March into the sea

This was going around earlier, cracking me up with its sheer absurdity: A rich libertarian expresses disillusionment with democracy, proposes moving into the sea.

Libertarians speak this discourse about freedom - but a strange, one-dimensional type of freedom which seems to reduce totally to the rights to (a) commodify everything and (b) to dispose of your personal property exactly as you saw fit. They never acknowledge the distributional problems - i.e. that some people have a lot, while others have hardly anything. In that case, this sort of de jure freedom rapidly becomes de facto unfreedom for most people. (I've suspected for a while that high levels of inequality are, in fact, the true purpose of libertarianism.)

Most people, of course, would define freedom in a much wider fashion - there would be something about the right to have your own stuff, but most of the content would be about voting rights, free speech, freedom from arbitrary imprisonment, torture and execution, bodily rights, etc. You know, the rights underpinning any democratic system of government.

This particular man argues that those democratic freedoms have come into conflict with libertarian "freedoms":

I remain committed to the faith of my teenage years:

[Usually a bad sign; signifies prolonged adolescence.]

to authentic human freedom as a precondition for the highest good. I stand against confiscatory taxes, totalitarian collectives, and the ideology of the inevitability of the death of every individual.

[He thinks that he'll live forever, in other words. Megalomania: also a bad sign.]

For all these reasons, I still call myself “libertarian.”

But I must confess that over the last two decades, I have changed radically on the question of how to achieve these goals. Most importantly, I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible...

The 1920s were the last decade in American history during which one could be genuinely optimistic about politics. Since 1920, the vast increase in welfare beneficiaries and the extension of the franchise to women — two constituencies that are notoriously tough for libertarians — have rendered the notion of “capitalist democracy” into an oxymoron.

[In short, he blames women and minorities for the lack of success that his pet pro-inequality policies have had. If they'd never been granted political freedoms - you know, if we were still locking up suffragettes and lynching African-Americans - perhaps rich white males could really be free.

Talk about an intellectually corrupt, gutter-crawling philosophy.]

Fortunately, this guy has a solution:

Because there are no truly free places left in our world,

[Parse this statement. Try and make sense of it. Does your head hurt too?]

I suspect that the mode for escape must involve some sort of new and hitherto untried process that leads us to some undiscovered country; and for this reason I have focused my efforts on new technologies that may create a new space for freedom. Let me briefly speak to three such technological frontiers:

(1) Cyberspace...

(2) Outer space...

(3) Seasteading. Between cyberspace and outer space lies the possibility of settling the oceans...

Please, march into the sea. I am eagerly awaiting the news report that a pack of rich libertarians have been kidnapped by pirates. You can really only laugh at these sad-sack people: Afraid of (other's) voting rights, afraid of women, afraid of people with less money or more skin-tone. Sitting on a huge pile of money afraid of every uncertainty that may lead them to part with a cent of it.

This guy will probably spend more money in a futile attempt to move into the sea than he ever would pay in higher tax rates.

Really, though, the libertarians aren't worth talking about. To paraphrase Eisenhower, their number is negligible and they are stupid. I wanted to talk about democracy. What is it?

Slavoj Žižek points out, somewhere or other, that democracy as it is today used refers to the existence of a set of rules that allow most people to vote and have their votes counted in some fashion. (For example, the US has an electoral college and Senate that allow people in small states a greater say in the outcome than others in larger ones. New Zealand, by contrast, has a Parliament with proportional representation that allows each party to be represented in proportion to the actual votes that it has gained. Both are considered democracies in spite of the fact that they treat individual votes quite differently.)

What we mean when we discuss this sort of democracy, Žižek argues, is not the emergence of any sort of people's will or collective decision, but the maintenance of the rules themselves. The rules of the game trump any other concern:

Democracy - in the way the term is used today - concerns, above all formal legality: its minimal definition is the unconditional adherence to a certain set of formal rules which guarantee that antagonisms are fully absorbed into the agonistic game. [The Universal Exception, p. 53]

[Incidentally, I think that this is one of the reasons that Hugo Chavez is viewed with such suspicion in Western quarters - he has set out to change the rules of the game, to put in place a different set of fundamental principles through democratic means. His successful attempt to change the Venezuelan constitution through a referendum outraged sensibilities more than nationalizations, I think.]

The democracy that Žižek seeks to argue for allows those "antagonisms" - by which he means the potentially chaotic workings-out of a collective will - freer play. Rather than being captured and tamed within an orderly process, he thinks that we need to "overdo democracy". This could entail a number of uncertain outcomes - going far beyond both the neatly unjust libertarian solutions and the rules of the game itself. If democracy is to be worth the name, it must encompass the possibility of nonlinearity, sweeping change, radical discontinuity.

This view is coded within the libertarian's remarks. He recognizes that his ideal dream society (a dream for him; a nightmare for the poor) is threatened by democratic change, even at the glacial pace at which it is occurring under the centrist Obama administration. To preserve his order of things, his celestial spheres of riches, he rejects democracy. I'd choose the opposite, and be happy when disorderly democracy swept away the dust from the surfaces of modern life.

[Note: I am aware that, in good Benjaminian fashion I have also romanticized the dust that I condemn at the above link.)