“Every government in history has been run by assholes. The beautiful thing about democracy, is that in a democracy, the assholes are us.”
-P.J. O’Rourke
I was trying to find exactly where P.J. O’Rourke said that quote. It turns out he used a marginally less offensive version that became the title of Parliament of Whores: “Every government is a parliament of whores. The trouble is, in a democracy the whores are us.” The version I remember was way, way back in the old days when P.J. O’Rourke was still writing for Rolling Stone and he was doing this takedown of Senator Joe Biden’s previous attempt to run for President. Another line I remember from that article was in reference to Biden stealing speeches from British Labour Party leader Neil Kinnock: “That’s like stealing lyrics from LL Cool J.”
But another thing O’Rourke said in one of his books that is at least as relevant to the current time is this: “There is only one basic human right, the right to do as you damn well please. And with it comes the only basic human duty, the duty to take the consequences.”
Here’s the reason I bring this up. About a week ago I saw this Facebook post from the handle “Quarynnetine Valente” saying “The pandemic has managed to do what so many couldn’t: just completely disprove libertarianism and all it’s brethren – No, people will not do the right thing if left to their own devices without the government. They won’t even do so much as wear a small piece of cloth over their faces.”
I’d also seen a Reason article about how even a necessary element of Federal coronavirus response was screwed up, where the GAO reported that at least a million of the coronavirus stimulus checks were actually sent to dead people. And I’d quoted that woman’s post in commentary: “Liberal comment today on Facebook: ‘this crisis completely disproves libertarianism! We can’t even trust people to wear masks without government telling them!’
Government: [cuts off regular recipients and gives COVID checks to billionaires and dead people] “
And a Democrat partisan friend responded, “No, (she’s) right. Libertarians like to concentrate on the handful of government failings and utterly ignore the sea of benefits. One of the reasons I have a hard time taking you seriously some times.” And I responded: “This is why I don’t take government seriously some times.”
I’m serious. It was private citizens and businesses who did more to encourage the shutdown in the first weeks of coronavirus spread than anything the national government has done – indeed, while the New York City and State governments both fell down at first, they started to create serious public health policies while the Trump Organization still refuses to do so.
Monday in The Atlantic, David Frum presented a damning timeline of events that conclusively demonstrate that Trump is not only refusing to take coronavirus seriously, he is actively encouraging the spread of the disease among the public. This is less by what he is doing than what he is not doing – notably not wearing a mask and not encouraging social distancing, even though Mike Pence and even Mitch McConnell now do appear in masks. It’s as though Trump were acting to do the exact opposite of what a president should, which ties into the other recent controversy that continues to bleed out, where reporters continue to investigate credible stories that Russia offered the Taliban bounties to kill our troops in Afghanistan and that Trump was aware of this and continued to take Vladimir Putin’s side on the world stage, for example, continuing to push for Russia to be re-invited to the G7 summits.
This all makes a lot more sense if you just assume that Trump is a Putin bitch whose specific job is to do everything he can to destroy America and everything it stands for. An idea which with every passing week becomes less and less conspiracy theory and more and more Occam’s Razor. But I digress.
In the last, perfunctory coronavirus task force hearing – at which, notably, Trump did not appear – reporters asked Vice President Pence why the Administration, specifically Trump, was encouraging people to gather in large crowds for Trump rallies and not follow experts’ advice to practice social distancing and use masks in public. And Pence started his response by saying: “The freedom of speech and the right to peaceably assemble is enshrined in the Constitution of the United States.” Yes, and in Die Hard With A Vengeance, John McClane had the free speech right to walk around Harlem wearing a sandwich board with the N-Word on it. That didn’t make it good for his continued health.
This Tuesday I was watching one of the talking-heads shows on MSNBC, and Jacob Frey, the Mayor of Minneapolis spoke in reference to the subject of police reform and said, “Culture eats policy for breakfast.” For someone who has done so much to undermine American soft power, Viceroy Trump does understand how to use it, by using the power of his office to shape the public culture. It was bad enough when the “liberal” media gave Trump free airtime that they never would have given a Libertarian or Green candidate because they wanted Hillary’s ride to the coronation to be less boring. But since he is now president, the dysfunctional people who follow him have that much more justification for their beliefs. It is largely for fear of offending them that those governors who had instituted coronavirus controls started to retract them before all, or even any, states had met the White House’s own guidelines for re-opening. So now, for SOME reason, there seems to be a huge surge in virus cases, even in states like California and Nevada that seemed to have it under control. So now in Nevada, Governor Steve Sisolak made it mandatory to wear a mask in public. And I’ve had at least one friend tell me that Sisolak can kiss their ass, but really, what do you expect? Trusting that people would do the right thing without being forced didn’t work.
So Quarantine Valentine or whatever her fucking name is is right about that, but it’s not quite as simple as “Government Good Liberty Bad.” And even then, it’s not like it matters. This Sunday I had to go out and stopped to get gas and got out of the car, and realized I hadn’t brought my mask from the house. I was kind of ashamed of myself, and then I realized that none of the other customers at the gas station were wearing a mask either. And this week I went to get my car looked at, and was at the garage for over two hours, and for half of that time, I was the only one with a mask on.
If I am a libertarian, and I think that a lot of regulations are just a bureaucratic power-grab to micromanage transactions that previous generations never had to micromanage, why does this matter to me? Why do I wear a mask and encourage others to do so? Because I see the need for it, because I educate myself, and I know (from my own recent brush with sickness in March) what the stakes are. I have what is perhaps mislabeled as common sense.
To me, a large part of libertarianism is the impression that government can get in the way of common sense. And what we are seeing in America’s approach to “liberty” is that the opposite of common sense is getting in the way of government.
And all this gets to a larger point. Libertarians might not like government much, but the fact of the matter is, the reason it got as big and intrusive as it has is because people saw a need for it. Sometimes that need is even genuine. In the case of this pandemic or any other genuine emergency, you need an authority who is going to be able to coordinate resources and set policies. And then there are other cases, like the entire Transportation Security Administration, where you have government micromanaging things that we were perfectly happy doing for ourselves before 9-11. And the uselessness of the TSA is only reinforced by the fact that government policy was deformed by the shock of 9-11, yet the 9-11 attacks had an immediate death toll of 2,977 plus the hijackers, yet our government has let over 120,000 die from coronavirus, and the Republicans who demanded a security state after 9-11 don’t bat an eye.
And yet we do need a government, because we need to have some kind of treatment for coronavirus, precisely because we as a collective of individuals cannot micromanage our public lives and private behavior to contain casual contact indefinitely, we cannot get even the most authoritarian government (for example, China) to micromanage individual behavior indefinitely and we sure as Hell cannot get THIS government to manage public behavior.
Government is on some level an admission of social failure. If the Facebook poster is correct in saying that we as a people cannot be trusted to put on a stupid mask to stop the spread of disease, anything government does to encourage that will be imperfect at best. But people are still going to ask for government, because the alternative default is unacceptable. If one advocates for libertarianism, then by definition you cannot create a more libertarian society with more government and more force. It means changing the culture so that we do not need as much government, so that people do the right thing without having to be told. Because again, government cannot do everything, even if we thought that was a good idea. And changing the culture so that people are more capable of self-government requires education and socialization.
In March, I’d said: “The Trump Administration is what you get when you combine class privilege with the government’s monopoly on force. Trump himself is the natural result of a system that pretends to capitalism but actually relies on social capital – what Randians would call ‘pull’ and we in Las Vegas call ‘juice’ – in order to avoid the checks and balances that are supposed to be inherent in the capitalist system, in much the same way that party solidarity has destroyed the checks and balances written into the Constitution.” You can see this in how anti-Trump commentators go on about how Trump has undermined the “rule of law”, which as we can see in retrospect is less a rule than an agreement from all parties to follow the law. It doesn’t matter how strict the law is if the people in charge of enforcing it allow it to be broken, or ARE the lawbreakers. Which gets to the point that what we’re dealing with is psychological as much as political. If all government is just a matter of social agreement, then the same thing applies to every other social arrangement, including business. Which also means that a right-wing “anarcho-capitalism” would not work any better than a left-wing anarchy, because there is no such thing as trade without rules and enforcement of rules, and there is no such thing as common property because resources have to be administered. It doesn’t matter whether you call that administration a government or not, it will come to exist by default. And that means it doesn’t matter if things are administered through officials acting in the public sector or the private sector if they all grew up with the same expectations as to what is acceptable.
They’re the SAME FUCKING PEOPLE.
And if that ought to give pause to a libertarian who thinks that people can be trusted to do the right thing without government forcing them, it really ought to give pause to a statist who thinks government can be trusted to tell people what the right thing is.