the contempt gap

Will Wilkinson does as he does and mocks the American left for thinking that we should try to advance our moral and ideological interests politically. He points out that our positions aren't super popular. Meanwhile, his cosmopolitan globalist liberaltarianism platform is sure to take off in the heartland. I expect it any day now.

It may be that the media's tendency to take any conservative populist movement seriously and to treat any liberal populist movement as a gang of crazies is too much to overcome now. I hear it constantly: "well, what liberals need to do is to start a tea party of the left." But the left wouldn't receive the fawning, credulous media coverage that the tea parties did. Look, from 2002 to 2005, I organized in the antiwar movement constantly. I knocked on doors and went to Departments of Licensing and Inspection and spoke to alternative media and attended meeting after pointless meeting. I still have the permits. You'd be surprised, if you live in the bubble of mainstream cable and Internet media, at how receptive and friendly most of the people I'd meet-- the mythical "average Americans"-- were to a dedicated and avowedly left-wing antiwar movement.

But that sympathy could never survive an incredibly hostile media environment, and both cable news and the establishment blogosphere-- even the liberal blogosphere-- took pains to paint the antiwar movement as a batch of Stalinist crazies. That this was perpetrated by corporate media is no surprise, but that progressive bloggers never learn that the extremes define the center is baffling. The Tea Parties don't get exactly what they want, usually. But they steadily and consistently push the conservative movement to the right, and in doing so drag the center with them. That's the salient lesson of the last several years: extremes define the center. Yet liberal bloggers delight in kneecapping the man to their left, while conservatives race to be the man to the right. How could anyone wonder why this results in a steady march rightward? What bothers me is never that liberal bloggers fail to adopt the ideas of the left but always that they don't understand that true left wing voices give them cover and help to establish a middle ground that is conducive to their interests.

Wilkinson's corpus is very odd to me, but it's odd in a way that's keeping with many other bohemian, culturally liberal libertarian writers. They have profound policy and political disagreements with American liberals and leftists, but on fundamental cultural and philosophical levels, they are far closer to the average American liberal than the average American conservative. The fundamental architecture of American cosmopolitanism-- the assumption of equal dignity across difference, the celebration of individuality over social constructs of religion or rank, the preeminence of the right to be yourself, the things that many of us truly value in the commission of personal freedom-- these have been built by the left. If you are more interested in specific legislative victories, I would remind you of who was the vanguard of civil rights for black Americans, women, and gay and lesbian men and women. But ultimately my concern here is social and  cultural, and I don't know how anyone can fail to give pride of place to the left for advancing the right to be your own weird self. We've always been the home of freaks and weirdos and out theres, and I couldn't be prouder.

Cosmopolitan libertarians live in liberal urban enclaves, surrounded by liberals, taking advantage of the kind of governmental cultural and transportation infrastructure that liberals created. They consume movies, novels, music, and theater crafted in overwhelming majorities by leftists. They operate in environments where the liberal spirit of tolerance and freedom from conformity underpins everything, yet they will identify again and again the liberal hand as the one of villainy. 

As is the case always on blogs, people will mistake the political for the personal. The point is not about the social ugliness of libertarian hatred for liberals. (Well, liberals they don't know personally.) The point is that rhetoric influences politics and politics defines policy. I don't understand why these people believe that they can express such disdain for cultural liberalism while maintaining the benefits of it. There's a bizarre faith among this country's rarefied political class that they can cede every major political battle to the the reactionary fringe and yet maintain their arty bohemian privileged lifestyles. I assure you: the average libertarian who disagrees with both sides but saves his invective for only the left does not want to live in Tea Party America. When ground has been given completely to the people who are bringing you this debt deal, they will find the consequences of their contempt gap to be quite non-theoretical.

I don't know what to take from the insistence like that of Wilkinson or the liberals he quotes that the public is not with us. Shall we give up? When I graduated high school the notion of gay marriage was a joke. We worked. History tells us that crazy commitments become less crazy. The Goldwater campaign happened. The idea that libertarianism would ever be as influential as it is was once a pipe dream. You are compelled by conscience, and so you work. Why that deserves mockery, whatever your ideological persuasion, will forever be a mystery to me.