The T-Word
Ordinary Gentlemen Erik Kain and Chris Dierkes have mixed reviews of my recent post on the tea partiers. Rather than responding to each point, here’s a restatement that, I think, touches on them all.
Though Chris is more generous than Erik, both Gentlemen voice a certain discomfort with the T-word, Tyranny — a term associated with Randian hyperventilation, conservative hypochondria, and the dread Mark Levin. I knew I was running a risk speaking the Language of the People. I should have led off with the tyrannical aspect of the previous administration’s national security policy. But I’m not sure that would’ve helped us think harder and more clearly about tyranny in a certain important respect. I worry less that we’ll all wind up thinking that blanket wiretaps and secret torture murders are actually pillars of a free republic than I worry that we’ll simply come to embrace, apologize for, and actually defend tyranny.
Shying away from the T-word probably makes this task impossible. For those of you familiar with Plato, my argument is technically more about Platonic despotism than tyranny. The Platonic tyrant is a guy who comes along amid the chaos and exhaustion of a decadent democracy — this is how Tocqueville understood Napoleon — and simply seizes the opportunity provided him by a people so weary of serving all desires that they relish the chance to repose in serving only his own. I like to think of the Platonic despot as the great-great-great-grandson of a particularly successful tyrant — the sort of guy who sits securely enough on a sufficiently established throne to spend what seems to be his spare time arguing with philosophers. Platonically speaking, a despotism is a going concern, while a tyranny is so inherently unstable — just like the tyrant, because regimes and psyches mirror one another — that it’s most likely to self-destruct. This is an important wrinkle in political philosophy, but as far as Princeton’s WordNet is concerned, despot and tyrant are synonyms, and in this regard I take WordNet to be squarely in the mainstream of popular American political thought. Since the American Revolution, the battle cry has been tyranny, not despotism, and I do not think this is because Americans actually like despotism.
That does not mean, of course, that we are unwilling to live under a despotic regime. Tocqueville is at his most penetrating when he describes the psyche of the citizen laboring under a kind of ubiquitous, micromanagerial regime at which he simultaneously feels envy and pride. Tocqueville did not worry much that America would fall to a Napoleon. He worried about a ‘soft’ kind of tyranny that defied neologism, one that gently but firmly insinuated itself into all the corners of everyday life — not the tyranny of a single bootstomp but of a trillion nudges.
Tocqueville worried that Americans would slip into the kind of quietude under such a regime that he, in a long line of European liberals, associated with ‘oriental despotism’. Nowadays I think we can safely say that if there’s one thing wrong with ‘oriental despotism’ it isn’t social torpor. The whole attraction of the China model — a model far more challenging to the US than, say, the Jihadist model — is its combination of social dynamism and governmental fiat. It’s an appeal that can only really resonate with those who take economics to be more important than, or in some essential way prior to, politics — whether on the theory that free markets create free republics or that they render them obsolete. For those who take economic freedom without political liberty to be a disgrace — and here, though their movement is no monolith, I count the tea partiers — the China model holds no allure. Tocqueville’s concern about soft despotism or the tyranny of nudges, in other words, remains sound, even though his concern about the way we’re likely to live under such a tyranny seems misconceived today.
Now, in my original post, however, I went out of my way to put things like this —
When a government learns how to use taxes to coerce, control, and manage the behavior of its citizens, a country is placed on a perilous road — not to serfdom, necessarily, but to tyranny, a tyranny that lords over even the rich and famous, even when they happen to profit from its favor.
— rather than, say, like this:
When a government raises taxes on its citizens, or even keeps them steady, a country is plunged into the funk and hellfire of tyranny, a tyranny worse than Stalin’s or Robert Mugabe’s, and only better than that of the Burmese junta because we can get ESPN. America woo
To raise a tax is not necessarily to take a corresponding step further down the road to tyranny. Over the past ten years, in particular, movement conservatives have come to rely almost completely on the heuristic that higher taxes often correlate with bigger, stronger, more meddlesome, more tyrannical government. The theory behind this rule of thumb is that taxes are first and foremost to be understood economically: high taxes mean ‘low productivity’. This is true, but it is also misleading. My claim, which I associated with the tea partiers, is that taxes should be fundamentally understood politically.
A tyrannical regime with any brains at all, I suggested, would labor to avoid crushing the productivity of its citizens. But the point goes deeper than that: when we have forgotten how to think about taxes except in terms of productivity, we really have taken a number of strides down the road to tyranny. This is true whether or not we are free marketeers. Republicans have been so in thrall to business interests, and to business-speak, that they have fallen to claiming almost exclusively that high taxes are bad because they lower our ability to produce and consume (certain) goods and services. As our own PEG has recently pointed out, of course, the French seem to recognize a broader range of goods and services than we do — including family time, vacation time, and ‘social cohesion’.
What’s that you say? Americans like hanging out with their families too? A-a-and not working? Who are you, Perry Mason? Yes, the key difference between the American and the French model is ‘social cohesion’. On the American right, taxing to spend on ‘social cohesion’ has been singled out as the great and pernicious obstacle to productivity. But, as my friends at TAC and Front Porch Republic like to point out, corporatist thinking, which can only understand tax policy in economic terms, is really at tremendous odds with the kinds of ‘noneconomic’ productivity associated with individuals who count creating or maintaining families among their creative projects of highest achievement. The logic of corporatism leads individuals to value productivity above all, only to deny that any sort of productivity that doesn’t reinforce the logic of corporatism is truly productive.
But a significant number of conservatives of the TAC or FPR variety — the loose term is ‘Christian Democrats’ — connect the productive character of family cohesion to that of social cohesion. Tea partiers are different. To the extent that they are Christian, it seems to me, tea partiers reassert a kind of Protestant politics different from the evangelical activism of the 80s and 90s. Where evangelicals mobilized politically as a means to cultural ends, tea partiers seek political ends. They see individual projects of family cohesion as generally salutary to political liberty, but government projects of social cohesion as generally inimical to it. So they reject Republican corporatism, but not for the reasons that renegade conservatives today usually do. Rather than worrying first and foremost about ‘the social fabric’ or ‘our sense of community’, they count their political liberties most dear. Rather than ‘it’s the culture’, the motto is ‘it’s the tyranny, stupid’.
The average tea partier is probably more likely than I am to tell you that we’ve crossed over into actual tyrannical government today, but that’s a matter we get to argue over. Indeed, it’s one we get to persuade one another about, just as conservatives on different sides of the national security debate are in the process of persuading one another that the Bush legacy really is or really isn’t tyrannical. So Erik is wrong, I think, to say that “no two people can agree” on what the legitimate purposes of taxation might be. I’m not even opening the related but separate questions of what property it’s legitimate to tax, or on what things it’s legitimate to spend tax revenues — and very many people agree on these questions all the time. There’s no reason why we can’t argue about which uses of taxation are legitimate, and no reason why we can’t be persuaded in one direction or another.
In sum: my concern here is not how the government uses tax revenues to enable its own behavior, but how the government uses taxation itself to condition and manipulate the behavior of citizens — because bad choices in the first instance may make for bad governance, but bad choices in the second instance may become destructive of the ends to which human beings institute governments.
James – you’re correct that I was not terribly generous in my post. I admit to moments of passion which cloud my otherwise more generous nature. I find you, as ever, an admirable thinker and writer.
I do still, nevertheless, think that you are walking shaky ground when you draw lines between social liberalism and economic tyranny. I’m glad you fleshed out your concepts here, but I’m still not sure you’ve made that connection. I think we agree more than we disagree on much of this, but I am still entirely baffled by that assertion – which also seems to fly in the face of libertarianism or at least civil libertarianism (which is not to say that libertarianism doesn’t have its faults) but which seems like an odd conclusion to reach vis-a-vis tyranny in particular.
Economic progressives I can see falling much more into this than social liberals or civil libertarians.
— E.D. Kain · Jan 19, 10:04 PM · #
I personally think you better start talking about this T-word.
Torturegate.
— matoko_chan · Jan 19, 10:26 PM · #
For now, I only have time to say there’s probably a reason you don’t see many libertarians in Congress. Their approach to social liberalism is typically a private-sector one. When it comes to implementing socially libertarian policy, sometimes the approach cuts right and sometimes it cuts left. When it cuts left, libertarians are put in the paradoxical position of — let me caricature it slightly for rhetorical effect — wanting not only to legalize everything but regulate it too. And that gets us back to where I want us to focus.
As for Torturegate, I wish to associate myself with Megan’s remarks, which seem to me definitive.
— James · Jan 19, 10:57 PM · #
Serious question: exactly who among the tea partiers has demonstrated a Manzi-esque concern for “social cohesion” at the expense of economic growth? Who among them has called for the lassoing of cowboy capitalism and its monomaniacal emphasis on productivity? As far as I know, none of the leaders have talked about such things.
Tea-partiers do not “fundamentally” understand taxes in terms of politics. They subscribe, by and large, to a crude version of supply-side economics, mixed with an ideological animus toward big government and progressive taxation. The result is that they look favorably on each and every tax cut as a concrete reduction of tyranny. In terms of economic thinking, they aren’t very different from the people they choose to speak at their rallies: Levin, Ingraham, Armey, Mark Williams, etc.
Let me put it another way: tea-partiers don’t see the Bush tax cuts as a sop that conservatives mistakenly opted for in lieu of more important freedoms. They see them as salutary, full stop, unlike many other bills and policies that Bush pursued.
— Tim Crimmins · Jan 19, 11:39 PM · #
I should’ve said that tea-partiers look on every tax cut as an economic good and a concrete reduction of tyranny. They sincerely believe in the economic efficacy of the Bush tax policy as well as in its political utility. So I should have said that they do not understand taxes “wholly” or “mainly” in terms of politics.
— Tim Crimmins · Jan 19, 11:50 PM · #
At least as I am reading this post, the Ordinary Gentlemen (current and former) have repeatedly missed James’ point — probably as James diagnosed, because of their focus on the “t-word.” We can’t measure “tyranny” by the federal income tax rate — they would likely agree with James that the Bush tax cuts didn’t reduce “tyranny.” Nor can the aggregated marginal rate a given citizen pays, taking into account all of the taxes to which he is subject.
I think tax rates have very little to do with James’ post; perhaps their only connection is that the commenters’ fixation serves as an illustration of the modern attitude towards taxes that allows for James’ “tyranny” to increase. Instead, I read his post as a call to reexamine the purpose of taxes, both on an individual basis and on taxes in general. What is our government using taxes for? Primarily to coerce behavior? To raise revenue? If it’s to raise revenue, is it for legitimate aims? How much does a given tax allow the government to have a say about… the number of children you have, or whether you smoke cigarettes, or buy a house, etc.?
These issues do not cleave along partisan lines. I think the ordinarily interesting Ordinary Gentlemen could contribute to a much better discussion about this then what I’ve seen so far. I hope they do so. And I think that’s true even if I am totally misreading James.
— Jay Daniel · Jan 20, 12:28 AM · #
Coolio, lieutenant. Do you also associate yourself with this?
“I usually do not swear on this blog. But all I can think of is a quote from PJ O’Rourke on seeing young kids shot by the IDF: “This is bullshit. This is barbarism.” This is not how a decent country acts, which is presumably why we lied about it.
I expect tomorrow, if Brown wins, we’ll hear a lot of talk about a Republican resurgence. But unless the Republicans can come up with a more convincing program to keep stuff like this from happening—and a more convincing economic program than cutting taxes in the face of record deficits— I don’t think they’re ready to lead.
My conservative readers are no doubt winding up to tell me I’m a liberal sellout. But I don’t think it’s particularly bleeding heart to think that we shouldn’t have to fake suicides to cover up for abusing prisoners. In fact, I think that’s the stance of a hard core believer in law and order.”
Bravo Mrs. Suderman.
You make me proud to be a grrl……and btw you have more nads then the whole TAS staff.
— matoko_chan · Jan 20, 12:42 AM · #
Jay Daniel: you’re sure not misreading. MC: those’re specifically the ones I had in mind.
— James · Jan 20, 01:40 AM · #
Regarding my earlier comments, I read and responded too hastily. I now see what James was saying. Basically, the tea partiers believe that after political rights have been assured, family cohesion and general social health will tend to follow, or at least become possible. That is all they are asking for.
What James has yet to explain is how taxes during the past decade served to “aggrandize” the state, and in what novel and/or specific ways tax policy coerced, controlled and managed us. Since the wide latitude for action that the Bush administration enjoyed had seemingly very little to do with taxes, it’s hard to make sense of James’s first claim in any terms other than encouraging complacency.Conservatives could look at the tax cuts and be satisfied that “conservatism” was winning the day – when it wasn’t. Surely that wasn’t everything James was talking about. So what am I missing?
— Tim Crimmins · Jan 20, 02:39 AM · #
The tea party timing is totally fishy. Why, if our political liberties have suffered a long, fluctuating decline, has the switch suddenly flipped? After all, hasn’t the yoke of the “ubiquitous, micromanagerial regime” loomed over us from the inception? When circumstances required— the Civil War, the Great Depression, WWII— haven’t we’ve tried it on outright? And haven’t our liberties survived, if a bit soggy? Perhaps the low boil of tyranny is just what our liberties require on occasion.
I was hoping to use “the emerging scaffold” of tyranny somewhere, but I have badly abused my metaphor limit.
— turnbuckle · Jan 20, 06:13 AM · #
Turnbuckle — a tipping point had to be reached at some point, and the progressive policies are attempting a much larger takeover than ever before — it makes sense that people are only now being driven to action of this magnitude — however, I’ve seen a lot of unrest over government actions since I’ve been watching from the 60s to the present. The Chicago Democratic Convention was quite a spectacle of unrest. Kent State caused a lot of fear about public protest for a long time, but still different groups have protested through the years — this is the year of the tea partiers.
— mike farmer · Jan 20, 06:58 PM · #
I suspect that the tea partiers have much less in common with James than he hopes. I say suspect because, on the one hand, James remains somewhat elusive in terms of specifics, and on the other hand, the agenda of the tea partiers is somewhat unclear if not in some ways incoherent.
But that said, I think the overlap between what James wants and what the tea partiers want is … not large. Among other things, I suspect that James and the tea partiers would disagree on the salience of issues related to “national security,” to bend over backwards to use a non-inflamatory term .
Which is to say that any attempt to reform the Republican party in a true minimal government direction is going to have to confront the national security state. War is the health of the state.
Even then, such a movement would need to confront several difficult facts: the popularity, even among many conservatives, of many components (and generally the most costly components) of the modern welfare state (“keep the government away from my medicare,” indeed), and the power of modern corporatism. But it can’t even begin to successfully confront those issues unless it confronts the national security state.
— LarryM · Jan 20, 07:06 PM · #
Tim — I’d like to try my hand at responding to your question. I apologize now for what will be a long comment. When James said that taxes “aggrandize” the state, I understood him to mean that exercising (1) the choice to tax, (2) the choice of the target of the tax, and (3) the (stated) purpose of the tax all serve to expand the field occupied by the government. That’s why I think focusing on “Bush” or the federal income tax can be misleading, although ultimately the same logic applies (think progressivity/regressivity). More interesting examples include taxes on things like cigarettes, primary residences (a negative tax), carbon, estates, etc. You may agree with the policy reasons for some or all of the these taxes, but I think it’s clear that these are primarily political — not economic — weapons, even if each of them (other than the home mortgage deduction, which is really a form of spending) raises revenue as well. And in each case, when the government chooses to use its power to tax to accomplish these political aims, it encroaches a little bit more on the territory previously occupied by civil society.
Tax’s alter ego — spending — is an even more obvious aggrandizing force. Every time the government enters a new sphere of life by spending money, its power is aggrandized. Take food stamps. If the government is going to pay for people to eat, it has an interest in what people eat with that money. So it regulates what people can use food stamps for. More timely, take health care. If the government is going to pay to keep people healthy, it has an interest in how people take care of themselves. This is a potentially enormous aggrandizement of governmental “tyranny.” Again, I know that others are making this argument too. I just think it is closely related to what James is talking about. And I’m a little surprised that people haven’t engaged or argued with him on this level.
But the interesting thing about taxes is that people across the ideological spectrum no longer seem much interested in debating the political ramifications of taxes. Now that the flat tax is no longer discussed, noneconomic rationales for and against taxes have largely dropped out of the political discourse. Proponents of a given tax argue on the basis of a need for the money, the tax’s overall revenue generating potential, or its ability to capture externalities. Opponents argue that the tax will stunt economic growth or increase the size of government (NOT the aggrandizing I’m talking about; the federal budget may or may not be correlated with “tyranny,” but it has no necessary connection with tyranny). I believe James is addressing this point, and perhaps he is right that the tea partiers are or have the potential to be the engine for changing that.
— Jay Daniel · Jan 20, 07:46 PM · #
Apart from my above comment, I’m stil finding James’ specific point vis a vis taxation elusive. If the problem isn’t “tax rates,” nor is it “how the government uses tax revenues to enable its own behavior,” then what is it? That would leave, I guess, taxes (or perhaps tax breaks) designed to directly influence behavior. And critiquing that sort of thing is all well and good, but in the greater scheme of things pretty small potatoes. And, significantly, not high on the agenda of the tea party crowd, at least as far as I can tell.
So what is it James? What would you do differently regarding the tax structure? Eliminate the (relatively few) taxes which are designed to “coerce behavior,” and eliminate the (many) tax breaks which have the same design? I actually think that’s a pretty nice program; though as a matter of politics – well good luck with that, the big ticket behavioral tax breaks (employer medical insurance deduction, mortgage deduction) are immensely popular, and the sin taxes (which don’t amount to much anyway) pretty popular as well.
— LarryM · Jan 20, 10:25 PM · #
“When James said that taxes “aggrandize” the state, I understood him to mean that exercising (1) the choice to tax, (2) the choice of the target of the tax, and (3) the (stated) purpose of the tax all serve to expand the field occupied by the government. That’s why I think focusing on “Bush” or the federal income tax can be misleading, although ultimately the same logic applies (think progressivity/regressivity).”
James said that taxes aggrandized the state in the past decade. The word implies that, as you write, taxes expanded the field occupied by the government. But looking at tax policy within the past decade, I don’t see anything like that. Bush cut the income tax by about a tenth and the capital gains tax by about a third. He abolished the estate tax altogether. Now, I don’t have comprehensive knowledge of Bush-era tax policy, so I might be missing various credits, loopholes and targeted rates, etc. But the basic trend was for the cutting of existing taxes and against the creation of new ones. I am not sure how James conjures an “aggrandized” state out of decreased taxation.
That said, state power did increase in the past decade; but the casual relationship that he originally posited between taxes and that increase is dubious, to say the least.
I take his point, however, that our continuation fixation on economic efficacy (or “fiscal conservatism”) distracts us from non-economic political goods.
— Tim Crimmins · Jan 21, 01:22 AM · #
I now see your point about taxes and tyranny, JP and agree with it to a point. But I would need to know a particular instance of taxy-coersion to know up to what point I agree with you. Is there something in the Health Care bill that is a step down the road to tyranny?
Beyond that, as someone suggested above, you way over-estimate the teapartiers. There is no cogent thought behind this movement. This has everything to do with the diminishing of old power structures. It’s a movement of old white people. It’s no coincidence that their enemy is young black democrat. The republican party has been catering to this group for decades now, and Obama’s election is the clearest sign possible that they are losing. This is what they are talking about when they say “my america is threatened.” They are right. It is threatened, if they insist on equating America with a certain cultural group being dominant.
Any policy recomendations are just rationalizations for tea partiers. Policy isn’t the point.
— cw · Jan 21, 06:12 AM · #
Tim – there are a few points of approach here. You’re right about the general trend, of course. But another way of framing the general trend is that the real tax cuts landed at the top and the bottom of the pyramid. It’s still way too hard for an independent, middle-class guy or a girl who wants to start a family and a small business – the self-reliant individual conservatives and libertarians are supposed to champion – to make good on that gambit. It’s pretty purple rhetoric to say the average American has to stand by and watch both parties pander to the poor and the wealthy, but I think there’s a lot of truth behind that kind of frustration. To nobody’s surprise – well, not to mine – this has crystallized in, and powered, the tea party movement. And I have to say, Bush’s devotion to ‘the dream of home ownership’ reinforced a tax-credit policy that helped swell and burst our calamitous housing bubble. The way I’m suggesting we look at taxes leads us to be as suspicious of tax credits as we are of tax raises. And I think that the Clinton years hardwired tax-credit mania in a way that Bush was totally unable to reverse. Tax credits, even when conservatives like them or benefit from them, are the sorts of redistributions of wealth they supposedly oppose on principle. Now, conservatives might be pushed to argue that they’re doing the best they can to return money, and helping reward Americans living their lives right in the process. But – just as the right needs to rethink its approach to the national-security state – we all need to rethink our approach to taxes and tax credits as policy implements. The whole way of thinking needs to be walked back.
cw – that the enforcers of health care reform will be the IRS strikes me as about as grim and foreboding a step down the road to tyranny as I can imagine. Yes, it wouldn’t kick in for a few years. Cold comfort! And yes, there’s some kind of religious exemption – so prepare for the kind of absurd theatrics that defined daily life behind the Iron Curtain, an official realm in which everyone games the ridiculous system overlaying an unofficial realm in which everyone sighs and rolls their eyes and speaks frankly. Prepare for lots of people having to claim exemptions that don’t exist just to live as free individuals. Hey wait – isn’t that already happening under the current tax regime? I suppose the good news is that this bleak picture seems increasingly unlikely now that the dastardly bill is headed for the dustbin. As for your broader point – that the tea partiers are baggy old whiteys without an intellectual spine – that’s an understandable way of seeing things, but I simply don’t think it captures what’s really going on, and I think as we move forward it will become increasingly inaccurate. I’ll have to say more about this later.
Thanks to you both for pressing on the weaker spots.
— James · Jan 22, 05:03 PM · #
Its nice to see that I was at least reading James correctly. And he answered a couple of my questions, albeit his response wasn’t directed at my comment.
Aside from the general disagreement about the agenda of the tea party movement, certainly not resolvable in a comment thread (though I’ll be interested to see what James has to say on this going forward), what strikes me about James’ position is that the tax credits he (rightly IMO) disparages probably disproportionately benefit (directly, at least) the “independent, middle-class guy or a girl who wants to start a family and a small business.”
— LarryM · Jan 22, 06:59 PM · #
LarryM – yes, sorry I didn’t direct some of those remarks your way. You’re probably right about who the tax credits benefit, because they were created specifically to placate middle class anger and anxiety. I think Ross & Reihan wound up pretty frankly admitting that Grand New Party hinged on the wisdom and goodness of bribing lower-middle and middle-class folks in a way that required of them a basic subscription to generic family values. I’d rather live in that world than the alternative the left is putting forward, but instead of both I’d rather see us begin to reject the whole concept of taxation that underwrites them. We shouldn’t create and perpetuate a political economy, in other words, in which average Americans – and especially the ones I pick out for special mention – NEED targeted tax cuts, which might benefit them disproportionately in relative terms but which, I suspect, are of less benefit in objective terms than what would obtain if we marched toward the theoretical and practical reform I’m advocating. Beginning to think in this way suggests, at least to me, exactly how and why Ross & Reihan wound up vulnerable, in an otherwise fairly invulnerable book, to the charge from the paleo right that their scheme was pleasant enough in some ways but profoundly unsustainable in other, more important ways. I’m pretty certain we could keep it up longer than the paleos fear (or hope), but for me that practical point has somewhat less of a bite than the basic political one: taxes are for raising revenue, not conditioning or extracting certain behaviors on a mass level, and a government that uses them for the latter and not the former is malfunctioning in a way hazardous to our liberty.
— James · Jan 22, 09:57 PM · #
I wonder how many Tea Partiers are calling for the elimination of the mortgage-interest tax deduction? Or the child tax deduction? If these aren’t considered big-government “nudges,” if not indeed subsidies, why not?
George Will, in his “Statecraft as Soulcraft” days, used to be fond of saying that taxation is itself, unavoidably, a “social program.”
Contra Reagan’s statement that government taxation “must not be used to regulate the economy or bring about social change,” Will wrote: “No previous President has stressed as much as Ronald Reagan has the possibility and importance of changing society by changing the tax code. Clearly, Reagan came to Washington convinced that certain tax changes are the key to his economic program, which is, in turn, the key to his comprehensive plan for revitalizing American society and improving Americans’ spirits.”
And more: a “ ‘free market’ economic system is a system; it is a public product, a creation of government. Any important structure of freedom is a structure, a complicated institutional and cultural context that government must nurture and sustain.”
Those Will quotes are from a chapter called “Conservative Political Economy.”
None of it would sound very welcome at a Tea Party rally. Repeat after Will: Free markets are not states of nature; they are systems.
Who wants a T-shirt?!
— Exile on Mainstream · Jan 30, 05:34 PM · #