Category Archives: Libertarianism

Scratch a libertarian and you will find a prude. It's a truth beautifully illustrated in the season finale of "Minx," HBO's breezy-yet-sharp comedy about a fictional '70s-era magazine that combines Ms.-stylefeminist editorial with dicks-out Blueboy-esque nude male centerfolds. The show's two "shock jock" characters, Willy (Eric Edelstein) and Franco (Samm Levine), use their airtime titillating drive-time listeners with stories about how much they love sex and partying. But Willy's wife Wanda (Allison Tolman) gets her hands on a copy of "Minx" and decides to stand up for her own right to enjoy her life, instead wasting her time giving her husband joyless hand jobs between serving him meals. Suddenly the libertarians aren't so pro-liberty anymore.

The politics of equality are useless, unless joined with a politics of pleasure.

Instead, the shock jocks interview Bridget Westbury (Amy Landecker), a Phyllis Schlafly-esque city councilwoman to announce a new partnership combining "men's rights" with this religious right-tinged war on pornography. With the studio's prominent nude painting of woman looming over the scene, the councilwoman rants about how she plans to clean up San Fernando Valley, and the two men eagerly join in with the anti-porn sentiment they discovered the second they found out that women have sexual fantasies, too. The whole scene is very reminiscient ofDonald Trump smirking next to a smug Amy Coney Barrett, the "libertine" and the Bible-thumper joining forces to crush the hope of women's liberation.

RELATED:Stop feeding Joe Rogan's trolls: Progressives must reclaim the politics of pleasure

It's a hilarious satire of the sort of men who vote Trump and listen to Joe Rogan, and like to imagine they're "pro-freedom," despite having political views that stifle the much more real freedom struggles of women and LGBTQ people.

Amy Landecker in "Minx" (Photograph by Katrina Marcinowski / HBO Max)But this bit also serves a larger, more pointed message aimed directly at the American left, which needs to hear it more than ever: The politics of equality are useless, unless joined with a politics of pleasure. "Give me bread, but give me roses, too" was a feminist slogan in the early 20th century, but it resonates across the 1970s and today for a reason. People aren't moved by dry political treatises about justice. What moves people is imagining what a better life would be like. That means talking about pleasure.

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And on "Minx," that means talking about dicks. "Minx" is primarily the story of the unsubtly named Joyce Prigger (Opehlia Lovibond), a feminist Vassar grad who reluctantly agrees to helm a male nudie magazine for porn publisher Doug Renetti (Jake Johnson). Joyce wants to publish a rather strident feminist magazine originally called "Matriarchy Awakens" but finds, understandably, no one in "respectable" publishing is willing to bet on such an obvious money-loser. But Doug is willing to back her with his company Bottom Dollar. He believes women want to see pictures of sexy naked men and he hopes padding the porn with more high-minded writing will make it an easier sell on the newsstand. Joyce hates the idea of porn and finds the whole subject of sexual pleasure uncomfortable. Still, she goes along, because otherwise, she's never selling her magazine.

Sexy photos are more than just the sugar that helps the feminist medicine go down.

What Joyce soon finds out, with the help of her sister (Lennon Parham) and Bottom Dollar employees Bambi Jessica Lowe) and Richie (Oscar Montoya), is that sexy photos are more than just the sugar that helps the feminist medicine go down. On the contrary, pleasure is central to the feminist project. One reason that sexism chafes so hard is that it deprives women of their right to pursue happiness. But if women don't even know what happiness could look like, it's hard to convince them to fight against the forces that keep them from having it.

Ophelia Lovibond, Lennon Parham, Jessica Lowe, Oscar Montoya and Idara Victor in "Minx" (Photograph by Katrina Marcinowski / HBO Max)

As I've written about before, in recent years, progressives seem to have forgotten about the importance of pleasure. Much of the discourse on the left has taken on a hectoring tone, focused on pressuring people to give up stuff they enjoy, rather than imagining all the new joys that await us if we can liberate ourselves. The pandemic bears much of the blame, of course. The right wing resistance to emergency measures like social distancing and mask-wearing caused far too many on the left to start seeing these misery-inducing behaviors as moral signifiers instead of temporary inconveniences. Truth told, however, the turn to the grim on the left had started well before the pandemic, fueled by the way that social media rewards self-righteous posturing and the politics of showy self-sacrifice over the politics of pleasure.

RELATED:Why "Bridgerton" probably won't make Benedict queer (but should)

It's been especially troubling for me, as I came up as a late third wave feminist and was part of the early aughts explosion of feminist blogging. We early feminist bloggers married the transgressive politics of pleasure to our demands for equality. We didn't just say rape was bad. We had pro-pleasure actions like Slutwalk. We argued that the ever-present threat of rape constrains women from enjoying their lives, by preventing us from doing everything from taking early morning jogs to having late night sexual adventures. We didn't just talk about reproductive rights in terms of coat hangers and young mothers damned to poverty. We talked about how contraception and abortion allowed women to having fun dating and to experiment sexually, instead of being tied down to the first guy you ever slept with.

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"Minx" is set in the '70s, but very clearly speaking to the social dynamics of our time. The joyless progressivism one finds on Twitter is reimagined on the show as a New York City dinner party. Joyce's pretentious Manhattanite friends sneer at her little porn magazine and trot out ignorant assumptions about how Bottom Dollar employees must be a bunch of lost souls and losers. That's probably not how people talked at dinner parties then, but is very reminscient of lefty social media now, with its focus on over-the-top trauma talk and tendency to treat fun as an embarrassing waste of time. Joyce ends up sneaking out to have a drink and make out with a cute guy at a bar. In a sign of how much she's grown, she refuses to apologize for wanting to have a good time. She doesn't even try to justify it by calling it "self-care."

Ophelia Lovibond and Taylor Zakhar Perez in "Minx" (Photograph by Katrina Marcinowski / HBO Max)

As "Minx" cleverly demonstrates, this kind of pleasure-centered feminism has real power. If nothing else, it exposes how the supposed "libertarian" right is no such thing. Evensupposed hedonists like Trump are happy to pass all sorts of draconianrestrictions on sexual freedoms and even free speech, just to keep women and LGBTQ people from enjoying the pleasures that come from equality.

As "Minx" cleverly demonstrates, this kind of pleasure-centered feminism has real power.

Unfortunately, all the grimness on the left these days has served Trump and his acolytes well, allowing them to portray themselves as the "fun" ones opposed to "cancel culture." This, even though Republicans are trying to cancel your sex life, your ability to read what you want, and now even Oreos and Disneyland. The right's is a mean and narrow view of pleasure, mostly about cheap insults and lame trolling. Even figures like Joe Rogan only appeal as some counterpoint to the supposed scolds of the left, but don't really have much on offer in terms of actual fun, especially for anyone who isn't a cis straight guy.

"Minx," in keeping with its pro-pleasure ideas, is a fun show, with lots of laughs and plenty of genuinely sexy stuff. (Though the comically fake penises are a rare misfire.) Freedom is a great idea in the abstract, but to make it worth fighting for, you have to remind people what it looks like in practice. On "Minx," that's lots and lots of dicks. But it can be anything you want, as long as you give yourself permission to enjoy it.

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"Minx" is a breezy good time reminding the left to reclaim the lost politics of pleasure - Salon

Throughout the Trump era it was a frequent theme of liberal commentary that their political party represented a clear American majority, thwarted by our antidemocratic institutions and condemned to live under the rule of the conservative minority.

In the political context of 2016-20, this belief was overstated. Yes, Donald Trump won the presidential election of 2016 with a minority of the popular vote. But more Americans voted for Republican congressional candidates than Democratic congressional candidates, and more Americans voted for right-of-center candidates for president including the Libertarian vote than voted for Hillary Clinton and Jill Stein. In strictly majoritarian terms, liberalism deserved to lose in 2016, even if Trump did not necessarily deserve to win.

And Republican structural advantages, while real, did not then prevent Democrats from reclaiming the House of Representatives in 2018 and the presidency in 2020 and Senate in 2021. These victories extended the pattern of 21st century American politics, which has featured significant swings every few cycles, not the entrenchment of either partys power.

The political landscape after 2024, however, might look more like liberalisms depictions of its Trump-era plight. According to calculations by liberalisms Cassandra, David Shor, the convergence of an unfavorable Senate map for Democrats with their pre-existing Electoral College and Senate disadvantages could easily produce a scenario where the party wins 50 percent of the congressional popular vote, 51 percent of the presidential vote and ends up losing the White House and staring down a nearly filibuster-proof Republican advantage in the Senate.

Thats a scenario for liberal horror, but its not one that conservatives should welcome either. In recent years, as their advantages in both institutions have increased, conservatives have defended institutions like the Senate and the Electoral College with variations of the argument that the United States is a democratic republic, not a pure democracy.

These arguments carry less weight, however, the more consistently undemocratic the systems overall results become. (They would fall apart completely in the scenario sought by Donald Trump and some of his allies after 2020, where state legislatures simply substitute their preferences for the voters in their states.)

The Electoral Colleges legitimacy can stand up if an occasional 49-47 percent popular vote result goes the other way; likewise the Senates legitimacy if it tilts a bit toward one party but changes hands consistently.

But a scenario where one party has sustained governing power while lacking majoritarian support is a recipe for delegitimization and reasonable disillusionment, which no clever conservative column about the constitutional significance of state sovereignty would adequately address.

From the Republican Partys perspective, the best way to avoid this future where the nature of conservative victories undercuts the perceived legitimacy of conservative governance is to stop being content with the advantages granted by the system and try harder to win majorities outright.

You cant expect a political party to simply cede its advantages: There will never be a bipartisan constitutional amendment to abolish the Senate, on any timeline you care to imagine. But you can expect a political party to show a little more electoral ambition than the G.O.P. has done of late to seek to win more elections the way that Ronald Reagan and Richard Nixon won them, rather than being content to keep it close and put their hopes in lucky breaks.

Especially in the current climate, which looks dire for the Democrats, the Republicans have an opportunity to make the Electoral College complaint moot, for a time at least, by simply taking plausible positions, nominating plausible candidates and winning majorities outright.

That means rejecting the politics of voter-fraud paranoia as, hopefully, Republican primary voters will do by choosing Brian Kemp over David Perdue in the Georgia gubernatorial primary.

It means rejecting the attempts to return to the libertarian makers versus takers politics of Tea Party era, currently manifested in Florida Senator Rick Scotts recent manifesto suggesting tax increases for the working class basically the right-wing equivalent of defund the police in terms of its political toxicity.

And it means and I fear this is beyond the G.O.P.s capacities nominating someone other than Donald Trump in 2024.

A Republican Party that managed to win popular majorities might still see its Senate or Electoral College majorities magnified by its structural advantages. But such magnification is a normal feature of many democratic systems, not just our own. Its very different from losing the popular vote consistently and yet being handed power anyway.

As for what the Democrats should do about their disadvantages well, thats a longer discussion, but two quick points for now.

First, to the extent the party wants to focus on structural answers to its structural challenges, it needs clarity about what kind of electoral reforms would actually accomplish something. Thats been lacking in the Biden era, where liberal reformers wasted considerable time and energy on voting bills that didnt pass and also werent likely to help the party much had they been actually pushed through.

A different reform idea, statehood for the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico, wouldnt have happened in this period either, but its much more responsive to the actual challenges confronting Democrats in the Senate. So if youre a liberal activist or a legislator planning for the next brief window when your party holds power, pushing for an expanded Senate seems like a more reasonable long ball to try to train your team to throw.

Second, to the extent that theres a Democratic path back to greater parity in the Senate and Electoral College without structural reform, it probably requires the development of an explicit faction within the party dedicated to winning back two kinds of voters culturally conservative Latinos and working-class whites who were part of Barack Obamas coalition but have drifted rightward since.

That faction would have two missions: To hew to a poll-tested agenda on economic policy (not just the business-friendly agenda supported by many centrist Democrats) and to constantly find ways to distinguish itself from organized progressivism the foundations, the activists, the academics on cultural and social issues. And crucially, not in the tactical style favored by analysts like Shor, but in the language of principle: Rightward-drifting voters would need to know that this faction actually believes in its own moderation, its own attacks on progressive shibboleths, and that its members will remain a thorn in progressivisms side even once they reach Washington.

Right now the Democrats have scattered politicians, from West Virginia to New York City, who somewhat fit this mold. But they dont have an agenda for them to coalesce around, a group of donors ready to fund them, a set of intellectuals ready to embrace them as their own.

Necessity, however, is the mother of invention, and necessity may impose itself upon the Democratic Party soon enough.

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Opinion | Will Democrats Soon Be Locked Out of Power? - The New York Times

On this Monday's Reason Roundtable, with Katherine Mangu-Ward out, Matt Welch, Peter Suderman, Nick Gillespie, and special guest Fiona Harrigan discuss the latest on the war in Ukraine and the ongoing Disney "groomer" panic.

1:37: Ukraine update: What the U.S. should and shouldn't do in Ukraine

19:27: The great "groomer" debate.

38:01: Weekly Listener Question: "Can a tent be too big? I understand the definition of libertarianism is fluid, but there has to be limits to that. Any time someone tries to nail down a few ideas, it's always countered with them saying "no true Scotsman fallacy" or "libertarianism is the goal, but we need to be pragmatic in the short term". All of this, however, is a convoluted way for me to say the LP of NH, the Mises Caucus, and last week's Roundtable emailer are not libertarian and should stop using the word. DeSantinistas, Trumpers, pro-Putin trad cons, and all right-wing reactionaries need to be disavowed and loudly."

This week's links:

"The Case for Pursuing the Issue of Russian War Crimes in Ukraine - Even Though Putin is Highly Unlikely to Ever be Tried and Punished" by Ilya Somin

"From Iraq to Ukraine, the American Press Loves a War" by Fiona Harrigan

"Ukraine Crisis: U.S. Must Use Restraint" by Nick Gillespie

"'Equity,' 'Multiculturalism,' and 'Racial Prejudice,' Among Concepts That Could Be Banned in Schools by Wisconsin Bill" by Elizabeth Nolan Brown

"40 Years of Free Minds and Free Markets" by Brian Doherty

"Goodnight, Moonshot" by Matt Welch

Send your questions to roundtable@reason.com. Be sure to include your social media handle and the correct pronunciation of your name.

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The Real War in Ukraine and the Culture War in Florida - Reason

The "sifting and winnowing" plaque at UW-Madison.

Its not so much about electing the right politicians or trying to force voters farther to the left than they think they want to go. Beating voters over the head with policy details doesnt work much, either. The voters are clueless: polls show that a majority actually wanted the majority of what was in Bidens Build Back Better agenda, and, yet, Bidens approval rating is in the tank and most voters dont know what he tried to do for them. They are complaining about the economy and, yet, the stock market is better than ever. Nobody is conveying the message to voters that stock performance and the average persons quality of life are largely unrelated, but it probably doesnt matter much, anyway.

Most voters have to be able to feel their way to democracy; it cant be an intellectual thing. Its about institutions. Its about having a sophisticated system for democracy. Its about supplementing the inherent weakness of liberal democratic constitutionalism with rigorous civic practice and wholehearted patriotic appeal.

Labor unions and public radio are examples of civic institutions for democracy. Universities and public schools are also supposed to educate citizens for democracy. That was the original hope of progressive thinkers like John Dewey, anyway. But, as we see every day, education for democracy is not working. The system and the vision have failed. Liberal democracy is in crisis today the world over. The four most prestigious democracy rankings in the West are in agreement that democracy and freedom have been declining globally for fifteen years and counting: Freedom House in Washington DC; The Economist Intelligence Units Democracy Index in London; and, two from Sweden, V-Dem Institute and International IDEA.

We need a better system for democracy and splitting hairs over the design of the US Constitution misses the point entirely. The answer to the problem of democracy has to be in the civic realm, not in tweaking the power relations between branches of government and elected representatives, or even the campaign process. Furthermore, democracy wont work without economic incentives: the promise of democracy is wedded to the hope for prosperity. Witness, for example, how The Atlanticthe most prestigious magazine in the countryrecently hosted a rewriting of the Constitution by three groups, progressives, libertarians, and conservatives.

Progressives and conservatives want different versions of judicial supremacy, wherein the Supreme Court has final say over the Constitution and trump-power over the other branches, but they have no answer to the problem of a politicized court. They also want Congress to function more like James Madison intended it to, with less faction and more deliberation for the common good, but they dont know how to make that happen. By contrast, libertarians want a system bordering on confederacyhence, their love of originalism, but theres no point going backward in history. There was never a point in history when life was magically easy and good, or when capitalism was the way it should be, or some other such nonsense.

Theres obviously no reconciling these three groups at the level of the existing government; it must be done in the civic realm with what academics call civic constitutionalism. While the balance of powers is an essential constitutional feature, that balance is based on brute power clashes (realpolitik) between branches and political parties. Weve also discovered that theres no separation of powers whenone party controls all three branches, and Congress is perpetually gridlocked, besides. Its not surprising that this system has never worked very well for defining and legislating Madisons desired common good. For one thing, the common good is an ideal to aim at that requires a more delicate system of rational conversation than the brute power struggle of Congress or the three branches can typically provide.

The common good is also a moving target: it evolves with time and with capitalismitself an evolutionary system that the libertarians crude, Newtonian system of divided powers cannot adapt to. Furthermore, while federalism, another right-wing favorite, has its place, it needs to be subservient to the national interest as a whole, to the common good. Alexander Hamilton understood this point far better than Madison or anyone else did at the time.

In considering these points, it becomes clear that the Constitution is designed for realpolitik, whereas the ideal of the common good requires something like an ideal constitution to be debated and deliberated upon in the civic realm. After all, isnt that what government of, by, and for the people implies? Citizens, businesses, unions, and NGOs alike need a democratic system that enables them to debate and communicate on the ideal policies that determine the common good. An ideal constitution would be, in effect, a Wikipedia version or working definition of the common gooda document very different from the original Constitution. An ideal constitution needs to be open-sourced and available to the entire society. This seems to be the implication of the academic term civic constitutionalism, which is as-yet only vaguely understood. And, when the common good is defined publicly and communicated to the public with true standpoint diversity between progressives, libertarians, and conservatives, that would be the standard or measure by which citizens can hold their state and federal governments accountable.

For, in order to have accountability, there must be a standard of accountability, an ideal by which to judge the representative accuracy of government. We currently have no such thing. The realism of Madisons Constitution needs to be balanced, therefore, with the idealism of true democratic deliberation and civic unity focused on a Peoples Constitution. It turns out that James Madison needed Alexander Hamilton more than he could ever have admitted, but neither of them could have foreseen that the three branches of government would need a further balance, check, and guiding ideal in the civic sphere.

Does this sound implausible? Too good to be true? Not so; such a system was partly built already at the turn of the twentieth century in Wisconsin. It was called, naturally, the Wisconsin Idea: a rudimentary democratic operating system. Tony Evers, the current governor of Wisconsin, just called for a revival of the Wisconsin Idea as a way to boost rural prosperity (By contrast, the former governor, Scott Walker, tried to erase the WI Idea from the University of Wisconsins mission statement. Read The Fall of Wisconsin by Dan Kaufman for the full story on that). Rural prosperitysounds like something voters supposedly want, doesnt it? Like Bidens BBB agenda. They want it and, yet, they dont recognize it when they see it.

A democratic operating system must make it easier for voters to govern themselves and to figure out what they all have in common, thus boosting levels of social trust, unity, and confidence in government. This is the only way to get the government accountability the right supposedly wants. Confederacy only leads to kleptocracy and an infinite regress of fragmentation. Thats why, if it werent for Alexander Hamiltons relentless push for national unity and a government powerful enough to protect it, we wouldnt have a country at all today. The only way to reconcile the ongoing clash between Hamiltonian nationalism and Madisonian checks, balances, and federalism, is through a sophisticated system of civic constitutionalism.

If you like what I wrote here, Ive got a lot more coming, but I need time to write and Im trying to raise the money to do an SJD and a PhD back-to-back at UW-Madison. I want to go back to school to overhaul the Wisconsin Idea and outline the plan for a new type of university, since I think the prevailing liberal arts model is outdated. So, while Tony Evers called for a revival of the Wisconsin Idea, nobody knows how to do it better than I do. Fund me and Ill prove it. The video of me above is visible on my GoFundMe campaign, which I will probably switch over to startsomegood.com in a month or more. The campaign title is Second American Revolution Needed.

Thanks for reading.

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Do Democracy: Remake the Wisconsin Idea - Daily Kos

The deadline to register to vote in the upcoming May General Primary Election is fast approaching. Voters must register by Monday April 25. Morgan County residents can register to vote through the Morgan County Board of Elections and Registration (BOER) office, located at 237 North Second Street in Madison.

The General Primary Election is slated for Tuesday, May 24, but local voters will have the opportunity to cast ballots early with Advance Voting kicking off on Monday, May 2 and ending on Friday, May 20.

Early voting hours will be from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m., Monday through Friday, with early voting available on two Saturdays, May 9 and May 14, from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. All early voting is done at the BOER office.

On election day, Tuesday, May 24, there is no voting at the BOER office and all voters must cast ballots at their assigned polling places in the county.

Your county polling location may have changed since the 2020 elections. You can confirm your election day polling place by going to mvp.sos.ga.gov or calling the BOER at 706-343-6311.

Morgan County voters will be able to cast ballots on several high-profile statewide races in 2022, including the race for Governor, Lieutenant Governor, Secretary of State, a U.S. House of Representatives seat, and one of Georgias U.S. Senate seats. Local voters will also decide two State Senate seats for District 17 and District 25 along with one State House of Representatives seat for District 114.

Locally, voters decide two contested races, one for a county commissioner seat and the other for a board of education seat.

As long-time County Commissioner Andy Ainslie retires from office this year, three candidates have filed to run for his seat in District 2 two Republicans and one Democrat.

Republicans Keith Wilson and Blake McCormack will face off in the upcoming primary election on Tuesday, May 24. The winner will run against Democrat Bob Baldwin in the Nov. 8 General Election for the open seat on the Morgan County Board of Commissioners.

In November, Democrat Dr. Claudia Crenshaw will square off against Republican Incumbent Dr. Forest Pagett for the District 5 Board of Education seat.

Morgan County voters will have to make choices on several state and federal races, with no shortage of candidates running for the seats.

In the race for Georgia Governor, two Republican titans will face off in the May 24 Primary Incumbent Brian Kemp and former U.S. Senator David Perdue. Other Republicans have also qualified to run, including Catherine Davis, Kandiss Taylor, and Tom Williams.

The winner will take on Democratic challenger Stacey Abrams in the Nov. 8 General Election, as well as Libertarian Shane Hazel and Independent Al Bartell.

One of Georgias U.S. Senate seats is up for grabs, as Democratic Incumbent Raphael Warnock faces Democratic challenger Tamara Johnson-Shealey. Republican challengers have lined up as well for the seat, including Gary Black, Josh Clark, Kelvin King, Jonathan McColumn, Latham Saddler and Herschel Walker. One Libertarian has qualified for the Senate seat, Chase Oliver.

In the race for Georgia Lieutenant Governor, Democrats Erick Allen, Charlie Bailey, Tyrone Brooks Jr., Tony Brown, Kwanza Hall, Jason Hayes, Derrick Jackson, R. Malik, Renitta Shannon have qualified to run. On the Republican side, Burt Jones, Mack McGregor, Butch Miller, and Jeanne Seaver qualified. Libertarian candidate Ryan Graham also qualified.

In the race for Georgia Secretary of State, Republican Incumbent Brad Raffensperger will square off against Republican challengers Jody Hice, a former U.S. Congressman, David Belle Isle, and T.J. Hudson. Democrats running for Georgia SOS include Dee Dawkins-Haigler, John Eaves, Floyd Griffin, Bee Nguyen, and Michael Owens. Libertarian Ted Metz is also running.

Congressman Jody Hice is vacating the U.S. House District 10 to run for Georgia SOS. A crowded field of candidates has emerged to win his seat. Republicans running include Timothy Barr, Paul Broun, Mike Collins, David Curry, Vernon J. Jones, Marc McMain, Alan Sims, and Mitchell Swan. Democrats running include Jessica Allison Fore, Tabitha Johnson-Green, Phyllis Hatcher, Femi Oduwole, and Paul Walton.

In the local state representative races, candidates have lined up to compete for two State Senate seats and one State House of Representatives seat.

For State Senate District 25, currently held by Burt Jones who is vacating office to run for Lt. Governor, candidates running to replace him include Republicans Rick Jeffares, Leland Jake Olinger II, Daniela Sullivan-Marzahl, and Ricky Williams, and Democrat Valerie Rodgers.

For State Senate District 17, Republican Incumbent Brian Strickland is running for reelection, facing Republican challenger Brett Mauldin. The winner will go to run against Democratic challenger Kacy Morgan in the Nov. 8 General Election.

State Rep. Dave Belton will not seek reelection for District 114. Republicans Wendell McNeal and Tim Fleming will face off in the May primary election for their partys nomination. The winner will face Democratic Challenger Malcom Adams in November.

Georgians will vote on the next Attorney General, with Republican incumbent Chris Carr running for reelection, facing challenges from Republican John Gordon, Democrats Jennifer Jordan and Christian Wise Smith, and Libertarian Martin Cowen.

Georgians will also vote for Commissioner of Agriculture, Commissioner of Insurance, State School superintendent, and Commissioner of Labor.

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Register to vote in the May Primary before the April 25 deadline - Morgan County Citizen

A foreign-policy alliance between the New Right, realists and libertarians, and the Old Left would pose a real threat to the Washington uniparty.

(From left to right) Dan Caldwell, Adam Korzeniewski, and Russ Vought speak at TAC and American Moment's Up From Chaos conference, March 2022.

The interventionist uniparty is afraidvery afraid. Afraid enough, in fact, to sling oodles of mud at a rising national coalition for foreign-policy restraint.

This new restraint coalition encompasses three camps: the broad New Right (including political Catholics, national conservatives, Claremont folks, and some Trumpy populists); libertarians and old-school realists (whove long bandwagoned together); and what might be called the traditional left (the likes of Glenn Greenwald, Michael Tracey, and myCompactcolleague Edwin Aponte). The three camps came together for TACsUp From Chaos snap conference in Washington last month, and tosignCompacts recent statement calling for de-escalation over Ukraine.

These camps disagree about a lot of issues, of course; in domestic policy, the libertarians are especially at odds with the other two, which increasingly coalesce over the need to save representative government from the predations of private, corporate poweror, to put it another way, to democratize the economy. Yet the American system generously rewards precisely such alliance-building around discrete issues. In this case, three groups are joining forces, as yet often loosely and unofficially, to give voice to the millions of Americans who drew the right conclusions from the last 20 years bloody and wasteful exercises in imperial expansion, who now seek a more realistic, less ideological posture abroad.

Such an alliance could have potentially wide ramifications in U.S. politics, especially if it is institutionalized to a greater extent than it is today. Which is why, I suspect, the bipartisan hawks are working double-time to smear the coalition as unpatriotic, pro-Putin, and worse.

Witness MondaysWall Street Journalop-ed by Jeffrey Scott Shapiro, in which the former Trump administration apparatchik accused therestraint coalition of falling for the Russia temptation, as the headline put it. In the piece, Shapiro fretted that too many populist conservatives had fallen for Russian propaganda and bought into Putins narrative. But while the piece was heavily weighted with conclusory statements, it was light on actual evidence of restrainers succumbing to the Russia temptationrather than calling for less ideology and more caution in response to Russias invasion of Ukraine, which is something else entirely.

Shapiro cited an online discussion group where some of his former Trump administration colleagues allegedly traded pro-Putin sentiments in the immediate aftermath of the invasion. Yet Shapiro didnt name names, making it impossible to substantiate what amounts to chatroom gossip. Beyond that, he came up mostly empty-handed.

Shapiro dinged Washington state congressional candidate Joe Kent for treating Putins negotiating demands as a decent starting point, which is effectively what the Kiev government is doing. Shapiro also assailed TACs Helen Andrews for saying, Ukraine is a corrupt countrywhich is a statement of fact, reflected in Ukraines abysmal Transparency International rankings as well as countless State Department reports and New York Timeseditorials lamenting Ukrainian graft. Is acknowledging inconvenient realities now a pro-Putin act?

Finally, Shapiro criticized theCompactdeclaration for calling for de-escalation and good-faith peace talks and for demanding that President Biden renounce regime change in Moscow. But how is any of this alarming, as Shapiro insists? The politicians and writers Shapiro criticizes have, contra his assertion, all denounced Russian aggression. What Shapiro seems to want, but cant bring himself to say outright, is escalation and regime change. So, instead, he frames opposition to such dangerous policies as extreme isolationism and Putinism, all in an attempt to erect a cordon sanitairearound foreign-policy realism.

An even more mendaciousindeed, downright vileattack was mounted last week against Dan Caldwell, a vice president at the Koch-affiliated group Stand Together, which advocates foreign-policy restraint from a libertarian perspective. Judd Legum, a former Center for American Progress and Hillary Clinton campaign staffer, published an email sent by Caldwell to the Stand Together staff and claimed that Caldwell had called for a partial victory for Russia.

Yet asReasonsRobby Soave noted, nowhere in his article does Legum share the email in its entirety: Instead, he selectively quotes from it, leaving out important, clarifying context. Indeed. There is selective quotingand then there is Judd Legum-style selective quoting. Far from making a merely boilerplate condemnation of the invasion, as Legum claimed, Caldwell had written, Russias invasion of Ukraine is immoral, unjustified, and should be immediately halted. In addition, the regime of Vladimir Putin is authoritarian and has inhibited the Russian people from enjoying the benefits of a free and open society.

As for the victory bit quoted by Legum, he really only quoted the single word, victory, and added his own verbiage to make it seem as if Caldwell hadcalledfor a partial Russian win. Heres what Caldwell had actually written to the Stand Together staff: An outright victory by either Russia or Ukraine is increasingly unlikely, and a diplomatic resolution is the path that best limits the bloodshed and minimizes the risk that the current war could escalate into a larger conflict. Now, you might agree or disagree with Caldwell on this analysisI happen to think hes dead-rightbut only an idiot or a malicious hack could interpret these words as support for a partial Russian victory.

Legum also blasted Caldwell forsaying that overly-broad sanctions rarely workas if he had caught his subject making a racist remark into a hot mic, rather than making a statement about the efficacy of sanctions, a question over which many reasonable experts disagree. Again, as Soave notes, its absurd to characterize Stand Togethers skepticism of sanctions as anything other than a sincere belief held by some libertarians, noninterventionists, and a great many progressives.

Then again, thats precisely what terrifies uniparty mouthpieces like Legum: that these different camps might share more than mere sentimentsand instead make common cause around shared purposes. Hence, the cheap smears from hawks.

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Why Hawks Fear the Restraint Coalition - The American Conservative

Assuming that the rule of law and intellectual integrity matters to a court with an originalist supermajority, the choice before the court is a clear one: It must weigh a modern libertarian preference for gun rights against the strong historical evidence allowing robust gun regulation, including may-issue permit schemes premised on specified threats like New York has had in place for a century. As the recent horrific events on the New York City subway underscore, guns have no place on public transportation or any other place where a large number of people gather. The Supreme Court would do well to act with some measure of judicial humility on this issue, respect history, not invent it, and reaffirm that the people, not unelected judges make the laws in our system.

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Guns, guns everywhere: Last weeks subway shooting was horrifying. If the Supreme Court creates a national right to carry, the future will be worse. -...

LENOIR Primary elections give voters the opportunity to decide from a pool of candidates who should ultimately be nominated by either political party to run in the general election.

Friday, April 22 at 5 p.m. is the deadline for Caldwell County citizens to register to vote or to change their party affiliation.

May 10 is the last day for residents to request an absentee ballot by mail by 5 p.m. Election Day is on May 17, when the polls will be open from 6:30 a.m. until 7:30 p.m.

Registered voters across the state can vote in the primary, said Director of Caldwell County Board of Elections Chad Barnes. However, voters affiliated with any political party will be given a ballot of candidates for their party. Unaffiliated voters may choose the ballot of candidates for either the Republican or Democrat party primary. Therefore, unaffiliated voters in Caldwell County in the May 17 primary may choose only a Democratic or a Republican ballot.

For early voting, or One-Stop voting, there are two locations where individuals can vote early: the Resource Center (lower level of the library), located at 120 Hospital Ave. in Lenoir, and the Shuford Recreation Center, located at 56 Pinewood Rd. in Granite Falls. Early voting starts on April 28th and ends May 14th. Residents can come by to submit their votes each weekday from 8 a.m. to 7:30 p.m., as well as Saturdays April 30th, May 7th, and May 14th from 8 a.m. to 3 p.m.

In Caldwell County, the Democrat Party does not have a primary for Clerk of Court, County Commissioners, Board of Education, N.C. House of Representatives, N.C. Senate, or U.S. House of Representatives District 5, N.C. Supreme Court Associate Justices, or N.C. Court of Appeals Judges. Any Democrat who properly filed for office will therefore appear as the partys nominee on the general election ballot in November.

Right now, the total number of registered voters in Caldwell County is 53,999. The total number of registered Republicans is 26,267, and the total number of registered Democrats is 10,418 people. There are currently 16,939 residents who have registered as unaffiliated, and 375 people have registered as Libertarian.

In 2022, the Libertarian Party does not have any primary elections because there are no contested Libertarian nominations for any office. Any Libertarian candidate who properly filed for office will therefore appear as the partys nominee on the general election ballot in November.

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Deadline to register to vote in primaries is April 22 - Lenoir News-Topic

At the beginning of his short book Why Not Socialism?, G.A. Cohen asks the reader to think about a group of friends going on a camping trip together. He doesnt describe anything out of the ordinary. The friends find a site and set up a tent. Some of them fish, some of them cook, they all go on hikes, and so on.

What Cohen wants the reader to notice is that the way this trip is run looks a lot like how socialists think society should be run. The pots and pans and fishing poles and soccer balls, for example, are treated as collective property even if they belong to individual campers. When the fish are caught and cooked, everyone gets to partake equally of the result of the collective effort, free of charge. Cohens hypothetical campers act this way not because of anything especially noble about them, but because this is how any group of friends would act on a camping trip.

To make the point more sharply, he invites us to imagine a far less normal camping trip one thats run according to the principles of a capitalist market economy. One of the campers (Sylvia) discovers an apple tree. When she comes back to tell the others, theyre excited that theyll all be able to enjoy apple sauces, apple pie, and apple strudel. Certainly they can, Sylvia confirms provided, of course . . . that you reduce my labor burden, and/or provide me with more room in the tent, and/or with more bacon at breakfast.

Another camper, Harry, is very good at fishing, and so in exchange for his services he demands that he be allowed to dine exclusively on perch instead of the mixture of perch and catfish everyone else is eating. Another, Morgan, lays claim to a pond with especially good fish because he claims that his grandfather dug and stocked it with those fish on another camping trip decades ago.

No normal person, Cohen notes, would tolerate such behavior. They would insist on what he calls a socialist way of life. Why, then, shouldnt we want to organize an entire economy around the same principles?

Many defenders of capitalism would insist that, however obnoxious or unacceptable it would be to treat your friends this way, people still have a right to assert private property claims including claims to private property in the means of production and that it would be unacceptably authoritarian for a future socialist society to abridge such rights. Cohen doesnt spend any time in Why Not Socialism? on this defense, perhaps because he addresses it at length in two of his other books, Self-Ownership, Freedom, and Equality and History, Labour, and Freedom.

Instead, he devotes the later chapters of Why Not Socialism? to objections that even some progressives might have about whether socialist principles can scale up from a camping trip to an entire economy. Is whats possible among a small group of friends really possible for a whole society? What about economic calculation problems? What about human nature?

Cohen takes these challenges seriously, but cautions against premature defeatism. He admits that its possible that the closest well get to the fully marketless economic planning modeled by the camping trip on a society-wide scale is some sort of market socialism although he thinks its premature to rule out the possibility of going further than that.

Either way, Cohens view is that the ideal is one worth striving for. Even if we dont get all the way there, a society that more closely approximates the way of life found on the camping trip would be better than one further from it.

Why Not Socialism? was published in 2009, the year Cohen died. Five years later, libertarian philosopher Jason Brennan came out with a critique entitled Why Not Capitalism?

In it Brennan argues that instead of looking at the flaws of actually existing socialism and those of actually existing capitalism, Cohen was weighing a socialist ideal against the warts-and-all version of capitalism. Such a lopsided comparison, he thinks, proves nothing.

Brennan illustrates the point by discussing the animated Disney show Mickey Mouse Clubhouse (not to be confused with the older variety show The Mickey Mouse Club). In a parody of Cohens camping trip chapter, Brennan describes the show as it actually is everyone seems to be friends with everyone else and there doesnt seem to be any poverty or serious social distress, but it looks like a regular market economy. Minnie Mouse owns a factory and store for hair bows called the Bowtique, Clarabelle Cow is a reasonably successful entrepreneur (she owns both a sundries store called the Moo Mart and a Moo Muffin factory), and Donald Duck and Willie the Giant both own their own farms.

Brennan then asks the reader to imagine a hypothetical version of the Mickey Mouse Clubhouse Village where some of the villagers started doing what Stalinist regimes did in the name of socialism. Donald forcibly collectivizes all farmland like Stalin did in 1929, Clarabelle Cow starts a secret police force, and so on. Obviously, that would be horrible!

If you dont think this hypothetical proves anything about capitalism and socialism, Brennan writes, you shouldnt think Cohens camping trip argument does either. In both cases, the problem is that like isnt being compared to like. And Brennan further argues that, even as an ideal, capitalism is better than socialism because in a laissez-faire capitalist world, anyone who wanted to secede and form a commune with their own preferred rules could do so.

There are three problems with Brennans argument. First, he is not comparing like to like in his attempt to satirize Cohen. After all, Cohen isnt describing some idealized fantasy of a camping trip; hes describing the kind of camping trip that untold numbers of people go on every year. They all work the way Cohen describes. The Mickey Mouse Clubhouse Village is a trippy sci-fi fantasy of animals interacting in a half-imagined society, one where its unclear whether a state exists or what sorts of labor laws or regulations it potentially enforces. To compare like to like, Brennan would have had to find a mundane experience that many readers have had, or at least are very familiar with, where a capitalist way of life would be obviously preferable.

Second, Cohen isnt contrasting the small-scale implementation of socialist ideals with the worst things that have been done in the name of capitalism. Sylvias insistence on her property rights stops the other campers from getting apple strudel she isnt denying any of them life-saving medications because they cant afford to pay. No one hires other campers to stack firewood for them and then hires Pinkertons to beat or kill the firewood stackers when they go on strike. Cohen doesnt come up with a camping trip version of the British East India company or the enclosures that drove peasants off their land and made them desperate enough to take jobs in early factories or Adolf Hitlers declaration of emergency powers to protect Germany from the threat of left-wing revolution.

Instead, all of Cohens examples are examples of people asserting exactly the kinds of economic rights that defenders of capitalism are eager to endorse the kind that everyone would have in Brennans libertarian ideal of capitalism! Morgans grandfather passed on his property to his descendants, Sylvia is asserting her property rights in the means of apple strudel production as the initial discoverer of a piece of unowned property, and the other two are simply trying to bargain for the best deal they can get in a free market.

If Brennan wanted to seriously engage with Cohens argument, hed have to explain why, if its not okay to act this way on a camping trip, it wouldnt even be desirable to try to figure out a different way to organize a society.

Cohen thinks that whats wrong with introducing a capitalist way of life into a camping trip and with it serving as the guiding principle for an economy is that capitalism fails to live up to an ideal that its defenders often tout: equality of opportunity. In each case, some people are doing worse than others due to factors outside their control not having seen the apple tree first, not having a grandfather who bequeathed the particularly good fishing pond, or just not being lucky enough to have been born with the same skills as their friends.

Similarly, Cohen thinks, no one deserves a worse life just because they didnt grow up in a rich family or they werent born with the skills that allow some to climb up the social ladder. He contrasts bourgeois equality of opportunity, meaning that there are no formal impediments to anyone succeeding (for example, racial discrimination) and even left-liberal equality of opportunity, which attempts to go beyond bourgeois equality of opportunity with programs like Head Start that compensate for certain social disadvantages, with socialist equality of opportunity the principle that no one should have a worse life due to factors outside of their control.

If different people, for example, want to make different decisions about how many hours to work and how much leisure to enjoy, its not unjust to reward more industrious choices with greater consumption. But no one should have a worse life because of who their parents were or how well they do on tests. Cohen supplements this with a socialist principle of community: if you recognize other people as part of your community, youll try to make sure they dont suffer too much even from bad choices they make of their own free will.

Id argue Cohens list of principles is somewhat incomplete. Historically, socialists have, for very good reasons, emphasized equality of power (although, to be fair, Cohen writes eloquently elsewhere about the unfreedom that workers suffer under capitalism).

I also wish hed read about other models of what socialism could look like. As an achievable halfway house between capitalism and completely marketless, moneyless camping-trip-style socialism, Cohen discusses John Roemers scheme under which every citizen would be awarded equal stock ownership, but Cohen doesnt seem to be aware of, for example, the slightly more radical conception of market socialism advanced by David Schweickart. I wish he had, because in implementing democratic control at the workplace, Schweickarts conception comes closer to Cohens ideal while still seeming realistic in the short term.

Despite these minor defects, Why Not Socialism? is an excellent introduction to socialist ideals. The form of presentation is intuitive and even deceptively simple, while the underlying arguments are careful and sophisticated. You can finish it in an hour, and Cohens points will linger in your head for years. Read it.

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GA Cohen Showed Why We Should All Be Socialists - Jacobin magazine

In these confusing and confronting times might there be some ancient wisdom that we could turn to that will help guide us through. Amanda Ruggeri argues that 'whether it's war or a pandemic, our health or finances, no matter how challenging our lives might feel, the Stoics tell us, we still can thrive'.She explains the history of the Stoics and reminds us that 'for Stoics, it isn't the thing itself that causes turmoil. It's how you think about it. And few things cause more distress than fighting against circumstances outside of our control, or getting attached to an outcome that isn't in our power'. The Stoics teach us to recognize what you can (and can't) control, choose how to respond, see every challenge as a learning opportunity and to remember that change and loss is constant. She explains what that means in our times and why we need to remember that this too shall pass.

Then, (at 14 mins) Amanda gets on her soapbox to rant about one person making a difference.

Also, (at 15 mins) what are the limits of libertarianism? Joel Kotkin explains that 'in recent years, libertarians increasingly seem less concerned with how their policies might actually impact people. Convinced that markets are virtually always the best way to approach any issue, they have allied with many of the same forces monopoly capital, anti-suburban zealots and thetech-oligarchy which are systematically undermining the popular rationale for market capitalism'. He goes through some core libertarian beliefs and how they've changed and says that 'in many ways, libertarians, like all of us, are victims of history' and that to become relevant again, libertarians need to go beyond their dogmatic attachments, focus on bolstering the vitality competitive free markets'. That 'libertarian ideas still have great relevance, but only so much as they reflect markets that are open to competition and capable of improving everyday lives'.

Then, (at 28 mins) have Russia and Ukraine always been so intertwined? Professor Sheila Fitzpatrick explains the history of their shared history and says that ' Ukrainians tell a story of the origins of the Ukrainian nation going back to 11th century Kyiv, surviving centuries of oppression by Russia and Poland, and, finally, emerging out of the wreckage of the Soviet Union as a sovereign Ukrainian state in 1991. For the Russians, the various western and southern provinces now called Ukraine were populated by Slavic border people (Ukrainians) who were essentially Russian. They considered this land as a part of the Russian Empire for centuries'. She says that 'it is not clear if the younger post-Soviet generation in particular, young men liable for military conscription see Ukraine and its current Western orientation in the same way as their elders' and that 'it remains to be seen how the Russian Army and Russians back home will feel about the killing of Ukrainians: Slavic kith and kin'.

Finally, (at 40 mins) are all natural disasters caused by climate change? Fred Pearce argues that 'there is a growing debate among environmental scientists about whether it is counterproductive to always focus on climate change as a cause of such disasters. Some say it sidelines local ways of reducing vulnerability to extreme weather and that it can end up absolving policymakers of their own failures to climate-proof their citizens'. He goes through some recent disasters such as the floods in Germany, the food crisis in Madagascar and the dry state of Lake Chad in West Africa, all of which were blamed on climate change but in reality was a mix of poor irrigation practices or government polices. He believes that 'no doubt climate changes intensifies the situation, however other drivers are key' and we ignore them at our peril.

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Stoics and storms - Counterpoint - ABC News