We’re ruled by people who talk about “freedom” when it suits their current political aims but turn a blind eye to coercion the rest of the time.
I’d imagine poor Morrissey has lost some of his old punk friends, who rightly shared his complaints about fascists and gay-bashing skinheads back in the 1980s but won’t join him in criticizing radical Muslims for the same sorts of intolerance, especially not given ethnic tensions over current rioting in England—and any moment now, perhaps a war with Iran about which to protest.
Morrissey may have fantasized about beheading Thatcher, but he’s consistent enough in his anti-violence to slam both right-wing-beloved and left-wing-beloved constituencies when they deserve it (deserve it deserve it).
Aptly, I learned about Morrissey’s old band the Smiths from the left-wing goth kids back in high school but, by the time I saw him live just a few years back, went to the concert with a prominent paleoconservative magazine editor who shares Morrissey’s wariness about immigration.
(Trying to rein in spending since the pandemic lockdowns, I was reduced last month, by contrast, to seeing the Smiths cover band Smiths Tribute NYC with a former comics editor who leans left but has increasing political doubts in recent years. Opening for the band was a fine combination Pretenders/Sheryl Crow tribute band called Chrissie Crow. No complaints. Times change.)
I’m all for finding borderless solutions to all tribal and cultural conflicts, but I admit my preferred solutions would involve a lot more crime-deterring private gun ownership, especially in England—not to mention an end to any government subsidies anywhere for migration or migrant housing. But then, I’d end all government subsidies in general and all government. That, my friends, is freedom.
I’m sure there are some aged punks out there, though, who now (on cue) think that the natural heir to the “freedom” mantle in the 21st century is our potential first black/Asian female president, Kamala Harris, and that the fact she cackled and danced even as cities burned in 2020 only makes her more “punk rock” (not just sociopathic, like most presidential candidates and leaders in general). That awful year began just months after the riot-filled Joker was in cinemas, after all, and the musical sequel (with Lady Gaga as Joker’s sidekick Harley Quinn) comes out just a few weeks before this year’s election.
The violence in the first movie got a lot of attention when the scolding media were fearful/hopeful it would spark right-wing white rioting (which it didn’t), but they didn’t finger-wag at the film’s anarchic street scenes too much the following summer as Black Lives Matter supporters set cities ablaze instead, some of them bailed out with money raised by a fund Harris touted.
Now Harris uses a Beyonce song about “freedom” in her first post-Biden campaign ad, but naturally she doesn’t mean freedoms like dancing, cackling, sleeping with your boss, or marrying a man who impregnated the babysitter during his previous marriage—all things that, whatever their moral value, one could in theory at least do without government having to burden other taxpayers. Nearly every freedom on her ad checklist implies a government expenditure: anti-poverty programs, government-funded healthcare, gun confiscation (presumably enforced by government guns), and the legal pestering of ex-presidents.
No doubt she’d also like to tax you more than Trump would, though I’m not suggesting he or the right generally understand freedom either. Trump apparently still thinks, like the dreariest kind of late-20th-century conservatives, that outlawing flag-burning would be a natural expression of freedom. Trump’s code-switching, so to speak, between freedom-lover and autocrat is worse than Harris’ between Indian and black Southerner and arguably even worse than Vance’s between neocon and hillbilly.
When the right uses the word “freedom,” it seems as though it just means mercilessly swatting different targets than the left would pick—possibly childlessness, for instance, which you increasingly get the impression they’d be happy to tax. I’ve noticed at least one Vance-leaning paleolibertarian online sounding sympathetic to Vance’s suggestion that the childless probably shouldn’t hold elected office, since they have less incentive to build a good future. Such a rule would bar from office such august non-parents as libertarians Ayn Rand, Ludwig von Mises, and Murray Rothbard. True, they might not have cared—which speaks well of them but not of clumsy attempts to engineer culture through law.
By all means, enforce simple laws against theft and assault, but try using cops to do more than that and you quickly end up with tragedies like the Libertarian Party being infiltrated by “feds,” at least according to its current chairwoman, Angela McArdle. She claims to be using FOIA requests now to ferret them out. I hope she’ll also remind some of the more right-leaning recent crop of LP members that fascist impulses, not wokeness, are usually what lead to these sorts of COINTELPRO government surveillance operations. It’s one of many reasons we’d all likely be better off with someone like the Libertarian Party’s presidential candidate, Chase Oliver, running the government than with another “law and order” Republican or Democrat. (Oliver will make his case this coming Monday at the Soho Forum in Manhattan, debating against conservative Trump-supporter Art Laffer.)
But then, no election will solve our problems. Changes in the intellectual climate just might, and to that end I note that Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch has a new book out arguing we suffer under Too Much Law; Glenn Loury (a non-leftist at Brown as I once was but unlike me one who’s actually brown) has just released Late Admissions: Confessions of a Black Conservative; and for more general limbering up of the mind, Charles Fort’s 150th birthday sees the posthumous publication of his Letters of the Damned, which shows how his mind traipsed back and forth across the dividing line between the scientific and the paranormal before the more rigid 20th-century divide between those two aspects of thought set in.
Despite the recent boom in UFO claims at congressional hearings, I’m not suggesting we leap back and forth across that divide willy-nilly, but as with politics, music, parenting, and so much else, it’s good to avoid lock-step, partisan thinking. Gentle poets tend to understand that better than political activists. As freedom dies, nuance is usually the first thing to burn. Alas!
—Todd Seavey is the author of Libertarianism for Beginners and is on X at @ToddSeavey