Genteel Anarchism

Politics, as the saying goes, makes strange bedfellows, and perhaps the strangest in American annals is the nearly half-century marriage of convenience between libertarians--the most hard-core of classical liberals--and conservatives. In large measure, this unnatural union can be explained by a cobelligerency grounded in a fervent opposition to state socialism and a correspondingly deep suspicion of the expanding welfare state and the increase in the power of the federal government. But now that socialism has been discredited and, as President Clinton put it, "the era of big government is over," we can expect a renewed battle for the soul of the American Right.

One figure sure to play a role in this conflict is Charles Murray, author of Losing Ground, a book that helped to redefine the welfare debate, and co-author of the infamous The Bell Curve, whose recently published manifesto, What It Means to Be a Libertarian (Broadway Books, 178 pp.; $20), seems intended to put a kinder, gentler face on libertarianism. Murray is significant not primarily as a representative of that movement but far more so as an influential spokesman for the anti-government ideology that is increasingly popular outside the restricted ambit of libertar-ianism--particularly in conservative Christian circles.

Murray's shtick is to exaggerate the all-too-real consequences of misguided government intervention while underplaying the benefits of constructive government action. The extent to which he is willing to go in this regard was pressed home to me a few years ago at a small conference at which Murray was the main speaker. The basic thrust of his argument, now quite familiar, was that certain types of social assistance, particularly AFDC, encouraged illegitimacy among the poor, as well as sexually irresponsible and even predatory behavior among young men--an argument that I found plausible then and continue to find plausible now.

But in the course of a discussion over what should be done with "deadbeat dads," Murray flatly stated that given the wide availability of abortion, fathers who have abandoned their families should not be required by law to make child-support payments.

Now, the logic to this position is actually not as perverse as it might initially sound. After all, if, in our abortionist regime, a mother has an unquestionable (libertarian?) "right" to opt out of motherhood at any time during the pregnancy for whatever reason without penalty, it is quite difficult to refuse to extend that "right" to the father as well. (At most one can expect the father to pay for half the cost of the abortion.)

Which is why I pointedly asked Murray to consider the counterfactual. What if we didn't have permissive abortion laws? I was fishing for a principled argument in which public authority might have a positive obligation to protect and nurture family life as the most fundamental of what Edmund Burke called the "little platoons" of civil society. I was hoping that Murray would say that if the law could require mothers to support their children from the moment of conception, it ought to require fathers to live up to certain minimal paternal obligations as well.

No dice. Murray explicitly rejected that approach. After pausing a bit, he said that even if abortion were illegal, government would have no legitimate authority to require child-support payments of the father. Murray's justification at that meeting took roughly the form it does in his book. In a libertarian world,

[k]nowing that they must be responsible for their own futures, far fewer women allow themselves to have a baby without a husband. The penalties for doing so become huge, immediate, and so pressing that they cannot be ignored. The crushing financial burden of a baby is the most tangible penalty, but there are social ones as well. The stigma against single motherhood quickly makes a comeback: Until government began masking the social costs created by large numbers of fatherless children, civilized communities everywhere stigmatized illegitimacy. The revised stigma also means that a single mother has devalued her stock in the marriage market at a time when the marriage market has become more important. A law punishing fathers for abandoning their wives and children or requiring them to support them would mess up the price signals in the marriage market.

That's Murray's idea of "family values." An "intervention" by the public authorities to encourage virtuous behavior and to discourage vice in marriage and family life won't work because it can't work, and it can't work because the market is the most efficient distributor of goods, both economic and social. If that sounds ideological and utopian, that's because it is.

In his memoir, The Sword of the Imagination, Russell Kirk, the dean of American conservativism, suggested that American conservatives were not likely to be delivered into the "ideological fanaticism" of totalitarian movements as they were in Germany. The more likely course of people with conservative impulses, were they to be "denied intelligent leadership and moral imagination," would be a descent "into mere silliness, adopting an ideology of absurdity." The silliness to which Americans on the Right were particularly prone, Kirk suggested, was libertarianism, "a genteel form of anarchism." Kirk likened libertarians to T. S. Eliot's "chirping sectaries," ideologues whose "only conservative aspect was their attachment to private property" and who "fancifully thought they could transform the United States into a utopia of moral negation and no recognizable rule of law." For Christians tempted to jump on the anti-government bandwagon--and inclined to put too much faith in the wisdom of the market--that's a caution worth heeding.

Keith Pavlischek is director of the Crossroads Program on Faith and Public Policy, a research and educational ministry of Evangelicals for Social Action.

Clipboard Ladies, Forward March

I was an easy mark. As a comfy-dressed middle-aged lady in tennis shoes, ambling through the mall a little after noon, I clearly was not a lawyer in clickety heels on a tight lunch hour, not a harried mom with a chocolate-smeared toddler. As I rounded the bend by the fountain I walked right into a swarm of Clipboard Ladies, and was snared.

"Would you have a moment to answer a few questions?" asked one, zooming up to me with a Perma-Prest smile. She looked hopeful and imploring in her little blue smock, and I felt sorry for her. Before I knew it, we were going through a series of demographic questions.

"Good! You qualify!" she said with a slight uptick in smileforce. "If you'll walk back with me to the office and answer a few more questions, we can pay you $7.00."

I followed her to a glass-fronted office under the sign "Opinion Center." There we wound past desks into a cubicle, where she popped a cassette into a VCR. "Just watch these commercials," she said, "then I'll ask you some questions about them."

I sat up straight and focused all my powers of concentration; I wanted to get a good grade in commercial aptitude. A series of vivid ads sped by: People having a great time at the Holiday Inn; people having a great time eating Dannon yogurt; a sleepless pregnant woman eating Mott's applesauce out of a jar and having a truly terrific time; a baby drinking a bottle of milk, then crying, followed by a message that Exxon has "clean enough" baby-changing stations for "the driver human" (what?); a man taking Advil instead of other things and probably having a great time after that.

Okay. Ready to go. I smiled back at the woman, and when she asked me which commercials I remembered, I proudly named six out of eight. I was bursting with wise opinions. I was eager to say that the Dannon commercial--people living black-and-white lives that suddenly went daisy-boingy color when they swallowed a spoon of goop--was just silly. That the pregnant woman should not be eating applesauce directly out of the jar with a spoon--the whole contents will begin liquifying due to enzymes in her saliva. (She'll find that out, as I did, when she tries to feed her baby from the babyfood jar, then store the remainder.) And the guy claiming that two Advil supply more pain relief than two Excedrin--I was raring to go on that one. It had been bugging me a long time. Yes, of course, it's true. That's because the recommended dose is only one Advil. It's the same as saying four Excedrin offer more medication than two. Then there was that Exxon commercial. That was just weird.

"I want you to look at that Exxon commercial again, and then I'll ask you just a few questions," said the smiling lady. Ah, so that was the trick; the other commercials were just interlarded to distract me. I turned again to the screen.

Nice black-and-white, hand-held photography shows a baby in a car seat, wearing a jumper with rickrack on the shoulder straps. The baby is working hard at a bottle, and various simple thoughts appear near her head: "Yum, milk" and "Good milk." Then suddenly, in midslug, the baby stops drinking and starts crying fretfully. This puzzled me as much the second time as the first. What happened? Stomachache? Gas pain? A sour patch? My theory: a pinch administered by someone just off-camera.

A message appeared, phrase by phrase: "Baby-changing stations . . . CLEAN ENOUGH . . . for the driver human." Now, what the heck is that?

My hostess turned to her computer keyboard and read off a question. "What was the message of this commercial, other than that Exxon sells high-quality gasoline?"

"The message was that they have baby-changing stations," I said, "but it didn't say anything about gasoline. There were two things wrong with the commercial. First, I was confused about why the baby started crying."

"Oh!" she said, beaming. "He was crying because he wet himself!"

"But babies don't do that," I said. "Babies don't cry when they're wet."

"Really? Mine does," she said brightly, reasoning with an idiot.

"Well, I had three, and none of them did," I said. "Maybe some do, after a while, after it gets cold. But not suddenly like that."

"Oh, I think most people know that babies cry when they're wet," she went on encouragingly. "He's drinking the bottle--and then he stops--wah! He wants to be changed!" She was delighted with the drama. "Then at the very end, did you hear him laughing? He was happy--goo! Because he was dry again!"

I had not heard that detail, actually. The Clipboard Lady continued beaming at me. She had faith in me. I was so close, so close to getting it, if I'd just try a tiny bit harder.

"Maybe I'm confused about what we're doing here," I said carefully. "I thought you were interested in getting my opinion."

"Oh yes, of course!" she said, surprised.

"Don't you see, it doesn't matter what you say to convince me?" I said. "The point is that this commercial failed for me. Exxon did not succeed in conveying their message."

She looked a little chastised and I felt bad. She returned to her computer screen. I hadn't said the other thing I thought was wrong with the commercial, but thought it best to hold my tongue for now.

"Was the message of this commercial that (a) Exxon provides a number of services for drivers, (b) Exxon offers excellent gasoline, (c) Exxon has clean baby-changing stations, or (d) Exxon supplies maps and directions to travelers?"

"Um, c, the one about baby-changing stations."

"Based on this commercial, what is a service that Exxon provides for drivers?"

"Based on this commercial? I guess that would be baby-changing stations."

"Exxon sells high-quality gasoline, but based on this commercial, what else do you know about Exxon's services?"

"Um, that they have baby-changing stations? Hey, haven't we answered this question before?"

A smile applied with a Phillips screwdriver.

"Based on this commercial, what would you say is one reason a driver might stop at an Exxon station?"

And so it went. Page after page. At last I got asked an essay question.

"Was there anything you didn't like about this commercial?"

"Yes!" I said, relieved. "Two things about the tag line. First . . . "

I paused. She was typing with two fingers. "Y-E-S T-W-O T-H-I-N-GS

A-B-O-U-T."

I spoke slowly. "I don't like the phrase, quote, clean enough."

I paused as she paused. "Quote?" she asked.

"Quote," I repeated, less confidently. I watched her type "Q-U-A-T-E."

"It's too lukewarm," I went on, feeling beaten. "It makes me think that they're not really clean enough."

I waited a couple of minutes for her index fingers to catch up with my seven-dollar opinion.

"Also, I dislike this phrase the driver human. It's obscure and contrived. I don't know what it's supposed to mean."

She finally typed "M-E-A-N," then looked at me inquiringly.

"That's it," I said.

She began typing, "T-H-A-T . . . "

Toward the end we got to the do-you-like-me questions. Would I now be more or less likely to stop at an Exxon station? Is Exxon a brand I would want to buy? Do I think the other gasolines are cuter than Exxon?

"Does Exxon offer goods and services that are better?"

"Better than what?"

"Just better."

"Better than other companies'?"

"Just better."

"Better than they used to be?"

"Just better."

Gas-station loyalty has never been one of my virtues. I've always been a gasoline coquette, sempre libre, flitting to wherever the nearest pay-at-pump sign displays. Still, I'd say nearly half my gas purchases have ended up being at Exxon stations. But at this point I didn't like Exxon much anymore. When one question asked how I would feel if Exxon disappeared tomorrow, I'm afraid I answered with intemperate zeal.

At last the ordeal was over. The smiling lady handed me a five and two ones, stapled together, thanked me for my time a bit coolly, and indicated I could leave.

On the way out I passed a counter with a stack of forms and a metal bin. A hand-lettered sign read, "Give us a hand! We value your opinion. If you would like to be consulted again, fill in this form and leave it in the bin. We'll be calling you!"

It was a long form. I filled in every line.

Frederica Mathewes-Green's commentaries can be heard on National Public Radio.

Copyright(c) 1997 by the author or Christianity Today, Inc./Books & Culture Magazine. For reprint information call 630-260-6200 or e-mail BCedit@aol.com.

Sep/Oct 1997, Vol. 3, No. 5, Page 6

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