Soledad O’Brien, at the beginning of CNN’s “Black in America:  Reclaiming the Dream,” cited as evidence of the at least partial fulfillment of Dr. King’s dream that “Some are CEOs.  Some are Secretaries of State.”

Well, I have a dream of my own:  To strangle the last CEO with the entrails of the last Secretary of State.

Seriously, there’s something really nauseating about a model of “Progressive” politics that’s perfectly willing to leave the present structures of political and economic power intact, so long as the board rooms and cabinets contain a representative selection of races and genders (”look like America,” as Slick Willie put it).

As a white man, I can tell you, I derive very little satisfaction from the knowledge that I’m being screwed over by people who look like me.  Instead of worrying about the racial and gender makeup of the board rooms and cabinets, I’d like to tear them down.

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The Art of the Possible’s mission is to bring together liberal and libertarian writers who agree on certain politically and morally enlightened essentials, and to encourage political coalitions in defense of same. Few projects, therefore, could be more suitable for this site’s participation and promotion than the Strangebedfellows alliance, and the AccountabilityNow political action committee it has led to:

Strangebedfellows is a unique and diverse left–right coalition which has come together to put a stop to the eradication of civil liberties in America. Modeled on a similar group in Britain, the initial Strangebedfellows group encompasses Ron Paul supporters (BreakTheMatrix.com, Rick Williams and Trevor Lyman), leading bloggers from the left (Glenn Greenwald of Salon.com, Jane Hamsher of firedoglake.com) and many more who share the view that warrantless surveillance, telecom immunity and other such outrages of the lawless surveillance state MUST END—AND END NOW. Our group of Strangebedfellows is organizing a moneybomb on behalf of AccountabilityNowPAC, and we’re reaching out to friends and colleagues from across the political spectrum who believe in the Bill of Rights and freedom in America. So join us– become a Strangebedfellow! Add your name and group to our list of backers, and enter your pledge today to donate to AccountabilityNowPAC. Let’s reverse these police state sellouts by our political leaders—FOREVER.

This week, Congress passed an atrocious bill that not only grants retroactive immunity to the telecommunications giants who for years illegally cooperated with the Bush Administration’s warrantless spying on Americans’ international telephone calls and emails, but the legislation also strips the 30-year-old Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) of its warrant requirement for eavesdropping on broad categories involving U.S. citizens, allowing warrantless spying on Americans’ electronic communications when the “target” is someone “reasonably believed to outside the U.S.” Republicans and Democrats brought this about; civil libertarians across the political spectrum are outraged.

AoTP is therefore delighted to interview Rick Williams and Trevor Lyman, and to support the current pledge-drive to hold accountable those in our Congress who voted for telecom amnesty and abridgment of our civil liberties. Pledges can be made via either the logo above or at the end of this interview, and pledgers will then all contribute on August 8, in one “money bomb.” Bloggers who wish to make known their public support by adding their names to the growing list of Strangebedfellows may do so here.

August 8 is the date on which Richard M. Nixon resigned from the office of president.

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AoTP: Rick and Trevor, welcome, and thank you for taking the time to talk with us. You are both libertarians who worked very hard on the 2008 Ron Paul presidential campaign — a campaign which conventional wisdom had held would not get much attention at all. Because of your efforts (and Dr. Paul’s, of course), that campaign became A Phenomenon. Why do you think the Paul message became so popular?

RW: Ron Paul said it best on the campaign trail: “Freedom is Popular!” The Ron Paul campaign was all about freedom, and his supporters (particularly the younger ones) found his words about limited constitutional government, sound money, an end to the overseas empire, and an end to the police state at home to be the right message for the times we live in. Our government in Washington DC has brought nothing but decline, and failure, and war, and debt. It’s time for a change– real change– and Ron Paul’s supporters know that.

AoTP: How did the Strangebedfellows/AccountabilityNow alliance come about – who first reached out to whom?

RW: The Strangebedfellows alliance of left and right actually came about through Joshua Koster, one of our members at BreakTheMatrix. Josh is a young political activist in Washington DC, and he works in the world of media and advertising, Josh represents a number of Democratic political candidates, and he has many contacts with the left. He realized that BreakTheMatrix and many of the leading bloggers on the left shared the same views and values on the subject of civil liberties and constitutional rights, and he brought us together with Glenn Greenwald and Jane Hamsher.

AoTP: Also, hasn’t Strangbedfellows been working in conjunction with the American Civil Liberties Union? If so, how did that come about and has it been a comfortable arrangement?

RW: We at BreakTheMatrix were pleased when the ACLU became involved in the Strangebedfellows effort. The ACLU has been a positive and consistent voice for civil liberties in America for a long time. We think it is entirely proper and appropriate that Bob Barr, Libertarian Party candidate for president, is an ACLU member.

AoTP: Considering how polarized American politics tend to be, it’s quite unusual to find such an alliance between the right and left ends of the spectrum. What are the core values shared by everyone in this coalition?

RW: In our view, the terms “right and left” and even “Democrat and Republican” have become largely meaningless in modern political discourse. The true divide in this country is between our establishment political class on the one hand, and the people they purport to serve on the other. Very simply, our political leaders of both parties have lost their way; they serve only themselves; and they stand for nothing that matters to the American people as a whole. Look at what happened after the Democrats received a mandate in 2006 to end the war in Iraq. Nothing happened. The leadership groups of both parties have continued forward with the war in complete disregard to the wishes of the American people. That’s why the Democratic congress has an 11% approval rating– they failed to fulfill their promises. Our Strangebedfellows alliance reflects a transpartisan consensus that the Iraq war must end; that the “War on Terror” is a sham; and that the police state measures of the FISA reauthorization “compromise” are an unacceptable encroachment on the civil liberties of the American people. These are core values that BreakTheMatrix and leading thinkers and writers from the left hold in common.

AoTP: And the flip side: what are some significant issues about which members of the coalition disagree, but are willing to set aside for now in pursuit of common goals?

RW: Many on the left still hold to the view that big government can somehow serve as a positive force for the American people. We at BreakTheMatrix look at the endless string of big government failures, and see no basis to expect anything better in the future. Very simply, we perceive that a socialist welfare state model is doomed to always and eternally fail– that the model itself is irretrievably flawed. The “big government” left and the “limited government” right are far removed from any consensus about how a society can (and should) best operate for the benefit of its people. Can these differences be put aside forever? No, of course not. But can we work together DESPITE such differences? Absolutely.

AoTP: Libertarians, some right- and many left-wingers have about eight years’ worth of complaints against the current administration’s actions, but not until the telecom amnesty bill — which also permits warrantless eavesdropping on Americans’ international electronic communications — have we seen a cross-spectrum coalition to fight it. Is there something uniquely repugnant about the telecom amnesty bill, or was it more of a “straw that broke the camel’s back” event?

RW: I think it’s a matter of timing more than anything else. Most of the stronger members at BreakTheMatrix were deeply involved in the Ron Paul presidential campaign, and genuinely perceive that this is a unique moment in American history. The moment has not “gone away” merely because John McCain will ultimately be the Republican standard-bearer in November. If anything, the freedom movement sparked by Ron Paul is gaining strength every day. One lesson we did learn from the Paul campaign is that coalition building is essential in politics. It’s not enough to rally a small group of true believers, and the great principles of freedom are not something that we as Ron Paul supporters hold alone in this country. The bipartisan political kiss of our Democratic/Republican leadership group in Washington DC is creating a growing disaster for ALL Americans, and freedom is the solution which cuts widely across our political spectrum.

AoTP: How did the money bomb idea come to be, evolve and be implemented for the Ron Paul campaign?

TL: I found the idea in a video on YouTube. James Sugra came up with the concept of having one day where 100,000 people would donate $100 each for a total of $10 million. At that point I took the video and placed it into the RonPaulForums.com forum to see if people were interested in participating. They were!

I bought the domain ThisNovember5th.com and proceeded to use my knowledge and experience about how people behave on the internet to create a website that would help grow pledges. By giving people feedback and statistics about the number of pledges and the best ways to spread the word, I was able to keep people motivated and on target towards our $10 million goal.

People became excited about giving money to the Ron Paul campaign when they realized it was a way to get him noticed in the main stream media. From this and with the help of the live money ticker on Ron Paul’s website the concept of the money bomb evolved. Supporters began asking for other supporters to donate at the same time in order to get Ron Paul’s money level above “X” amount within a given time frame and this created the money bomb.

AoTP: Many of the people you hope to reach with your August 8 AccountabilityNow money bomb campaign are ideologically opposite in many respects from the folks who contributed to the Ron Paul money bombs. Will that demographic difference impact the “bombing” strategy, and if so, how?

TL: Politically the demographic is different, but in terms of the issue and the fact that we are targeting those that use the internet for their information there is no difference. I don’t think the way this will work is going to be changed and so I don’t foresee a change in strategy.

AoTP: Why did you choose August 8 as the money-bomb date?

RW: We all realized that the week of July 7 would be a very significant time of debate on the FISA bill. For many in the Senate, this will be their opportunity to stand up for freedom and civil liberties. We perceive that the American people will be focusing on the FISA debate this week, so this was chosen as the “launch date” for the money bomb effort. It takes about a month for the money bomb to develop its full power and potential across the internet– hence August 8.

We’ve also selected August 8 because that is the date Richard Nixon resigned from office as a result of his Watergate conduct, which itself involved surveillance on his political adversaries. The Nixon resignation is a good example of what the American people can do when moved to action. Even a president, let alone a group of telecoms, is not above the law.
AoTP: What do you plan to do with the money you raise?

RW: BreakTheMatrix is a “for profit” company, so we will not be involved in making campaign contributions to or on behalf of political candidates. Our role in connection with the AccountabilityNowPAC is as a vendor and service provider retained to organize and fulfill the money bomb. Others from the right and left will ultimately decide how the money is spent. But we believe the mission is clear: candidates and politicians (whether Democrat or Republican) who support civil liberties will be supported by the PAC, while those who oppose freedom in America will not be supported.

AoTP: Telecom amnesty and warrantless surveillance of Americans’ international communications are unpopular with Americans; in theory, therefore, to please voters most elected officials should oppose a bill providing for such measures. Why then has a PAC become necessary vis-a-vis these and related civil liberties issues?

RW: Look at the record of our politicians. The big corporations give them money, and the politicians vote in favor of the money providers. The wishes of the American people are of little importance. And, of course, our politicians and the mainstream media keep up a steady drumbeat of fear-mongering propaganda about the supposed threat of “terrorism” at home and abroad. Not surprisingly, a sizable number of people in America believe such stories, and these people all too often are ready to trade liberty for the illusion of government sponsored “security.” An informed populace is essential if freedom is to survive, and regrettably, the stream of news transmitted to the American people through the mainstream media is designed to mislead rather than inform.

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The Art of the Possible staffers Mona and Jennifer Abel conducted this interview. (more…)

Certain liberal talk-radio hosts.

Consider.

DC’s Air America outlet is kind of lame. Yesterday it ran a Thom Hartmann broadcast about Heller from before Heller was even decided. (Looks like it was the June 17 show.) Hartmann had on a scholar from the Independent Institute, Stephen P. Halbrook, and proceeded to badger him about standing armies. The whole point of a militia, Hartmann insisted, was to obviate the need for large standing armies. So how come you’re not trying to [SOMETHING that would make standing armies go away, though Hartmann never quite said what] instead of trying to make sure DC drug lords can get ahold of a Mac-10? My question is, how ignorant do you have to be, how little due diligence on your guests do you need to undertake, to be so clueless about how the Independent Institute feels about standing armies?

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Alright, fair warning. This is going to be long. And it’s probably not organized optimally. That’s the nature of blogging, I’m afraid. I think there’s a payoff to getting to the end, namely seeing what’s really rotten about the Heller decision (hint: it’s not that it overturns a handgun ban).

Let me preface things by noting for the record a) that I approve the substantive outcome of Heller, b) that you’ll know I’m planning to run for office in 5-10 years when I join a gun club, and c) the Democrats’ push for gun control, as Jim points out, has been the most idiotic tactical maneuver since the Judean People’s Front Suicide Squad last deployed, yet Democrats and liberals appear still not to have figured it out. Handgun bans are infringements on liberty that accomplish nothing besides fostering a (kinda justified) siege mentality among gun owners that will perpetuate their mistrust of the left indefinitely. Maybe once liberals get tired of whining about Heller, they’ll recognize what an enormous blessing it was for the political fortunes of the Democratic party.

That said, both Scalia’s majority opinion and Stevens’ dissent are really atrocious miscarriages of jurisprudence, and for parallel reasons, failing both as historical and conceptual analysis. (more…)

A lot of today’s fighting young progressives probably won’t really believe that movement liberalism ever did have any genuine “excesses” that helped turn voters away from the Democratic Party. But my God, the hysteria greeting the Heller decision among some parts of Netrootsia and Greater Liberalism makes me think some of today’s progressives are determined to repeat even the pointless mistakes of Leftism Past. The practical legal effect of Heller will be minimal. The practical effect on crime will be likewise. Mark Kleiman has made this case for years, persuasively to my view. (Unfortunately his current post on the topic is not link-rich, so you’ll have to do your own digging.) I say this as someone who was disposed to find evidence on the other side - statistical proof that more guns, as they say, meant less crime. What I could see of statistics from Britain and the US and elsewhere was that gun laws had no material effect whatsoever on the level of violent crime. The effects of gun control on the one hand and shall-issue concealed-carry on the other were utterly swamped by other factors, especially demographic ones.

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Thanks to George Will, I think I have a better idea of the thrust of Cass Sunstein and Richard Thaler’s much-discussed new book on “libertarian paternalism,” Nudge. It’s not about distorting the tax code with a million new Pigovian prods. It is also, it should be noted, not remotely libertarianism pure. It’s a regulatory regime. It would impose some burdens on businesses and probably individuals. It does sound like an incremental improvement over existing nanny-state impulses, though. And the plain truth is, generalized libertarianism is unproven as a plan for human betterment. (There’s a rights-based case that side-steps the practicalities of whether every single possible reduction of governmental sway over our lives will make people happier and materially better off. A dedicated anarcho-capitalist is pretty sure life would be “better” without government, but thinks that what matters is that life without government would be more moral.) Meanwhile, past - managerial - approaches of liberalism to societal problems have often misfired spectacularly.

As I wrote yesterday over at Unqualified Offerings:

House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer is working eagerly with a Democratic-controlled Congress to grant George Bush all the power Bush wants to intercept Americans’ telephone calls and emails without warrants, and to retroactively grant immunity from civil or criminal sanction to the telecoms that have been assisting with Bush’s illegal eavesdropping for years — telecoms that heavily contribute to congresspeople of both parties, and which are in the middle of lawsuits they’d dearly love to see rendered moot by Hoyer’s efforts.

[...]

To fully understand how sickening and outrageous this all is (and tell me, why did I vote a straight Dem ticket in ‘06 again?), read Greenwald. (Brief ad click-through.) I can’t do better than he does, as he has been working on this issue feverishly and my re-explaining it could only be a paraphrase of his posts. Then, contribute to this fund to put heat on Hoyer and the other Democrats who are acting like good little authoritarian GOP-bots.

Strange Bedfellows Unite to Fight FISA Deal (6/18/2008)

Contact: (202) 675-2312, media@dcaclu.org

Washington, DC — A sham spying deal could be rammed through both the Senate and House this week. It’s moving that fast. If we don’t stop this, telecom companies that broke the law by supplying mountains of personal information to the government without a warrant will be let off the hook.

A broad alliance of strange bedfellows is now forming to support a campaign to fight the gutting of FISA (The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act) with the intent to work together on all civil liberties, constitutional rights and rule of law issues.

The ACLU is joining with activists from the Ron Paul campaign, represented by Break the Matrix, Rick Williams and Trevor Lymon, and civil liberties writer Glenn Greenwald of Salon, and leading liberal bloggers including, Jane Hamsher of firedoglake, Matt Stoller of Open Left, John Amato of Crooks and Liars, Howie Klein of Down with Tyranny, Digby, Josh Nelson of The Seminal and activist Josh Koster to tell Congress that we will not let them ignore the Constitution or give immunity to telecoms which deliberately broke our laws for years.

This group of Strange Bedfellows is mobilizing a broad-based left-right coalition of office holders and candidates, public interest groups and individuals who are devoted to preserving basic constitutional liberties to join in the fight. The goal is to work together to impede the corrupt FISA/telecom amnesty deal.

Glenn Greenwald said, “The Beltway establishment has made clear that they support the Bush administration’s assault on our basic constitutional protections and the rule of law. Constitutional rights and the rule of law are not liberal or conservative principles. They’re American principles, and this broad-based alliance is devoted to defending them from the bipartisan political class that wants to trample upon them.”

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Jim Henley launched a very instructive discussion below on the point that F.A. Hayek, among other libertarians, was open to social-safety net legislation. Certainly with regard to Hayek this was so. From Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom (bear in mind that in this work Hayek employs the term “liberal” to essentially mean what today in America is commonly thought of as “libertarian”), my emphasis: (more…)

Entertainment! That is, watching the neocons whistling past the graveyard as Americans continue to reject their movement and the GOP (tho at least one Cornerite admits after a Dem won a traditionally Republican seat on Tuesday in Mississippi, that they and their party are “frakked.”) For example, “neo-libertarian” Jeff Goldstein sees fit to post a lengthy “analysis” of the New Left’s fascist tendencies, a perspective he leaps to via approving reference to Jonah Goldberg’s trenchant opus, Liberal Fascism. Is Goldstein really unaware that the New Left is in fact a geriatric ideology, and nearly obsolete? Goldstein also advances the notion that there is some significant connection between the 60s radicals and those who today — you know, 2008, not 1968 — identify as “progressives.”

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Greetings to the readers of the Art of the Possible. Some of you may know me from the blog Freedom Democrats, an online community occupying the niche of libertarianism within the Democratic Party. For those readers who are encountering me for the first time, I have been an amateur activist in libertarianism, the Democratic Party, and blogging off and on for several years now. I am very thankful for the opportunity to blog here at the Art of the Possible and wanted to take advantage of the timing of Mona’s most recent blog post on this site’s purpose to introduce myself, and my views, more fully.

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With some new readers here, it seems timely to quote from AoTP’s About page, and ask what folks think about the possibilities therein entertained:

The Bush administration has been extreme enough in its authoritarianism, flagrant law breaking, and flouting of basic human rights norms to cause fractures in the old GOP coalition. There is now the possibility of new political alliances forming. Speaking broadly, it may be that many of the factions in the Democratic Party, and some of the factions that call themselves “libertarian,” collectively represent a kind of loose anti-authoritarian coalition, or rather, the possibility of one. This site aims to facilitate conversation among those factions.

We bring together liberal and libertarian writers who agree on certain politically and morally enlightened essentials. Their discussions here serve to delineate the reasons why basic human rights must always be defended. Their disagreements, by contrast, will illustrate why forming new alliances is hard, and perhaps serve as a reminder as to why new alliances are so rare.

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I’ve been supporting Obama. My mom, Blanche, is a vocal supporter of Hillary Clinton. Since Obama supporters seem to be over-represented in the non-McCain blogosphere, I asked my mom to write a post about why she favors Clinton. Here is what I was sent: (more…)

The blogs respond to my post of yesterday. I respond to the blogs responding. That darn Mona says my participation here is “limited.” Limited! I’ll show her!

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Hello everyone. My name is Jim Henley and the brain trust here at AOTP has honored me with an invitation to guest-blog here for a bit. My home blog is Unqualified Offerings. If I have a claim to fame, which is doubtful, it is becoming pretty much the first “warblogger” after the atrocities of September 11, 2001 to represent the anti-interventionist tenets of libertarianism in what came to be called the blogosphere. Back then I thought of myself as a man of “the Right,” though not a “conservative,” and pitched my arguments against promiscuous war, untrammelled security prerogatives and nationalism in “right-wing” terms, trying to explain how militarism, hegemony and torture contravene libertarian and conservative principles of limited government, humility and prudence.

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Libertarians and liberals probably aren’t going to persuade each other on their basic philosophical starting assumptions. Libertarians aren’t going to convert liberals to the non-aggression principle, and liberals aren’t going to convince libertarians that government intervention is ever desirable.

But we don’t have to agree on fundamental principles to cooperate in the areas where we agree. All our disagreements, as many as they are, leave a lot of room for common ground on areas where both sides agree that more liberty is desirable.

And in establishing this common ground, both sides may be a partial corrective to each other’s shortcomings.

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Madeline Kara Neumann was only 11 when several weeks ago the she died of entirely treatable diabetes, even as her parents eschewed medical science for prayer. According to The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, Madeline died due to: (more…)

Obama really knows how to harsh a guy’s buzz.

A while back, I expressed the hope that he was to some extent a departure from establishment liberalism.  Establishment liberalism, I had previously argued, was the ideology of the professional and managerial New Middle Class, which managed the new large organizations that had sprung up in the corporate economy of the late nineteenth century, and wanted to manage society as a whole the same way they managed their corporations.  It was exemplified by Herbert Croly who, in The Promise of American Life, called for the achievement of “Jeffersonian ends by Hamiltonian means.”

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In “Libertarianism and Liberalism: What Went Wrong,” I tried to describe some of the features of conventional libertarianism and conventional liberalism that inhibit an anti-authoritarian coalition between them. In this post, I’d like to mention some promising trends within liberalism that offer hope for common ground with libertarians.

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Since the general theme of this blog is an anti-authoritarian entente–or even coalition–of diverse liberal and libertarian elements, one question that comes to mind is: “What are the most objectionable features of both establishment libertarianism, and establishment liberalism, from the standpoint of achieving such a coalition?”

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