Pun Salad

A libertarian—which means a true “liberal” in the original sense of the word—wants a society with no human‐made, involuntary ups and downs, no masters and slaves. That’s all there is to it.

But what about equality?

One reply is that the libertarian admires the varied gifts of humans: some have athletic prowess, some have wisdom in religion, and some have insight into commercially tested betterments, such as a new app or a new hip replacement. The libertarian therefore wants people to exchange their gifts for mutual advantage and mutual enlightenment. It amounts to free trade and free speech among free adults. Lovely.

You know it works in rock music and friendship and the English language. Let’s have equal liberty of permission to venture, says the libertarian. Let’s not have governmental intervention in rock music, friendship, language … or the economy. Equality of permission. No masters with a clipboard or a regulation and the threat of a fine or imprisonment to back them up.

Even among ideological libertarians, the Libertarian Party has long been viewed with a mix of disdain and embarrassment. To the degree anybody else is aware of the LP, it’s from the 2016 presidential campaign of former New Mexico governor Gary Johnson, whose poll numbers briefly broke into the low double digits before collapsing to a desultory 3.3%. Other than that, the party has languished for five decades, usually getting 1% or less of the vote for president every four years and electing only a tiny smattering of local officials around the country.

But the LP’s lack of electoral relevance does not mean that its recent takeover by a reactionary and populist faction is a politically inconsequential event. The party’s core active membership is in the low five figures, somewhere between the Proud Boys and the Democratic Socialists of America. It has a decent organizational infrastructure with a chapter in every state and in many local precincts too. And it has a history of mobilizing resources in a targeted fashion to pass ballot initiatives and organize protests.

If it decides, for example, to aid election subversion efforts in 2024, it could turn out people in support of Jan. 6-style rallies or worse around the country. This is not a far-fetched possibility given that the new national leadership either minimizes or sympathizes with Jan. 6 rioters, and several state party chapters have made statements in support of the riot.

[…]

Aside from Johnson’s candidacy, the party had mostly drawn attention for antics ranging from the mildly amusing to utterly cringe-inducing, such as running an Elvis Presley impersonator as a perennial candidate, nominating someone who accidentally turned his skin blue by drinking colloidal silver, entertaining the presidential aspirations of the mentally unstable alleged murderer John McAfee, and treating C-SPAN viewers to a man stripping nearly naked on the national convention stage. But now, as Ken White, a criminal defense lawyer and respected commentator known by his online moniker Popehat, aptly observed on Twitter, “bigoted shitposters” have now wrested control from these “mostly harmless cranks.”

Time was, conscientious parents fretted about “summer learning loss.” Now, when much of what schools do subtracts from understanding, summer could at least be a time for recuperation from educational malpractice — were summer not just another season of screen addictions for young people deformed by this digital age.

In 2008, Americans were being inundated by journalism performing anticipatory sociology. “Techno-cheerleaders” — Mark Bauerlein’s term — predicted that millennials (born 1981-1996), the first generation suckled by their digital devices, would dazzle the world with the sublime personal and social consequences of their mind-melds with those devices. And their emancipation from the dead hand of everything prior. Bauerlein, Emory University professor of English, dissented.

Fourteen years ago, in “The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future (Or, Don’t Trust Anyone Under 30)” he anticipated that millennials were going to become “unsatisfied and confused” adults, bereft of the consolations of a cultural inheritance, which is unavailable to nonreaders. They would be gripped by the furies of brittle people bewildered by encounters with disagreement, which they find inexplicable. And by the apocalyptic terrors that afflict frustrated utopians, the only kind there is.

The Midwest has been told to brace for rolling blackouts this summer. We expect the occasional outage when the grid’s stressed; we’re not unreasonable. A transformer blows and throws a squirrel into low orbit, and I’ll get a text from my power company explaining they expect it to be fixed by 4:17 p.m. But this summer? We might get a text that says, “Hey, it’s Tuesday.”

Isn’t it about time, really? The idea of having power whenever we want it, well, that’s pure 100 percent American privilege, as if we’re entitled to keep the lights on while the planet turns into a lifeless cinder. Remember what our first Fundamental Transformer said in his early days of hectoring his lessers:

“We can’t drive our SUVs and eat as much as we want and keep our homes on 72 degrees at all times . . . and then just expect that other countries are going to say, ‘Okay.’”

Well, I have to admit, I’m not particularly concerned with whether other countries (Nepal? Madagascar? Peru? which one is our moral better, I forget?) will say Okay, good going, nice start when our air conditioners shut off and the garage door doesn’t open and your electric car won’t recharge and the hot water isn’t hot. I am concerned with some old lady in an apartment who dies in a heat wave when the AC goes down, as happens every summer in Our Moral Very-Better France. Odd how all the people who told us we were killing Grandma because we didn’t wear three masks while walking outdoors at a zoo are content to put her on the altar like some Aztec sacrifice to the climate gods, but I digress.