“Paging all dealers, I mean, doctors…”

Californians are preparing to vote on a measure to legalize marijuana this Tuesday. How did things get to this point?

Last week, supporters of drug legalization came clean about role of medical marijuana in facilitating the current measure:

I tell Cliff that what I’m most struck by is how the medical marijuana movement has euphemized the old glossary. “Users” are now “patients.” “Dealers” are “caregivers.” And the dope itself? “Medicine!” says Cliff, going for the assist. “There’s no more weed. I correct everybody now. Because that’s part of getting rid of the stigma. It’s medicine.”

But if its only allowed for medicinal purposes, surely doctors must be maintaining strict standards to prevent abuse, right? Not so, says Nicholas Kristof:

Special medical clinics abound where for about $45 you can see a doctor who is certain to give you the medical recommendation that you need to buy marijuana.

The charade which is medical marijuana is now being revealed for what it really is: a preliminary stage to weaken public resolve, enabling further drug legalization.

Glenn Beck’s Rally, the 9/11 Mosque, and the ties that bind.

We can see the Enlightenment assumptions underlying the American Right and Left in two events from last month: Glen Beck’s Restoring Honor Rally and debate over the 9/11 Mosque.

Here is Harvey Mansfield on the ‘Restore Honor’ Rally:

“Glenn Beck is a kind of libertarian, and he has made a fair amount of money. But he rejects the private life that libertarians seem to recommend. He goes public with his distrust of everything public and thus requires libertarians to march behind patriotism, religion, and honor—all things not in your immediate self-interest.”

Usually, Libertarians want to reject loyalties to country or God and replace it with enlightened self-interest. Their belief is these traditional loyalties are merely irrational prejudices and so they can’t provide the basis for public policy. Yet appealing to your self-interest isn’t going to inspire the public in a rally. And its not going to unite the citizenry together either. In the end, calculation and contract are not enough to form a community.

Lets see how similar thinking underlies the Left’s view of the 9/11 Mosque. Liberals criticize Conservatives for manifesting “what the ancient political philosophers called “the love of one’s own.”

Liberals believe this preference creates a distinction between insiders and outsiders. For example, the current controversy is making Muslims feel like outsiders. And since no one should be made to feel like an outsider, Liberals reject the “love of one’s own” as unjust.

Carson Holloway explains how this view began in the Enlightenment:

“Liberals act in these ways in part because contemporary liberalism is abstract and rationalistic in its philosophic roots. Liberals are still in important respects children of the Enlightenment and still hold dear its universalistic assumptions and aspirations. The Enlightenment hoped to usher in an empire of the “rights of man,” to establish society on the basis of what is owed to human beings as human beings, and accordingly rejected older, more partial loyalties—to clan, country, or faith—as merely arbitrary.”

The commonality between the Libertarians and Liberals then is they strip human beings of all ties which make life meaningful (faith, family, and friends). Both reject patriotism; Libertarians replace it with collective selfishness while Liberals emphasize cosmopolitanism e.g. they’re citizens of world (which is to say they’re citizens of no place in particular).

Is the “love of one’s own” aka inherently unjust? Holloway thinks not:

“From another perspective, however, one might contend that such loyalty is perfectly rational—in the sense that, while every man would admit that his father has no particular claims on the human race, every man would equally claim that a father does have a very powerful claim on the help and affection of his own son.”

Instead of rallying around the flag, these Enlightenment extremes would either say every man for himself or we shouldn't play favorites when it comes to attending rallies.

Its not an Either/Or

The American Right and Left commit the same error when it comes to politics. See if you can catch it.

On the Right, Glenn Beck was interviewed by NY Times Magazine: "Progressives speak of putting “the common good” before the individual, which “is exactly the kind of talk that led to the death camps in Germany,” as he said on his show in May."

On the Left, Slate’s William Saletan argued Christine O’Donnell is a Socialist because she believes certain private acts which occur in the bedroom are immoral.

Catch it? In both instances, the reader is given a false dichotomy. The suggestion is there are only two choices, individualism or collectivism, when really there are more. Ross Douthat explains: “[they’re] reflecting the modern tendency to reduce all of human affairs to a state/individual binary (or a Marx/Rand binary, if you will), with no room for family, community, and other intermediate areas of effort, collaboration and self-sacrifice." Beck and Saletan mistakenly think that any denial of an individual right is an endorsement of the centralized government.

Both sides of the political spectrum see the only possibilities for ordering society are two Enlightenment extremes: Individualist Capitalism or Totalitarian Government. If that's the case, its just a matter of picking your poison.