I couldn’t disagree more. This would only result in an even higher chance of being incarcerated for crimes that you didn’t commit, or crimes that were never committed at all by anyone.

Oh, well then, let’s bring back something really embarassing for the government to foul up. For example, we could kill people like this:

On 2 March 1757 Damiens the regicide was condemned ‘to make the amende honorable before the main door of the Church of Paris’, where he was to be ‘taken and conveyed in a cart, wearing nothing but a shirt, holding a torch of burning wax weighing two pounds’; then, ‘in the said cart, to the Place de Grève, where, on a scaffold that will be erected there, the flesh will be torn from his breasts, arms, thighs and calves with red-hot pincers, his right hand, holding the knife with which he committed the said parricide, burnt with sulphur, and, on those places where the flesh will be torn away, poured molten lead, boiling oil, burning resin, wax and sulphur melted together and then his body drawn and quartered by four horses and his limbs and body consumed by fire, reduced to ashes and his ashes thrown to the winds’(Pièces originales …, 372-4).

— Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish, p. 3

With these kind of punishments in place, I’ll bet the politico-legal system would be really careful not to convict the wrong person, right? Let’s hear it for de-abolition of public torture!

Matt,

Let me try to put the point in a less “arid” way by not mentioning the word “philosophical.”

Enmity towards people who are wealthy and opposition to wealth as such are two different things and need to be distinguished if you want to offer any kind of useful characterization of people’s reasons for action.

There are lots of reasons that you might feel enmity towards people who are wealthy today. It might be because you have some kind of problem with wealth itself. On the other hand, it might be because you think there’s nothing wrong with wealth but there is something wrong with the way most people come by it. You may remember that Adam Smith, just to take one example, often wrote quite harshly of the wealthy people of his own day, because he thought that many of them came by their wealth dishonestly (through feudal privilege and mercantilist political patronage). It is perfectly possible, and probably even wise, to criticize how many people in our current state-dominated, cartelized, subsidized, hyperregulated business environment come by their wealth, without having any problem with wealth itself or the idea of people having it. If that makes you “anti-wealth,” in the sense you’re trying to push, well, then what’s wrong with being “anti-wealth?”

Matt: A related test might be to ask whether they basically see all of society as “in this together” or if they frame everything in terms of oppressors vs oppressed.

Are you claiming here that any claim to the effect that one social class oppresses another reflects “resentment” of the people identified as oppressors? Or do you mean to make some more limited claim?

Matt: … this was composed with modern political landscapes in mind, so applying it to past eras may not yield coherent mapping.

Any “mapping” that doesn’t count Marx or Proudhon as a leftist is, I’d submit, a bad mapping, regardless of what you were aiming at. The term has a perfectly good meaning already, which includes a bunch of people from the past couple centuries in addition to OCAP or some dude writing comments on Arianna Huffington’s website, and if you meant to specifically gripe about ascetics or the envious or player-haters or whatever then you should probably find a term that better matches what it is you want to discuss.

Matt,

If you want to claim that leftists are all anti-propertarian and liberals aren’t, I think you’re mistaken (for some reasons I’ll mention below). But whether that claim is mistaken or not, being opposed to private property is not the same thing as being opposed to wealth per se. The technically correct term for what you’re trying to capture is “communist,” not “leftist.”

There are leftists out there who have been opposed to wealth as such, or who claimed to view wealth as such as morally corrosive. (Tolstoy, in his old age, claimed to be one such thinker; although the preferences manifest in his actions were rather different from the preferences expressed in his writing.) But most of the thinkers identified as paradigmatic leftists didn’t think this or anything like it. They have usually thought that material wealth (comfort, health, good food, rewarding work, enjoyable leisure, etc.) was a good thing and professed a desire that everybody should have it as far as it’s possible.

It’s true that Marx and Trotsky and Chomsky oppose private property, or at least private property in land and the means of production. But they don’t oppose wealth. Their complaint against private property is that they (wrongly) think that it stands in the way of ensuring wealth for everybody and (wrongly) conclude that forcible collectivization of land and the means of production is a just way to solve this alleged problem. The idea is that this would end the artificial scarcity allegedly endemic to capitalist forms of production, and bring about an era of unprecedented prosperity.

As for Proudhon, he was not against private property. He was against one conception of private property based on grants of state privilege, and in favor of another based on possession and use. Benjamin Tucker, to take another example, also defended private property (while condemning state-granted monopoly).

And as for whether or not somebody has “enmity” against the actually existing wealthy, well, who cares? I take it that the issue here is philosophical principles, not loyalty or affection towards any particular group of people.

Right or wrong, all the folks I named, when they expressed enmity towards wealthy people, expressed it not because they were wealthy, but because they concluded that those people obtained their wealth illicitly, and did so in a way that unfairly hindered other people from gaining wealth. Depending on a thinker, their conclusion may be wise or foolish (I think Proudhon’s understanding of matters was much sounder than Marx’s), but in either case they aren’t coming down on wealth as such, just on what they (rightly or wrongly) regard as wealth acquired through injustice.

Matt,

If your dividing line between “liberals” and the “left” wouldn’t count (just to pick a couple examples) Pierre Joseph Proudhon or Karl Marx or Leon Trotsky or Ellen Willis or Noam Chomsky as a leftist, then maybe your attempt at a definition is ill considered, and ought to be revised. That is, if you mean for “left” to be a term of analysis and criticism that applies to real people over the past several decades, rather than a merely polemical term for whoever you find distastefully envious at the moment.

Brian,

I think you’re oversimplifying the causes of the riots in France (the relationship of the police to residents of the immigrant ghettoes, just to take one example, seems to have been pretty important). But even if the riots were purely about “violent rejection of French culture,” there’s two different elements that you have to look at in that formula: (1) the rejection of French culture (whatever that comes to concretely), and (2) the violent expression of that rejection. I’d like to suggest that (1) is not a sufficient condition for (2), and Belgium and Switzerland are good examples of why.

It’s true that Belgium, like many of its neighbors, has problems with bristling, sometimes-violent relationships between the white population and the residents of immigrant ghettoes. What I was referring to, though, was the prickly but notably nonviolent relationship between Flemings and Walloons (as well as the small German-speaking minority), not the relationship between the white ethnic groups and the population in immigrant ghettoes. The fact that these two kinds of relationships across inter-ethnic divides are so different might tell you something about the underlying causes. Perhaps it has more to do with the way that immigrants and their descendents are treated by the government than it does with whether or not any particular national group is “assimilating” to, selectively incorporating elements of, rejecting, or simply ignoring the culture of other national groups within the country?

The point here is that people very often cite countries that have suffered ethnic bloodbaths within living memory (the Balkans in the past decade, for example) in order to “demonstrate” the need for unitary, homogenous national cultures within the borders of a given state. I find this frankly ridiculous. Quebec is not descending into civil war; Czechoslovakia existed and then disappeared without bloodshed; and Switzerland has remained as peaceful, prosperous, and free as any country in Europe for several centuries. There’s precious little evidence to suggest that “balkanized silos” of people who aren’t substantially alike in their language, religion, literature, etiquette, habits, leisure activities, dress, or other elements of culture, are a sufficient condition for making inter-ethnic relationships particularly hostile, let alone openly violent. What does tend to reliably produce inter-ethnic hostility and violence are political arrangements in which some national groups are ghettoized and politically and culturally subordinated to other national groups. In other words, the issue here is political domination vs. political equality, not cultural melting pots vs. cultural salad bowls.

“… we can’t afford the rise of balkanized silos or a salad-bowl scenario.”

Yeah, that would be horrible. I mean, we could end up like Switzerland or Belgium.

Unless, just maybe, violence in certain multinational societies (French immigrant ghettoes, the Balkans, Iraq) has more to do with issues of constitutional politics, and not much at all to do with cultural “assimilation” or the lack of it, after all?

Gadfly: You gay people can all go home now; you aren’t special, and you don’t deserve special rights.

I’m sorry, but I must have missed what “special rights” I’m getting out of Brokeback Mountain being nominated for a pile of Oscars.

I keep checking my mail every day, but I haven’t gotten my “Brokeback Mountain” check yet…

That works if you think representative democracy and populism is particularly good. I don’t. There are numerous examples for why it’s not, such as Jim Crow laws in our own country, Apartheid, Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy and a sad, long list that goes on and on.

I have plenty of complaints against what I’ve described as “elective oligarchy” and what you describe as “representative democracy” here, but I don’t think that these are very good examples to cite. Just to take a couple of your examples, South African Apartheid and American Jim Crow, were sustained by systematic and near-universal disenfranchisement of the Black population (which in South Africa and in some parts of the South meant that the numerical majority of the population weren’t able to vote). They are no more examples of “representative democracy” than the “election” of the Holy Roman Emperor by the Prince-Electors or of the Pope by the College of Cardinals. And in fact both systems were promptly, permanently, and thoroughly destroyed by the simple expedient of enfranchising Black people to vote.

There are lots of crimes and lots of failures to lay at the doorstep of elective oligarchy, but this really isn’t one of them. The cases you mention are cases where representative elections, when they happened, destroyed or blocked the power of would-be tyrants, and in which it was only through the ruthless use of disenfranchisement, political repression, and overt terror that pseudo-representative power was consolidated.

Doss: Another of my troubles with the definition provided is the idea that Athenian Democrats would look at what we have now and call it tyranny, but in fact what they practiced was elective oligarchy- only rich men of the polis (not slaves, not women, not outsiders) could vote and the votes were binding on the rest of the population who had no say.

Sure, that’s a fair complaint. (Except that, terminologically speaking, what they had was pure, self-appointed oligarchy, not even elective oligarchy; the oligarchs voted amongst themselves, of course, but they weren’t elected by the subjects that they claimed the authority to rule over.) That said, I don’t think that the sorts of political institutions that the ruling men of Athens participated in depended on domination over an extensive slave class (either of socioeconomic status or of sex). The Athenian men disagreed (they tended to argue that liberty depended on the unearned leisure that they secured through violent extortion), but I simply think they were mistaken on that point; the institutions could and ought to have been opened to everyone in the name of liberty and human dignity. So, while I have no admiration for the Athenian “democrats,” I am willing to say some kind words for the democratic institutions that they advocated and built. The purpose of using it as a counterexample is simply to demonstrate that there is another way that popular sovereignty could be and has been practiced, besides just through elected legislatures or parliaments, and to illustrate the point that what democracy and democratic values have traditionally meant is supposed to be something much more direct than “rulers picked by the people.” The idea isn’t to provide an ideal case, but just to get people to think more about what kind of cases might be on offer.

Doss: I think it is somewhat unfair to him to judge him by today’s standards,

1. I don’t think of it as a matter of “today’s standards” as vs. “yesterday’s standards.” Slavery was as wrong in the 1770s as it is today; that’s a matter of human rights, not a matter of contemporary fashion.

2. As an empirical matter, it’s also wrong to suggest that slaveholding wasn’t known to be wrong at the time. Patrick Henry, for one, knew it; he said that it was wrong in his letters but never did anything about it when he had the direct and immediate power to do so. Moreover, I think that the idea that the beliefs popular amongst slavers constitute the only “standards” of the time is a mistaken one. Lots of people at the time weren’t so keen on slavery; chief among them, the slaves.

Doss: … and I don’t think hypocrisy per se is a major sin or vice (depends on the consequences).

No, but slavery is.

The reason I think that Henry was a scoundrel was that he held slaves. I mention hypocrisy only because it helps explain why I don’t think that his posturing in defense of liberty merits any admiration for him as a person (although the speech itself is worthy of remembering, and emulating).

bago:

“Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God! I know not what course others may take; but as for me, give me liberty or give me death!” — Patrick Henry

“Civil liberties do not mean much when you are dead” — Jim Bunning

Which of these two would YOU call a patriot?

Neither.

Bunning is obviously a snivelling tyrannical creep. But Patrick Henry, who personally held slaves, deserves no admiration for his hypocritical panegyrics on the liberty he steadfastly opposed for his black slaves, or the grotesque irony of condemning life lived at “the price of chains and slavery” when he daily inflicted actual chains and literal slavery on others. He was a hell of an orator and perhaps a useful agitator, but as a person he was nothing more than a hypocritical scoundrel, deserving of contempt. A speech like the one attributed to him is worth a lot as a speech, but if the question is how patriotic, virtuous, or admirable Patrick Henry was, on the basis of that speech, then in his mouth it is worth less than nothing.