I’m starting to get a handle on fellow comics/politics blogger Franklin Harris–he’s an, I dunno, supralibertarian. I’ll admit that this is something of an… odd concept to me. I’ll plead I.L.I. (Ivy League Ignorance) on this one: At Yale, political belief systems tended towards old-money Republicanism (veering off into advocacy of a reinstated monarchy) or white-guilt liberalism (veering off into People’s Republic of Berkeley communism). Libertarians were few and far between, and though most everyone had libertarian leanings, they tended to be along the lines of “end the drug war, legalize the weed, no censorship, no Big Brother surveillance” etc. That’s certainly my viewpoint at any rate.
Point is, Franklin mildly took me to task over my ripping of Pat Buchanan’s pro-Confederacy stand. Franklin argues that putting the issue of slavery aside, the Confederate states had every right to secede from the Union, and Lincoln’s victory in the Civil War was some sort of might-makes-right blow to the Constitution.
I can see where the argument comes from, but to be honest, it just sounds like so much legalistic nonsense to me. It seems nuts to put “state’s rights,” i.e. the rights of a concept involving boundaries and official birds and flowers and whatnot called a State, before the rights of the people living in them–in this case, the slaves. I know, I know, the Civil War wasn’t started because of slavery, it was because the economy of the North would tank without the South and because advocates of a strong federal government didn’t want to set a precedent for secession, yeah yeah yeah. But in the end, if the South had succeeded in securing its “rights” from the North, you’d have ended up with some creepy militaristic apartheid state occupying the lower half of North America. Blecch. I’m simply not going to get too exercised about the unconstitutionality of an action that freed millions and millions of people and put an end to one of the most appalling practices in human history, particularly when that unconstiutionality only adversely affected the “rights” of an invisible picket fence.
This argument reminds me of Radiohead frontman Thom Yorke’s comments in Spin about the war in Iraq. Regardless of “this particular maniac,” said Thom in reference to Saddam Hussein, the laws and rules of the UN must not be thwarted by the U.S. & the U.K. Putting aside Thom’s ridiculously rose-colored view of the UN (when has it ever solved a conflict? when did it ever operate independently of the vested interests of its member states, in particular the US and the USSR?), he was apparently putting the “rights” of the imaginary entity known as “Iraq” ahead of those of the real live people living inside Iraq. This just seems like a tremendous abdication of responsibility to me–to say nothing of the fact that, from a libertarian perspective, Iraq (and for that matter the Confederacy) was one of the governments most intrusive into the lives of the human beings living therein.
What you’re left with, it seems to me, is the view that everyone else on Earth can go scratch, because my libertarian ideals prevent me from allowing my government to ever do anything to help them in any way. Again, blecch!
I myself believe that the ultimate arbiter of moral AND political rightness or wrongness is the degree to which people are allowed to choose, for themselves, how they want to live. This stems pretty directly from the occult teachings of Aleister Crowley and the pseudophilosophical prank religion of Discordianism, but I’m not as mean-spirited as the former nor as irresponsibly goofy as the latter: I believe that every man and woman was put on this Earth to achieve something, that it’s up to them to puzzle out, and that any time you do something that impedes people from figuring out what to do on their own (from lying and cheating all the way up to murder and totalitarianism) you’re doing something you morally oughtn’t. That’s where my libertarian streak comes from–it isn’t up to the government to decide what God you should worship, for instance–but it’s limited by the fact that, stemming from this belief, I try to take every issue on a case-by-case basis, so I never get hamstrung, as I believe Franklin has, by the kind of thinking that has you arguing for the Confederacy on a technicality.
It’s good to find out, every now and then, that I’m still a liberal at heart.