Conscience Warrior

Thinking today of Wilmer McLean, a veteran of the Virginia militia who was making a living as a grocer in Manassas in the summer of 1861 when General P. G. T. Beauregard, known as “the Creole,” commandeered his home to use as a headquarters. This occupation attracted the attentions of General Irvin McDowell and his enthusiastic, yet green Union volunteers, who were eager to make quick work of the rebels and get back their homes. The reach of Gen. McDowell and his men unfortunately exceeded their grasp, and the Creole handed the Union its first decisive defeat in the first major battle of the new war. Legend holds that a Union cannonball came down Mr. McLean’s kitchen chimney in the course of the shelling. After the battle, Mr. McLean moved his family south to both improve his business prospects, and to avoid being quite so much in the middle of a conflict that few believed would still be active almost four years later.

Mr. McLean could not help but appreciate the irony, then, when, on the afternoon of 9 April 1865, Colonel Charles Marshall, an aide to General Robert E. Lee of the Army of Northern Virginia, knocked upon the door of his family’s new home in Appomattox Court House, Virginia, and asked if the house could be used as the venue for Gen. Lee’s surrender to General Ulysses S. Grant. Mr. McLean reluctantly acceded, saying in his later years that the Civil War "started in my front yard and ended in my front parlor."

The Civil War did not truly end with Gen. Lee’s surrender one hundred fifty years ago today, of course, but once the Army of Northern Virginia was no more, the end of the war was both ordained and in sight.

08 April 2015

Pheidippides Paul, and other Legends

Many libertarians in the United States seem to believe that effective communication is the missing piece of the revolution they seek in American politics. The notion, I think, is that the libertarian definition of freedom holds an inherently wide appeal, and if more people heard their message, libertarians would sweep into office across the land. That this fantasy endures speaks to the epistemic closure that pervades fringe movements.

Libertarianism is inherently an opposition ideology. In terms of practical politics, that means opposition to social insurance, opposition to military intervention, and opposition to monetary policy, chiefly. The first obstacle to the libertarian revolution is that these broad policy categories are all fairly popular. When any specific provision of, say, social insurance actually approaches the chopping block, as Medicare did recently, opposition to the cut in question overwhelms opposition to the program.

The second obstacle, as identified by Nate Cohn, is that self-identified libertarians often do not vote, and when they do, they do not reliably vote for self-identified libertarian politicians. Mr Cohn theorizes that "'libertarianism' has become a catchall phrase for iconoclasts of all political stripes." Therefore, the target audience of self-identified libertarian politicians (nominal Republicans, in every case) is a subset of the approximately 11% of the population that identifies as libertarian, namely the fraction that can be counted upon to vote Republican.

An implied third obstacle is that any politician that chooses that thorny path is placing a wager that the total volume of voters that their libertarian message attracts is greater than the total volume that it repels. A tall order indeed.

Update: Professor Mankiw weighs in, but manages to refer to Ron Paul when he clearly intends to refer to Rand Paul. Professor Freud has no comment.