There are the libertarians, who hate martial culture on the international scene, but who wish to allow it or maybe even encourage it (personally, not through the government) at home, through the medium of guns. They are inconsistent, and they should consider being more pro-gun control than is currently the case. But I don’t expect them to budge: they will see this issue only through the lens of liberty, rather than through the lens of culture as well. They end up getting a lot of the gun liberties they wish to keep, but losing the broader cultural battle and somehow are perpetually surprised by this mix of outcomes.
To put his post in matrix terms, suppose that we have
| low-profile foreign policy | high-profile foreign policy | |
|---|---|---|
| anti gun control | Reason supporters | Trump supporters |
| pro gun control | Bernie Sanders Democrats | Hillary Clinton Democrats |
Tyler’s claim is that only the diagonal positions are culturally consistent. The upper right quadrant is into defending personal honor and national honor. The lower right quadrant is into Kumbaya pacifism. The off-diagonal positions face the problem of cultural dissonance. One likes to see Americans use guns abroad but not at home. The other likes the reverse.
My thoughts:
1. You can see the Presidential candidates in the off-diagonal boxes struggling with the awkwardness of this cultural dissonance. Reason fave Rand Paul is soft-pedaling his anti-interventionism, in what seems to be an unsuccessful attempt to avoid alienating the upper right quadrant. Hillary Clinton will not concede that intervention in Libya and Syria had adverse consequences. (As Bryan Caplan puts it, politicians are adept at “packaging even their worst actions in conventional moral garb.” ) But I bet that you will not see her trying to put foreign policy on the top of the debate agenda within the Democratic Party.
2. The quadrants do not quite map to Walter Russell Mead’s four foreign policy types. The Bernie Sanders Democrats might be Mead’s virtue-seeking Jeffersonians. The Hillary Clinton Democrats might be Mead’s safe-for-democracy Wilsonians or his safe-for-capitalism Hamiltonians. The Trump supporters might be his Jacksonians. The Reason supporters are Jeffersonian in spirit, but they do not get along with the Bernie Sanders Democrats.
3. I will say it again. This is not a libertarian moment. Still, I think that libertarians have a lot to contribute to the public debate. What we should do is remind others that (a) the political process almost never adopts an ideal policy or executes a policy well and (b) policies that seem good today can have unintended consequences tomorrow.
4. I do not see any guaranteed solutions here. If you think that unrestricted gun ownership promotes freedom, are you prepared for the police powers that the public will gladly accept in order to prevent more mass shootings? If you think that gun control is the answer, do you have a credible enforcement strategy? If you want more intervention in the Middle East, are you prepared for the winners that we back to turn out to be not such good guys? If you want less intervention in the Middle East, are you prepared for what the bad guys might do?
Didn’t I post the link to the mass shooting data and the assault weapons ban was virtually imperceptible to the naked eye (fancy statstical methods notwisthanding)? Believe it or not, I post way less than I type so I don’t remember.
Basically, replace guns with TSA and re-think Cowen’s premises.
I want a much higher profile intervention but with a drastically lower footprint. Publicly try terrorists in absentia, then offer rewards and hunt them down. Doing more of either nothing or the exactly wrong things is incorrect. Invading countries is dumb. Destabilizing moderate(ish) regimes is dumb. Drone strikes are dumb. It’s not a libertarian moment because voters are dumb.
So Trump has the same foreign policy as Libya and Iraq interventionist Hillary? So somehow “we don’t want them coming here” is the same as “we want to drop bombs on their women and children”? Those strike me as different positions.
Is it “taking the most charitable view of those who disagree” to only give anti-gun control people the option to be Reason supporters or Trump supporters?
“To put his post in matrix terms, suppose that we have”
Have what? False dichotomies?
Yes, but you aren’t choosing your matrix buddy, just your matrix.
I think this highlights the difficulty of the choices and the uncertainty of any action being the right one. Though ambiguity and nuance are an anathema to politics we should be wary of those expressing certainty and absolute positions.
“You can see the Presidential candidates in the off-diagonal boxes struggling with the awkwardness of this cultural dissonance. ”
Contra TC, there’s nothing inherently dissonant about a low-profile foreign policy and ‘low-profile’ gun control (in fact, the entire history of the US from its founding until WWII was just that). And the same goes for the combination of gun control and aggressive militarism (many militaristic states have had strong limits on private weapon ownership).
Also, Hillary Clinton doesn’t seem to be struggling with cultural dissonance — her problem is not her promotion of interventionist policies per se, but that the ones she had her hand in directly (e.g. Libya) have turned out so badly. The problem that Rand Paul and Bernie Sanders face is that there just aren’t enough voters in their cells in the matrix.
To try to synthesize Arnold and TC (can we just start calling them Magnum and TC?) I will assume they mean that the stance libertarians in the Reason quadrant would have to take is alliance with the rhetoric and politics of people like Trump resulting in belligerent foreign policy.
The problem I have with this is that I think the public is dumb (for reasons) and that a little gun control will be met with attacks that it didn’t stop and calls for even more gun control AND belligerent foreign policy.
I feel like I’m missing something on the inconsistency claim. Why can’t a libertarian say, on the one hand, that there’s absolutely nothing wrong with private individuals owning and using guns, so long as they do so in a non-rights-violating way. But on the other hand, to also say that it’s not okay states to use force against those who who haven’t aggressed against us and don’t pose an imminent threat?
And then spin that into a critique of culture, where you say that it’s perfectly fine to have a culture where people are able and encouraged to possess the means to defend themselves, but also that we should be skeptical of calls to use state violence against others and skeptical of the bloodlust that often accompanies it?
Tyler Cowen is very meta. I suspect he means that you can feel that way, but if all libertarians feel that way, they aren’t going to contribute to getting a result they want.
If you think that unrestricted gun ownership promotes freedom, are you prepared for the police powers that the public will gladly accept in order to prevent more mass shootings?
What if you think that unrestricted gun ownership is a way to reduce the salience of mass shootings? The US, for example, has dramatically reduced deadliness of mass shootings relative to countries with little to no culture of private firearms ownership.
The comments on that TC post are full of contradictory evidence. Interesting theory, but doesn’t seem to hold up well. Americans were an especially gun-owning nation well before the US became an empire e.g.
Liberals and conservatives aren’t crazy about giving up the civil liberties they like in trade for security, just the ones the other side likes. Thus tenuous correlations to actually benefiting security is not that big of a problem to them.
“Americans were an especially gun-owning nation well before the US became an empire e.g.”
Keep in mind, from it’s earliest days up through the end of the 19th century, the US was expanding westward and subjugating hostile Indian tribes, so you could argue it was behaving like an empire from go. Consider, also, the War of 1812, fought to attempt acquire land in Canada and the Caribbean.
This is the first thing I read that helps me understand what Tyler Cowen is getting at (though I still don’t buy it).
Btw, aside from granting it for the sake of argument. What is the link between gun ownership and foreign policy? For example, this “martial South” was on the non- interventionist side of the civil war. Put simply, walk softly with big sticks. I don’t see it as inconsistent at all. I see it as a lot of otherwise brilliant people not understanding it. Is it that I have to accept that “culture” is that eople will never get it?
I believe I have a very credible enforcement strategy for moderate gun control, which is to say that guns must be stored securely so that they are not used inappropriately by children (ie toddlers on playdates) or high risk groups (mental health factors, terrorism suspicion if that’s the way the government goes). If a gun is not stored appropriately (the specifications of this are an easily surmountable technical detail that we should simply recognize and move on) and then kills someone accidentally or on purpose, the owner is subject to criminal and civil liability.
Civil liability already exists, but it is rarely used. We should make winning these cases easier by introducing clear guidelines and legal mandates for gun storage, and we should encourage victims and their survivors to file suit. Criminal liability would work similarly. The incentives for proper gun storage do not seem to be nearly enough.
I would also give the boilerplate that background checks need to be a lot stricter and that internet/gun show loopholes need to be closed.