Dear Reader (especially those of you who didn’t forget to stash the booze),
Some points of view, when expressed, make people very angry for understandable reasons. We don’t have to catalog the full list. Most people get why targets of racism or antisemitism get pissed off by, well, racism or antisemitism.
But some groups of people are shockingly defensive, quick to anger, and even quicker to claim victim status. Having spent so many years doing whatever the hell you call what I do, I’ve been on the receiving end of that anger more than a few times. Make a joke at the expense of vegans, atheists, or urban cyclists and you will get somewhere between a few and a few hundred rabid emails from furious zealots.
It’s like the old joke, “How many feminists does it take to screw in a light bulb?”
“That’s not funny!”
Obviously, it’s not true of all vegans, atheists, or urban cyclists. Similarly, I know there are enormous fans of the WNBA, professional soccer, marmite, the Avatar movies, Neil deGrasse Tyson, the gold standard, lactivism, caveman dieting, cryptocurrencies, etc., who are very well-adjusted, thick-skinned, and pluralistic. It’s just that, thanks to such traits, they’re not the ones motivated to protest or lecture you for 40 minutes at a cocktail party about how wrong you are or send you 6,000-word emails simultaneously mocking and trying to convert you.
I once wrote a column about the annual avian holocaust wrought by feral cats. Estimates vary, but feral and outdoor cats kill somewhere between 1 and 4 billion birds, per year. Now perhaps the headline of my column—“Kill the Cats”—was needlessly provocative (I do like cats). But the response from readers was borderline terrifying. There are people out there who care more about protecting feral cats than any public policy issue you can think of. More than a few quite earnestly told me I should be killed for even suggesting the feral cat population should be curtailed. I also learned that some people hate birds so much that they’re mad at the people who feed the feral cats. After all, that distracts them from what should be an all-bird diet.
I need to move on, but I think this is a small example of a real phenomenon that rarely factors into discussions of things like media bias and elite conventional wisdom. A lot of writers, across the ideological spectrum, are very wary of pissing off their audiences. I’ve written a lot about audience capture concerning politics; a lot of pundits and personalities take positions as a kind of fan service. But that’s just one slice of the pie. Lots of writers avoid touching certain topics because they’re intimidated by the hassle of dealing with the blowback. Social media intensifies this dynamic because the feedback is instantaneous.
A is A.
I bring this up here in part because I still can’t convince Steve to turn his launch key on a Dispatch group blog, where such observations would be more at home. But also because I was going to start with a reference to Ayn Rand, and there’s a Randian subculture or sect that hates me with blinding intensity. And they like sharing their feelings with me.
A while back, I joked on The Remnant about how the FX series on the Lewinsky scandal “slandered” me by claiming that I had an Atlas Shrugged poster in my old bachelor apartment in the 1990s. I’ll admit my language was a little provocative, but the response from a handful of Randians was on par with what I might expect if I wrote a column calling for a ban on bike lanes to make room for cat-slaughter patrols that would force atheist vegans to eat their prey after reciting the Lord’s Prayer.
I doubt this will make up for it, but the Randians have a useful concept: “A is A.”*
It’s a pithy summation of the “law of identity,” which basically holds that a thing is what it is. It exists and cannot be anything other than what it actually is. Reality is this thing outside of us, and our wishes, hopes, and prayers won’t make a brick a duck. Now, I’m going to annoy the Objectivists when I say that I disagree with how far they take this true observation. I have only two cheers, for “A is A.” Taken to an extreme, I think it expresses an antiseptic and cold philosophy that suggests sentiment is meaningless if it no longer serves a rational purpose. (To give a really annoying illustration: Bruce Willis goes through a lot to retrieve his father’s watch in Pulp Fiction. As a matter of cost-benefit analysis, he was a fool to take such risk to retrieve it. But I endorse the decision all the same.) It gets even more unattractive when it’s deployed to heap scorn on transcendence and religion. But that’s a conversation for another time.
Putting the atheism stuff aside, I just think that extreme Objectivism leaves too little room for epistemological or metaphysical uncertainty. In Atlas Shrugged, John Galt gives a famous speech, in which he explains:
Whatever you choose to consider, be it an object, an attribute or an action, the law of identity remains the same. A leaf cannot be a stone at the same time, it cannot be all red and all green at the same time, it cannot freeze and burn at the same time. A is A. Or, if you wish it stated in simpler language: You cannot have your cake and eat it, too.
(That speech runs 60 pages, by the way, which is a small indication of why some people find Randianism totalitarian-adjacent aesthetically. At 33,000+ words, it would take a normal person between two and four hours to deliver it. That’s kinda Castro-y. By the way, remind me to have the interns open my mail and taste my food for a while.)
Now, I agree with the last bit about having your cake and eating it, too. And I largely agree that a leaf cannot be a stone. But a petrified leaf is more like a stone than this stark binary would suggest. And as for a leaf not being all red or all green at the same time … maybe. It could be objectively green but someone with colorblindness might see it as red. Also, most human eyes can perceive only six of the color bands in light. Other animals can see a lot more. The mantis shrimp—God love ‘em—can see 16. My only point is that perception of reality is not the final word on reality. Quantum physics, I predict, is gonna cause some annoying revisions to the law of identity.
I am sure the Randians have responses to all of this, and I did not intend to pick a fight with them. But I am a Burkean, and one of the core convictions of Burkeanism is to recognize that even the most important abstract principles can be taken too far. So I like this A is A thing, but let’s not get carried away.
Socialism is not neighborliness.
Tim Walz is catching grief for saying—on a “White Dudes for Harris” Zoom call—that “one person’s socialism is another person’s neighborliness.” He deserves some grief, though perhaps not all of it. It’s silly to leap to the conclusion that Walz thinks the hanging of Kulaks or the Cultural Revolution were examples of “neighborliness.”
But if one person’s socialism is another person’s neighborliness, then the second person is an idiot—or maybe someone trying to pass off sh-t as Shinola.
Neighborliness is purely a thing of civil society. Neighborliness is not enforced by the state. It can be coerced to some extent, but the coercion takes the form of social norms and expectations of right behavior, not government diktats. Ultimately, the decision to bring a casserole to the folks who moved in next door or to help the Johnsons across the street move a couch to the curb is voluntary.
Socialism is coerced. Socialism—whether Scandinavian social democracy or Bolshevik collectivization—is imposed and volunteering has nothing to do with it. There have been experiments (kibbutzim, communes, co-ops, etc.) that have attempted to create a kind of voluntary reciprocal socialism. Results have been at best mixed. But that’s not what Walz is talking about.
Walz is tapping into a very old tradition of trying to sell coercion as mere cooperation, statism as nothing more than civility (as I wrote about at book length in my underrated second book).
FDR loved to say, “Taxes, after all, are dues that we pay for the privileges of membership in an organized society.” But dues are voluntary. In It Takes a Village, Hillary Clinton wrote that “civil society” is simply the “term social scientists use to describe the way we work together for common purposes.” But that’s not how social scientists describe civil society: Civil society is the place where different groups of people voluntarily work for different purposes. It’s the realm of social life where Americans find meaning and purpose outside of top-down government programs.
Barack Obama was fond of waxing poetic about neighborliness. “If I am sitting pretty and you’ve got a waitress who is making minimum wage plus tips, and I can afford it and she can’t, what’s the big deal for me to say, I’m going to pay a little bit more? That’s neighborliness.” His favorite way of framing tax hikes on the rich was to say we need to “ask” them to pay a little more. “Ask” is to “demand” what neighborliness is to socialism.
Democrats used to love the phrase, “government is simply the word for those things we choose to do together.” No, it’s really not. Very few public policies have 100 percent, or even 60 percent, popular support. The people who oppose those policies—and voted for politicians to oppose the policies—didn’t magically choose to do them together just because they were outnumbered at the polls.
Now, we live in a democracy, and in democracies the majority gets its way, or at least is supposed to on most things. Sometimes it stays that way. And, sometimes, the failure of policies or politicians creates a new majority that reverses course. But I despise claims that suggest America works as some kind of unified, organic, whole.
This is my problem with all rhetoric that tries to turn the country into a family or some other thing that isn’t government. Socialists and nationalists alike buy into this formulation all the time. But not just socialists and nationalists. Mainstream politicians of all types traffic in this kind of thing all the time, because to describe what they want to do accurately would make it harder to sell. They loot the shelves of civic life for popular items, tear off the labels, and slap them on state action.
Obama loves to say that his political philosophy stemmed from his view that we are our “brother’s” and “sister’s” keeper. But the only place “brother’s keeper” comes up in the Bible is when Cain is sarcastically trying to dodge a murder rap. Even if you think there’s an idea somewhere else in the Bible that justifies being our fellow citizens’ “keepers,” it’s worth keeping in mind that “keepers” hold livestock captive for the keepers’ purposes, not the cattle’s. But hey, it sounds good.
I think Walz’s policy of providing meals at schools is entirely defensible—as is opposition to it, depending on the costs and benefits. But that’s not neighborliness. Good neighbors don’t walk into the house across the street, raid the fridge and pantry, and then say, “Back off man, I am stealing from you to feed the kids of strangers halfway across the state of Minnesota.”
A is A and government is government. It’s not a church, a tribe, a father, or a mother. It’s not a country club or the Rotary. We do need government. We don’t need as much as we have, but we do need one. But we should not be seduced into thinking it’s something other than what it is. Indeed, you have to wonder why the people who think government really is the answer to all of our problems are constantly trying to cover it in rhetorical camouflage to make it seem like it’s something other than what it is.
Right before Walz said that thing about neighborliness being just some people’s word for socialism, he admonished them to go out and “make the case” and “don’t ever shy away from our progressive values.” He’s right. People who believe in the stuff progressives believe in should “make the case” for their progressive values. What they shouldn’t do is lie about what they’re trying to do. Calling it “neighborliness” is a lie.
Various & Sundry
Canine Update: I’ve been alone with these animals all week. I’ve probably talked to them more than I have to any human, not counting over a podcast mic. Occasionally they talk back. Whenever The Fair Jessica is out of town, the beasts get much needier. I mean, the population of their live-in staff has been cut in half. But this week has been extra hard because of all the thunder.
Also, Pippa is America’s Most Harmless Dog® 99 percent of the time, but sometimes, for entirely unpredictable reasons, she becomes wildly, ferociously (at least ferociously sounding) territorial. She growls and bares her teeth at Zoë or Gracie when they try to get close to her or possibly encroach on her prime spot. It happened the other night around 1 a.m. Pippa just started growling and snarling while lying in the bed next to me. Zoë looked at her with a mixture of bemusement and f-around and find out Dingoness. Gracie, who was on the foot of the bed, was totally bewildered by the whole thing. I grabbed Pippa’s schnozzle and chastised her. And then growling subsided after a minute. I think in this case she was actually acting out something from a dream about a world where people are supposed to be afraid of spaniels.
These moments of spaniel rage worry me for two reasons. Because Pippa doesn’t actually know how to fight, I fear that she doesn’t know when to back off, and she could hurt Gracie before I put a stop to it. The other fear, which there’s some precedent for, is that Zoë might take Pippa seriously and fight back. And even with only a fraction of her teeth left, Zoë would still wipe the floor with Pip.
Anyway, nothing like it has happened since and they’ve been having a very nice time with Kirsten and the pack. They’ve also been doing yeoman’s work chastising crows and keeping squirrels in their place. And we’ve had some really excellent mornings. I even played a nice game of Catch the Dingo with Zoë the other day. And, yes, I’ve been appeasing Chester—under protest—while TFJ has been gone.
Introducing ‘The Dispawtch’
In other canine (and perhaps feline) news, we’re toying with a new V&S feature—The Dispawtch—that, if popular, we may turn into a standalone product.
It’s no secret that I love talking about my quadrupeds. But I also love talking about other people’s quadrupeds—particularly Dispatch members’ quadrupeds. And while we at The Dispatch reject journalistic pandering and fan service, we believe animals and babies do not count.
So here’s what we’re thinking: At the end of every Friday G-File, we’ll feature a Dispawtcher of the week—a dog or cat belonging to one of the many, many good-looking, intelligent, and discerning readers of this “news”letter. We’re going to start out by featuring Penny—the Garveys’ new Boykin spaniel, who has already acquired quite a following—but you can submit your pet for a future G-File by clicking here. (We’re also hoping to one day spotlight Kevin Williamson’s tubular snapping turtle.)
Owner’s Name: Declan Garvey
Why Owner is a Dispatch Member: Job perk.
Pet’s Name: Penelope (Penny) Rose Garvey
Pet’s Breed: Boykin Spaniel
Pet’s Age: 12 weeks
Pet’s Likes: Biting shoes, biting fingers, biting ankles, biting air.
Pet’s Dislikes: Being prevented from biting shoes, biting fingers, biting ankles, or biting air. And being lifted in the air like Simba while “The Circle of Life” plays.
Pet’s Proudest Moment: When she first realized she could climb out of her playpen and forced Declan to buy her a taller playpen.
Moment Someone (Wrongly) Said Pet Was a Bad Dog: When she decided to stop licking Declan’s face and instead start biting his beard, leaving a weird bald patch on his chin.
Anyway, we’ll see how this goes. If people don’t want to read it, that’s fine. (Some people actually dislike the Canine Update. Weird, I know.) But you do have to be a Dispatch member to participate. And we look forward to including your submissions in future G-Files.
ICYMI
Now for the weird stuff …
Author’s Note: The initial version of this “news”letter (which went out to hundreds of thousands of people via email) referred to “A is for A” when the actual phrase is “A is A.” The author has no excuse, other than haste and negligence.
Please note that we at The Dispatch hold ourselves, our work, and our commenters to a higher standard than other places on the internet. We welcome comments that foster genuine debate or discussion—including comments critical of us or our work—but responses that include ad hominem attacks on fellow Dispatch members or are intended to stoke fear and anger may be moderated.