Pretti Good

Each major political faction has reversed its position on so many things—contradicted itself on so many things—as it became strategically useful to do so, that lately people tend to skip over any discussion of basic principles and go straight to the accusations of hypocrisy, as if that will reveal what we should do. It almost never does, though, because anytime someone espouses A and not-A, you’re still left with the question of which of his two assertions to ditch.

If you’re wracked with anxiety over, say, your fellow Democrats suddenly asserting that a man who was shot and killed by Border Patrol (as Alex Pretti was) had a right to carry a gun and that dissident states have a right to keep out the federal government, or your fellow Republicans suddenly asserting that a man bringing a gun to a fight was asking for trouble and that the federal government (and its menacing standing army) must be obeyed, in defiance of those two parties’ usual rhetoric (see: Rachel Maddow and Alex Jones, respectively), you just need to use my daily mantra for making sense of the contradictions.

Practice denouncing both major political factions in one breath—each day—until it becomes natural, not jarring. It needn’t feel like a betrayal of whichever faction you started out liking. It certainly needn’t feel like a contradiction. It isn’t. You can vary the precise list of items in the mantra according to your needs, but throughout stay focused on the fact that authoritarian violence is bad no matter who commits it.

Try, for instance, saying (inhale deeply before each item): Border Patrol shouldn’t execute people… and governments shouldn’t tax people (whether those governments plan to turn around and give the money to swarthy newcomers or elderly white locals)… and the Drug Enforcement Administration shouldn’t shoot at people for trading psychoreactive substances… and regulators shouldn’t seize people’s businesses or assets for failure to obey… and censors shouldn’t threaten to take broadcasting licenses from pornographers or enemies of the President… and science/tech institutions shouldn’t be subsidized to parrot the government’s preferred position on healthcare… and the military shouldn’t be supplied with a trillion dollars’ worth of hardware per year to fight unnecessary wars. (Exhale after each item.)

That’s seven suggestions for shrinking government right there, about half of them traditionally considered left-wing and half traditionally considered right-wing, with that last one perhaps oscillating back and forth depending on who’s running the government at the moment, but none of that should leave you feeling confused or whipsawed. Just emphatically stick to all of them regardless of who’s in charge at the moment, and work for the day when no one is in charge so we don’t have to worry about any of it. No need to feel partisan about it. Just feel (potentially) free, and never root for any faction getting in the way of that freedom. Ah, relaxing.

When in doubt: defer to localities, you centralizing, fascistic, moronic hypocrites of all parties. If you instead just defer on the side of enjoying seeing “the other party” pressed by government for a change, you’re only inviting more authoritarianism in the long run, endless retaliations. The next thing you know, you’re sounding vaguely fascism-curious like Anna Khachiyan and Dasha Nekrasova on the New York-based Red Scare podcast. Funny for a moment, as if expanding your intellectual horizons with some postmodern irony, then debilitating because it leads to the kind of Weimar or Eastern-European cynicism in which all politics is either hard-left or fascist with nothing in between, an authoritarian failure of imagination. Try real bourgeois nuance. Remember it?

The negative stereotypes about the two major political factions, right and left, are mostly true, and it’s tempting to pounce on them any time they appear, but the ferocity of the pouncing tends to be proportional to an eagerness to conceal the comparable moral failings, likely authoritarian, of one’s own side. So, try mixing things up a bit. Complained about the right yesterday? Complain about the left today. And so on. I’m not saying fake it, but you might learn something from the experiment.

Be consistent in your own (preferably anti-authoritarian) principles throughout and you’ll also more fully earn the right to criticize those hypocrites I mentioned at the outset. Complain about inconsistent left-liberals who praise Ezra Klein for pointing out how badly regulations delay construction and wealth accumulation but then go back to defending any and all regulations a day later. But next, try complaining about schizoid right-wingers hating thieves and taxes their whole lives but then praising Trump for imposing punitive tariffs on any country that won’t let him seize Greenland. He wants it! But you know in your heart that’s not a justification. Thinking that wanting something is enough is how you end up in prison, and rightly so. Of what else is a barbarian like that capable?

But who then, of what are any of them, of any party, capable as long as they tell themselves, hey, the other side does worse? How low have you sunk lately, for that matter? How much lower will you go, if tripping up the enemy matters more to you than taking at least a few steps toward civility and everyday freedom? Mercilessly eradicating the enemy might feel so great it makes you forget your own failings for a moment, but calming down and letting others be is pretty good too, and the body count will probably be lower.

—Todd Seavey is the author of Libertarianism for Beginners and is on X at @ToddSeavey