| Number 178 | November 1, 2002 |
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This Week:
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Greetings, Welcome to the new readers of Nygaard Notes! Years ago I attempted to refer to you as "Nygaardians," but it never caught on. Well, you don't need a special name to appreciate whatever it is that people appreciate about the Notes, but I certainly hope to hear from you as we go along with your comments, questions, and interesting ideas. This week, for example, reader Marty wrote in with an idea for a new acronym for the times: WABEE ("War Against Bush's Endless Enemies") Where did he come up with that, I wonder... But it got me thinking; it's really more accurate than the "War Against Terrorism (the WAT?!) So many ideas, so little space! I could forgive readers for thinking that I have some sort of obsession with Tim Penny, since I am spending so much time writing about his foibles lately. True enough, I don't plan to vote for him for Governor, but if you read closely you will see that my real point is to look at the remarkable situation in which someone who has a clear record on the major issues of the day can convince people to pretty much completely ignore it. I focus on Tim Penny because I think he offers a particularly clear view of this political curiosity, but it is not at all unique to him. After all, if my objective was to damage his campaign, wouldn't I have gotten around to it a bit sooner? Some of you won't even read this until after the election. In any case, he may be elected, he may not. It's the fact that he has a chance to be elected that I am interested in, and I try to explain why in this week's piece about elections and Wellstone. Every election disappoints most of us, to some degree, since nothing revolutionary is going to happen as a result of any individual election. So somewhere around every big election I re-print my "Seven Steps to Better Elections." Look for it next week. The October 2002 edition of The Nygaard Notes Pledge Drive is over. A quick THANK YOU to all of you who donated this past week. It is so important I can't even begin to tell you. You'll be getting your official thank-yous and pseudo-receipts in the mail soon. See you at the polls, and in the streets, Nygaard |
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I am not too interested in elections. Or, rather, I am not too interested in elections when they happen. Any teacher or organizer will tell you that about 90 percent of what happens in a class or in a meeting is due to the preparation you do outside of that class or that meeting. The same is true with elections. The social forces that define the basic parameters and possibilities of any election are set in the months and years before the election—indeed, before there are even any candidates. What are the conditions that produce a Tim Penny, or a Paul Wellstone? A George W. or a Ralph Nader? I don't believe that these are "special" men who were or could be elected because they have inspired or might inspire great social changes. Just the opposite. Social change movements produce the leaders they need, not the other way around. Right now the Individualist and Competitive forces are more organized, so we have a George W.-type political scene, and few genuine peace and justice candidates on the horizon. It could be different, and probably will be. That's why I disagree with some of my friends and allies who say that the death of Paul Wellstone deals a "devastating blow" to the anti-war movement. If we have a real movement, then we will produce a dozen more Wellstones, and get them elected. The conditions that made it possible for a Paul Wellstone to be elected will make it possible for someone like him to be elected in the future, if we continue to do our work. The civil rights movement didn't happen because of Martin Luther King. Martin Luther King happened because of the civil rights movement. Elections come and go. The possibilities presented by those elections are decided by what we do in the meantime. Those possibilities will be set by the books we publish, the songs we write, the media we create, the picket lines we walk, the teach-ins we hold, the alliances we build, the rallies we put together, and the communities we form. Out of our work and our perseverance will come social change. The leadership exists, it just needs a movement to lift it up high enough to be seen. So, by all means, go out and vote. People have died for our right to do so, and we disrespect them if we don't exercise our right. But if we want to have real candidates and real choices, and not just Tweedledum or Tweedledee, then we can't stop there. The work we do AFTER Tuesday will bring us another Wellstone—or better—if we work hard enough and honestly enough. Joe Hill said, "Don't mourn – Organize!" I say we should mourn AND organize. We mourn because we are human beings, with souls. We organize so we can live like it. |
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Tim Penny and the Rise of Libertarianism II: Penny the "Centrist" |
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Last week I commented that Minnesota Independence Party Gubernatorial Candidate Tim Penny has become more extreme in his views since he left Congress in 1995. I claimed that he has come to tilt ever more strongly in the direction of Libertarianism. You may or may not be troubled by this, but the important thing to notice is how the apparent contrast between Penny's recent stands and his current claims to occupy the "sensible center" have been handled by the Minnesota media. Minnesota Governor Jesse Ventura takes great pride in referring to himself and his Independence Party as "centrist," and this is routinely parroted by the Minnesota (and other) media, although the facts don't support it. His mix of socially "liberal" and fiscally "conservative" positions is the standard mix you see in many Libertarian politicians, as I pointed out last week. Most reporting and commentary on Tim Penny's campaign routinely links him, accurately, to the Ventura administration, which in turn is routinely characterized, inaccurately, as "centrist." The result is that we see comments like the one in the October 19th Star Tribune (Newspaper of the Twin Cities!), which said, "One of the central questions in the [gubernatorial] campaign has been where Gov. Jesse Ventura's supporters will go, whether they will return to the traditional parties or stay loyal to his centrist message and back Penny..." There's no point any longer in talking about our petty and immature Governor, as he now has one foot out the door. It is, however, worth looking in some detail at Penny's writings and public positions of recent years, as they illustrate just how far campaign reporting can stray from reality. Penny's Recent Positions, in Detail Perhaps the most revealing picture of Penny's views in recent years can be found by looking at Chapter 24 of the Cato Institute's "Policy Recommendations for the 106th Congress," published in 1999, just three years ago. The Cato Institute is a Libertarian think tank/advocacy group that has become increasingly influential in recent years, a phenomenon I won't discuss right now. Tim Penny was a fellow at Cato in the late 1990s until I-don't-know-when, fairly recently. The list of cost-cutting ideas that Penny recommended in Chapter 24 ("The Federal Budget") includes recommendations to terminate 300 federal agencies, sell off (i.e. "privatize") federal assets, "eliminate foreign aid" (which has "almost no public support," he says), and cut nearly a quarter of a trillion dollars in the next five years from "public housing, food stamps, and other welfare." In case you don't get the picture, here is a more specific list of "Recommended Federal Program Terminations," per Tim Penny, 1999:
This is a small sample; the original list goes on for six pages. And remember, Penny was not recommending reducing or streamlining; he was recommending elimination. Stephen Moore, Penny's co-author of Chapter 24, at the time was the Cato Institute's Director of Fiscal Policy Studies, and is now President of the "Club for Growth." The Club is a campaign-money group that supports "the Reagan vision of limited government and lower taxes," standard code for individualist, competitive organizations, including Libertarian ones. Moore told the Star Trib that "his and Penny's chapter of the 1999 Cato Handbook was ‘one of our major projects together' during Penny's time at the Institute, and that the two of them spent four months writing it, along with two staff members." Moore added that "For the most part, it was a good collaboration. We saw eye to eye on 80 percent of this stuff, when it came to dealing with budgets." Penny's approach to "dealing with budgets" has, for many years, been to balance them. Part of his approach, as we have seen, is to cut spending by chopping the living daylights out of myriad government programs. The other side of the budget-balancing equation is taxes, and in Chapter 24 Penny says that "Chapter 5 of this handbook provides the details of how taxes should be reduced." Looking at Chapter 5, we see that some of those details include abolishing the capital gains and estate taxes, enacting an alternative "maximum tax for individuals and businesses," and "replac[ing] the income tax with a national sales tax and clos[ing] down the Internal Revenue Service." More "sensible centrism," I guess. How The Fringe Becomes the Center Why, in the face of so much evidence to the contrary, do reporters and editors continue to refer to a right-wing—or, in Nygaard parlance, Individualist and Competitive—Libertarian as a "centrist?" It goes back to what I have been saying about the prevalence of the dualistic approach to thinking about issues in this culture. People in Minnesota, as in other states, tend to look at ideas and issues as if they have only two sides, or two choices. Politics in Minnesota, then, is either "left" or "right," the two being represented in the public mind by the Democrats and the Republicans. Just last week I heard Governor Ventura talking about how he thinks Minnesotans are looking for political leaders who are not from the "extreme left," like the Democrats, or the "extreme right," like the Republicans. He's been saying this for years, going back to 1999 when he told the Washington Post "I believe the Republicans and the Democrats have reached levels of extreme, where they're out there representing 15 percent extreme left and 15 percent extreme right. And the 70 percent of us who are more centrist have to then choose between the lesser of two evils." Leave aside for a moment the madness of referring to the Minnesota Democratic Party as "extreme left." We're used to our Rasslin' Governor's frequent transmissions from Dreamland. Consider, instead, how such "either/or" thinking limits our understanding. If the only two imaginable choices are a Democratic "left" on one side, and a Republican "right" on the other, then any "third" party must be some sort of "center," or "moderate," or something in relation to the basic two choices. In the real world, there are many, many philosophies that interact and can be judged in relation to our values and principles. Only in a land of Dualism Run Amok can a Libertarian like Tim Penny make a claim to represent this "sensible center," and be believed. And it is in this land that we increasingly appear to be living. |