Deadwood as the model of a Conservative’s Utopia

You know, I always thought it was me and my bad habits of stereotyping and making sweeping generalizations about people, but it’s often seemed to me that there is a type of Conservative of the more corporatist and self-congratulatory "libertarian" bent who believes that the only reason he’s not a titan of industry is that America has gone downhill since, oh, about 1876.

This type seems to think that if he were suddenly blown through a wormhole in time and dropped in the Black Hills of the Dakota Territories just after the Civil War with nothing but the clothes on his back and a Swiss Army knife he’d show up back here a year later, rich as Croesus, having dug a gold mine out of the mountainside with his spoon and fork and corkscrew attachments and incidentally having invented the telephone, the electric light bulb, the internal combustion engine, and time travel. 

You listen to them talk and you’d swear they truly believe that they left behind a thriving little city named after them, with their statue on the town green, the bank’s vault filled with their gold, and the beautiful rancher’s daughter who loves them, waiting for their return.

At any rate, that’s my explanation for why cubicle workers, nerdy pseudo-intellectual types on the Right Wing dole at some magazine or think tank, trust fund slackers, insurance agents, car salesmen, frat boys, dentists, bought and paid for Congressmen, legacies of all kinds, and the occasional law school professor pontificate with assumed authority on the heroic nature of the unfettered capitalist and the boon such supermen and superwomen are to society.

I’ll hear them growing wistful for the good old days when men like them were allowed to be men like them and their women were silent and docile and full of unquestioning admiration for men like them and all other men and women, the ones who weren’t like them and weren’t theirs, knew their places as obedient and uncomplaining workers, servants, cannon fodder, and beasts of burden, and I'll think they wanted to drag us all back to the 1800s.

But then I’ll tell myself to snap out of it.  Nobody in their right mind longs for a time when small boys and girls worked twelve hours a day in factories and women couldn’t vote and African-Americans could be murdered by white people at whim and the air over industrial towns was gray all day long, all year long with coal dust and the rivers were open sewers and the urban poor lived ten to a single filthy room, more if you counted the rats, and the rural poor starved and went barefoot and wore themselves out by the time they were forty and everybody’s children died of of diphtheria, cholera, TB, typhus, and yellow fever.

Fooled me, didn’t I?

Let’s consider, say, the year 1880. Here was a society in which people were free to keep everything they earned, because there was no income tax. They were also free to decide what to do with their own money—spend it, save it, invest it, donate it, or whatever. People were generally free to engage in occupations and professions without a license or permit. There were few federal economic regulations and regulatory agencies. No Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, welfare, bailouts, or so-called stimulus plans. No IRS. No Departments of Education, Energy, Agriculture, Commerce, and Labor. No EPA and OSHA. No Federal Reserve. No drug laws. Few systems of public schooling. No immigration controls. No federal minimum-wage laws or price controls. A monetary system based on gold and silver coins rather than paper money. No slavery. No CIA. No FBI. No torture or cruel or unusual punishments. No renditions. No overseas military empire. No military-industrial complex.

As a libertarian, as far as I’m concerned, that’s a society that is pretty darned golden.

That's Jacob Hornberger writing in Reason.

And these are some people writing in other places about how amazingly dumb Hornberger's being.

Eric Rauchway at The Edge of the American West.

Sir Charles at Cogitamus.

John Holbo at Crooked Timber.

Will Wilkinson.

And over at the Daily Kos, Devilstower gets into serious detail.

Oh, and in case you were wondering, there's at least one "Liberatarian" who is in fact nostalgic for the day when women couldn't vote, own their own property, if they were married, or, you know, own their own bodies.  Bryan Caplan.

See John Holbo again.

Hat tip to Brad DeLong.

Comments

[Ken Muldrew]

As DeLong writes in a draft version of Slouching Towards Utopia, "This school [libertarian economic fundamentalist] is such as to make refutation difficult: their universe of values and assumptions is "crazy" in that it has so little in common with the one that the rest of us take for granted that it is hard to determine what arguments will have purchase."

I like Al Swearengen's take on this utopia: "Pain or damage don't end the world. Or despair, or fucking beatings. The world ends when you're dead. Until then, you got more punishment in store. Stand it like a man... and give some back." There is nothing like a proper beating to make you appreciate your liberty.

[BPx3]

"I’d hear them growing wistful for the good old days when men like them were allowed to be men like them and their women were silent and docile and full of unquestioning admiration for men like them and all other men and women, the ones who weren’t like them and weren’t theirs, knew their places as obedient and uncomplaining workers, servants, cannon fodder, and beasts of burden, and I'd think they wanted to drag us all back to the 1800s."

Well put. An accurate description of the mindset of roughly ninety-eight percent of Republican men.

I wish, however, you had written, "the rancher's beautiful daughter," instead of "the beautiful rancher’s daughter." I'm now haunted by a vision of Lorne Greene, from Bonanza, wearing lipstick and mascara.

[wwolfe]

The indifference to Jim Crow and women's disenfranchisement is repulsive, yes, but this one is just plain puzzling:

"People were generally free to engage in occupations and professions without a license or permit."

Maybe it's just me, but I'm not nostalgic for a time when my doctor didn't need a medical license. Either that, or Hornberger thinks "Sawbones" is a term of affection, not gruesome literal fact.

[Mark]

Libertarianism is the sophomore men's fantasy rule the world club.

[Kathleen]

I think tonight I'm gonna party like it's 1899.

[Belvoir]

I kind of wish Megan McArdle got to enjoy libertarian livin' in 1860. Especially the silent part.
Scrubbing laundry down by the gulch, polishing her man's bootstraps during her agonizing 14th pregnancy. Oh god, that sounds wicked of me. But libertarians really do seem to live in some narcissist dream world, while on our planet they're rarely elected dog-catcher.

I always imagine McCardle on her comfy couch typing missives about initiative and self-reliance and the sappy liberals for her male audience of slavering geeks, while she eats a box of Ring-Dings and half-watches Oprah, ironically of course.

[Rana]

It's like the New Agers who all believe that they were princesses in a past life - none of these schmoes stops to think that, for most of them, life would have ended at 40, having spent most of their existence breathing in coal dust or risking limbs for enough wages to keep a roof over their head and to buy enough alcohol to deaden the pain until the next day's twelve-hour shift.

And, of course, in this glorious past life, they would all be free of cavities, poor vision, measles, heart disease, and so on, and no one they loved (if they love anyone) would die from lack of medical care.

Life may have been more "free" then - but that doesn't mean that it was good, even for the guys on top of the heap.

[Lance]

BPx3: I wish, however, you had written, "the rancher's beautiful daughter," instead of "the beautiful rancher’s daughter." I'm now haunted by a vision of Lorne Greene, from Bonanza, wearing lipstick and mascara.

BP, sorry about that. Of course there are those who'd find the image of Ben Cartwright in drag alluring, but maybe it will help you to think of Barbara Stanwyck in The Big Valley. Ben Cartwright didn't have any daughters, that we heard about at any rate, but Victoria Barkley's daughter looked exactly like a very young Linda Evans. Oh, and rumor has it that Susan Sarandon will starring in a movie remake of The Big Valley.

wwolfe: Maybe it's just me, but I'm not nostalgic for a time when my doctor didn't need a medical license.

That puzzled me too. All I can figure is that Hornberger is also a Walter Mitty and imagines that he could just walk into an operating room or a courtroom and successfully remove a rich man's son's brain tumor or save a corporate executive from being whacked with a million dollar settlement in a wrongful death suit. More likely, though, it's an expression of conservatives' hatred of professional organizations, particularly teachers' unions and the ABA.

Kathleen, lol.

[Fairfax]

Actually, there is place where the libertarian dream rules, a place of limited government (and how!), wide open spaces, a place Where A Man Can Do What A Man Wants To Do without a bunch of bureaucrats demanding he be licensed to do it, or trying to take away his guns.

It's called Afghanistan.

And just like anyone who dared to utter even the meekest statement critical of US foreign policy in the 1950s and 60s was urged to go to Russia, I urge all the so-called libertarians to take their covered wagons to the Khyber Pass, and head north.

I'm also reminded of a line from the play The Solid Gold Cadillac, where the hero (a self-made tycoon of the sort the libertarians dream of being, albeit one with a conscience) tells the heroine about how he went to the Klondike to dig for gold with his bare hands. "Did you find any?" she asks. "Nope, men with shovels got there ahead of me."

[nadine]

yep, i hear folks go off on their fantasy of the olden days lots. I murmur my appreciation of their appreciation and then point out that were we in the olden days, i would have died 15 years ago from cancer if i hadn't already died in pregnancy.

then i bring up the prevalence of VD back then, and the painful cures...

[Linkmeister]

Fairfax, I think the latest destination for the ultimate in libertarian paradise is actually Somalia. In Afghanistan you gotta pay bribes to get anything done, which essentially means you have to follow somebody's rules.