Apparently Charles Murray, the Bell Curve guy, has the hot new strategy for conservative power in the twenty first century: lots and lots and lots of frivolous lawsuits.
In a nutshell, if Chuck and David can’t buy the President then they can drop a few hundred million for a defense fund to keep the Executive branch tied up in court forever. In other words Murray and his fans, Jeb for example, want an insurgency by the few against the many, in fact pretty much an explicit insurgent campaign against the general idea of democracy. Titling his book ‘By the People‘ comes across as a cute play on words for a guy who is pretty explicit in his opinion that the privileged Randian few should tell the dim masses what to do and how to live. The ‘people’ Charles Murray has in mind would number from about twelve to a few hundred at most. Their world; the rest of us would live in it.
Assuming that our current rightwing SCOTUS majority hangs on long enough to legalize this currently illegal strategy*, at least we will get to watch the FOX demographic validate Cleek with the most epic reversal in, well, not quite ever.
(*) Murray mentions early on that he is not an expert in Constitutional law, then exhaustively proves the point. To summarize Constitutional law, you can’t file suits and pointlessly prolong a legal action just to harass the other party.
Weaselone
Brilliant! It takes real genius to propose doing something that is essentially already being done. Maybe he can propose that conservative controlled states use state resources to launch parallel law suits next.
WereBear
Gee, when I watched Mad Max it never occurred to me that some would consider this a great idea.
But I say we compromise; Adelson and the Koch Brothers can do as they wish as long as they wear nothing but those assless chaps?
OzarkHillbilly
I don’t think the GOP knows this.
Scott S.
@OzarkHillbilly: I’m pretty sure the GOP doesn’t actually care anyway… :/
Paul in KY
Off topic a bit, but I have given up on finishing ‘Atlas Shrugged’. Got to about page 250 and I just couldn’t countenance wasting my life in that manner. You beat me, Ayn.
Keith P.
@WereBear: We know who killed the world.
MomSense
@Paul in KY:
It’s dreadful. I hated every minute of it and I don’t think I finished either
CONGRATULATIONS!
Oh, that takes me back. Always loved seeing awful shit happen to that pompous jerk Warner.
@Paul in KY: I grew up (still am) a Rush fan, and between that influence (they grew up as well) and a former girlfriend, I started that shitpile of a book back in college.
It fucking sucked. I don’t know how you got that far, and I’m the kind of guy who will read anything. Proof? I read and finished Battlefield Earth. But I couldn’t do a hundred pages of Atlas Shrugged. That’s the worst fucking thing I ever read in my life.
Omnes Omnibus
@Paul in KY: I never managed to get past page 20.
Tim F.
@CONGRATULATIONS!:
Were you high?
srv
If the President would just start following the law instead of reimagining it, he would not have a problem.
@Paul in KY: My 17yr old cousin gave up around 70. It must be an age thing, appealed to you more.
kindness
Makes me think the French weren’t completely wrong about how they handled their revolution. Guillotine yet?
@CONGRATULATIONS!: When you say you are a Rush fan I sure hope you mean the band.
Paul in KY
@CONGRATULATIONS!: I read ‘Battlefield Earth’ and liked it more than Ayn’s waste of paper. Probably better written too.
Paul in KY
Thanks to all the people here commiserating with me. Glad to know I’m not the only one.
OzarkHillbilly
@CONGRATULATIONS!: Myself, I read the whole of the Fountainhead. Don’t remember why. Must’ve been on a dare.
Gin & Tonic
A telling quote from Murray in one of the articles Tim links to:
IOW, “I’m useless, so I’ll just throw tantrums for the rest of my career.”
boatboy_srq
Aren’t Murrey et al the same ones that whinge about Teh Frivolous Lawsuit™, and trumpet Tort Reform™ as the great cure-all for the Job Creators’ ills?
Amir Khalid
@Paul in KY:
I saw Battlefield Earth the movie, and I wouldn’t touch the book with a ten-foot pole. As for Ayn Rand, I read the first few pages of some book or other of her “philosophy”. I’m appalled that intelligent people take such childish twaddle seriously.
...now I try to be amused
@Paul in KY: When I was younger and more tolerant of bad writing I read Rand’s For the New Intellectual which has excerpts from some of her other books. One of them was John Galt’s speech in Atlas Shrugged, all ~100 pages of it. I had read more than enough of AS by the time I was finished.
Smedley Darlington Prunebanks (formerly Mumphrey, et al.)
How is anybody still listening to this asshole? He’s like the William Kristol of sociology. Has he ever been right about anything?
As to Rand… I’ve always kind of wanted to at least take a look at Atlas Shrugged, if only to see how awful it really is. Never have found a way to make myself do it, though. I guess that’s a good thing…
dr. luba
@CONGRATULATIONS!: I read it, back in high school, in the early seventies. Well, except for the John Galt speech–skipped all eighty or so pages of it. There were fewer distractions back in those days, and only 4 television stations. And I was less discerning about what I read.
I wouldn’t get past the first few pages now……The book was given me by a friend, which is how I ended up reading most of what I read. Our English classes were a mess then (some weird educational experiment, I reckon), and we rarely ever actually read anything, particularly books, in high school. So I have little grounding in the classics, and was given little direction in what to read and why.
(Note: lost track of said friend after high school. He dropped out of college, went to work in his dad’s construction firm, and became a right wing zealot. Of course.)
My niece was more discerning than me. They had to read an Ayn Rand book (“We The Living”) in high school, and she absolutely hated it.
Ryan
@OzarkHillbilly: Of course they do. They are experts on the Constitution, just ask them!
Valdivia
How is this strategy any different than what the GOP has been doing since Obama took office? They are challenging everything through the courts and via nullification. Not that I can’t foresee these people taking it up to 11 but still, we already know what this looks like. These people are not a political party anymore, they are nihilists/anarchists.
Proud to say I haven’t read any of Ayn Rand’s books.
boatboy_srq
@Gin & Tonic: Or, “none of my Really Really Good Ideas™ will go down with voters – which makes their failure Democracy’s fault (and not mine).” This is the whinge of an abosolute-monarchist.
Smedley Darlington Prunebanks (formerly Mumphrey, et al.)
@boatboy_srq:
Well, you see, when losers sue their betters, that’s frivolous. When the betters sue the government for trying to help the losers, that’s justice.
I have a hard time fathoming just how deeply this guy, and those like him, must hate people to want to just point and laugh as hard working, struggling people slowly sink beneath the waves. I know that;s a metaphor, but if he saw a Black guy drowning, what are the odds, do you think that he’d throw the guy a line rather than sitting and watching, rapt, as the guy slowly goes under?
OzarkHillbilly
@Smedley Darlington Prunebanks (formerly Mumphrey, et al.):
Take a nice big smelly dump in your toilet, than puke all over it. Now, for the next 3 weeks spend at least 2 hrs per day staring at it. That should give you an idea.
Scott S.
@Smedley Darlington Prunebanks (formerly Mumphrey, et al.):
How is anybody still listening to this asshole? He’s like the William Kristol of sociology. Has he ever been right about anything?
He tells them it’s great to hate non-white people, and liberals hate him. Therefore, he’s better than Jesus.
Roger Moore
@Smedley Darlington Prunebanks (formerly Mumphrey, et al.):
They listen to him for the same reason they listen to Kristol: he tells them what they want to hear.
a hip hop artist from Idaho (fka Bella Q)
@Paul in KY: @Omnes Omnibus: @…now I try to be amused @MomSense
@CONGRATULATIONS!
You’re all made of sterner stuff than I. I’m not sure I made it to double digits.
Frankensteinbeck
@CONGRATULATIONS!:
I like Battlefield Earth, and I’ve read it several times. It’s pulp science fiction, a less spaceshippy, more aircrafty version of EE Doc Smith’s Lensman series. One Man Versus The Evil Space Empire stuff. It’s very good at that.
@Amir Khalid:
I am told that the movie and the book resemble each other only in the faintest ways. That’s certainly the impression I got from the trailer. There’s no Scientology in the book whatsoever, and I am also told Battlefield Earth does not resemble any of Hubbard’s other books. It’s unrealistic, actiony, absolute good vs. absolute evil, one perfect hero pulp, like any cowboy movie or Star Wars.
CONGRATULATIONS!
@Tim F.: Yes.
Oddly enough, that didn’t help with the Rand book, though. I tried.
Paul in KY
@Amir Khalid: I think the book was better than movie (or so I’ve been told, as I wouldn’t touch the movie with a 10 foot pole).
boatboy_srq
@Valdivia: This takes “Party of No” to a whole new level, and substitutes the 0.001% and their collective resources for the GOTea as a whole. A political party – even a wholly-owned one such as the GOTea has mainly become – is still vulnerable to the whims of the base; direct action by the Movers’n’Shakers is far less encumbered by the baggage the shrieking hordes are likely to tack on. Example: with a few exceptions the targets of Murray’s ideas aren’t especially invested in the anti-SSM or anti-choice efforts (they don’t add to the bottom line much), so the social conservatists will be duly ignored. OTOH, small business – the original “Job Creators” – will also be ignored because they don’t have the resources to match the big players, so unless the Chamber gets refocused on everyone below the big boys, anyone below Fortune 50 will be left to whistle for influence. Murray’s political illuminati will be free to obstruct, but they won’t need all the Kenyan-IslamoFascoSoshulist b#llsh!t to keep support high enough to win elections; I suspect the result would be just as frustrating, but (just a little) quieter. BTW anyone who’s reading Murray as a cookbook for a Permanent Republican Majority is missing Murray’s point that the GOTea is just as unnecessary as the Democrats, just as much a hindrance as the Democrats, and only one step further away from the dustbin (and that only because they’re slightly less unhelpful); the GOTea hopefuls who are signing on here are signing their party’s own death warrant, and possibly doing so because it comes with ringside seats to the Democrats’ demise to be carried out immediately before their own termination.
Paul in KY
@…now I try to be amused: I never got to that. I was only up to getting some inkling of who this ‘John Galt’ fellow was. Lots of Dagny stuff & how everyone but her sucks.
Paul in KY
@OzarkHillbilly: I see you’ve read it…
CONGRATULATIONS!
@kindness: What else could I mean?
There’s some jerkwad who stole their name but nobody pays attention to that guy anymore.
boatboy_srq
@Smedley Darlington Prunebanks (formerly Mumphrey, et al.): I still say these people take the Parable of the Samaritan as good for the rabbi and the Levite because they weren’t stuck with the bill for the traveler’s care and feeding.
boatboy_srq
@Paul in KY: It says something that the founder of a pseudo-cult with major pull with pols and movie bigs wrote less unengaging trash than the author half the GOTea claims to revere.
OzarkHillbilly
@Paul in KY: No, I read the “Fountainhead” which I have been told is the better of the 2 tho I am hard pressed to see how a book could be worse than that.
Linnaeus
The link leads to an article about how Jeb(!) Bush likes Murray, but nothing about lawsuits. Is there another link that I’m missing?
Amir Khalid
@Frankensteinbeck:
I has a surprised to hear that. It was my understanding that the Hollywood star who got the movie made was himself a devout Scientologist and a big wheel in the religion.
The Other Chuck
I’ve read pretty much all of Ayn Rand’s corpus, back when I was a more voracious reader than now. Angular planes … it’s all about the angular planes. Oh, and rape fantasies. She’s got about the same degree of thought that Nietzsche had in 1910: that is to say, of someone who’s been dead for a decade. But even so, try reading the writings of her intellectual heir, Leonard Piekoff. He makes Rand look like a goddam genius by comparison.
WereBear
@Amir Khalid: Yes, but he did it as a tribute. If he’d tried to put Scientology in it, that would not have gotten off the ground.
Though really, Battlefield Earth should never have been made. It is one of the stupidest films I’ve ever seen, and this is coming from an actual Ed Wood Fangirl.
Linnaeus
I’m no fan of Murray, but he actually comes off less badly in the interview linked in this passage than he does in his books and in other interviews. It’s a classic case of having a kernel of a reasonable idea, but then making questionable assumptions. The idea that social scientists should be forthright about the interpretive frameworks they employ in their scholarship doesn’t strike me as particularly unreasonable because it’s fairly common in other scholarly fields, but I don’t think that Murray is as honest as he says he is and I think he understates how many scholars do what he says they should do. I think the idea that vocational education is a good thing and should be widely available so people have options besides college is a decent one. Of course, where Murray goes wrong is to assume that there’s always some innate reason why a person struggles in college and that it’s mutually exclusive to make college more accessible and make other kinds of education and training available at the same time.
JustRuss
@OzarkHillbilly: I don’t know, I thought The Fountainhead had some redeeming features. Remove those and play up the terrible parts, squared, and you get Atlas Shrugged. Or so I assume, one Randian tome per lifetime is my limit.
joel hanes
To summarize Constitutional law, you can’t file suits and pointlessly prolong a legal action just to harass the other party.
That may be the law, but that’s not the reality.
See the legal history of Scientology’s “Religious Technology Center”, and its endless campaigns against Larry Wollersheim, Dennis Erlich, Keith Henson, and who could forget over two thousand “individual” lawsuits against the IRS. It may help to add the names Moxon and Kobrin to the Google search.
Many morally-decayed organizations have learned from Scientology’s perverse success in this arena.
Hoodie
So much better in the original German. If you had any doubt, Murray is a garden variety fascist, and not a particularly bright one. Even if you bought into his ridiculous premises, one of the obvious holes in Murray’s plan is that why would someone who has become enriched by the current system want to file a bunch of lawsuits to destroy a system that has made them wealthy and upon which they regularly rely to enforce their property rights? Does he not stop to think that a lot of wealthy people are not idiots and have already contemplated such solutions, and rejected them in favor of buying candidates that pursue such obstruction so much more effectively? Outside of a few areas that the big money doesn’t care about (e.g., women’s reproductive rights), this strategy is a loser. So, assuming this is another one of Murray’s failed theories, will his next book take the next step and advocate burning government buildings and blaming it on leftists?
Just One More Canuck
@Paul in KY: that’s about 230 pages further than I got
Valdivia
@boatboy_srq:
What is most disquieting to me, is the anti-democratic impulse here. If you can’t achieve your goals through the regular process within the institutions (win presidential elections, actually pass laws in Congress) then hijack the system and the consequences of it be damned. Once you start dismantling the system like this, making it not work, as a feature, not a bug, it becomes impossible to govern. Anyone who cares about the endurance of governability should be extremely concerned that this is the way things are developing on the other side. I have seen this in Latin America many times, not to be alarmist, but it’s ominous.
Hoodie
@Linnaeus:
That’s kind of a fundamental error, one he’s consistently been making for about three decades. The rest you refer to are some edible scraps from a dumpster. Murray isn’t saying anything particularly profound or novel about vocational education.
Linnaeus
@Hoodie:
Agreed, he’s not, and I also agree that his errors are quite fundamental. I just think that the linked excerpt didn’t really highlight that very well, that’s all.
Cckids
@Paul in KY:
Twilight is better written than anything by Rand. Much better.
And IT sucks.
Lurking Canadian
@Valdivia: this. “None of my politically possible ideas would help” is equivalent to “the stupid proles don’t know what’s good for them, and there’s no way to help them anyway”.
Oh, and I read Atlas Shrugged all the way through. I figured after I had gone to the trouble of illegally downloading a pirated copy, it was the least I could do.
Linnaeus
@Lurking Canadian:
Heh. Very Objectivist of you.
Valdivia
@Lurking Canadian:
I never had curiosity for Rand, instead I read Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom. I know. I am still shaking my head that I did that.
Kudos to you though for illegally downloading it :)
Paul in KY
@boatboy_srq: I think he had more grounding in plot and story arc, etc.
He sure did a helluva job with his cult.
Hob
@Linnaeus: I think Tim left out the relevant link, but this should explain– it covers the nuisance-suit stuff about halfway through the article.
Paul in KY
@JustRuss: 1/5th of a Randian tome is mine :-)
Hob
@Linnaeus: Never mind me – actually Tim’s second link (“insurgency”) has the details.
chris9059
“Murray mentions early on that he is not an expert in Constitutional law, then exhaustively proves the point. To summarize Constitutional law, you can’t file suits and pointlessly prolong a legal action just to harass the other party.”
Indeed, what Murray is proposing is a program of systematic “barratry”, a crime in many jurisdictions.
Paul in KY
@Hoodie: I saw 15 or 20 that flunked out on purpose, as they did not want to be there & parents had (in their words) ‘forced’ them to go & by God they were going to fix that situation.
Paul in KY
@Lurking Canadian: I’m pretty impressed!
Linnaeus
@Hob:
Ah, thanks. Murray supports neofeudalism. What a shock.
Linnaeus
@Hob:
Thanks anyway for your link, it was a little more comprehensive.