Very few people respond to arguments on their merits, especially in politics. They like some speakers and dislike others, largely for tribal reasons, and then they praise or condemn the associated arguments accordingly. So, if you’re establishment darling Ezra Klein, you can safely cowrite a book (Abundance) condemning absurd, byzantine, efficiency-killing thickets of regulations—in liberal cities in particular, he dares to observe—and be widely praised for your insights, though libertarians and free-market conservatives have been issuing the same warning for decades and are condemned as monsters for it.
Jon Stewart, slapping his hand to his head, now listens with horror to Klein’s (wholly unsurprising) tales of construction approval processes that take months or years—only for the process to start again when it seems as if the filing of endless forms is nearly over—whereas just weeks ago, cordial though he was, Stewart lamented in his interview of libertarian Nick Gillespie that without significant government oversight, the market inevitably devolves into a soul-crushing system of constant exploitation. The kind of “exploitation” that allows you and a willing, paid worker to finish putting an awning on your hardware store or a deck in your back yard without it turning into a federal case is good exploitation. Let free individuals worry about it, not government.
I don’t need to imagine how Stewart and his liberal ilk would have reacted to deregulatory suggestions such as Klein’s 20 years ago. I lived it. Or more accurately, one of my co-workers at the time at the mostly anti-regulation American Council on Science and Health, Jeff Stier, lived it. He gamely went on The Daily Show, which Stewart then hosted, to explain that regulations banning chemicals from food routinely target substances that do no demonstrated harm and are present in such small amounts they can barely be detected. If the regulations were applied consistently, most of nature, which is essentially made of chemicals, would have to be eradicated.
Liberals like Stewart and his applause-sign-heeding audience don’t feel the need to get into all the scientific and historical details on how we ended up banning even trace amounts of things that might possibly harm you if you consumed a barrel of them per day. The Daily Show simply deployed Samantha Bee to get a cooperative Stier to hold an ostensibly poisonous banana while she sprayed bug-killing chemicals around his head and tried to goad him into admitting he felt unsafe. Ha ha! Hilarious! Take that, capitalism! Take that, mainstream science! Liberalism forever, dude!
Or if not forever, at least until Ezra Klein, who has done, like, interactive graphs for The Washington Post and stuff, gives liberals tribal permission to laugh at the regulators instead of the businesses and chemical-makers. You wouldn’t want to admit the truth too hastily and end up looking like a Republican, after all. Not when you worked so hard for that liberal arts degree that proves you’re smart.
Of course, if Stewart et al get carried away with their cheap-shot, partisan pseudo-arguments, they simply pivot away from political lecturing (the most snide variant of which may be Daily Show alum John Oliver’s feigned, stunned hyperventilating over any non-left development in the news) and say: hey, it’s all just jokes, man, no reason to expect us to check facts or take counter-arguments seriously.
You won’t see liberal-leaning audiences affording quite so much tolerance and wiggle room, though, to, say, Elon Musk’s constant online trolling, juvenile though I agree it often is. They should consider—amidst the rising chorus from real Tesla-vandalizing hordes denouncing him as a fascist—that Musk may be fighting essentially the same battle that Klein and his co-author Derek Thompson, not to mention newly-moderate Jon Stewart, are. That is, they’re all trying to get a burdensome, tyrannical regulatory-and-spending state to behave more rationally and produce more efficient and cost-effective results for hundreds of millions of taxpayers.
(And a pox on the first passive, acceptance-seeking libertarian who responds merely by saying, oh, well, at least the liberals like Klein are coming around, great news. If it takes normal, sane market conservatives all of five minutes to see the wisdom of deregulating or cost-cutting but liberals six decades and counting, maybe the liberals aren’t really trying that hard to understand economic debates or freedom and won’t have your back next time—not that conservatives can be trusted anymore either, but that I will address in future columns.)
But if, even after seeing how The Daily Show and Klein affect liberal brains, you don’t believe liberals mainly want to hear sermons praising big government and condemning its foes rather than hearing rational arguments, note phenomena such as Rev. Dana Colley Corsello, aglow with moderate, Episcopalian moral self-congratulation, giving a literal sermon at the National Cathedral about Musk lacking empathy and empathy being crucial for morality. Like most people, especially my fellow utilitarians (not to be confused with Unitarians), I agree empathy is central to morality. It’s the almost telepathy-like link to other humans by which we ask the essential question “How would I feel in that person’s place?” It makes kind treatment of others intuitive so that we don’t have to make complicated charts and graphs first.
But an intellectually honest person trying to understand how others think and feel would strongly suspect that Musk, when he said recently that empathy can be exploited as a weakness in our culture, wasn’t hoping to make people unfeeling. Rather, it seems obvious he was warning them, much as Gad Saad has tried to and much as Ayn Rand meant to with her criticisms of “altruism,” that a simple, emotive response based in empathy can lead you astray when making complex policy decisions, causing net harm to the very people about whom you were concerned. Even the lefty site Snopes, while affirming that Musk said empathy can be a weakness, felt compelled to provide context to that effect.
But why bother teaching your parishioners about complex secondary effects when you can pretend that the target of your sermon is just a startlingly inhuman villain with no concern for other humans, even as you ooze warmth and faux-understanding of him, the poor, and one and all? Even the blandest and most mainstream of churches needs a good villain. And it’s even more satisfying if one can condescend to the villain as if he must have been raised wrong or suffered a brain impairment that makes him unable to grasp even the most basic moral concepts.
Less satisfying is wrestling with the more tricky real arguments in play, which might undermine government, left-liberalism, and religion alike, and not a moment too soon.
—Todd Seavey is the author of Libertarianism for Beginners and is on X at @ToddSeavey
