That Sucking Sound ...

... is being caused by an intellectual vacuum, as a post by Megan McArdle demonstates (HT: Glenn Reynolds).

McArdle is reacting in The Atlantic Monthly to the charge that she is enjoying left wing disappointment over Obama's cabinet appointments. She is not, she assures us. In fact, not only did she support Obama herself, but she would, "personally be pleased to see Ingrid Newkirk appointed to head the USDA." McArdle has been mistaken for a conservative and she's setting the record straight.

So far, so good, so to speak.

It's when she explains why she feels some measure of equanimity about this situation (and, by implication, why her fellow Obama supporters should, too), that things get interesting. After first calling herself a libertarian, she names having a "radical agenda" as a commonality between libertarians and "progressive" leftists, along with "the lunatic belief that if only there were some structural change in the world, they'd finally get the opportunity to enact their agenda".

Politicians don't listen because progressive and libertarian activists are not pushing minor schemes to benefit themselves greatly at small cost to everyone else. They are pushing for radical change that will require radical fiscal medicine to effect. That fiscal medicine will not pass unnoticed, and hence, it does not happen. [bold added]

Let us set aside McArdle's claim that there is a libertarian "agenda", for what she is saying about radical agendas per se is the interesting point here: This is half-right and half-wrong, which is worse than simply being wrong, because the correct half makes the incorrect half look correct.

Yes. It is true that politicians don't like agendas (radical or otherwise) when people understand that such agendas imply consequences that they do not support. (e.g., "[T]hey want national health insurance and lower government spending, but, you see, not that way....")

But no. It is not true that politicians simply don't listen to radicals, or that popular opposition to radical changes is written in stone. History shows us that, for better or worse, politicians frequently do listen to radicals. This is directly because radicals frequently do effect fundamental changes in popular opinion. Otherwise, we would still have black slavery, but lack an income tax today.

What, then, is the nature of McArdle's error? Her closing paragraph says it all:

This does not make me happy. It does not make me happy that I can't privatize social security [sic] and eliminate the corporate income tax, and it does not make me happy that I can't have radical agricultural reform and a stiff carbon tax. But the universe is not here to please me.

Set aside the fact that her goals are contradictory (or even self-contradictory, as in the case of Social Security). Notice the magical powers she seems to attribute to politicians generally and Obama in particular. What would it take -- to use a truly pro-freedom example -- to phase out Social Security?

To listen to McArdle (or most leftists), it would seem to take some form of dictatorship. What other kind of "structural change", exactly, would it take to get popular objections to all that "nasty ... medicine" out of the way of these radical agendas? To her credit, she opts for resignation, instead, but she is still wrong.

And the nature of her error is that it is a confusion of the man-made for the metaphysically given. "[T]he universe is not here to please me." True, but as the case of slavery shows us, widespread sentiment is, unlike gravity, not a natural force beyond man's control. It can be changed.

The question is: How? Man, environmentalist fashion and centuries of religious dogma to the contrary, is a natural phenomenon. His mind is, and his opinions are. As with any other thing in nature that one wants to change, one must consider the nature of man and his mind before one can attempt to change popular opinion.

When one does so, he will realize that he cannot force a mind to agree, but that he can attempt to persuade other individuals of the merits of his position by offering sound arguments. This is what the "moral suasion" of the abolitionists was, and we see the results today. It sounds contradictory to put it this way since men have free will (and individual rights), but in political discourse, it is true: "Nature, to be commanded, must be obeyed."

But McArdle, I would guess, despairs of achieving a radical agenda at least in part because she understands (correctly) that popular opinion will not change overnight. However, there is more to this picture. If persuading other people is the key to (eventually) enacting a radical agenda, what is required to do so? The one thing libertarians uniformly dismiss: fundamental philosophical principles. You can neither explain what freedom is or offer a convincing argument for why someone should support it (instead of, say, government handouts) without recourse to principles that correspond to the facts of reality.

Libertarians thus "tend to moon over" various free-sounding (but often contradictory) random stances but ultimately become resigned to politics as usual. This is because they refuse at the outset to arm themselves for the battle of ideas necessary to achieve (or even understand) the goal of freedom they say they want. In doing so, they leave the door wide open to those who will not shrink from the kind of "structural changes" needed to enact their radical agendas without popular consent.

Anyone who doesn't like this state of affairs, take note, and know that treason vs. resignation is a false alternative.

-- CAV

Updates

Today: Changed wording of one sentence.