Cory Doctorow this week: “No-tax brain worms are a hell of a drug” and other commentary on the willingness of libertarians to “trade other peoples’ fundamental rights for preferential tax treatment.”
In my previous post, we just looked at what price libertarians such as Charles Koch are willing for other people to pay as their pawns.
Doctorow committed a tweet rant on that topic to a permanent archive. It’s worth a read:
“Are you calling me a racist?” (permalink)
In “I Can’t Breathe,” Matt Taibbi’s book on Eric Garner’s murder he writes, “You could reduce…Fox News and afternoon talk radio to a morbid national obsession that could be summarized on a t-shirt: ‘Are you calling me a racist?'”
It’s a passage I found myself turning to regularly during the Trump years, when right wing figures bristled at being called racist merely for supporting an explicitly racist party that took power by appealing to white nationalism.
The media spent a lot of that period asking itself whether being a Republican was the same as being a racist, and one commonsense answer that cropped up a lot was, “It may not mean that you are racist, but it does mean that you’ll accept racism as the price of GOP rule.”
I was reminded of this by the current episode of Backbench, Canadaland’s national politics podcast. This week, host Fatima Syed interviews a listener who sent an angry email to the show after hearing voters for the People’s Party of Canada called “racist.”
The caller was angry because he was not a racist: he’s a “libertarian” who wants low taxes. At the start of the interview, he insists that the manifestly racist People’s Party is not racist.
But as Syed points out the explicit racism in its platform its extensive ties to avowed neo-Nazis, the caller’s position gradually shifts – from denying racism to describing racism as a universal factor in all parties.
Finally, he acknowledges the party’s racist ties but excuses them as the price of low taxes – “You gotta take the good with the bad.”
Interestingly, the caller was able to speak intelligently about the nature of systemic racism and identify it as a serious problem.
He just doesn’t think it’s as big a problem as high taxes.
This is what we mean when we talk about saying the quiet part out loud.
Of all the brain-worms that prey upon the conservative mind, none are quite so powerful as the “no tax” pathology.
After all, clowns like Doug and Rob Ford were not solely elected by people who were swayed by promises of $1 beers and a ban on teaching butt stuff in sex ed – the Fords’ constituency includes millions who’d vote for a dead squirrel if it would knock $0.25 off their taxes.
Likewise, many wealthy Texan GOP donors are going to continue to procure abortions for themselves, their spouses and their kids. They’re likely horrified by the state’s new forced childbirth law. It’s not that they don’t believe in abortion rights.
Rather, it’s that a $1 discount on their tax bill is worth more to them than the suffering of every person who endures a forced birth, and every child produced by those births. No-tax brain worms are a hell of a drug.
Libertarianism is notionally grounded in the idea of self-determination and personal responsibility, but in practice, powerful libertarians routinely trade off (others’) freedom for (their own) tax savings.
Sure, the Kochs donate a lot of money to fighting private prisons – but it’s eclipsed by their campaign contributions and dark money for GOP candidates who support private prisons. They sincerely oppose private prisons, but not as much as they support low taxes.
It was ever thus. Von Hayek and Friedman – those great defenders of freedom! – endorsed and gave material aid to Pinochet’s military dictatorship, as it butchered 40,000 of its opponents, leaving their body parts in roadside trash-bags or pushing them out of helicopters.
There’s nothing “libertarian” about a military dictatorship, but the Chicago Boys were all about low taxation. Indeed, Friedman never met a form of oppression he wouldn’t trade for lower taxes.
Take school segregation: as Nancy MacLean writes, Milton Friedman saw racist fury at school integration as an opportunity to draw supporters to his plan to end public education (thus lowering taxes):
Friedman helped start the Charter School movement as a way for white parents to get public money to send their kids to private, whites-only schools, after the Supreme Court and Congress ended public school segregation.
I have no idea if Friedman was racist. I don’t even care. It doesn’t matter if you do racism because you are racist, or because you have anti-tax brain-worms that make you throw in your lot with violent, racist would-be genociders. Being “pro-genocide” is incompatible with being “pro-liberty.”
In contemplating rightist thought, I have three definitions. The first is Steven Brust’s (quoted in my novel Walkaway): “Ask what’s more important, human rights or property rights. If they say ‘property rights ARE human rights’ they’re on the right.”
https://craphound.com/category/walkaway/
The second is Corey Robin’s, from The Reactionary Mind: Some people (bosses, white people, Americans, men) are born to rule, and others (racialized people, women, workers, foreigners) to be ruled over. We thrive when natural rulers are in charge.
https://coreyrobin.com/the-reactionary-mind/
The third is Frank Wilhot’s: “Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.”
The willingness to trade other peoples’ fundamental rights for preferential tax treatment fits neatly into all three of these, as does the delusion that somehow this can be resolved with sufficient “personal responsibility.”
(Image: HKDP, CC BY-SA, modified)
The pro-liberty-self-branded are a dangerous bunch, both the nattiest-dressed among them and those wrapped in the flag while brandishing weapons and wearing tee shirts lionizing Pinochet. The only thing missing is carrying crosses. Give them time.
This is the back of that tee shirt:
