DON'T VOTE - It Just Encourages the Bastards E-Book

P. J. O'Rourke

• Herausgeber: Grove Press UK
• Kategorie: Lebensstil
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2010

Seitenzahl: 351

Beschreibung

Best-selling humorist P.J. O'Rourke is back with his latest political masterpiece, DON'T VOTE - It Just Encourages the Bastards. Far from the typical high school textbook's survey of United States history, DON'T VOTE takes a hysterically sharp look at some of the most important issues Americans face today.Using his signature wit and keen observational skills, O'Rourke reflects on his forty year career as a political commentator, spanning his addled hippie youth to his current state of right-wing grouch maturity.Proclaiming his political stance as to the right of Rush Limbaugh, O'Rourke explores ideas ranging from why Americans love freedom and the founding fathers' unique perspective on the pursuit of happiness to the modern application of the Bill of Rights, an odd document of which Americans are inordinately proud, that guarantees their rights to Twitter, kvetch, and prevent the Pentagon from sending Marines to sleep on fold-out couches.

Leseprobe

DON’T VOTE!

It Just Encourages the Bastards

Also by P. J. O’Rourke

Modern Manners

The Bachelor Home Companion

Republican Party Reptile

Holidays in Hell

Parliament of Whores

Give War a Chance

All the Trouble in the World

Age and Guile Beat Youth, Innocence, and a Bad Haircut

Eat the Rich

The CEO of the Sofa

Peace Kills

On The Wealth of Nations

Driving Like Crazy

DON’T VOTE!

It Just Encourages the Bastards

P. J. O’Rourke

First published in the United States of America in 2010 by Grove/Atlantic Inc.

First published in Great Britain in 2010 by Grove Press, an imprint of Grove/Atlantic Inc.

Copyright ©P.J. O’Rourke, 2010

The moral right of P.J. O’Rourke to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of the book.

Every effort has been made to trace or contact all copyright-holders. The publishers will be pleased to make good any omissions or rectify any mistakes brought to their attention at the earliest opportunity.

1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2

A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library.

Hardback ISBN 978 1 84887 906 5

Trade paperback ISBN 978 1 84887 942 3

eBook ISBN 978 1 84887 908 9

Printed in Great Britain

Grove Press Ormond House 26-27 Boswell Street London WC1N 3JZ

www.groveatlantic.com

To my wife, Christina,

for her encouragement of this particular bastard

and for not imposing term limits

Contents

Acknowledgements

Apologia Pro !%@& Sua

PART I

THE SEX, DEATH, AND BOREDOM THEORY OF POLITICS

1. Kill Fuck Marry

2. Politics Makes Us Free—And We’re Worth It

3. A Digression on Happiness

4. The Happy Realization That All Freedoms Are Economic Freedoms (And Failure Is an Option)

5. The Murderous Perverted Nuptial Bliss Method of Establishing Political Principles

6. The Purgatory of Freedom and the Hell of Politics

7. Morality in Politics—And What’s It Doing in There?

8. Taxes

9. More Taxes

10. Being Penny-Wise

PART II

WHAT IS TO BE DONE?

1. The U.S.S. Thresher Bailout and the Washing-Machine-for-Her-Birthday Stimulus Plan

2. And While We’re at It . . .

3. Generation Vex

4. Health Care Reform

5. Climate Change

6. The End of the American Automobile Industry

7. The Trade Imbalance

8. Gun Control

9. Campaign Finance Reform

10. Terrorism

11. Foreign Policy

12. Foreign Policy, Part Two—It Keeps Getting More Foreign

PART III

PUTTING OUR BIG, FAT POLITICAL ASS ON A DIET

1. Why I’m Right

2. Where the Right Went Wrong

3. A Digression on Shouting at Each Other

4. The Next Big Stink

5. The Fix Is In

6. All Hands on Deck

Acknowledgements

The title belongs to the great American political consultant, campaign strategist, advance man, and political prankster Dick Tuck. More than thirty years ago Dick told me that “Don’t vote—it just encourages the bastards” was a favorite saying of his mother.

Dick Tuck was the Nemesis of Dick Nixon. At the first Nixon–Kennedy debate Tuck hired an old lady to get in front of the TV cameras wearing a Nixon button and throw her arms around the sweaty candidate who thought he’d bested his young opponent. “Don’t worry, son,” the old lady said loudly. “He beat you now, but you’ll get him next time.”

Tuck did some of his best work for the Kennedys, in particular the most estimable of them, Robert. Dick, I apologize for any harsh words about my fellow bogtrotters in the following pages. Although Tuck and I are, politically, an aisle apart, I’ve never had a partisan argument with him. Who could argue with the Nemesis of Dick Nixon?

Along with some jokes, this book is a work of political theory. As such it is not too original, and I mean that in a good way. Nothing is worse than a too original political theory except perhaps a too original cookbook. “Bring water to a boil and immerse live pythons.” To call an artist derivative is an insult.1 To call a political theorist derivative is to admit that he or she has paid some attention to the eon of human political activity from which political theory derives.

Any reader who notices my use of the phrase “politics is an arrangement among persons” (or my use of the phrase “It’s not a thinking man’s game”) may suspect that Don’t Vote is a gloss or a glib exposition upon Michael Oakeshott’s 1947 essay “Rationalism in Politics.”2 And that’s true. Or I think maybe it’s true. Twenty years of intermittent efforts were required for me to push my way through the prose brambles of Oakeshott’s thesis. What you read here may be a passage of thought, or it may be a record of scratched mental tissue and torn ideological clothing resulting from an attempt to follow in Oakeshott’s footsteps.

There are other writings that should be consulted for smarter versions of what I’ve written. Novus Ordo Seclorum—The Intellectual Origins of the Constitution by Forrest McDonald delivers what it promises it will. Adam Smith’s The Theory of Moral Sentiments was the best work (and still is) of moral philosophy available as the moral philosophy of America was being formed. McDonald believes that The Theory of Moral Sentiments and The Wealth of Nations were the dominant flavorings to the broth of intellect in which America’s founders stewed. (A silly metaphor but one of the pleasures an author takes in writing acknowledgements is knowing that they go to press lightly edited.)

Thomas Paine is a political theorist whom I love for his sheer irksomeness to authority.3 All there really is to say about the politics of liberty is contained in Paine’s dictum “man has no property in man.” But I have a crumbling, old collection of Paine’s work (cover price 50¢) where, in a windy introduction by John Dos Passos, Paine’s limitations are inadvertently pointed out. Dos Passos damns Paine by praising his “faith in man’s unaided reason.” A fellow hated by both the king of England and Robespierre and distrusted by John Adams—surely there was more to Paine than that.

Thomas Paine by Craig Nelson and Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man by Christopher Hitchens gave me a better understanding of one Tom. And Hitchens’s Thomas Jefferson: Author of America shed light on the complications of another. That book also ends with a splendid line of Christopher’s, which I meant to find a place for in this book. Here will have to suffice: “History is a tragedy and not a morality tale.”

While randomly pulling books from my reference shelf to look up some small historical matter I made the happy find of Hugh Brogan’s The Penguin History of the United States of America. My copy was published in England in 1990, and I seem to have owned but not consulted it for a score of years. Brogan turns out to have a discerning eye for the manifold threads of populism in American politics. I thank him for an improved comprehension of Jacksonian Democrats, Radical Republicans, Greenbackers, and Progressives.

As to populism, I was holding forth in a lecture hall not long ago and, in answer to a question about the Tea Party movement, I said, “At least they aren’t demanding any further positive rights from government. Name me another American populist group that hasn’t demanded new positive rights.” A voice from the crowd called out, “The Whiskey Rebellion!” Point taken.

For the concept of positive and negative rights, I—and all the rest of us—owe gratitude to Isaiah Berlin and his 1959 book Two Concepts of Liberty.

When I’m faced with political-economy conundrums (and political economy seems to contain nothing else), I fall back on a few works filled with common sense: The Road to Serfdom by Friedrich Hayek, Economics in One Lesson by Henry Hazlitt, Capitalism and Freedom by Milton Friedman, and Free to Choose by Milton and Rose Friedman.

These books are moral as well as material guides. Dr. Larry Arnn, president of Hillsdale College, once had an argument with Milton Friedman on this point. It went something like this:

Arnn: “Free to Choose is a deeply moral book.”

Friedman: “Free to Choose is a book of practical economics.”

Arnn: “It’s a moral book.”

Friedman: “It’s a practical book.”

Arnn: “It’s a moral book.”

Friedman: “I wrote it, and I say it’s a book of practical economics.”

Arnn: “Once you write it, it isn’t yours anymore. I read it, and I say it’s a moral book.”

When I become confused by economic theory (and is there any other way to be?), I turn to New Ideas from Dead Economists by Todd Buchholz. He quickly and cogently explains the ideas of dead economists and tells us why to hope that most of them stay dead.

Then there is a book that provides a negative lesson. Much as I admire the stylings of H. L. Mencken, it is his worst work, Notes on Democracy, that I find inspiring. Notes was published in 1926 and is an extended bitch on the subject. All Mencken can manage by way of complimenting democracy is to ask, “Is it inordinately wasteful, extravagant, dishonest? Then so is every other form of government: all alike are enemies to laborious and virtuous men.” That’s crap. Witness mankind’s experiences with “every other form of government.” Witness the alternatives to democracy on offer the very year Notes came out: Russia’s communism, Italy’s fascism, the whiff of mob rule in Britain’s general strike.

One more writer upon whom I’ve relied heavily—though he’s neither profound nor consistent—is me. Writing about politics after an adulthood spent writing about politics would be impossible without a certain amount of self-plagiarism.

Some phrases, sentences, and the occasional paragraph from my previous books reappear in this one. In Parliament of Whores, All the Trouble in the World, Eat the Rich, and On The Wealth of Nations I tried, in different contexts, to think through some of the same problems I’ve tried to think through here. Sometimes you say things as well as you can and when it’s time to say the same thing the person you end up quoting is you.

“He must be a poor creature who does not often repeat himself,” said Oliver Wendell Holmes. “Imagine the author of the excellent piece of advice, ‘Know thyself,’ never alluding to that sentiment again.” And I’ve used that before too, in The CEO of the Sofa. Only once, however, do I lift a long passage from a volume of my own. In 1993 I wrote an op-ed for The Wall Street Journal saying what I thought of Hillary Clinton’s health care reform proposal. I included this in a 1995 collection, Age and Guile. As a testimony to the circles—per Dante’s Inferno—that politics runs around in, I changed one name and a couple of numbers and this was what I thought of Barack Obama’s health care reform proposal.

Besides cribs from my books, at least twenty-seven essays and speeches written over the past fifteen years have served as rough drafts for parts of Don’t Vote.

I am very grateful to The Weekly Standard where I’ve had a happy home since it was founded in 1995. I thank everyone on its staff from William Kristol and Fred Barnes at the top of the masthead to the most temporary of interns who politely pretend to know who I am when I phone the office. It is a pleasure working with all of you. And for adding ideas to my head and subtracting solecisms from my prose I give specific thanks to deputy editor Richard Starr, literary editor Philip Terzian, managing editor Claudia Anderson, and my oldest friend in Washington, senior editor Andrew Ferguson.

I also had ample opportunities to talk, think, and write about politics at The Atlantic under the editorship of Cullen Murphy and before that under the editorship of the late and much-missed Michael Kelly.

The chapter “Why I’m Right” appeared in the book Why I Turned Right, edited by the brilliant Mary Eberstadt, mother of my goddaughter, Alexandra.

“The End of the American Automobile Industry” chapter I owe to an assignment from The Wall Street Journal.

Jim Denton, my other oldest friend in Washington and the publisher of World Affairs, encouraged me to plunge into the morass of foreign policy.

Additional articles from which I’ve drawn material appeared in Forbes, the Financial Times, and, of all places, Rolling Stone where for some reason Bill Greider and I were allowed to conduct a months-long left vs. right debate in print, doubtless to the utter mystification of the Rolling Stone target demographic. (Bill’s a great guy—wrong about everything, but a great guy.)

For almost thirty years I’ve been working with—well, he’s done all the working—Don Epstein at the Greater Talent Network lecture agency. Through the kind and diligent efforts of Don and everyone at GTN I’ve had the opportunity to try out various political ideas and opinions on lecture audiences around the county. (No audience members were harmed in these experiments. As far as I know.)

When the idea for this book was larval, Larry Arnn listened attentively to my description of the grub.

Greg Lindsay, executive director of The Center for Independent Study, invited me and my family to Australia and New Zealand in 2009. There Greg and his family showed us splendid hospitality. (Greg, Tina is still Googling “How to remove red wine stains from white lamb’s wool rugs.”) The talks that I gave in Sydney, Canberra, Perth, and Wellington would, through no fault of Greg’s, evolve into the opening chapters of Don’t Vote.

Thanks also to John Green and his family for making our antipodean journey so excellent (for everything except white lamb’s wool rugs).

The Cato Institute, that most thoughtful of Washington think tanks, has been providing me with research support—not to mention the moral kind—since the 1980s. There is no one working at Cato who hasn’t, in some way, helped form my political ideas. To name a very few of them:

executive vice president David Boaz, especially for his book Libertarianism: A Primer and for his editorship of The Libertarian Reader.

Tom Palmer and Roger Pilon for their knowledge and under standing of constitutionalism.

Peter Van Doren, editor of Cato’s invaluable antiregulatory Regulation magazine.

Jerry Taylor, who knows everything about resources and the squandering of them, which government is so good at.

Michael Tanner, Michael F. Cannon, and Aaron Yelowitz, without whose mastery of facts and figures I could not have written the health care chapter.

And, of course, Ed Crane, Cato’s president-for-life, who has bestowed upon me the title “Mencken Research Fellow” at Cato. I’m honored even though I’m pretty sure Ed has read Mencken’s Notes on Democracy.

Max Pappas was my assistant a decade ago and has done well anyway. He now occupies the post of vice president, public policy, at FreedomWorks. Max researched the origins of modern terrorism, and I apologize for taking ten years to put his research to use. It was also Max who walked me through the blind alleys of ratiocination behind campaign-finance reform and who explained to me what the hell the recent Supreme Court ruling on the subject was all about.

Richard Pipes, the preeminent historian of Russia and the Russian revolution, is a good friend and also a great teacher about the process by which reform turns to radicalism and radicalism turns to riot. I am deeply in debt to his book Property and Freedom, the most powerful argument for linking these social goods since Adam Smith’s.

It was Charlie Glass who, more than a quarter-century ago, showed me through the ruins of Lebanon and let me see that, when we call the American political system “highly polarized,” “chaotic,” and “corrupt,” we are full of shit. Charlie and I don’t usually agree about politics, but it is my hope that he’ll be able to get through at least a few chapters of this book before he writes to tell me that I remain a right-wing nut.

Jay Winik confirmed my hunch that Alexander Hamilton never recanted his objections to the first ten amendments to the U.S. Constitution. “But,” wrote Jay, “I also strongly suspect that, like most of the other founders, he made peace with the Bill of Rights.”

Nick Eberstadt provided me with, among many other things, an educated guess at the body count from Mao’s “let a hundred flowers bloom” pogrom.

Kudos to Neil Hudley for rediscovering Milton Friedman’s radio interviews from the Paleolithic (1970’s) era of media.

Tim Baney pointed out the number of gun murders (none) in North Dakota, a state with notoriously lax gun-control laws.

Ed Mallon and Des Desvernine are doing important ongoing undercover work, therefore I cannot name them publically.

Candles for Men—“Mandles”—was the idea of Alex Vogel. The complete range of scents available as soon as Alex gets his start-up capital: Beer, Cigars, Old Dog, Spilled Bourbon, Gear Oil, Pool Hall, Frying Meat, Grass Clippings, Charcoal Smoke, Chainsaw Exhaust, Canvas Tarpaulin, and Trout.

Michael Gewirz had the savvy notion for marketing Home Colonoscopy Kits.

“Motorized cupholders” is a quip I stole from Lee Bass. Lee will know what I mean when I say, “After finishing this book I need to sit down for a moment and sort things out.”

I swiped the line about Japan sticking its economy “where the rising sun never shines” from my old friend Dave Garcia in Hong Kong.

James A. Weiner, Foreign Service Officer (Ret.), provided me with a joke that will go unspecified.

My assistant, Phoebe Bunker, spent many long hours digging up obscure and abstruse research material for this book. She also spent many more and much longer hours inputting and outputting and (for all I know) shot putting the manuscript because I don’t even know which end of a computer to stick the eight-track cassette into. Phoebe, you were very good-natured about it all.

The dust cover photo was shot with style and flair by James Kegley, who is not to be blamed for his subject’s looks (or attire —that being the author’s idea on the theory that the only real benefit of being over sixty is a perfect freedom to injure one’s own dignity, to the extent that time hasn’t done the job already).

The author would look even more frightful if it hadn’t been for the ministrations of stylist Janis Heffron and of photographer’s assistant Mike Stargill who kept moving the lights around in an attempt to keep the cover photo from looking like a portrait of Uncle Samosaurus.

At the behest of my excellent friend Frank Saul, Washington’s Hay-Adams Hotel lent us a room for the photo shoot. Jenny Niessen made us comfortable there, for which we thank her. You should stay at the Hay-Adams even if you live in Washington already. It’s so close to the White House that you can see the president sneak a smoke, but not so close that he can lecture you on health care reform and financial regulation.

Grove/Atlantic has remained a patient and understanding publisher. Chief executive Morgan Entrekin, with whom my friendship dates back to the 1970s, has published all but one of my books and he reissued that one. Thank you Morgan, and thank you Eric Price for keeping Grove/Atlantic functioning,

Charles Rue Woods for keeping it looking good, Deb Seager and Scott Manning for keeping it publicized, Don Kennison for un-mangling my spelling and grammar, managing editor Michael Hornburg for managing, Sue Cole for making sure somebody remembered to send the book to the printer, and to Andrew Robinton and every other Grove/Atlantic literary light.

And lastly I want to thank my wife, Tina, for fifteen years of happiness, which is none of the reader’s business. More to the point I want to thank her for the editorial targeting she did on Don’t Vote. Tina undertook a careful re-aiming of my 12 gauge, open bore, scatter-shot approach to my subject. She convinced me to use full choke in both barrels on politics. I’ve got a bead on the thing now, Honey. And I promise I won’t ask you to clean or cook it.

Apologia Pro !%@& Sua

I beg forgiveness from the reader for the vulgar language in this book. Politics is a vulgar fucking subject. I have resorted to barnyard words because of the amount of bullshit, horseshit, and chickenshit involved in politics. I’m sorry I can’t devise a more polite mode of expression. I can only blame myself. It is possible, I suppose, to take a decorous approach to politics. But I’m reminded of the American guest at a dinner in one of the great houses of Britain. The American was seated to the left of a very grand and fat old duchess and an Englishman was seated on her right. During the soup course the duchess farted. The Englishman, taking chivalrous responsibility, said, “I beg your pardon.” During the fish course the duchess farted again, louder than before. Once more, the Englishman said, “I beg your pardon.” Then, during the meat course, the duchess cut loose with a tremendous, resounding blast. The Englishman said, “I beg—”

“No, no,” the American interrupted. “This one’s on me.”

PART I

The Sex, Death,

and Boredom Theory

of Politics

The man of system . . . is apt to be very wise in his own conceit; and is often so enamored with the supposed beauty of his own ideal plan of government, that he cannot suffer the smallest deviation from any part of it.

—Adam Smith

“Scientific socialism” would hold especial attraction for intellectuals by promising to replace spontaneous and messy life with a rational order of which they would be the interpreters and mentors.

—Richard Pipes

Here’s a good rule of thumb:

Too clever is dumb.

—Ogden Nash

1

Kill Fuck Marry

Having been a political commentator of one kind or another since 1970, it has occurred to me to ask: What the hell have I been talking about for forty years?

It’s a surprisingly difficult question to answer. One subject has been power, the skull beneath the skin of politics. Sometimes we get flayed completely and there’s nothing left but a pile of skulls. Then there’s freedom. From my addlepated hippie youth to my right-wing grouch maturity, I’ve been a fan of freedom, particularly my own. Furthermore, because I’ve always lived in a nation that is self-ruled (if often by selfish selves) and that is under the rule of law (if often legally unruly), responsibility, too, has been a topic, although I dislike taking any.

Power, freedom, and responsibility are the trinity of politics in a free and democratic country. But it’s hard to know how to go about understanding this triad. We are so passionate about our politics. And how do passionate affairs end? In a passion, usually. In a crime of passion, sometimes. Occasionally they turn into stable, permanent, connubial relationships, which is to say endless, peevish quarrels.

How should the political institutions of America be approached? Do we overthrow them with violence? Do we screw around with them while they screw around with us? Or do we try to build something that’s lasting and boring, worthy and annoying, marvelously virtuous and at the same time dreadfully stifling?

No wonder most of my fellow political commentators and I have preferred to rave about politics rather than consider them. It’s human nature—at least among free and democratic humans—to be angry, confused, and instinctual about politics. So how do we go about creating a set of political principles that don’t suck? We need a reasonable, reasonably precise, and reasonably well reasoned way to look at political institutions, political policies, and politicians. There is ample evidence of what happens when such principles are lacking: Somalia.

Power, freedom, and responsibility are not principles in and of themselves; they’re perspectives. But we can use these three ways of looking at things to analyze politics. The game “Kill Fuck Marry” comes to us, as far as anyone can tell, from late-night giggle sessions at all-girls boarding schools. Take three political institutions that seem to occupy different vertices in the triangulation of power, freedom, and responsibility. Or, because it’s more fun, take three politicians. For instance, the Kennedy brothers: charismatic Jack, conscientious Bobby, and Teddy with a lampshade on his head. Obviously, we kill Ted, fuck Jack, and marry Bobby.

If choosing among martyred (plus cancer-stricken) Kennedys seems tasteless, we can use the 1992 U.S. presidential candidates, who, for example’s sake, were exemplary. We kill Ross Perot. We could hardly avoid a fuck from Bill Clinton. And we marry kindly, old George H. W. Bush.

The game’s outcome is not always certain (per our mysterious elopement with Bill instead of our church wedding with George). In the case of the 2000 presidential election people of goodwill were evenly divided about whether to fuck Al Gore or marry George W., although I believe we all agreed on killing Ralph Nader.

I won’t venture any answers involving more recent elections for fear of attracting attention (hard as that sometimes seems) from the Secret Service. But the game works on the parts of government as well as it does on the politicians who run them. We kill the postal service, fuck the Department of Health and Human Services, and marry the armed forces. The same goes with government policies: fuck agricultural subsidies, marry Social Security, and health care reform kills us.

Try “Kill Fuck Marry” at your next cocktail party if you want the people you invited never to speak to one another again.

2

Politics Makes Us Free

And We’re Worth It

When I first began to think about politics—when mastodons and Nixon roamed the earth—I was obsessed with freedom. I had a messy idea of freedom at the time, but I had the tidy idea that freedom was the central issue of politics.

I loved politics. Many young people do—kids can spot a means of gain without merit. (This may be the reason professional politicians retain a certain youthful zest; Strom Thurmond was the boyo right down to his last senile moment.) I was wrong about the lovable nature of politics, and even at twenty-three I probably suspected I was wrong. But I was sure I was right about the preeminent place of freedom in a political system.

Freedom is a personal ideal. Because politics is an arrangement among persons, we can plausibly assume that freedom is a political ideal. Our favorite political idealists think so. They’ve been unanimous on the subject since Jean-Jacques Rousseau convinced polite society that human bondage was in bad taste and John Locke showed the divine right of kings to be a royal pain.

The signers of the Declaration of Independence declared us to be residents of “Free and Independent States.” John Adams demanded, “Let me have a country, and that a free country.” Tom Paine warned that “Freedom hath been hunted round the globe.” And he exhorted us to “receive the fugitive and prepare in time an asylum for mankind.” Calling America an asylum may have been a poor choice of words, or not. Thomas Jefferson, in his first inaugural address, preached “Freedom of religion; freedom of the press, and freedom of person.” Jefferson was quite free with the person of Sally Hemings. And a dinner toast from Revolutionary War general John Stark bestowed upon New Hampshire a license plate motto that must puzzle advocates of highway safety: “Live Free or Die.”

With Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations as a useful gauge of what we think we think, we find that Emerson poetized, “For what avail the plow or sail, or land or life, if freedom fail?” Hegel weighed in, “The history of the world is none other than the progress of the consciousness of freedom.” As unlikely a character as the crackpot Nietzsche had something to say: “Liberal institutions straightway cease from being liberal the moment they are soundly established: once this is attained no more grievous and more thorough enemies of freedom exist than liberal institutions.” The UN Commission on Human Rights comes to mind.

We can survey the arts, where mankind is most blatant in its truths, and find artists taking the broadest liberties. (They are especially free with the use of fate as a plot device.) We can peruse philosophy, where mankind is less truthful, and not hear freedom denied by anything except free thinking. Theology makes sporadic arguments against free will, with which the devout are freely willing to concur. Science is deterministic and its special needs stepsister social science is more so. But people are free to pick and choose among the determinations of science until they find something they like. I give you Al Gore and you can have him. Perhaps there are scientists who make a sound case for the inevitabilities of biology and such. But we don’t know what these geniuses are talking about and very likely neither do they. For example, the important biologist Richard Dawkins has written a book, The God Delusion, in which he uses predestinarian atheism to argue that Richard Dawkins is the closest thing to a superior being in the known universe.

The theoretical (as opposed to practical) enemies of freedom are feeble opponents. And we are all but overrun by theoretical allies in freedom’s cause. We’ve got collaborators in the fight for freedom that we don’t even want. “The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains” is the penultimate sentence of the Communist Manifesto. And a creepy echo of it can be heard in the refrain of Kris Kristofferson’s “Me and Bobby McGee.” Mao announced, “Letting a hundred flowers blossom and a hundred schools of thought contend is the policy . . .” Half a million people died in those ellipses.

If we were to give out the proverbial “a word to the wise,” the sagacity-testing utterance with which to provide the sages would be “freedom.” In the unabridged Oxford English Dictionary the noun has fifteen definitions and the adjective “free” has thirty-six. These definitions, along with their usage citations, occupy 189¼ column inches of small and smaller type.

Peter Roget (1779–1869), of Roget’s Thesaurus, was a physician, a scientist, the secretary of the Royal Society for more than twenty years, and an exhaustingly systematic thinker. He designed his thesaurus (Greek for “treasury”) as a reverse dictionary. Instead of listing words and giving their meanings, he listed meanings and gave words for them. Under the heading “freedom” there are more than four hundred entries in twenty-one categories. And “freedom” is only one of the twenty-three headings in Roget’s “Section I, General Intersocial Volition” of “Division II, Intersocial Volition” of “Class Five, Volition.” It’s hard to know whether or not to be thankful that Peter Roget’s obsessive-compulsive disorder meds hadn’t been invented.

Among the various types and kinds of general intersocial volition, about ten have something to do with political freedom.

freedom in the abstract

autonomy

enfranchisement

toleration

frankness

leisure

laxity

abandon

opportunity

privilege

Several of these may seem beside the point. But “frank,” for instance, is from the Old French franc, meaning free. We can be frank with the president of the United States. We can honestly and openly say what we think to him. And what we think of him. But in all our name-calling the name we call our president that sticks is “Mr.” He’s not “Your Excellency” or “Your Highness,” nor do we kowtow, genuflect, or curtsy to him. Callisthenes, the great-nephew of Aristotle, plotted to kill Alexander the Great rather than prostrate himself in the Persian manner to the conqueror of the known world. It’s probably just as well that our current president forgoes even a handshake with Fox News.

Then there are the freedoms of leisure, laxity, and wild abandon. Anyone who thinks these have nothing to do with democracy hasn’t met the demos. Also, it was not so long ago, during the great political demonstrations of the 1960s, that I was risking my neck—well, risking a conk on the head and a snootful of tear gas—in the battle to create a utopian society where I could lie around all day, utterly heedless and high as a kite.

Freedom, of course, may be considered as an abstraction. I was young enough to be highly abstracted—not to say stoned—when I began to think about freedom. But I wasn’t old enough to think. Therefore I can tell you nothing about my abstract thinking on the subject. And so can’t a lot of other people, because there are languages in which the word “freedom” doesn’t exist. (Not surprising if you think about some of the places languages are spoken.) Richard Pipes, emeritus professor of Russian history at Harvard, who is fluent in a number of tongues himself, makes this point in his book Property and Freedom (a perspicacious analysis of what the title says).

Professor Pipes cites the work of M. I. Finley, preeminent historian of classical antiquity (and, incidentally, a Marxist, something Richard Pipes is the opposite of ). Finley wrote, “It is impossible to translate the word ‘freedom,’ eleutheris in Greek, libertas in Latin, or ‘free man,’ into any ancient Near Eastern language, including Hebrew, or into any Far Eastern language either, for that matter.” Indeed, when the Japanese first encountered Western notions they were hard put to translate “freedom” and ended up using the word jiyu, which means something like “getting jiggy with it.”

Freedom and liberty themselves don’t have quite the same meaning. “Free” is derived from the Indo-European root pri, to love. The p becomes f in Germanic languages, thus fri in Old German and freo in Old English. The original sense of the adjective was “dear,” and it was used to describe those members of a household who had a kinship relation to the master of the house. Since at least the reign of King Alfred the Great, ruled 871–899, the primary definition of “free” has been “not in bondage.” You’re free because . . . Who loves ya, Baby?

Liberty is probably the better word;1 its source is in the Indo-European leudh, “to mount up, grow.” Hence Latin for children, liberi, and German for populace, Leute. We the people make leudh into eleutheris and libertas.

Yet, the first definition of “liberty” in English is, once again, “exemption or release from bondage.” Whatever we mean by our abstract statements about freedom and liberty, the most meaningful thing we’re stating is that mankind has a sickening history of slavery.

Enfranchisement is the lively, fortunate, and honorable freedom, for the sake of which our political ancestors pledged their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor. Nothing concerning the goal of enfranchisement is ignoble except its attainment. Among those who choose the congressmen, senators, and presidents of the United States we now include people who are not considered mature and responsible enough to have a beer. (If it’s any comfort, we should remind ourselves of the purpose of voting. We don’t vote to elect great persons to office. They’re not that great. We vote to throw the bastards out.)

Toleration is the best comfort of a free life for most people most of the time, especially if they experience as well as practice it. But tolerance is of minor interest to politics. Politics aspires to a big, positive role in things. And the role of politics in toleration is small except in the usually negative actions of keeping the peace. Yet it was two consummate American politicians who supplied us with a model for the universal formulation of tolerance: “Mind your own business and keep your hands to yourself.” These may be rightly called the Bill and Hillary Clinton Rules. Hillary, mind your own business. Bill, keep your hands to yourself.

The ontological freedom known as autonomy isn’t part of practical politics, it’s all of practical politics—imposing my will and thwarting yours. If the actions of mankind and the events of history turn out to have been foreordained it will be a good joke on politics.

This leaves us with the nub or butt end of politicking: privilege and opportunity. Ignore everything politicians say about opportunity. They’re lying. When politicians tout “opportunity” either they are trying to help voters disguise an extortion as a gift or they are the groom of government complimenting the bride of private property while in bed with the socialist maid of honor. And ignore all of politicians’ sniffing at and scorn for privilege. Privilege and opportunity are the names for rights—opportunity being rights you’d like to get and privilege being rights you’d like someone else to surrender. A politician doesn’t ask if he may have the privilege of a dance; he says he has a right to it.

Our gassing about our rights is almost equal to our gassing about our freedoms when we’re bent over and puffed full of air concerning our form of government. We’re inordinately proud of the Bill of Rights. But it’s an odd document.

The First and Sixth Amendments are straightforward enough, reassuring us that we may pray (OMG!), Twitter, kvetch, and be tried in the same court as O. J. Simpson. And the Fifth Amendment says that when we screw up big time we don’t have to give our version—like anybody’s going to believe us. But the Second Amendment is woefully confusing. (Not that it confuses me about gun ownership, in case you were considering a mugging to get my Jitterbug mobile phone.) The principal right that the Second Amendment seems to guarantee is the right to be a soldier. To judge by our various episodes of national conscription—Civil War, World War I, World War II, Korea, Vietnam—this is a right we sometimes have to force people to enjoy.

According to the Third Amendment the Pentagon can’t just randomly send the U.S. Marines to sleep on our fold-out couch. This is something that, as a home owner, you’d think would be obvious. Although, in fairness, there are people elsewhere who wish they had an amendment keeping the Marines out of their house.

The Third Amendment and the Seventh Amendment (concerning jury appeals), are undercut by weasel words: “but in a manner to be prescribed by law” and “otherwise . . . than according to the rules of the common law.” The Fourth Amendment (mandating warrants) and the Eighth Amendment (limiting punishments) include strange pairs of modifiers—“unreasonable” and “probable,” “cruel” and “unusual”—better suited to a drunken description of my first marriage than to a sober writ of law.

And the message of the Ninth and Tenth Amendments is: You have other rights but you have to guess what they are.

There was opposition to the Bill of Rights. The modern mind expects it to have come from slave owners. But this is too modern. Support for the first ten amendments had little to do with dictionary definitions of freedom and liberty and a great deal to do with qualms that old-line Revolutionary patriots—including Sam Adams—had about the new federal government. Alexander Hamilton, who had other qualms, made a case against the Bill of Rights in that supposed ur-text of American freedoms The Federalist Papers, in number 84.

Hamilton put forth various arguments opposing the addition of any bill of rights to the U.S. Constitution. Some of the arguments were weak. Hamilton claimed that the Constitution, as it was, affirmed and maintained the ancient protections of individual liberty embodied in British common law. Maybe. But a less dangerous and expensive way to retain British common law had been available in 1776. Hamilton claimed that previous, precedent-setting bills of rights, starting with the Magna Carta, were merely bargains between a sovereign and his subjects about a ruler’s prerogatives. Hamilton felt that no such sharp dealing and unseemly horse trading was necessary in a social contract freely made among equals. But if Nietzsche was right about what liberal institutions do once they’re institutionalized—and there’s no evidence he wasn’t—then Hamilton was wrong. And Hamilton believed the Constitution already included the most important safeguards of freedom: establishment of habeas corpus, prohibition of ex post facto laws, and a ban on titles of nobility. Hamilton was listing the principal instruments in the tyranny tool chest of his era. He didn’t foresee the future inventions of oppression such as ethnic cleansing, even though ethnic cleansing of North America was well under way at the time the Federalist essays were written.

But Hamilton’s other objections to the Bill of Rights were prescient. Don’t give the government ideas, he warned.

Why, for instance, should it be said that the liberty of the press shall not be restrained, when no power is given by which restrictions may be imposed? I will not contend that such a provision would confer a regulating power; but it is evident that it would furnish, to men disposed to usurp, a plausible pretense for claiming that power. They might urge . . . the provision against restraining the liberty of the press afforded a clear implication that a power to prescribe proper regulations concerning it was intended to be vested in the national government.

And now we have not only the FCC’s naughty involvement in Janet Jackson’s wardrobe malfunction but also the gross obscenities of binding and gagging displayed in America’s campaign finance legislation.2