The Debatable Land
No gods and precious few heroes: transatlantic dispatches from Alex Massie
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June 21, 2007
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21 Jun 2007 15:21:23
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Bloomberg: good for the libertarians?
Rather oddly, Matt Yglesias seems to think so: "...it seems to me that a Bloomberg Administration is likely to be substantially more libertarian than either a Democratic or a Republican one would be. Bloomberg, however, is specifically identified with a brand of trivial nanny-stating -- indoor smoking ban, trans fat ban -- that seems to be to aggravate libertarians in a manner that's out of proportion to the actual significance of the policy issues." This seems unconvincing. To begin with, episodes such as the smoking ban are not trivial to libertarians. But nor are they actually all that insignificant in terms of policy issues either. These sorts of illiberal policies demonstrate that there's almost no area of human activity Bloomberg doesn't believe could (and worse, should) not be improved by the all-knowing, well-meaning state. (To remind you: the smoking ban is offensive not merely because it inconveniences people but because it's an assault upon business and a publican's right to run his affairs as he sees fit.) It's hard, then, to think that a President Bloomberg is going to be any friendlier to libertarian preoccupations than his rivals, none of whom, it surely does not need to be said, offer...
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Are Rednecks More American Than You?
Paul Waldman doesn't much care for romanticising the American south: Southerners are always taking offense at people who supposedly look down on them, but to someone who was raised in the Northeast, the idea that southerners are inherently more "real," and more American, than the rest of us is deeply insulting. Of course this is part of a whole complex of stereotypes about what and who is really American. And nobody embraces them more than the liberal northeastern elitists in the media. As far as they're concerned, the South is more American than the Northeast or the West, small towns are more American than big cities, country music is more American than folk or jazz or hip-hop, NASCAR is more American than basketball, and so on. The fact that those media Brahmins themselves don't live in small towns or listen to country music or watch NASCAR is precisely what feeds their idealized view of what a "real" American is, and what his beliefs and tastes are. Kevin Drum agrees: Amen to that. I can't begin to tell you how tired I am of the South's victim complex. Five of our last seven presidents have been from the South and the...
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