TheAgitator.com
A Vigorous Rogering
Wednesday, January 30th, 2008Various people have asked what I make of Cato Vice President for Legal Affairs Roger Pilon’s Wall Street Journal piece on FISA. I thought it was awful, and really disappointing. Julian Sanchez and Tim Lee have already and ably taken hatchets to the substance of the op-ed, so let me just say a couple of things about Cato, which is taking a beating in the libertarian blogosphere over the piece.
Julian is right, the real impact of Pilon’s op-ed isn’t its persuasiveness (it isn’t, really), it’s the fuel it gives neocons and Bush acolytes to say, “See? Even the libertarian Cato Institute supports warrantless wiretapping…” It also gives Cato’s leftist critics more fuel to say the organization is really no different than, say, Heritage, or AEI.
It also isn’t the first time Pilon has wandered off the reservation on issues of executive power. Truth is, and I hope my friends at Cato aren’t bothered by my saying this, most of the people at 1000 Massachusetts Ave. disagree with Pilon. I’d also imagine that a good deal of the building is pretty pissed off about the piece. In fact, Roger could well be just about the only person over there who holds the positions he does. He was close to isolated on these issues when I was there. I remember hearing about vocal, sometimes angry debates during policy meetings, and hearing heated arguments myself regularly emanating from the Cato lunchroom.
To be fair to Cato, in 2006 Tim Lynch and Gene Healy wrote a damning paper on Bush’s power grabs that got lots of media attention. Lynch and Healy have also been pretty prolific in denouncing most of this administration’s war on terror efforts to grow the power of the presidency. Cato also staged a debate between Roger Pilon and Bob Levy on these issues (Levy cleaned Pilon’s clock). And of course I and Juilan are both former Catoites opposed to warrantless wiretapping, as is Tim Lee, who’s currently still affiliated with Cato.
I do think it’s a credit to Cato that they allow their scholars to have divergent views on contentious issues. That said, Cato is a libertarian organization. It’s one thing to have internal disputes over issues like intellectual property, incrementalism versus absolutism, or even (at least at the outset), the war in Iraq. But it’s something else to have a scholar making a public case for unchecked executive power to spy on U.S. citizens. Cato would never hire a health care analyst who favors a single-payer health care system. They’d never hire a criminal justice scholar who supports the war on drugs. You might hire, say, an education or trade analyst who doesn’t toe the party line on foreign policy. But you wouldn’t hire an education analyst who thinks we should give more money to the public school system, or a trade guy who supports farm subsidies or steel tariffs.
Unfortunately, I think the people criticizing Cato over Pilon’s op-ed have a point: Cato’s number one legal scholar, the top constitutional scholar at the most prominent libertarian think tank in the country, is taking to the most prominent neoconservative op-ed page in the country to advocate for massive, virtually unlimited powers for the president to fight an ill-defined war that likely will never end. And he’s done it before. That’s a huge problem. Pilon’s position is not shared by many or some or even a few of his peers. But his title and rank at Cato give his position on these issues a great deal of clout.
Frankly, I don’t know what Ed Crane does about it. Pilon’s an institution at Cato. But he’s way off the reservation on this. And he’s doing considerable harm to the reputations of both Cato and libertarianism.
Pilon is a member of the Neo-con fifth column. He should be fired from the Cato Institute.
This is exactly the reason I stopped supporting the Cato Institute - they’ve allowed neo-cons to infect their organization. Radley - if you have the courage of your convictions, you should resign unless Pilon gets the boot.
Incidentally, I’m curious how you square your views with your participation in Faux News, the organ of the Neo-con Republican Party for the unlettered.
These Neo-con guys are a freaking disease on the body politic. I think they should all be banished to the green zone, along with their tools Bush and Cheney and Rumsfeld (and Feith, Wolfowitz, Addington, Yoo, Rice, Powell, and the rest of that pack of lying authoritarian scum). They could come home once there is a functioning democracy in Iraq, and grateful Iraqis are strewing palm fronds at their feet as they promenade along the banks of the Euphrates.
Institutions are often in need of toppling. I would hope and expect Cato to understand that better than anyone and I imagine Cato could make a powerful statement if Pilon were to be shown the door.
What do you think it will take to spur Cato to action for his apostasy on this issue?
divadab… Radley doesn’t work at Cato anymore.
Radley: you hit the nail right on the head. Libertarianism, being open to such things as logic, science, economics etc, is going to have a more divergent and vibrant group of thinkers than more doctrinaire ideologies that enforce intellectual orthodoxy. That said, you can go too far.
First Ron Paul, now Roger Pilon: these disappointments undo years of hard work in getting the libertarianism ethos into the public sphere.
What is the solution? Besides not ever supporting someone with initials RP, perhaps the approach that is most true to the libertarian ethos is to have other senior members of Cato write a counter to Pilon’s WSJ article. This needs to be done quickly.
1) I don’t work at Cato anymore. Haven’t in more than a year.
2) Fox publishes whatever I send them. They rarely if ever censor me (the only time I can recall is when I wrote a column directly attacking Bill O’Reilly). If I can reach the Fox audience with a libertarian message, why wouldn’t I? How is it any different than, say, a libertarian writing a column for the New York Times or Washington Post? Or should principled people turn down that opportunity, too? Should we only write for publications read by other libertarians? How exactly does that advance the cause of liberty?
Also, it’s awfully easy to demand other people show the courage of their convictions by resigning. Even Beltway wonks have to make a living. You’re never going to work for an organization that you agree with 100 percent of the time. Should all principled libertarians also resign from corporations that engage in rent seeking? To imply that you’re implicitly endorsing everything said organization does because you haven’t resigned is pretty silly. If that were the case, we’d all be living off the grid, stocking bottled water and living off subsistence farming somewhere in Idaho.
Bronwyn - thanks for the correction.
Did Roger Pilon crib his article from the neo-radicals talking-points(conservative they are not)? What Roger Pilon espouses is for us, US citizens, to give up our liberties or we all may die in some diabolical islamo-facist-terrorist plot.
What tripe!
Radley - I think it may come to that (living off the grid). I think it’s going to get much much worse before it gets better, if it ever does. And chaotic times create a huge opportunity for fascists (let’s call a spade a spade) to “restore order”. Look at how much mileage the fuckers got (and continue to get) from 9-11.
That said, I recognize the merit of your “inside the belly of the pig” argument. The problem is that people think you’re the pig’s friend.
Radley makes a great point about principled libertarians working for corporations. If you’re an uncompromising libertarian, I don’t know how you’d find work in Corporate America.
I currently work for a company that gets a big chunk of its business from the ethanol industry. Previous to that, I worked at an ad agency that received tax money for job training and hiring. Yeah, I don’t like those practices. But my opposition isn’t nearly as important as providing my family with a stable income.
>>The problem is that people think you’re the pig’s friend.<<
If that’s the case, they’ve never read what I write for Fox.
And if they can’t trouble themselves to actually read what I’ve written before denouncing me, then I’m not going to bother taking them seriously.
I’m hoping someone out there can come up with a comparison of the reactions of the beltway libertarians over the Ron Paul newsletters vs. Pilon’s editorial. For instance, the measure of embarrassment and need to publically and vocally distance themselves from the offending party.
WHoa there, Radley! A little sensitive, are we?
Just consider that Faux News uses tame commenters who diverge from the party line to give themselves “free and balanced” cover, much as the Republicans use Lieberman to give themselves “bipartisan” cover. Consider Hannity’s sidekick.
Frank,
Check out Justin Raimondo’s take on the attacks on Ron Paul by beltway libertarians. Then compare that to David Boaz’s outrage over Ron Paul here.
That Raimondo piece is bullshit. I thought about responding to it, but it’s so chock full of inaccuracies, outright lies, and wacko conspiracy theories, it would have taken me a full day to do it justice.
But I’ll give you one example: He accuses me of being part of his Koch-Cato-Neocon conspiracy. Why? Because I write a column for Fox News. Never mind that I have used that column to sing Ron Paul’s praises three times (that I can remember), and have used it to bash Bush, the war, and neocons dozens of times. No, in Raimondo’s world, merely writing for Fox is proof enough that I’m pro-war, pro-Bush, pro-neocon.
This is the second time WSJ has targeted a libertarian with a distinctly non-libertarian message to “teach the controversy” (as the intelligent designers say). It is a way of weakening the overall position of the movement.
The previous time was when they published whats-his-face talking about pro-war libertarians and Ron Paul. What was that guy’s name? I totally forget and I am too lazy to look it up.
Precisely what is bullshit about it? Why don’t you publicly offer him a chance to debate with you, uncensored here or at Reason’s website? Your response was pretty bloody emotional, and lacking in details as to why it was any of the things you said it was, and that makes it hard to convince anyone of your claims.
What is increasingly clear is that there is no real libertarian movement anymore than there is a conservative one anymore. The Ron Paul debacle seems to be libertarians what the Bush presidency has been for conservatives. Officially both may still exist, but in practice, the divisions are extreme enough that we are separate factions with a good deal of overlap.
My god that article is awful. He cites exceptions to the Warrant requirement in domestic police work and then, argues that this means the President should be able to do whatever he wants. Huh? What a fucking moron.
As post #1 said, Cato has been infiltrated by neocons, just like the Republican party and NRA have slowly been infiltrated. This is subterfuge, and is what I’d do if I were insidious. It might take a few generations, but incrementalism is used so 20+ years go by and then once the harm is obvious, everyone wonders “how did we get here”? Look up the Fabian Society. Gradualism/incrementalism, it’s all the same.
The price of freedom is eternal vigilance. DO NOT BLINK.
Hunh. I don’t think that Raimondo piece is bullshit at all. In fact, it seemed downright reasonable to me.
Perhaps you’re drawing your conclusion about his disdain for you being due to your Fox column from somewhere else, as he certainly never says any such thing in that piece. But I gathered that his disdain centered more around your willingness to jump on the anti-Paul bandwagon, apparently without first reading the entire context of the quotes.
I don’t have time to respond to a 5,000-word article on internal libertarian squabbling. Julian does here:
http://juliansanchez.com/notes/archives/2008/01/one_last_word.php
But if you’re really willing to bite on the wild-eyed Orange-Line Mafia conspiracy crap Raimondo’s selling, be my guest. No one is forcing you to read this site.
I stopped advocating for Paul because I learned that he and Rockwell made a cynical, calculated decision to profit politically and financially by appealing to racists and wackos. Paul helped perpetuate the attitudes that still plague the drug war and the criminal justice system — the stuff I write about every day.
It’s that simple. I liked him. The stuff in the newsletters offended me, took me off guard, and made me embarrassed for having supported him. Also taught me a lesson about ever getting too excited about a politician. In the end, it’s still a politician.
If you can read those newsletters and not find them offensive, well, that’s your problem, not mine. And if you don’t find them offensive, then maybe this site isn’t for you. Try VDARE.com.
Yes, you can isolate a few of the passages, and they seem fairly innocuous. But many are openly bigoted. And taken together, I don’t think anyone with a lick of common sense can dispute the ugliness and the blatant appeal to the basest of prejudices they represent. And by appealing to those prejudices, the newsletters also reinforced them. I want no part of that.
I’m also done commenting on all of this.
The reason I come here is because you’re the only beltway libertarian whose work I still have largely unqualified respect for. You’ve made your share of mistakes like jumping in too soon in the Jena 6 case, but your work as a reporter actually is the sort of investigative journalism that is commendable. I didn’t say that I agree with Raimondo about his characterization of you or your work for Fox News. However, if you are honest you will admit that there is a disturbing tendency in Northern Virginia for “libertarians” to be wishy washy about their views on how far the state should get involved. The ones that come to mine as the most immediate transgressors of this are the ones that work for the Progress and Freedom Foundation’s intellectual property wing, who have no shortage of support for IP mandates on manufacturers and private citizens.
I would like to remind you that sweeping labels like “wackos” can catch up a lot of intelligent people or people who while normally nuts, are actually very right about something deemed a “conspiracy theory.” The idea that a new constitution was being drafted instead of changes to the Articles of Confederation would have indeed sounded like a kooky conspiracy theory during that convention, but it happened in secret nonetheless. The European Union, despite having an official existence of less than 20 years, celebrated its 50th anniversary not that long ago. This is why a number of people don’t think Ron Paul is a nut when he talks about the North American Union (there is precedent for this sort of behavior).
As to those attitudes being the primary reason why the War on Drugs is maintained, that is bunch of pure bullshit. There are many reasons why it is maintained, not the least of which is that most white and asian families don’t want their own kids using drugs, and there are plenty of people who damn the consequences and go gung ho out of principle. Racism is by now an afterthought to most supporters of the War on Drugs. It’d rank right up there with marijuana makes you smell like shit after you’ve smoked up.
Sorry, I shouldn’t say those are necessarily the primary reasons, but they are apparently in your mind a major reason.
[...] feds do is. UPDATE: Julian Sanchez tears Pilon up here and points some other sins from Cato. Balko tries to defend Cato, but finds this unforgivable. I agree with him on what kind of dissent is proper for [...]