Thursday, March 8, 2012

Pat Robertson Embraces Key Components of Our Modest Proposal Regarding the War on Drugs

http://news.yahoo.com/pat-robertson-wants-smoke-pot-legally-143457144.html

Of course this isn't really a big surprise to me.  I've got quite a number of ultra-reactionary Christian friends, and I've noticed something that might surprise those who consume a steady diet of MSM news and entertainment.

In general they're a lot less totalitarian than the median voter.  They're more honest about talking about guns & cages than is the average Joe---who constitutionally just CAN'T seem to grok the fact that whenever you pass a law or regulation, you're compelling obedience to it with force---but differ from the libertarians in that they've made their peace with it.  Give them control of the government of the US, and what you're likely to get is a high-tech rerun of the 1950s.  Even the Spanish Inquisition, despite the massive propaganda, never really killed a lot of people---the highest estimates give less than 5000 over the span of 250 years and most estimates are substantially lower than that.

The real hardcore totalitarian impulse comes from the Yankee Progressives (Banned in Boston WAS the trope for aggressive censorship).  Most of the reactionary elements generally preferred to have such activities be low status and kept out of sight, occasionally illegal with lax to no enforcement.  Reactionaries at the gut level recognize that utopia isn't an option, and that there's a terrible cost to vigorously enforcing laws where you don't have serious supermajority support.  Accordingly they tend to establish a model wherein they keep elements that they morally disapprove of low status without any really serious attempt to use the law against them unless they start agitating for higher status.  The drive to smash their enemies is fairly low on to-do lists, which is also, unfortunately, why they're doing so poorly in the cultural war.

2 comments:

Jack Black said...

There's actually 3 levels of laws/customs.
1. Banned entirely. Often with harsh penalties(Drugs).
2. Banned publicly with light penalties and people often ignore it if it'd done discreetly (homosexuality for most of western history, rape of a loose women).
3. Openly allowed.

Our written laws don't really capture these differences well. Traditionally these differences where enforced at the jury/judge level on a case by case basis.

Drugs should be moved to and kept at tier 2.

Jehu said...

Jack,
There's also not banned but considered low-status and people are allowed to eject it from their neighborhoods informally...call it 2a.
That's where I'd like to put MJ. Most other drugs I'd prefer to put in category 2. Reactionaries as a rule don't have issues with having laws & customs where exceptions are made for truly exceptional individuals. That's the reason, I wager, why despite allowing formally a lot more women to enter the hard sciences that the rate of female Nobel winners in those areas doesn't seem to have changed at all. The Curies, for instance, got exceptions made for them all over the place.