A Growing Disconnect?
Surge in sales of 2 books offers political hints
Frank Wilson
http://www.philly.com/inquirer/opinion/20090712_A_growing_disconnect_.html

In April, University of Tennessee law professor Glenn Reynolds noted on his very popular blog, "Instapundit," that sales of Friedrich von Hayek's

The Road to Serfdom
had shot up since last year's election. At the time it was ranked No. 601 among all books sold on Amazon.com. "Pretty good," Reynolds observed, "for a book that's been out for over half a century." (It went on to reach No. 283 and was holding its own recently at No. 999.)

Nor is Hayek, a Nobel winner who died in 1992, the only vintage author to get a postelection sales boost. Another is Ayn Rand, whose 1957 novel, Atlas Shrugged - scheduled to hit the big screen in 2011 - recently ranked No. 310 at Amazon.

When Rand's novel debuted, the controversy surrounding it focused on its atheism and opposition to altruism. Its anticollectivism, on the other hand, seemed downright patriotic in those anticommunist days. More than 1,100 pages long and set sometime in the future, it centers on a strike by America's most talented and productive people engineered by an inventor named John Galt.

There is something eerily prophetic in the visit heroine Dagny Taggart and steel magnate Hank Reardon make to the ruins of "Twentieth Century Motors." The same can be said of the "Anti-dog-eat-dog Rule":

"The Rule provided that the members of the National Alliance of Railroads were forbidden to engage in practices defined as 'destructive competition'; that in regions declared to be restricted, no more than one railroad would be permitted to operate . . . [and] that the Executive Board of the National Alliance of Railroads was empowered to decide, at its sole discretion, which regions were to be restricted."

Hayek's book, written during World War II, was meant as a warning that democratic institutions were not necessarily prophylactic against collectivism, which Hayek thought was necessarily coercive and despotic:

"The various kinds of collectivism, communism, fascism, etc., differ among themselves in the nature of the goal toward which they want to direct the efforts of society. But they all differ from liberalism and individualism in wanting to organize the whole of society and all its resources for this unitary end and in refusing to recognize autonomous spheres in which the ends of the individuals are supreme. In short, they are totalitarian."

To attribute the surge in popularity of these books to "conservatives" seeking solace after a defeat at the polls is both tempting and easy. But it almost certainly has less to do with partisan politics than with fundamental principles.

Some years after The Road to Serfdom, Hayek wrote an essay called "Why I Am Not a Conservative." In it, he describes "as liberal the position which I hold and which I believe differs as much from true conservatism as from socialism," and he proceeds to argue that "the liberal today must more positively oppose some of the basic conceptions which most conservatives share with the socialists." Of course, Hayek uses liberal in its classic sense, referring to someone whose aim is "to free the process of spontaneous growth from the obstacles and encumbrances that human folly has erected." (John Galt couldn't have put it better.)

Moreover, what Hayek says about conservatives applies equally well to many who today call themselves progressives:

"Conservatives are inclined to use the powers of government to prevent change or to limit its rate. . . . They lack the faith in the spontaneous forces of adjustment. . . . The conservative feels safe and content only if he is assured that some higher wisdom watches and supervises change, only if he knows that some authority is charged with keeping the change 'orderly.' "

In this view, neither today's "progressives" nor today's "conservatives" are liberal, which is to say committed, in Hayek's words, to the "set of ideals that has consistently opposed all arbitrary power."

Happily, a good many people in America remain committed to just those ideals, and what the burgeoning sales of books such as those by Hayek and Rand really suggest is that more and more of them are becoming aware that, precisely in regard to those ideals, there is a growing disconnect between the country's political class and its citizens. It was manifestly on display last month when the House approved the Waxman-Markey cap-and-trade bill, which in its final form was longer than Atlas Shrugged and which none of the members voting on it had read.

That the free citizens of a free country would be served so cavalierly by their elected representatives is the sort of thing any good novelist would hesitate to invent, for fear it would seem too implausible.

Frank Wilson is the retired book editor of The Philadelphia Inquirer and the proprietor of the blog "Books, Inq. - The Epilogue"


The Neo-Nazi Boogyman
Shannon Love
http://chicagoboyz.net/archives/7989.html

The Mudville Gazette [h/t Instapundit] reports:
____________________________________________________________________________

"Morris Dees, the founder of the Southern Poverty Law Center, says researchers have identified 40 personal profiles of people who list the military as their occupation on the Web site New Saxon.

The site is run by the Detroit-based National Socialist Movement and describes itself as an “online community for whites by whites.” Its leader, Jeff Schoep, says site operators remove any violent comments they find.

Dees sent a letter to four congressional committee chairs asking for an investigation."
____________________________________________________________________________

I can see why this requires a congressional investigation. Forty members of a racist site claiming to belong to the military represent a serious problem. After all, there are only 1,473,900 active service personnel and only 1,458,500 reservists so if there are 40 white supremacists that means that a staggering 1 in every 36,847 active service personnel is a white supremacist! Clearly, this is a pants wetting emergency requiring immediate Congressional attention!

Okay, it doesn’t.


As the Mudville Gazette points out, the military represent a cross section of American society (except, I would add, leftist intellectuals who are too moral to serve). When you start talking about a diverse population with 1.5 million members you shouldn’t be highly surprised if you find a small (0.0027% to be precise) number of weirdos.

Why the alarm? Firstly, as a revenue-seeking corporation, the Southern Poverty Law Center has every incentive to fabricate an attention generating “crisis” whenever possible. This “discovery” will no doubt generate a lot of money for them. More importantly, this story feeds into a deeply held fantasy of leftists in which fascism is a major factor in American life.

To understand the context of this, you have to understand that most leftists believe that neo-Nazis, Klansmen, Christian Identity etc. are large groups to which a significant percentage of the American non-Left belongs and a much higher percentage is sympathetic to. When they find a web site with “dozens” of (i.e., more than 24) kooks merely claiming military service they see this as confirmation of the vast fascist conspiracy that underlies the American Right.

In the fantasy world of the Left, the neo-Nazis are the distillation of the American Right. They believe this with iron certainty even though neo-Nazis and the like are (1) overtly hostile to capitalism and the free market, (2) hostile to mainstream Christianity, (3) opposed to free trade, (4) opposed the liberation of Iraq, (5) hold Israel to blame for all of the troubles in the Middle East, etc. If you remove the racism from their ideology, you end up with an ideology very close to that of American far-Left.

The need of leftists to inflate their own sense of self-righteousness and self-importance leads them to magnify a tiny, highly marginalized, wacky subculture of racist socialists into this great threat to the republic which only the noble Left can stop. They also like to stigmatize the military whenever possible, so they absolutely believe that such people are common in the military. They see an ice cube floating by and imagine an iceberg.

Conversely, they ignore anti-American extremists on the far Left. Almost all of the large anti-war/anti-democracy rallies during the early part of the liberation of Iraq were organized by International ANSWER, a group founded by leaders of the  Stalinist Workers World Party. No one on the Left had a problem with that. Bill Ayers is easily the leftist equivalent of a neo-Nazi. He fantasized about murdering 25 million Americans in gulags after his hoped-for communist revolution. Only his own bomb-making incompetence prevented him from detonating a large anti-personnel bomb at a U.S. Army dance and killing dozens. However, no one on the Left has any problem with him moving for years in the same close-knit society of Chicago leftists as did Obama. Moreover, Ayers and his wife are far from the only unrepentant leftist extremists in good standing with the American Left.

The obsession with neo-Nazis et al is the leftist’s version of Dungeons and Dragons, wher they imagine themselves as heroes fighting some monstrous evil instead of deluded geeks obsessing over another group of pathetic, powerless, losers on the margins of society.

Whatever kills a lonely Saturday night I suppose.