The ongoing war of words between Glenn Beck and Frances Fox Piven over the prospect of workers rioting in the streets isn’t just a two-way dance. Stanley Kurtz has provided insight into Piven’s work over the years in his book, Radical-in-Chief, and a prominent figure of the left, Barbara Ehrenreich, has fired back. In an op-ed for the Los Angeles Times, Ehrenreich said that the reaction to Piven’s writings shows that America is “no longer a democracy but a tyranny of the heavily armed.”

Ehrenreich’s position contains a kernel of truth, but the real armed tyranny is the one Piven seeks to impose.

We have a window into Ehrenreich’s thoughts on violent struggle from her book on the subject, Blood Rites: Origins and History of the Passions of War. I attended a presentation Ehrenreich gave during my senior year of college precisely because of the contrast it might provide to my own views. Ehrenreich was a pacifist seeking to understand the passions that drive war so that they might be stifled or stamped out, while I was about to take a commission in the Army and head off to Infantry Officer Basic Course and Ranger School.

Ehrenreich traces man’s capacity for conflict back to the time when he was not at the top of the food chain. Early man’s violent instinct grew out of necessity; the need to build primitive weapons and fight in groups to kill natural predators, primarily lions and other big cats.

A rallying instinct lies at the heart of a successful hunt. Members of a hunting party must be willing to lay down their lives for each other, facing a beast with speed and natural weapons that would overwhelm each man individually. The bond produced by this group experience surpasses anything that develops on the football field. Indeed, combat is the only place where the phenomenon exists today.

In Ehrenreich’s view, this rallying instinct made the move from a hunter-gatherer society possible, but it also facilitated conflict between tribes and nations. Tribes rallied around the skin of an impressive kill or a totem symbolizing their most-feared predator when in conflict over land and natural resources.

As we began to aggregate our self-interests into larger groups, the totem became a flag, and the rallying instinct became nationalism or patriotism. The political class, the villains in Ehrenreich’s telling of the tale, could then use patriotism to manipulate the masses toward war.

While Ehrenreich takes a few feminist detours along the way, her theory on the origin of a rallying instinct I understood — patriotism — rang true. Ehrenreich’s assertion that we all have a remnant of this tribal instinct is consistent with thinkers across the spectrum. Blood Rites may make an appropriate companion to Victor Davis Hanson’s The Father of Us All: War and History, Ancient and Modern.

Ehrenreich admitted defeat at the end of the presentation. She noted that while some of the best of man’s nature is brought forth by war — think of a grunt throwing himself on a grenade to save his brothers in arms — she saw no way to turn these selfless instincts against war itself.

This is why Ehrenreich’s defense of Piven is a bit disappointing (though not surprising — both are Honorary Chairs at the Democratic Socialists of America). Piven’s citation of the riots in Greece as an example for American workers to follow is hardly an example of non-violence in action.

More disturbing is Ehrenreich’s blindness to — or obfuscation of — the fact that government is organized violence, and a push for government to do more is not a pacifistic stance. The rule of law is the threshold at which the government will spill blood and confiscate treasure. Changing the rule of law to guarantee equality of outcomes, not simply equality of opportunity, is a proposal for violence.

Government enforcement of a redistributive policy — taxes to support more handouts have to come from somewhere — is done with at least the implicit threat of violence sanctioned by the state. Try and resist and at some point men with guns — the police, IRS, or Marshals — get involved. SEIU President Andy Stern put this option on the table, explaining that his organization was using the “power of persuasion” before getting government to use the “persuasion of power.”

Ehrenreich talks a good game about seeking peace, but in the end she’s simply cheerleading from the other side of the battlefield. But this battlefield should remain rhetorical. The threats against Piven are inexcusable. We should oppose redistributive instincts — peacefully — now, not after the coercion of government takes the field in support of progressive efforts to “spread the wealth around.”

A Pacifist Finds Her Call to Arms is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

So U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan invited every Education Department employee to attend Rev. Al Sharpton’s Glenn Beck counter-rally. As David Boaz explained in the Examiner, it was a ”highly inappropriate” thing to do, pushing people who are supposed to serve all Americans to support one side of a “political debate.” But that’s just the most obvious problem with Duncan’s weekend doings.

Perhaps just as troubling as his rally-prodding is that Duncan declared education “the civil rights issue of our generation” at Sharpton’s event. This only about a year after helping to kill an education program widely supported by many of the people he and Sharpton insist they want to empower. I’m talking, of course, about Washington, DC’s, Opportunity Scholarship Program, a voucher program that was proven effective. But the heck with success — Duncan and President Obama let the union-hated program die.

The cause for concern, though, doesn’t end there. According to the Examiner, an Education Department spokeswoman tried to gloss over the boss’s out-of-bounds play by suggesting that Sharpton’s rally was but a mere “back-to-school event.” Sound familiar?

That’s right! As I just blogged about, last year the Obama administration scared parents and taxpayers across the country by sending politically charged material to all public schools to prepare them for the president’s planned address to the nation’s children. Only after it took serious heat for that did the administration have the most alarming material changed. And then what did it do? Declared that the address would obviously be but a simple back-to-school speech, and tried to make everyone who knew what had actually transpired seem like a partisan attack dog.

As long as politicians run education, education will be hopelessly politicized. Unfortunately, that’s the simple back-to-school lesson for today.

Duncan’s Invitation Just the Start of the Problem is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

It’s about 3:43 into this Louis Black segment. I think my expression is … appropriate.

My First Appearance on The Daily Show is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

Fox News’ Glenn Beck Show recently spent a week featuring Chris Edwards and the Downsizing Government website.

The following video provides highlights of Glenn’s discussions with Chris on how we can downsize the federal government:

We applaud Glenn’s efforts to shine a spotlight on the urgent need to rein in the federal government before massive spending, deficits, and debt bankrupt the country.

Downsizing on Glenn Beck is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

One of the topics Chris Edwards will be discussing with Glenn Beck this evening (5:00 EST, Fox) is the “Not-So-Great Depression” of 1920-21.

Cato Senior Fellow Jim Powell notes that President Warren G. Harding inherited from his predecessor Woodrow Wilson “a post–World War I depression that was almost as severe, from peak to trough, as the Great Contraction from 1929 to 1933 that FDR would later inherit.”

However, instead of calling for bigger government to right the economy, as President Obama did upon inheriting George Bush’s mess, Harding pushed for spending and tax cuts.

The result?

With Harding’s tax and spending cuts and relatively non-interventionist economic policy, GNP rebounded to $74.1 billion in 1922. The number of unemployed fell to 2.8 million— a reported 6.7 percent of the labor force— in 1922. So, just a year and a half after Harding became president, the Roaring Twenties were underway. The unemployment rate continued to decline, reaching an extraordinary low of 1.8 percent in 1926. Since then, the unemployment rate has been lower only once in wartime (1944), and never in peacetime.

The following chart shows federal spending from 1920 to 1940:

Cutting Government Spending in a Recession is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

Jim Geraghty of National Review reports:

A few moments ago in the car, I heard Glenn Beck, talking about the 2012 prospects, declare, “I really like Rick Santorum . . . This guy gets it 110 percent.”

That would be Rick Santorum, the former senator who explicitly rejects “this whole idea of personal autonomy, . . . this idea that people should be left alone” and “the pursuit of happiness.”

A few more statements like this, and people will begin to wonder if Glenn Beck is really a libertarian.

Glenn Beck Likes Santorum is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

This morning, Politico Arena asks:

Do you take Glenn Beck’s “new national movement” seriously? Is the GOP establishment letting itinerant celebrities and talk show stars set the party’s agenda?

As Winston Churchill understood, democracy is messy (and, as in his case, sometimes ungrateful).  Glenn Beck is no William F. Buckley Jr.  But then, “Joe the Plumber” probably never read National Review, which like most other journals of “high opinion” was never self-sustaining.  Liberals today, their noses in the air Obama style, look across America from the vantage of the famous New Yorker cover and see pitchfork brigades, forgetting that those who fill the brigades generally love America, which is more than can be said of some of the baggage that has surrounded Obama.

There is a problem in the Republican Party, to be sure.  Nominally the party of limited constitutional government, it recently gave us two presidents from the same family – one standing for a “kinder and gentler” government, the other for “compassionate conservatism” — plus a career Senate nominee for president, none of whom ever really understood the party’s core principles, much less nourished them as they must be nourished from generation to generation.  As a result, the party has been hollowed out intellectually and spiritually, and into that vacuum, which nature abhors, has poured an assortment of people, most from outside the party.

The struggle in democracies between intellectual rigor and populism is as old as that between Socrates and the sophists.  We all know the dangers of populist demagoguery.  But there is also great danger in rule by elites, which are hardly immune from demagogy and outright fraud (witness the “accounting” in the current health care debate).  Achieving that balance is often difficult and messy.  But I for one am encouraged by this populist movement to reform the Republican Party.  I know, for example, that at the Orlando rally The New York Times referenced this past Saturday, people passed out copies of the Cato Institute’s pocket Constitution, which includes the Declaration of Independence and my preface relating the two documents with respect to their underlying principles.  The people who attended the April 15 tea parties and the September 12 march on Washington were ordinary Americans who understand that something is fundamentally wrong, constitutionally, with the direction the country has taken over the past two decades, at least.  They see the Republican Party, in our two-party system, as the more likely institution for changing that, but not as the party is presently constituted.  Still, there are people within the party who give hope and are ready to take over.  Populists working outside the party, together with those of us who do “politics” (broadly understood) for a living, may just be the spark that enables that to happen.

Reforming the GOP is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

This is a reminder, citizen: Only cranks worry about vastly increased governmental power to gather transactional data about Americans’ online behavior. Why, just last week, Rep. Lamar Smith (R-TX) informed us that there has not been any “demonstrated or recent abuse” of such authority by means of National Security Letters, which permit the FBI to obtain many telecommunications records without court order. I mean, the last Inspector General report finding widespread and systemic abuse of those came out, like, over a year ago! And as defenders of expanded NSL powers often remind us, similar records can often be obtained by grand jury subpoena.

Subpoenas like, for instance, the one issued last year seeking the complete traffic logs of the left-wing site Indymedia for a particular day. According to tech journo Declan McCullah:

It instructed [System administrator Kristina] Clair to “include IP addresses, times, and any other identifying information,” including e-mail addresses, physical addresses, registered accounts, and Indymedia readers’ Social Security Numbers, bank account numbers, credit card numbers, and so on.

The sweeping request came with a gag order prohibiting Clair from talking about it. (As a constitutional matter, courts have found that recipients of such orders must at least be allowed to discuss them with attorneys in order to seek advise about their legality, but the subpoena contained no notice of that fact.) Justice Department officials tell McCullagh that the request was never reviewed directly by the Attorney General, as is normally required when information is sought from a press organization. Clair did tell attorneys at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and  when they wrote to U.S. Attorney Timothy Morrison questioning the propriety of the request, it was promptly withdrawn. EFF’s Kevin Bankston explains the legal problems with the subpoena at length.

Perhaps ironically, the targeting of Indymedia, which is about as far left as news sites get, may finally hep the populist right to the perils of the burgeoning surveillance state. It seems to have piqued Glenn Beck’s interest, and McCullagh went on Lou Dobbs’ show to talk about the story. Thus far, the approved conservative position appears to have been that Barack Obama is some kind of ruthless Stalinist with a secret plan to turn the United States into a massive gulag—but under no circumstances should there be any additional checks on his administration’s domestic spying powers.  This always struck me as both incoherent and a tragic waste of paranoia. Now that we’ve had a rather public reminder that such powers can be used to compile databases of people with politically unorthodox browsing habits, perhaps Beck—who seems to be something of an amateur historian—will take some time to delve into the story of COINTELPRO and other related projects our intelligence community busied itself with before we established an architecture of surveillance oversight in the late ’70s.

You know, the one we’ve spent the past eight years dismantling.

Who Reads the Readers? is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

On the eighth anniversary of the terrorist attacks on New York and D.C., things are going much better than most of us dared hope in the initial aftermath of that horrible day.  We’re still a secure, prosperous, and relatively free country, and the fear-poisoned atmosphere that governed American politics for years after 9/11 has thankfully receded.

Not everyone’s thankful, however.  Boisterous cable gabber Glenn Beck laments the return to normalcy. The website for Beck’s “9/12 Project” waxes nostalgic for the day after the worst terrorist attack in American history, a time when “We were united as Americans, standing together to protect the greatest nation ever created.” Beck’s purpose with the Project?  “We want to get everyone thinking like it is September 12th, 2001 again.”

My God, why in the world would anyone want that?  Yes, 9/12 brought moving displays of patriotism and a comforting sense of national unity, but that hardly made up for the fear, rage and sorrow that dominated the national mood and at times clouded our vision. 

But Beck’s not alone in seeing a bright side to national tragedy.  Less than a month after people jumped from the World Trade Center’s north tower to avoid burning to death, David Brooks asked, “Does anybody but me feel upbeat, and guilty about it?” “I feel upbeat because the country seems to be a better place than it was a month ago,” Brooks explained, “I feel guilty about it because I should be feeling pain and horror and anger about the recent events. But there’s so much to cheer one up.” 

One of the things that got Brooks giddy was liberals’ newfound bellicosity. That same week, liberal hawk George Packer wrote:

What I dread now is a return to the normality we’re all supposed to seek: instead of public memorials, private consumption; instead of lines to give blood, restaurant lines… ”The only thing needed,” William James wrote in ”The Moral Equivalent of War,” ”is to inflame the civic temper as past history has inflamed the military temper.” I’ve lived through this state, and I like it.

There’s something perverse, if not obscene, in “dreading” the idea that Americans might someday get back to enjoying their own lives.  “Private consumption!”  “Restaurant lines!”  The horror!  The horror!

Like Brooks’s National Greatness Conservatives, a good many progressives thought 9/11′s national crisis brought with it the opportunity for a new politics of meaning, a chance to redirect American life in accordance with “the common good.”  Both camps seemed to think American life was purposeless without a warrior president who could bring us together to fulfill our national destiny. 

That’s why prominent figures on the Right and the Left condemned George W. Bush’s post-9/11 advice to “Enjoy America’s great destination spots.  Get down to Disney World in Florida.  Take your families and enjoy life, the way we want it to be enjoyed.”  As Jeremy Lott notes, “in his laugh riot of a presidential bid,” Joe Biden repeatedly condemned Bush for telling people to “fly and go to the mall!”  A little over a year ago, asked to identify “the greatest moral failure of America” John McCain referenced Bush’s comments when he answered that it was our failure sufficiently to devote ourselves “to causes greater than our self interest.”   

True, Bush’s term “destination spots” is a little redundant; but otherwise, for once, he said exactly the right thing.  And of all the many things to condemn in his post-9/11 leadership, it’s beyond bizarre to lament Bush’s failure to demand more sacrifices from Americans at home: taxes, national service, perhaps scrap-metal drives and War on Terror bond rallies?

National unity has a dark side.  What unity we enjoyed after 9/11 gave rise to unhealthy levels of trust in government, which in turn enabled a radical expansion of executive power and facilitated our entry into a disastrous, unnecessary war. 

In his Inaugural Address, Barack Obama condemned those “who question the scale of our ambitions, who suggest that our system cannot tolerate too many big plans.” “Their memories are short,” he said, “for they have forgotten what this country has already done, what free men and women can achieve when imagination is joined to common purpose and necessity to courage.”

Riffing off of Obama’s remarks, Will Wilkinson wrote:

Can you recall the scale of our recent ambitions? The United States would invade Iraq, refashion it as a democracy and forever transform the Middle East. Remember when President Bush committed the United States to “the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world”? That is ambitious scale.

Not only have some of us forgotten “what this country has already done … when imagination is joined to a common purpose,” it’s as if some of us are trying to erase the memory of our complicity in the last eight years — to forget that in the face of a crisis we did transcend our stale differences and cut the president a blank check that paid for disaster. How can we not question the scale of our leaders’ ambitions? How short would our memories have to be?

Oddly, even Glenn Beck seems to agree, after a fashion.  The 9/12 Project credo celebrates the fact that ”the day after America was attacked, we were not obsessed with Red States, Blue States, or political parties.”  And yet Beck has called on “9/12′ers” to participate in tomorrow’s anti-Obama “tea party” in D.C. 

On the anniversary of 9/11, what’s clear is that, despite the cliche, September 11th didn’t “change everything.”  In the wake of the attacks, various pundits proclaimed “the end of the age of irony” and the dawning of a new era of national unity in the service of government crusades at home and abroad.  Eight years later, Americans go about their lives, waiting in restaurant lines, visiting our ”great destination spots,” enjoying themselves free from fear — with our patriotism undiminished for all that.  And when we turn to politics, we’re still contentious, fractious, wonderfully irreverent toward politicians, and increasingly skeptical toward their grand plans.   In other words,  post-9/11 America looks a lot like pre-9/11 America.  That’s something to be thankful for on the anniversary of a grim day.

Good News: 9/11 Didn’t ‘Change Everything’ is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

Appearing on the “Glenn Beck Program” with ABC’s John Stossel, Cato H.L. Mencken research fellow Penn Jillete discusses his views on health care reform, the nanny state, Canada and more.

Penn Jillette on Health Care Reform is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

I was on the Glenn Beck Show yesterday…

…talking about this rendering of the House Democrats’ 1,018-page health care plan:

That’s you all the way on the left, and your doctor/hospital all the way on the right.

What could be simpler?

JEC/GOP Chart of House Democrats’ Health Plan is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

Harvard Economist Jeff Miron tells CNN that the drug laws make no sense.

On March 17, Cato will be hosting an event about The Politics and Science of Medical Marijuana.  One of our guest speakers, Rob Kampia of the Marijuana Policy Project, was recently interviewed by Glenn Beck.

For more Cato work on the drug war, go here.

End Drug War and Save $77 Billion is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog