This weekend it was my fiancée’s turn to host a regular monthly brunch with her friends, and naturally my presence was required. The attendees, as always, were my fiancée’s old college pals – a homogeneous group of fairly affluent, highly intelligent, talky left-wingers in their late 40’s or so. They rarely speak of politics, and when they do it’s always standard Bush-bashing or the latest buzz on local affairs. They are loud, opinionated New York area urbanites, and all on the same liberal page. They are generally quite religious, heavily into J.R.R. Tolkien and such, as well as anything going on in the Big Apple. I don’t have much in common with them, so whenever I attend these Sunday soirées of gluttony I chalk it up as my duty to my fiancée; I realize that she needs to spend time with her friends, and also wants me to fit in. Previously I’d been quiet at these events, desiring not to commit a social gaffe or offend anyone. This time, however, things would proceed a little differently.
There were only two guests early on, Chuck and Joe, and something about our political process was being bandied about. With one eye on the football game on TV, I suddenly felt constrained to echo Hans-Herman Hoppe’s opinion that democracy is a kind of soft communism. This was greeted with some quick objections, which soon led me to state that my two guests were preaching blatant socialism. The response was essentially an annoyed “so what?” I then asked if they agreed with Marx’ doctrine of “from each according to his ability, to each according to his need,” and the response was tepid but basically affirmative. I replied to Chuck that in that case, he should hand over his boots, since it was my strong conviction that I needed them more than he did. His thinly-veiled insult of a reply was “you couldn’t wear my boots,” but I let it pass. Joe opined that the question of who is the arbiter in such a system might be problematical. “What’s the difference,” I asked him, “isn’t it anti-liberty?” He matter-of-factly agreed that it was, but before I could ask why an anti-liberty doctrine should not be summarily condemned, the conversation was interrupted by the arrival of another guest.
My feeling is that the answer from both men would have been “sometimes liberty has to take a backseat.” Up to that point their position had been clear, i.e., that there are times when liberty should be curtailed in the name of fairness or equality. This was, to them, especially true when essentials (food, water, shelter) are in question – i.e., allocation is desirable and perhaps even necessary. Luxury items might fall into another category, they declared, open to question. There was much in this that could have been challenged, of course, but I didn’t want the discussion to become more heated than the low simmer it already was, there were two of them against one of me, and this pair combined was certainly sharper than I was by myself.
Soon there were three guests, and with one ear I followed the monologue of my fiancée’s friend Alan, who happened to be sitting on a jury in a criminal case. The usual comments were tendered about the slow and wasteful nature of the process, and during a TV commercial break there was an opening for me to chime in, so I took it. “You’re allowed to vote your conscience, you know. You don’t have to listen to the judge’s charge to the jury.” This was met with a triple tag-team dose of head-shaking, edginess and, frankly, venom. An irrelevant semantic argument was launched at me over the word “allowed”: if the judge states that if you find the facts to be “A” and as a juror you must vote “A,” then you clearly aren’t allowed to vote “B,” and if you do, that would be illegal. I replied that juries defy judges’ charges all the time, and they are commonly not punished, so it’s obviously not illegal in any strict sense. I then added that in addition to voting their conscience, jurors are also allowed to judge the law itself, which was met with palpable howls of derision, and doctrinaire statements that juries are only permitted to judge the facts, period. I directed them to the Fully Informed Jury Association on the web, and someone moved over to a PC to look it up, but Alan said with agitation that if what was found was read aloud, he’d have to leave the brunch to avoid hearing it, lest he taint his duty as a juror. Despite the preposterousness of this, to keep the peace I refrained from saying “there’s the door,” and told the person at the PC not to read it out loud. The football game came back from commercial, the subject was dropped and things calmed down. I glanced at my fiancée; I was happy that she didn’t seem as annoyed with me as I’d feared.
A short while later there were five guests. Someone brought up the subject of the American Civil War. Naturally, this proved irresistible; I could hardly wait to hear the reaction of a roomful of liberals as I interjected: “you know, that wasn’t really a civil war.” Confused cries of disbelief. I clarified: “A civil war is one where two factions are fighting over the same territory. The south merely seceded, and just wanted to be left alone. That is not a civil war.” The first rapid-fire response from a pack of four wolves (the fifth guest, perhaps in shock, abstained) was that I was simply wrong. The second was that the United States was one nation and the South was fighting over United States territory. The third statement was that since the North won, it proved that the US was a single nation, and that the South had therefore been fighting over US territory, which meant it had been a civil war. The fourth was that by my definition there had never been any civil wars throughout history.
I replied that the Union was a voluntary association of sovereign states, that the federal government didn’t own them or the country, that at the time secession was considered perfectly legal by most legal scholars and other authorities. Even Lincoln said as much, I added, although not in those exact words. (In January 1848 he said: “Any people anywhere, being inclined and having the power, have the right to rise up and shake off the existing government, and form a new one that suits them better.”) The unanimous, indignant response was that since the North won the war, secession had been, in fact, proven illegal. In other words, the winner writes the history and that is reality. The suggestion was then made that the war had been a good thing, since it “eliminated slavery.” I replied that while the war was indeed wrapped up in slavery, that wasn’t why it was fought – it was all about the North continuing its exploitation of the South. “Look it up on the Internet,” I told them. “Look it up.”
Well, that did it. With that jab at one of the most sacred of long-cherished liberal beliefs – the North invaded the South to free the slaves – pandemonium erupted. One guest, a teacher/tutor, simply blew up: “Look it up!?” he exclaimed, leaving the room, livid and shouting epithets. Apparently he believes himself an authority on the subject, and his expertise had been insulted. While he was being soothed by a female guest in the kitchen, the wolves abruptly stopped howling, and the subject was nervously changed by Guest #5 to one less scary. “Hmph. Pretty thin-skinned,” I thought. My fiancée seemed unconcerned, for which I was glad, and I moved my attention back to the TV.
Later, while everyone else was discussing more tepid topics, someone said “Andy isn’t talking.” I replied, “I’m done for the day.” I felt I’d rattled enough cages for one afternoon, had successfully challenged the prevailing “wisdom” in the room and, after keeping my mouth shut through a chorus of liberal twaddle of twenty-odd brunches over three years, had somehow struck a minor blow in the name of liberty. I was taken aback by the depth of irritation of these smart and educated people, however. Not for an instant did they entertain the idea that anything I said might have some merit; they merely reacted reflexively to defend the “truths” they learned in school and protect their belief system. If this group of supposedly open-minded individuals had such a ferocious reaction to my little challenges, how hard it will be, I wonder, to get through to the uneducated and uninterested masses that comprise the bulk of our society.
December 6, 2006
Andrew S. Fischer has worked in various fields.
