Adventures in Television

"Paul Rieckhoff told me to blog, so blame him"

Traffic Cops of Baghdad, or, A Loving Rebuttal to Libertarianism

Four years ago, when a massive case of burn-out and a mild case of PTSD had me stuck on a couch watching the elections as a civilian, I would occasionally have regret pangs about hanging up my spurs whenever I watched two candidates in particular.

One was Barack Obama.  The whole narrative of his campaign was epically American.  It was raw, uncut, red, white and blue symbolism, the kind that any news junkie goes instantly crazy over.  Most journalists I know endure the shitty pay, the shitty hours and the shitty public pillory of the job so they can get a front row seat at history.  And that was Obama.  The whole thing reeked Lincoln.  14 years earlier, the guy had been living in a South Chicago apartment over a place called Jimmy’s Chicken Shack and drove a used Buick with a hole in the floor.  By February of ‘08, he had gone from long shot candidate to harbinger of 21st Century America.  Journalists, like everybody else, want to feel like they are significant: that their lives and their work have meaning.  You get that soaked in the adrenal tide of breaking news that’s ultimately pointless, you do that many stories about how the world is quickening to chaos, you compromise any and all idealism about journalism as a mechanism for social change and all you’ve got left is the good fortune to say “I was there”, “I saw that”, “That was me who wrote the first draft”.  And those are the good ones.

But the other candidate was Ron Paul.  At the time, I was still licking my Iraq wounds, reading a lot of Chalmers Johnson and thinking about the end of empire.  So when I heard Ron Paul go off on the echo chorus of conventional wisdom Republicans that year, I sat up and took notice.  They say a mistake in politics is when a politician says something that’s honest.  So by that measure, Paul was making mistakes left and right.  Only he wasn’t.  Because as John McCain displayed in 2000 and then utterly forgot in 2008, straight talk has an enormous appeal with the American public.  Whether you agreed or disagreed with Paul, the guy laid out intelligent positions simply and didn’t fudge principle.  Whodathunk, in the cynical world of Washington, an actual politician stood for a well thought out political creed and acted accordingly.  Later, when the newsletters from the 80’s and 90’s came out with him either penning or endorsing racial and homophobic invectives, the bloom fell off that rose.  But I still contend that Paul’s well organized, philosophically intact, grass-roots campaign was the great under-reported narrative of 2008.

My suspicion is that many of Paul’s supporters agreed as well.  Because it was the Ron Paul mailing lists that quickly turned into the Tea Party hue and cry spamming my inbox.  The anger at TARP, the anger at special interests, the rage against imperial expansion at the expense of domestic improvement, that was all textbook Ron Paul.  But Fox decided a rebrand of the word Libertarian was in order.  So in early 2009, after CNBC’s Rick Santelli lost his shit on the CME floor, the word Tea Party became the default.  And what was once the product of several decades of thought out Libertarian policy based on founding documents became a hodgepodge of inchoate rage, populism, Jeffersonian fear of government, Jefferson-era bigotry and the most huah “let’s stick a boot in it’s ass, it’s the American way” Toby Keith-isms of Big Government Republicanism under Bush Deuce.

Poor Ron Paul.  It must have sucked so back to have his entire school of thought co-opted by a Colonial Williamsburg re-enactor waving a misspelled sign.  But Paul made his mark in time and it was called the 2011 Congress.

Watching the hostage negotiation that was the latest debt deal, I got the nagging feeling that there wasn’t enough of an examination of the ideological underpinnings to the debate: namely a rebuttal against the laissez-faire confidence that shit just works itself out in human governance.  To watch the news was to think all that mattered was the political play-by-play, a bunch of rival teams battling for dominance, not the best interests of the country.  And as for the logic behind either side’s position, well …

#Humblebrag, one time late at night somewhere between Lesotho and Rwanda, I found myself on an airplane listening to President Clinton wax philosophic about Harold Holzer’s book “Lincoln at Cooper Union”.  The thing that lit the President’s eyes up was the way that Lincoln, in his career-making 1960 speech in New York, vaulted himself into the political mainstream by “lining up his opponents positions and taking gut shots at their logic”.  That kind of political discourse is impossible now.  Nobody takes gut shots.  Nobody aims at logic.  They carpet bomb soundbites and hope the media is too lazy or ADHD or too in the pocket to take a step back and frame the larger issue.

But the message behind the message of the Paul ‘08 campaign, nee Tea Party, nee Freshmen Republicans in 2011 was, at its core a lively debate about imposing Libertarianism.  Which I contend is lovely in theory but a horrible practice.  And here’s why.

The basic premise of Libertarianism is that society is essentially a self-governing mechanism and that government’s logical end is tyranny.  Less government, less potential for tyranny.  So, practically applied, that’s less taxes, less regulation, less overseas influence, etc. etc.  Let the people do what they want and it will all work out. 

Sounds awesome in a college dorm or a cocktail party at CPAC, right?  Plus you automatically make yourself sound punk rock because now your debate opponent has to, on some level, prove that government *doesn’t* equal tyranny.  That’s hard.  The other guy automatically looks like an asshole defending the status quo.  And whoever made friends arguing for things like water treatment plants or food inspection?

But then there is the reality about letting that theory run its course.

After the invasion in Baghdad, there was a traffic cop I used to refer to as ‘My Hero’.  He worked in the roundabout outside my hotel, the Ramaal.  Day in day out, in blistering heat, this guy marched into Al-Saadoun Street, the main thoroughfare in what used to be called the Red Zone, and directed traffic.  He was a big guy, easily two bucks fifty, but he blew his whistle and worked his hands and moved like a dancer in what appeared to be the Baghdad police equivalent of a Class A dress uniform.

You have to understand that traffic in post-invasion Baghdad was abject chaos: people driving on the wrong side of the road, snarls everywhere, camels, tanks, Blackwater dudes in white vans shooting at people to get the fuck out of their way, the occasional car bomb.  Nothing worked.  Not traffic lights, not power grids.  Look at the CPA questionnaire of Iraqis before Bremer cut bait.  The total absence of government is why we lost Iraq before the surge.

And yet, into that chaos, walked the Traffic Cop.  And every time I saw him I thought to myself “this right here is the logic behind libertarian conservativism.  Maybe when you do strip government to nothing, there is an automatic physic of self-governance.  Maybe private enterprise does rise to fill the void.  Maybe it’s this guy”.  And he was impressive as shit.  The guy owned.  But the fact is, one traffic cop couldn’t hold back that entire city from falling apart and could barely regulate traffic beyond his tiny roundabout.  And, man, did that city fall apart fast and hard and with a nasty body count.

So I invite you, if you find yourself having a reasonable disagreement with an advocate of libertarianism, to ask them what comes after.  What do you get when all you have is, in Grover Norquist’s words, a government you can “strangle in a bath tub”.  Is it a self-governing Utopia?  Does it have even the potential for chaos?  And why socially experiment with America when those policies have failed when applied to other countries in recent memory?

Funny story about ‘My Hero’.  I asked Khaled, my fixer, what happened to him when one day, towards the end of a trip, I didn’t see him around anymore.  Apparently some fundos shot him for “collaborating with the enemy” for trying to keep Baghdad from crumbling.  So much for the invisible hand.

http://youtu.be/YUCNsZXCd58

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