A Cry from the Far Middle Read online

  The political Coastals are enamored of world peace, although it’s Coastals who send the U.S. military on fool’s errands to Iraq and Afghanistan. It’s Heartlanders who join up.

  The crux of the matter is not about Heartlanders being good and Coastals being evil. It’s about their respective ability to tell the difference.

  This is similar to their respective judgments about intoxication at an early age. Young Heartlanders get drunk and know they’ve become stupid. Young Coastals get stoned and think they’ve become brilliant. The same pattern will continue into adulthood. Mature Heartlanders watch the news about something like the 2020 presidential election and know they’ve become confused. Mature Coastals watch the same news about the same something and think they’ve become experts.

  Heartlanders believe in applying common sense to the question of good and evil. Coastals believe in arguing the premises of the question.

  To take a simple example of good, there’s the Bill of Rights. A Heartlander looks at the Bill of Rights and thinks, “It’s pretty good.” A Coastal has an argument with every one of the first ten Amendments.

  I. Free speech

  What if it makes college students cry?

  II. Right to bear arms

  Unless the guns are scary-looking.

  III. No soldiers to be quartered in houses in time of peace

  Does Airbnb count? Because Airbnb is contributing to the shortage of affordable housing in rapidly gentrifying inner cities and while I don’t advocate the quartering of soldiers per se, because that might be insensitive to antiwar home owners, there are the homeless to be considered and . . .

  IV. Unlawful search and seizure

  Although in many ways Wikileaks made important contributions to the goals of transparency in . . .

  V. Protection against self-incrimination

  Unless investigated by the House of Representatives Judiciary Committee.

  VI. & VII. Right to jury trial

  When not already found guilty in a New York Times editorial.

  VIII. Prohibition of cruel and unusual punishment

  Except reputational death by Twitter.

  IX. Enumerated rights

  Wait a minute! They left out the right to health care, the right to education, the right to a living wage, the right to . . .

  X. “The Powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.”

  But . . . But . . . But so many of those states are in places like Oklahoma and so many of those people live in states like that and . . .

  Which brings us back to knowing hay from straw. It turns out not to matter. A Heartlander will tell you that either hay or straw will do just fine to stuff in the mouth of a Coastal.

  Quiz

  ARE YOU A COASTAL OR A HEARTLANDER?

  It’s not where you live. It’s how you live. Take this quiz to find out whether you’re an Organic All-Natural Unrefined Sea Salt person or whether you’re the Salt of the Earth.

  Check option A or option B, then tally your scores below.

  RESULTS

  If you checked fifteen or more items in the Option A column you’re a Coastal. If you think books that have personal profile quizzes in them are a stupid waste of time you’re a Heartlander.

  Goodbye to Classical Liberalism . . .

  “It’s the End of the World!”

  People are always saying this. Especially people my age. Marcus Tullius Cicero, born in 106 B.C. and even older than I am, is famous for his apocalyptic declaration, “O tempora! O mores!” (“Oh, what times! Oh, what behavior!”) The trouble is, sometimes Cicero and I are right.

  Cicero, the greatest orator of the Roman Republic, was denouncing the political conspirator Catiline.

  Catiline was a “reformer” who ran for the Roman consulship on a platform—this will sound familiar—of increased benefits for disadvantaged plebeians and tabulae novae (“clean slates”) universal debt cancellation. Then, when he lost the election, he tried to overthrow the Roman government.

  Catiline was the SPQR Bernie Sanders. Except, as a social justice warrior, Catiline actually was a warrior and his army of supporters really were armed—with swords instead of bongs, Hacky Sacks, and $5 campaign contributions.

  Rome’s legions killed Catiline in 62 B.C. But the ­Catiline conspiracy was just one episode in a long stretch of Roman political polarization and vicious partisan infighting that resulted, in 44 B.C., in Julius Caesar being made dictator for life.

  Which didn’t last long. Caesar was assassinated the next month. Nevertheless Cicero was correct in his analysis (and also dead in 43 B.C. by order of Augustus, the next Caesar). After almost five hundred years that was the end of the world for the Roman Republic.

  And this is the end of the world for Classical Liberalism.

  Civil liberties. Free speech. Property rights. Rule of law. Representative democracy. Free enterprise. Free trade. These are the ideas of Classical Liberalism. Since 1776 the fortunate among us have been living in places where those ideas were embraced.

  Sometimes it’s been an awkward embrace. We’ve watched Classical Liberalism get a clumsy “Joe Biden hug” from advocates for greater political interference in private life. In the matter of Classical Liberalism, “populists” want the “classical” to be more Pop, and “liberals” want the “liberal” to dispense largess with greater liberality.

  But the core ideas persisted. And they produced excellent results. In the middle of the twentieth century fascism was defeated and its totalitarian sister ideology communism was contained by Classical Liberalism.

  Classical liberals caused “imperialism” to be booed off the world stage—reduced to making guest appearances in the prattle of poly-sci-class academic phonies.

  Classical liberals changed “colonialism” from an international villainy into an international tourist destination like the British Virgin Islands.

  In the 1980s the tower of human misery constructed by the communists fell on its architects. Lenin, Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot joined Hitler, Mussolini, and Tojo in the collapsed basement of hell.

  The personal freedoms embodied in Classical Liberalism went a long way toward destroying other theoretical justifications for oppression such as antidisestablishmentarian theocracy, Plessy v. Ferguson segregation, and apartheid in its various forms around the world.

  Given a chance, Classical Liberalism could even ­banish—or at least mitigate—prejudice and bigotry. Liberty means free and responsible individuals. Free and responsible individuals have a lot to do, exercising their freedoms and shouldering their responsibilities. No set of principles, however noble, can prevent people from detesting each other, but Classical Liberalism can keep people otherwise occupied and busy.

  An example from the 1960s. During the height of the civil rights struggle Atlanta’s sort of but not really pro-integration mayor Ivan Allen came up with a weasel-phrase slogan to indicate that the local white establishment, although not fully reconciled to civil liberties and equality before the law, was willing to—as we’d call it these days—move on. “Atlanta, a City Too Busy to Hate.”

  We would hate but we’re just so busy!

  Under the aegis of Classical Liberalism earth thrived. Global per capita GDP went, in inflation-adjusted dollars, from $3,900 in 1950 to $17,300 in 2017. Thank you, civil liberties, free speech, property rights, rule of law, representative democracy, free enterprise, and free trade.

  As the tenets of Classical Liberalism spread, the governmental practice of oppression seemed to be fading.

  In 1945 only the lucky few could be called citizens of a free country. Today, 39 percent of the world’s population has political freedom, another 24 percent has partial freedom, and 74 percent of the world’s 195 nations are at least free enough to give
Classical Liberalism a try.

  So says Freedom House, the nonpartisan advocacy organization for democracy, which is so nonpartisan that it was founded in 1941 by defeated presidential candidate Wendell Willkie and Eleanor Roosevelt. (Such, at one time, were the powers of faith in Classical Liberalism. Imagine, today, an advocacy organization founded by Hillary Clinton and Melania Trump.)

  Classical Liberalism has had a good run. Now it’s about to get run over by a bus full of stupid “post-capitalist” political trends—the new socialism, the new nationalism, the new trade war mercantilism, and the new social media platforms that drive this bus.

  Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping, Donald Trump, and the numerous candidates who ran for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination are all onboard. So are the Brexiteers and so, for that matter, are the maniacally microregulating bureaucrats of the EU that the Brexiteers want to leave.

  Wave goodbye to Classical Liberalism. Or you could just wave at the camera you’re facing on your phone or computer. Too late to put a sticky note over it. Your civil liberties are already gone. Not a click falls on a keypad nor a finger taps a touch screen without the Internet seeing.

  You are a fly caught in the World Wide Web. Email is blackmail with a .com on the end. Civil liberties—and the free will needed to exercise them—are impossible when someone knows everything about you. And someone does. Probably it’s just that twerp Mark Zuckerberg who’s got your every word, worry, action, attraction, emotion, motion, and notion stored in the Cloud. But how long before a more serious person or thing hacks in and starts running your life? (Jared Kushner, Greta Thunberg, George Soros, NSA, the UN, Proud Boys, IRS, NRA—you can bet that the person or thing that keeps you up at night will be what hacks you.)

  And how do you know they haven’t done it already? How hard can it be? The Internet treats user privacy with the same respect that snakes get in a cage at a carnival sideshow. And Zuckerberg is a thirty-five-year-old still wearing his underwear in public. His mother no doubt writes his password on the waistband of his Y-fronts with a laundry pen.

  Plus the average cost of an Internet connection in the United States is $67.17 a month, so free speech isn’t free anymore anyway.

  Property rights will be next to go. Here too the Internet aids and abets, particularly in the destruction of intellectual property rights. Take it from me, a print journalist. “Content Is Free”—that’s the founding concept of the Internet. I spent forty years as a print journalist. Now I’m a “content provider.” And . . . Content Is Free.

  Our remaining property rights, our rights to physical property, will be sacrificed either to the campaign for income equality or to the campaign against climate change (or, should these hysterias fail, to the campaign against something terrible we haven’t imagined yet).

  Whether property is swiped in the name of economic fairness or in the name of nature being treated unfairly will depend on which end of the world comes first: everybody on earth in bankruptcy court (total global debt is now $244 trillion, three times the size of the world economy) or everybody on earth crammed into the last 1,878 vertical feet of Mount Everest because of the rising sea level.

  In the former case, a horde of people will show up at polling places under the impression that voting machines are like the slots at Mohegan Sun. If they pull the lever often enough there will be a huge payout.

  The Internet tells me (for free) that, using the broadest definition of “money” (cash plus all banking and money market account balances), there’s about $80 trillion in the world. The world’s population is 7.5 billion. Dividing it equally, we each get $10,666.67.

  We’ll blow through that pretty fast, and the aftermath will be interesting. I’d make a personal recommendation about what to do in this situation, but the Second Amendment is just one more property right soon to be dispensed with.

  In the climate change end-of-the-world scenario we’ll all die, which makes abiding by the principles of Classical Liberalism particularly difficult. But before we die we’ll panic.

  I understand why people are bothered by climate change. It bothers me four times a year—arthritic winter, allergic spring, summertime bedroom A/C window unit falling out and smashing the patio furniture, and my Harris Tweed sport coat full of moth holes in the fall. But we’ve let our annoyance and worry be turned into abject fear. I’m sure our earthly home could use some tidying, climatologically. But when the house is a mess you get out the mop and the broom, you don’t call the police.

  In our panic we’ll demand strict government regulation to prevent carbon emissions. And most carbon emissions result from the exercise of property rights.

  Among the properties that belong to you are a pair of lungs. The Internet tells me (for free again) that those lungs emit 2.3 pounds of carbon dioxide a day. Multiply by world population and that’s 17.25 trillion pounds of carbon dioxide, which is much more than the 209 billion pounds of carbon dioxide that burning fossil fuels emits daily.

  You can see where the regulatory direction is headed. Exhaling to be allowed by licensed permit only and deep sighs forbidden under any circumstances. And, speaking of exercising your property rights, the lungs of long-distance joggers, gym rats, hot yoga practitioners, and others who engage in vigorous physical activity can emit as much as eight times the average amount of CO2. The police would run you down, except that would cause even more global warming, so they’ll shoot you from a distance.

  (Yes, yes, I know. The experts try to explain to me that breathing isn’t like burning fossil fuels because breathing doesn’t involve “sequestered carbon.” But I’m as dumb as the next voter and don’t know sequester from Ryan Seacrest. Or, anyway, I’m as dumb as Senator Elizabeth Warren who, when she introduces a federal law against breathing, will tell us that only the rich will have to hold their breath.)

  Your possessions will go away. And, because “possession is nine-tenths of the law,” rule of law goes with them. (That “nine-tenths” adage isn’t about squatters’ rights or who’s borrowed the car. It’s an old maxim of English common law, first cited in print in the late sixteenth century by Richard Carew, high sheriff of Cornwall. Carew was pointing out that the main purpose of law is to protect property. Foremost in the law’s protection is that property most precious to you—you. The foundational property right is your ownership of yourself as a free person. Much as we may hate the private islands, Park Avenue penthouses, trust funds, Learjets, limousines, and other property accumulated by the filthy rich, without property there is no freedom.

  If rule of law goes away so does representative democracy­—­the legal system of checks and balances that’s entrusted with both guidance by majorities and protection of individuals. When government takes ownership of everything the result is either the terror of collectivism or the horror of crony capitalism or, as in China, both. The checks bounce and the balances are weighted by the thumbs of special interests.

  Also, lacking civil liberties and property rights, representative democracy is left with nothing to represent except the will of the mob or—as it’s called these days—“activism.”

  We already live in a country where activists are snatching the role once played by duly elected and duly appointed officials.

  When Dr. Frankenstein is up to something in his castle, does modern America send the county building inspector to check if the electrical wiring is safe? Not when a large group of activists with pitchforks and torches are available to chase Dr. Frankenstein back to the local urgent care facility and make him provide Medicare for All.

  As I mentioned before, the collapse of Classical Liberalism is by no means just an American problem. The same Freedom House that brought us the good news about the growth of democracy since World War II brings us bad news in its most recent report, “Freedom in the World 2018.”

  •Democracy faced its most serious crisis in decades . . . as its basic tenets—including guarantees o
f free and fair elections, the rights of minorities, freedom of the press, and the rule of law—came under attack around the world.

  •Seventy-one countries suffered net declines in political rights and civil liberties, with only 35 registering gains. This marked the 12th consecutive year of decline in global freedom.

  And how will the end of the Classical Liberal world affect your daily life?

  Imagine even a trip to the grocery store without Classical Liberalism. How about Mexican tonight? (Or is cultural appropriation forbidden now?) But, first, you need civil liberties just to leave your house. And no matter what you think about immigration, if Hispanic Americans didn’t have civil liberties you wouldn’t know mierda about Mexican food. You’d be making tacos by rolling liverwurst in Aunt Jemima pancakes and seasoning it with pumpkin pie spice. The grocery store requires free speech to advertise its specials. You could be paying twice as much for the corn tortillas as you would have paid at the other grocery store down the road. Except, without property rights, there might not be another grocery store down the road. In fact there might not be any grocery stores at all. You’ll have to wait for dinner until there’s a government taco handout. Furthermore, absent rule of law, just how old is that guacamole? And lastly, although you might not think representative democracy would come into play at the checkout counter, what if a certain kind of doofus becomes America’s Augustus Caesar and the kid who’s bagging your groceries double bags the Dos Equis six-pack and gets—as they call it these days—canceled for not sequestering your carbon?

  O tempora! O mores!

  Big Fat Politics

  At the beginning of 2019 we had a thirty-five-day “government shutdown.” For those with more or less libertarian views (myself included) this was a be-careful-what-you-wish-for moment.

  Not that it didn’t seem like a perfectly good time to shut the government down, what with the ongoing political bumfuzzlement—bum in the White House and fuzzlement in Congress.