Defeating the Tyranny of the ‘Conventional Wisdom’
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I really feel sorry for Katharine
Mangu-Ward: she walked into a hornet’s nest when she appeared
on Fox News the other day and disparaged
Ron Paul – or, rather, mocked his chances of winning the GOP
presidential nomination. She might have thought she was merely expressing
the Conventional Wisdom on Paul’s candidacy – which, indeed, she
was – but her comments underscored an important point about
how social change works, which I’ll get to in a moment. But first
…
As senior editor of Reason magazine, an ostensibly
libertarian publication, the Paulians rightly expected her to stand
up for her team. Oddly, it was left to the other panelist, journalist
and author Liz
Trotta – not a libertarian, as far as I know – to defend
Paul, and her defense was interesting: she said the wars are a bigger
issue than anyone realizes, and since Paul is the only Republican
candidate calling for an
end to US intervention around the world, the issue could conceivably
catapult him into the top tier. Mangu-Ward, a former
staffer at the Weekly Standard, sat there and rolled
her eyes, as if someone had suggested the moon is made of green
cheese.
Immediately after her performance, a howl
of outrage went up from the libertarian ranks, demanding Mangu-Ward’s
head. “Fire her!” they demanded – indeed, so numerous and loud were
the protests and subscription cancellations that Nick
Gillespie, former editor-in-chief at Reason and now
resident Talking Head, was forced to take to the Reason
blog with a rather weak defense of his colleague’s faux pas.
Since Reason’s slogan is “free markets and free minds,”
averred Gillespie, their editors are free to say and write whatever
they want. According to this theory, Mangu-Ward could predict the
victory of the Socialist Party candidate, and not collect a pink
slip. That this would never happen is irrelevant: Reason
is a Beltway institution, although they still retain their office
in Los Angeles, and Gillespie was simply defending his fellow Beltway
pundit – and the Conventional Wisdom she gave voice to – against
the mob of ignorant hoi polloi,
But why were the libertarian hoi polloi so angry? It was, I think,
much more than the fact that one is supposed to defend one’s own
tribe against external attack: after all, this isn’t
the first time Reason has sneered at Ron Paul, who
is so far removed from the trendy “lifestyle” issues
the magazine loves to write about that the distance can only be
measured in light years. The “cosmopolitan” wing of the libertarian
movement has very little in common with the grassroots, and this
is true for the simple reason that the “cosmotarians” nearly
all live and work in Washington, D.C., where the tyranny of
the Conventional Wisdom is strongest.
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No one in the Imperial City, outside of Ron Paul and his
staff, believes the Paul campaign is going anywhere, and, more –
they don’t believe it can go anywhere but into the dustbin
of yesterday’s failed campaigns. It is they – the self-appointed
gatekeepers and guardians of the Conventional Wisdom – who define
the parameters of the possible, and they have deemed a Paul presidency
impossible because it goes against everything they’ve ever
known and were taught to believe. Even the “libertarians” among
them – and I use the term very loosely – are trapped inside
this bubble where nothing much ever changes, and this means the
State and its worshippers are always going to be on top, and the
libertarian “radicals” (and their
progressive brothers-and-sisters-in-spirit
on the “far left”) are always going to be marginal. This ultra-conservative
mindset – conservative in the temperamental sense – is a function
not only of what the Beltway pundits believe, but, rather, of who
they are and where they live.
They are intellectuals, albeit of the third or fourth tier, publicists,
policy wonks – denizens of the Beltway subculture, where Power is
at the center of everything. In these circles, one’s relationship
to Power determines one’s social and professional standing, and
the attainment of Power is the end-all and be-all of existence.
If you’re not in Power, then you’re constantly angling and scheming
to get back into Power. The role of libertarians in such a milieu
is to act as the class clowns, or the Bad
Kids – who are allowed a certain amount of leeway, but, in order
to keep their jobs and their vaunted credibility, invariably police
themselves so as to avoid expulsion from Olympus. Thus, the Beltway
“libertarians” are allowed to play in their own sandbox, contenting
themselves with extolling
methamphetamine addiction and calling for the immediate importation
of the entire Mexican population to Arizona – but beyond that they
dare not stray. Thus, Reason stayed “neutral” – i.e. objectively
pro-war – during the run up to the invasion and occupation of Iraq,
running both
pro and anti-war pieces as if the two held equal weight from
a libertarian perspective. War is debatable over at Reason magazine,
but the legalization of heroin and the
sale of babies – not so much.
In any case, the really interesting part of all this – didn’t you
know we’d get to the interesting part eventually? – is what it says
about how differently the two main classes in American society see
the possibilities of social change.
To us ordinary Americans, the hoi polloi if you will, the process of social and political change is simple: we get to decide if and when a political change occurs, because, you see, we have these events known as elections. Which means we get to pick and choose our leaders: if we don’t like the current occupant of the Oval Office, we can pitch him out and raise someone else up to take his place. It could be any native-born American in theory at least.
August 29, 2011
Justin Raimondo [send him mail] is editorial director of Antiwar.com and is the author of An Enemy of the State: The Life of Murray N. Rothbard and Reclaiming the American Right: The Lost Legacy of the Conservative Movement.
Copyright © 2011 Antiwar.com