carry moral weight and do not involve advocating immoral motives or actions.

How I Analyze Political Candidates

In the wake of 2016 and with the presidential campaigns for 2020 already ramping up, I want to spend some time proposing a model for analyzing political candidates. One big reflection I had on the sort of discourse and debate I found myself engaged in in 2015 and 2016 is that it suffered from a lack of clarity around concepts of integrity, ideological purity, and pragmatism. I suspect that you have encountered plenty of this sort of frustrating ambiguity and that it gave rise to quite a few frustrating discussions in your own experience as well. Now I am, admittedly, a big believer in clarifying terms, premises, and assumptions in almost any discussion—I labor under the belief that most arguments would be far simpler and less vitriolic if people were clearer about what precisely they mean and what premises they are working from—but I hope that you will either find this compelling or will do me the very great favor of showing me (in comments) where you think it fails.

The Defacto Model

I propose that this is the model people use when we do not want to reflect or engage much with the election process. Campaigning and debates sort of happen around us for a while and then, on voting day, we vote for the candidate we happen like most. In this model there isn't a lot of conversation to be had because like is pretty subjective, and because we tend to feel attacked when someone criticizes what we like. People who use this model could hardly be described as critical voters; they might or might not be informed but they are not really engaged in critical and careful decision making in a meaningful way. Ultimately, propaganda and in-group identification will probably have the greatest impact on how they vote.

The Nuanced Defacto Model

This represents something of an improvement and sometimes an increased degree of cynicism over the defacto model. Voters who use this model are able to recognize that no candidate is perfect (a claim you will likely hear them make incessantly) and are often willing to vote for candidates in the "meh" range so long as that candidate's opponent is in their "no" range. These voters vote against a candidate at least as often as they vote for one. When they vote they often do so out of a sense of civic duty or out of group identification (the candidate may be "meh" but either they support the party or all of their friends vote) but they can occasionally become energized voters when the encounter a candidate in their "yes" range.

The Moral Integrity Model

This step brings us closer the model which I am proposing (though I still want to add some more complexity). Here the question you would ask about a candidate is not "do I like them" but "am I morally comfortable with this candidate?" In this model a person's response to that question can range from "no" through "I can vote for the candidate but I  have reservations about them" up through an enthusiastic "yes". I have built a range into each of these three categories to allow for the uniqueness of persons. I can heartily affirm two different candidates and still find one to be better than the other.

The really important addition to this model is what I have labeled the line of integrity which divides the reservations range from the no range. That line is critical to the way I think about candidates and its placement is always at the top of the no range. In this model, to ask someone to vote for a candidate who exists below the line of integrity is to ask that person to violate their actual conscience (note that a person's actual conscience may be different from their stated or public conscience and that sometimes they might not be aware of the difference). A lot of the cross-talk argument in the center and on the left had to do with misunderstanding the line of integrity and/or misdiagnosing its location. For now I will restrict myself to saying that everyone who is not a psychopath or sociopath has a line of integrity somewhere insofar as they would not vote for a candidate who advocates unabashed genocide no matter how much they agree with that candidate on other dimensions or how much they dislike with the candidate's major opponent. 

Voters who use some version of this model are more likely to develop some degree of resistance to the most common form of propaganda and will sometimes break from their peer-groups when voting. Because there are candidates whom these voters consciously cannot support, they are somewhat more likely to have voted for 3rd party candidates, or to have been conscientious non-voters in some elections (it will depend on who is on the ballot). Most notably these are the voters who are most likely to vote against their typical party or ideological affiliations in situations where a candidate is the subject of scandal just because scandals are the sort of thing that can plunge a candidate below the voter's line of integrity. Of course that line will be in different places for different people; its placement is subjective to each individual voter since individual voters will have differing levels of tolerance for (for instance) graft, bribery, theft, or sex scandals. A politician who has cheated on their spouse will likely thereby fall below some voters' line of line of integrity but certainly not all. Further an individual voter's line of integrity will vary both in terms of sensitivity, but also by the dimension involved—remember that we are not talking about the candidate's morality, we are talking about the moral comfort of the voter with the various aspects or dimensions of a given candidate.

With this model we can identify the snarls which lead to some tangled political arguments. If a candidate falls just below Wanda's line of integrity but just above Bob's line, then Wanda and Bob will agree that the candidate is "problematic" and will likely agree about the candidates failings but if they do not recognize the existence and roll of the line (or the fact that they have analyzed the candidate differently in relationship to the line) they will not see eye to eye on whether or not it is possible to still vote for the candidate.

And now that I have mentioned that there are multiple dimensions to any given candidate, let's move on the the "final form' of this model.

The Dimensions of Moral Integrity Model

Just to keep things simple I have only included four dimensions in this illustration but there are actually as many as the individual voter happens to notice or care about. Notably absent from this illustration yet relevant to recent US elections for instance would be Immigration and The Environment but there really isn't any functional limit on the number of dimensions available. The final—and vital—addition to the model here is the recognition that a candidate may well be excellent in one dimension but fall below the line of integrity in another dimension. This complicates both our analysis of candidates, and a voter's capacity to reason clearly about a given candidate. Specifically, I think this this helps to untangle a lot of messy political arguments. When two people argue about whether a candidate is imperfect-but-still-viable or "too problematic" (the most common term I have encountered on the left to imply that the candidate has dropped below the line of integrity) the snarl in their communication may reside in the fact that they locate the candidate on different sides of the line, or that they are judging the candidate on different dimensions. This is further complicated by the fact that each dimension is weighted differently for each person. My "NO" threshold on economics (and economic justice) may be lower than yours while your "NO" threshold is lower than mine on foreign policy. 

Let me emphasize that the line of integrity is likely significantly lower than we are generally happy to admit. That is to say that we are generally willing to tolerate more that we would like to say and that this becomes most clear when a candidate who we really like turns out to be significantly "problematic" in one realm. The Democratic ambivalence around Gillibrand's calls for Al Franken to resign would be an example of this. For some voters Franken's behavior fell below their real line of integrity in the issue of sexual assault and harassment; for others it fell above their real line but below their public line. This, of course, resulted in their feeling very ambivalent about the call for him to resign. They do not want to be seen as people for whom his behavior is above the line, but they are also not really convinced that his behavior merited his resignation. 

The space between the red and the grey line is ripe for political miscommunication and misunderstanding, often because we ourselves are often not quite sure about that area. We often convince ourselves that our public line is our real line and only discover the difference when someone action, position, or behavior falls between them. Even then we only make that discovery when we are brutally honest with ourselves—self justification is one hell of a drug.

Of course the big problem with all of this is that the moral impetus we feel regarding issues below the line is entirely different from the impetus we feel about those above the line. Below-the-line-of-integrity discussions are different in kind from above-the-line-of-integrity discussions.

The essential difference between the two kinds of discussion boils down to the role of pragmatism in our political decision making. Above the line, pragmatism is an important and even moral factor. We all recognized that we will rarely, if ever, get a candidate with whom we agree perfectly on every issue and who has a sterling record—there are no perfect candidates—and so pragmatism or questions of "electability" are worthwhile so long as the candidate stays above the line. This is true both within a given political party and in the general election. I suspect that a great many of the people who yearn publicly for "a return to the days when Republicans and Democrats could disagree and still respect one another's politics" do so, at least in part, because in their estimation both Republican and Democratic candidates exist exclusively above the line whereas people who are utterly flummoxed by that notion see candidates from the opposition party as falling below the line in one or more places. Conversations across the line of integrity will always fail just because support which is deemed possible by one party is actually impossible for the other.

That is not to say that it is impossible to have meaningful conversations about political candidates with someone who differs with you about where those candidates stand in relation to the line. It only means that you need to have a different kind of conversation in those situations. At that point, to be meaningful, the conversation needs to be about the facts—"does the candidate really think/say/do that?"—or about the placement of the line itself—"should/shouldn't X really be disqualifying?".

Maybe some examples will help to clarify all of this.

Some Examples

Please note that for all of these examples I will be assuming that the locations on the chart represent your assessment of a hypothetical candidate.

SAMPLE A The Acceptable Candidate

I take this to be the chart for a fairly standard "no candidate is perfect" type of candidate. The candidate here is great on civil rights and you really respect their character. Their economics aren't perfect (you have some significant disagreements with them) and they are frankly far more hawkish/dovish than you are. You likely would not have supported this candidate in the primaries but you will probably be a strong supporter in the general election. As a side note, this is also what nostalgic moderate Democrat baby boomers like to imagine "the opposition candidate" charted in "the good old days when we were less divided".


SAMPLE B The Baffling No-Go

This candidate is precisely the sort of candidate that is likely to get you into fights with your own friends on social media. Here is a candidate whose foreign policy views you simply cannot countenance. Likely your whole social circle will not be thrilled with the candidate but, if they (and you) agree that the major opposition candidate is even worse then unless they understand your line of integrity, they won't understand why you just can't vote for this "lesser of two evils". This problem will be particularly compounded if you are able to honestly recognize that the candidate is a person of good character who honestly holds to the foreign policy beliefs which you find so unconscionable. This, chart, I suspect represents the way McCain supporters felt about Obama (or at least, it represents the way McCain himself spoke about Obama).


SAMPLE C(1) The Dictator Comparisons

This sample should be fairly straightforward but it has one feature which I think is relevant to our political moment. This is my best mock-up of the way I think most moderate Democrats would have charted Trump. In itself I doubt that there is much surprise here but with a few tweaks I think it can shed some light on one particular frustration.

SAMPLE C(2) The Reluctant Trump Voter

 This, I think, represents the situation of the Reluctant Trump Voter®. This person seems to have almost identical views with the moderate Democrat (your milage may vary) and their public line of integrity is in about the same place as the moderate Democrat. Yes they don't see Trump in quite as negative a light as the moderate Democrat but he clearly falls below their public line of integrity. However, because he remains above their real line of integrity they were still able to justify voting for him since he opposed Clinton*. We saw this most clearly in the evolving reactions to the Access Hollywood tape. The contents of the revelation thrust Trump below most Republicans' public line of integrity which left them publicly denouncing him and looking desperately for an alternative or option. However, because his behavior was still above their real line, they effected an about face at the flimsiest of excuses (the "locker room talk" contextualization, his tepid apology, accounts of his later salvation experience) the strength of the pretext didn't matter much so long as it allowed them to retain the appearance of their public line. This is also why I think it is important to note the Republicans who never went back to Trump after Access Hollywood. Their failure to return is an indication that, for them, the tape represented a real line.


Finally I want to end with a quick look at two hypothetical left leaning Americans in 2016, one of which would have almost certainly voted for Clinton, the other of which would not.

The Reluctant Clinton Voter®

This person is clearly a Bernie supporter, who would have voted for him in the primaries and was likely rather upset when he lost. They may even have blamed Clinton for bankrolling the DNC and ensuring that Sanders never really got a fair shake. Nevertheless, they would have seen Clinton as a tragically necessary compromise of their ideals and would have voted for her "as a way to stop Trump" and possibly consoled themselves with the virtue of supporting the first woman candidate in a major political party (though they were probably wishing she had been Warren).

The #NeverClinton #NeverTrump Voter

Notice that this is another Sanders supporter. The difference with the Reluctant Clinton Voter® is only that for this person, Clinton fell below the line of integrity when it came to foreign policy (maybe all the Benghazi talk worked on them, maybe they are a strong dove and see her as part of "the Blob"). This is a likely Johnson or Stein voter or a principled non-voter. This is also the person whom the Reluctant Clinton Voter likely railed at in the aftermath of the 2016 election. Unless they clarified their differences viz. the line of integrity on foreign policy, both of these voters probably left the conversation without making any headway and incredibly frustrated with one another. This voter likely saw the Reluctant Clinton Voter as lacking in integrity (after all, they admitted that her foreign policy positions are problematic) and the Reluctant Clinton Voter likely saw this person as too precious and concerned to care about the real harm that Trump is going to do to oppressed minority people and the the country's norms and institutions. This, despite the fact that the two of them agree perfectly on everything about Trump. If we were to lower their real lines of integrity and add public lines of integrity, the confusion might become even more clear.

Conclusion

I hope that you find this to be useful tool in modeling the way people make minimum-viable political and electoral decisions. Please don't hesitate to hit me up in comments if you have suggestions, critiques, or questions about how I could improve or modify this.

*I have explicitly chosen to ignore the roll that party and ideological association and attendant in-group/out-group effects have on our estimation of a candidate by simply presenting the estimations as final and not exploring the reasons we have for locating a given candidate at a given spot on the chart. Those reasons are real and the proper subject of healthy and passionate political, sociological, and religious debates. For the purposes of this analytic model, however, they may be simply taken as givens.

Myth as Dream and Nightmare

“When they told him this, Ransom at last understood why mythology was what it was -- gleams of celestial strength and beauty falling on a jungle of filth and imbecility.”                         - C.S. Lewis  Perelandra

I have been thinking about myth again recently. It is a particularly special kind of story, myth, neither history nor fiction, nor—quite—a mere combination of the two. Myths are not properly understood to be lies about history, nor are they fictional histories. Despite some of the rather bigoted and paternalist theories of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, it looks more and more as though the great tellers and recorders of myth never believed their stories to be historically true. But they did believe them to be true nonetheless. If you will excuse the circularity I think the answer to the question "what could be more true than facts" is "myth'.

It is, after all, the case that story is the instrument we use to access reality. Without story our experience of the world would be nothing more that incoherent data. It is story which turns the collection of shapes, colors, sounds, smells, and sensations into a child. Every thing with which we interact is its own story a story we write and are told. To spend much time thinking about this will open you to the twin shocks that the story of this life which you think you are writing is really one which you are being told and that the story you think you are being told is really a story that you are always writing—existence is a collaborative piece of art.

These are stories which are neither fact nor lie but are often deeply true. Because myth is the exploration of meaning, it can neither ential perfect correspondence to facts, or utter independence from them. The hard bitten empiricist reduces myth to lie (though that conclusion will never be found in their accumulated data) while others attempt to harden myth into brittle fact  thereby exposing it once more to the attacks of the empiricists. But myth will not submit to any enforced metamorphosis and, to my knowledge, only one myth has ever become fact, and that was of its own volition. This is all a rather round-about way of saying that our myths are our attempts to find the meaning behind our existence. Without them we would be beyond lost, we would be without meaning.

I will not walk with your progressive apes,
erect and sapient. Before them gapes
the dark abyss to which their progress tends
if by God's mercy progress ever ends,
and does not ceaselessly revolve the same
unfruitful course with changing of a name.
I will not treat your dusty path and flat,
denoting this and that by this and that,
your world immutable wherein no part
the little maker has with maker's art.
I bow not yet before the Iron Crown,
nor cast my own small golden sceptre down.

Selection from Mythopoeia  by J.R.R. Tolkien

There are two myths which I have been particularly thinking about recently and I hope that by thinking about them together I might be able to shine a little light on a few of the healthy and dangerous uses of the art. Specifically I have been thinking about the recent musical The Greatest Showman and also the myth of America.

The Greatest Showman

The Greatest Showman is one of those wonderful movies which was panned by the critics and embraced by audiences. The movie does not represent the facts of the history on which it is based instead the movie is a myth about community, humanity, acceptance, diginity, ambition, and right relationship. It is a hero’s journey (actually it is several overlapping hero’s journeys) and it pierces right to the heart of the tension between and unjust society built for the comfort of the rich and powerful and a just and joyful society built by and for those marginalized by the rich and powerful. In Christians terms, it is a myth all about the difference between the Kingdom of God as described in the Beatitudes and the Kingdom of this world. The loud secret of The Greatest Showman is that the life of joy and dignity is to be found only when we celebrate the humanity and worth of not being safe, secure, and privileged. It is a well told, and beautiful version of the story all of our hearts desperately long to live and most of our hearts are too afraid to ever try. The quote, often attributed to Thoreau that “the mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation and go to the grave with the song still in them” represents a dark magic which The Greatest Showman works to unravel—story and myth are, after all, the good magic which sets us free from the dark lies we tell ourselves about this world, and The Greatest Showman is a story of singing the song in the face of the dark.

But the history is not the same as the myth. In real, factual history P.T. Barnum simply was not the man we see as the protagonist of the myth. In real, factual history his circus was not the full celebration of humanity in all of its glorious diversity that we see in the myth—actually there was some serious exploitation and racism going on there; Barnum was pretty terrible with his animals as well.

The man on whom the myth-story is based was a broken, messed up, guy. He was wildly imperfect and sometimes evil. That isn’t a problem for The Greatest Showman unless we make the myth for the facts, unless we try to replace history with myth. Because the history is also important. The real history of racism, bigotry, animal abuse, exploitation, and the other wretched sins Barnum committed matters. The facts matter. When we pretend that the myth is the history we turn good magic into bad magic. We have a term for doing that: “whitewashing”. The spell which could work to liberate us, becomes a curse binding us more tightly to the sins of our past. Because the facts of history will remain regardless of whether we remember them. And history always has its effects.

The world is the way it is because of its history. When we whitewash our history it is like trying to tell a good story but changing all of the unpleasant parts at the beginning—it won’t work. The prince cannot search the kingdom for the girl whose foot fits the glass slipper if Cinderella is never kept from the ball in the first place; there would be no fairy godmother and the story would end with her having a pleasant time at the ball. Once the darkness is erased from the story, the happy ending (what Tolkien called the “eucatastrophe”) becomes impossible. So to with the real story in which we live. If we do not know our own history any real improvement on our current situation will be impossible.

As C.S. Lewis is want to remind us, it is the highest angels who make the most terrible demons. Myth known as myth highlights meaning and draws us towards progress and joy; myth mistaken for history blinds us to the ability to ever improve.

The Myth of America

The myth of the United States of America is a beautiful thing as well. The myth of America is one of freedom for and the equality of all people. The myth of America is a story of a wild, empty land slowly tamed for the good of all people by the rugged determination, the blood sweat and tears of fiercely determined regular people. It is the story of tough people who struggled to overcome oppression and tyranny and succeeded by strength of their grit, faith, and families. The American myth is the myth of a people enriched by and ever enriching their land. It is the story of the downtrodden of many lands who find sanctuary, overcome, and rise up to protect the downtrodden of the world. The American myth is hard work, hard living, and the simply joy of well earned safety in a healthy home with a loving family. The American myth is not a perfect vision of human flourishing but it is an honest and joyful representation of that ineffable spirit which is the United States.

But the Myth of America is not the history of America.

The land was not empty

The history of the United States is much more complicated and far, far darker. The history of the United States is the history of slavery and oppression of the poor and those who were not “granted whiteness”. The history of America is the history of a land cleared of its inhabitants by disease and violent genocide for the sake of those who believed that land is a thing to be owned and exploited. The “wild empty land” of the myth was, in fact, the land of the Susquehannok, the Cherokee, the Lakota, the Iroquois, the Creek, the Seminole, the Comanche, the Chinook, and so many, many more. Some little of it they have kept, their blood stains the rest. The history of America is a history of liberty won and liberty denied. There has been progress, yes, but that progress has been always too slow. The history of America is a history of stolen wealth, of robber barons and a civil war fought to retain a “right” to keep others enslaved. There have been plenty of tough and hardworking people in America’s history and they have accomplished great and unprecedented things. But the system they used to build those things, the institutions which enabled them to do what they did, can not be separated from the genocide and slavery out of which they were born. There is no America without those sins.

Dred Scott

The history of America is a history of poisoning our land for money. The history of America  is the history ripping apart the atom in order to slaughter our enemies. The history of America is ending slavery with one amendment and recreating it as mass incarceration with the same amendment. The history of America the strong prey on weak and throw their bones to their brothers to buy their complicity. The history of America is one hand stretched out to immigrants while the other pens “Chinese exclusion acts, the US vs Baghat Singh Thind, executive order 9066, and a million other words of exclusion. The History of America is Wounded Knee and Jim Crow. The history of America is the history of “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof” and then treating one million flavors of “Christian” as the only religion that counts. The history of America is the history of not worrying about an epidemic which “only affects gays and Haitians.” The history of America is 200+ years of marriage and identity denied to those unlike “us”.

The United States has accomplished great things, but each great accomplishment has grown, in some degree, out of the corpses of those who were walled out of the myth.

Take a moment and stare the tragedy of America right in the eye. Don’t blink.

It is only in recognizing the nation’s darkness, in seeing it for what it is, that the US has any hope of moving towards what it might be. The great danger—the great temptation—is to substitute the myth for the history and thus to turn the angel into a demon. As I have said elsewhere, I have never encountered a more powerful vision of both the history and myth of America than in Langston Hughes’ Let America be America Again. This is the eyes-open view (it should not surprise us that it is a poet who is able to see both truth and fact with such clarity) which hears myth and fact in sterio and never confuses the one for the other. May we learn to do the same.

Let America Be...

If I had to recommend a mascot for the USA...

In the wake of President Trump's "shithole" comment, I have noticed one well intentioned but not quite accurate theme in the responses. It essentially boils down to "this is not who we really are". This is usually offered by good people who are trying to tell others (other nations, other people) that the President's racism does not have the support of the whole country—that there is real opposition to him. And I think that is a good thing to want to communicate, as far as it goes, but I don't think that framing—this is not who we are—is the right one because... well... this is exactly who we are. The United States is the nation which made Trump possible. Yes our #resistance is real, but our bigotry, our racism, our xenophobia — that is real too. Trump wasn't an accident. Trump was encouraged, and tolerated by enough of us that he became our executive, our leader.

Trump does not represent my values, my interests, or my desires, but the plain fact is that he does represent the nation of which I am a part. He does represent me; to me that is one more reason to resist him.

I worry a little, that the desire to say "this isn't us" comes from a desire to pretend that a mythology has more historicity than it does. There is a real United States and then there is also a dream of the United States. The real, historical United States is a country born in the blood of genocide and built on the back of chattel slavery. The real historical United States has, truly, built and accomplished great things; but far too often it has accomplished those great deeds over the corpses of others. The real, historical United States really is a purveyor of beauty, grandeur, holocaust, theft, and oppression. The real, historical, United States has nailed the body of Jesus to the front of our Roman Imperial temple. That, horrific and grand nation is the real and historical United States.

But there is also a mythology. And as mythologies go, the myth of the Unites States is a good one. It is a myth of all persons, free and equal in dignity. The myth is a myth of liberty and liberation. Of siblings, children, and parents; of hard work and good play; of education and simplicity. As an aspiration it is able to move us closer to the good—as many of the great myths are able to. The danger is in confusing our history with our myth. The history is who we are, the myth is who we want to be. I have never found this more perfectly represented than by Langston Hughes:

O, let America be America again—
The land that never has been yet—
And yet must be.

"The land that never has been yet—and yet must be." We are, still, the land of Donald Trump. We will, now, forever be the land that once elected Donald Trump. That is who we are; it is not who must be.

Early Pebbles: A Dinner Which Led Me Away From Politically Conservative US Christianity

"Why do our Christian brothers and sisters in the United States hate us?"

I was only just old enough to overhear this question when it changed my life. I suppose that people change for a lot of reasons and in a lot of different ways—certainly I have. Sometimes we encounter someone or learn something that changes us in a flash. One moment we were convinced of one thing and were living our lives by it and then—bam—we learn a missing fact or meet someone new and are convinced almost instantly that we had been wrong, that a different proposition is actually true, and our lives change. But most of the time I don't think it works like that. I think most of the time we have these experiences and they settle in and start to work on us slowly. If our significant changes in the way we are oriented towards our world can be compared to landslides, then most landslides start with pebbles bouncing down the hill; they bring a few other pebbles with them and those pebbles loosen bigger rocks. Now the hillside is less stable and then there is a rainstorm and then, in what seems like an instant, the whole vista gives way and changes irrevocably.

I have experienced a number of these shifts in my life; I consider it a sign of health. After all, I know more now than I did when I was younger, and I have picked up habits of reasoning which (I hope) have improved my capacity to analyze what I know. Additionally my character has been formed through relationships and through my reading; the weight things have with me has shifted and—I  hope—grown into a more accurate reflection of the real value of the world.

The question I opened with—Why do our Christian brothers and sisters in the United States hate us?—is one of the pebbles, possibly the first pebble, in the what became the landslide which marked my ultimate rejection of politically conservative US Christianity. Of course, few quotes are meaningful without context and the context for this one is critical. I was in (I think) seventh grade at the time, and the question was on the lips of a Palestinian Christian. He asked the question to my Dad after dinner.

In fact it took a lot for me to hear that question. My family moved to Turkey when I was seven years old—my dad was offered and accepted a position at a joint venture company in Ankara—and I lived there till college. While I was there my parents helped to found the International Protestant Church of Ankara and have been involved in its leadership ever since. When I was around twelve my parents planned a family vacation to tour Israel and Palestine. In the course of planning the trip, they spoke with some fellow church members of ours who were Palestinian Christians studying at one of the universities in Ankara. One of those students was from Bethlehem and was determined for us to go and visit his family while we were in the area. At that point in the mid-90's the Israel/Palestine conflict was in one of its hotter periods so American visitors had been warned against going to Bethlehem. Our friend the college student gave my dad some instructions about how to ensure that our car would be protected by Palestinians and insisted that we visit. You can imagine that for a twelve year old, this was the very height of international adventure. We were going to act on privileged information, put the right symbol in the dashboard of our car and be granted special access to visit Bethlehem at a time when most Americans were afraid to go.

The Church of the Nativity

And all of it worked. We drove into Bethlehem, visited the Church of the Nativity, and had a lovely ham dinner with a charming and hospitable Palestinian family. The delight of the ham particularly stuck with me because, as an American Christian living in Turkey, I didn't get to enjoy pork products all that often and, since we were vacationing in Israel for most of the trip, I hadn't been able to get any on vacation either. After dinner my two younger siblings wandered away from the table to play with some of the children of the family but, as there weren't any children my age, I stayed at the table and listened to the adults talking. That is when one man asked my Dad the question—Why to our Christian brothers and sisters in the United States hate us? I don't remember what my Dad's answer was—I don't think he was a fan of Christian Zionism even back then, so I imagine he did his best to regretfully explain a culture of largely uniformed religious ethnocentrism—and I don't remember the rest of the conversation. I think I asked my parents about it in the car on our way back to Jerusalem later because I was never able to be politically pro-Israel after that trip, and I have a vague memory of thinking that American Christians were "sort of confused" about the Middle East (a belief which was only reinforced when I began to attend bible college in South Carolina and found that telling people I had grown up in Turkey inevitably conjured up images from the film Casablanca in their minds).

You aren't going to convince me to hate Palestinians

That was one family, one conversation. But it made its impression. It was a pebble rolling down the mountain and, once down, it could not roll back up the hill and regain its place. It was only a few years later that I became an Evangelical teenager in the late 90's (for those of you who shared that cultural moment with me, you will already know the weight of it, for those who did not, I will only say that it was both the heyday and swan song of American White Evangelical culture). I bought in almost to the hilt. I built a mental, religious, political, and philosophical structure out of the materials of late 90's White American Evangelical culture. Francis Schaeffer, DC Talk, the OC Supertones, True Love Waits, I Kissed Dating Goodbye, Quiet Times, Passion, Republicanism, Apologetics, the lot. My first vote was for George W. Bush and I worked my first job out of college to the sound of conservative talk radio.

But that structure had been built on an undermined foundation. That pebble (and others—they will have to wait for other blog posts) was missing. And I should say that it was consciously missing. I thought it gave me nuance. Knowing the kind of person I was in college, I probably thought it made me a little bit better than most of my peers. I understood that things were really more complex. But here is where that pebble really starts to make itself known. You see, the thing about having a pebble missing from under your foundation is that it is really difficult to just "let the empty space be" you need to fill it with something—I may be stretching this analogy too far, but work with me here—so you start to excavate the little hole. You study it, you dig around it, you try to figure our why the pebble that fell out of the hole didn't "work" there. This displaces more pebbles as you find that they don't really work either. Then you displace more pebbles.

Back in the real world (and away from pebble-analogy land) this excavation process really sped up after 9/11. I remember going online that night and somehow getting involved in a chat room (remember chat rooms?) where someone wanted "us" to "just go bomb the crap out of them" without any clear awareness of who "them" was beyond "middle eastern Muslims". I was somewhat horrified (remember that I have family and friends in a predominantly Muslim middle eastern country, and then that family in Bethlehem came to mind) and when I tried to push back I encountered the full, unveiled face of Christian American Nationalism. It was ugly, and more pebbles rolled down the mountain. See, it is hard to hate people you know. It is even harder to want the destruction of people who have been kind to you. It is harder than that to categorize as a "good" the mistreatment of people with whom you have identified—our Christian brothers and sisters—and who have been kind to you. It is hard to support a structure which keeps telling you to be against them.

This is not the space for a full story of the deconstruction of my politically conservative Christianity; I hope to write my way through that in time. But from here I hope the outlines of the process have become clear. If religious political Conservatism was wrong about Israel then what else might it have been wrong about? And the "space" around the pebble grows... The questioning process, once properly begun, will not stop until it is frightened into remission, or has scoured the hillside down to the bedrock. In the end my trust in Jesus survived (HERE is a series about what my relationship with Jesus looks like these days), my Christian Nationalism and religious political conservatism did not.