Archives for 2011

Via Greg Sargent, Mark Schmitt at Democracy Journal intelligently eviscerates the threadbare whinging of “centrists” in general, and the Fonzi of Freedom’s new book in particular:

The last three years have brought the dysfunction of the political system into sharp relief, and, not surprisingly, the fantasy third parties and independent candidates-to-be-named-later have sprouted like mushrooms after a rainstorm. There’s No Labels, an organization that promises to recast American politics without partisanship. There’s Americans Elect, which seeks to secure a ballot line in as many states as possible and then use the Internet to nominate a presidential candidate to occupy it. The books have just started to appear, with The Declaration of Independents by the libertarians Matt Welch and Nick Gillespie the first of them. But just as in previous years, actual candidates willing to play the role of savior are scarce on the ground…
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The refreshing thing about this year’s first entry in the category of books promising political independence is that it breaks the first of the rules: Its authors, both of Reason magazine (Gillespie edited it from 2000-2008; Welch is the current editor), are not successful lobbyists or political consultants. Welch and Gillespie “declare independence not just within politics, but from the politics.” Unlike the careerists of Americans Elect, they don’t much like politics, and it shows. Their purpose is to make politics small enough that we don’t have to give much thought to it, and can return to “the pursuit of happiness” through loose, decentralized activity, which is their real topic. Early on in their book, for example, we’re treated to a well-executed ten pages about the Velvet Underground and its influence on Czech dissidents in the 1980s—a fascinating subject, but one only tangentially related to American politics in 2011. (A later digression about the characters in a 1988 video game called Lee Trevino’s Fighting Golf is hilariously even less relevant.)…
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Libertarians do have what Americans Elect can only dream of—a ballot line. The Libertarian Party’s presidential ticket generally appears on the ballots of 45 to 50 states. But Welch and Gillespie mention the party only twice, in passing, with no explanation of why they don’t see it as a vehicle for their independence. While the book promises an optimistic alternative vision of politics, in form it adopts the conventional argument for the mystical independent or third-party candidate. That starts with the Friedmanesque litany of “Amazon, iPod, drugstore.com,” but Welch and Gillespie extend that riff into the bulk of the book, with only minimal effort to connect it to politics. These chapters are mostly interesting case studies in various businesses or individuals who broke down established structures through individual initiative—free-agent statistical blogger Nate Silver, Southwest Airlines, microbreweries. These anecdotes have their own shortcomings—very few people have the nerve, genius, and luck to be Nate Silver, and the microbreweries struggle daily against the price-setting power of the two multinationals that control four-fifths of the American beer market. And here’s where the implied analogy to politics shatters: If you start a microbrewery that gains 1 percent of the U.S. beer market, you’ll become fabulously wealthy, but if you start a political party that gets 1 percent of the vote, you are, even in the best-case scenario, Ralph Nader. In 1996.

(Of course, a rude reviewer might wonder if Gillespie & Welch are not “successful lobbyists or political consultants” the same way Willard Romney is not “a professional politician” — it’s not that they’re too pure for the task, just that nobody’s been willing to pay for their talents.)

But do go read the whole thing; because Schmitt’s assembled his assault on flabby centrist thinking so tightly, it’s really hard to do justice by excerpt.

“The Myth of the Middle”Post + Comments (24)