The Great Debate

Monetizing the marginalized

Chadwick Matlin

Feb 28, 2012 14:30 EST

Five years ago, Ron Paul’s popularity was still surprising. Sometime in 2007, the former physician, longtime crank in Congress, and thoroughly fringe Republican had somehow turned his shtick into success — at least monetarily. Paul raised more than $31 million in the 2008 Republican primary even though he never actually won a contest where actual delegates were at stake. For a longshot like Paul, it wasn’t the chance of his success that drove people to donate; on the contrary, all but the deluded knew he would fail.

Now, in 2012, the idea of his success among the fringe is mainstream. And Paul’s alchemy — turning derision into dollars — isn’t exclusive to his corner of the fringe. The powers that be — politics, media, Corporate America — have refused to embrace causes from Occupy Wall Street to Elizabeth Warren. And yet these underdogs still find a way to succeed because marginalization has become incredibly lucrative. How else to explain the $150 million that the DIY funding site Kickstarter is expected to help raise this year, even though many of the projects it funds will do no better than Ron Paul?

As always, credit the Internet. Since the earliest days of altnet message boards, we’ve known the Web can build just as well as it can destroy. Its vastness allows for connections both obscure and passionate, while its anonymity creates hate both entropic and cowardly. This new economy of the marginalized is the child of the first dynamic — the one that can rally thousands to a cause with the smallest of sparks.

In the past, the spark has been all that was necessary, especially in politics. Remember when Joe Wilson yelled “You Lie!” to President Obama at the State of the Union in 2009? Until then Wilson had been a meek Republican congressman best known for his determination to support Strom Thurmond and keep the Confederate flag flying at the South Carolina statehouse. The media made him into a symbol of all that was wrong with Washington. Just as quickly, supporters made him — or his campaign war chest — rich. He raised $2 million in the week after the State of the Union. The Washington Post dubbed it, and every other controversial sound bite that takes on a life of its own, a moneyblurt.

But this most recent crop of marginalized parties is taking part in a more nuanced process than Wilson. These parties have used more than just controversy to raise money. They’ve used the promise of reversal.

Clay Shirky, the author-thinker-smart guy who spends more time pondering the Internet than you do surfing it, told me it takes two things for a mass, financial mobilization: coordination and leverage. On the Internet, plenty of groups can gather en masse. But they won’t be moved to act, let alone donate, unless they think their support is actually going to do something. Shirky points out, for example, that there are plenty of people who want to legalize marijuana, but all their efforts have been focused on changing state law. They know there’s no use pouring their money into a national campaign if the White House isn’t going to acknowledge their issue.

How Ron Paul may have won — and lost — Maine

Amy Fried and Michael Socolow

Feb 16, 2012 13:38 EST

Washington County, Maine, is the easternmost point in the continental United States. This region of rocky shores and pinetree forests is populated by proudly independent — and defiant — citizens.

The Republicans in Washington County have supported such radical and underdog candidates as Ross Perot and Patrick Buchanan in the past.

Too bad they didn’t get to participate in the Maine caucuses last weekend.

Due to a snowstorm, the Republican party in Washington County (and in various locations in neighboring Hancock County) was forced to reschedule its caucuses for this coming weekend. Yet despite not having results from these precincts, Maine Republican Chairman Charlie Webster declared Mitt Romney the victor in the Maine caucus. Romney, Webster reported, earned 2,190 votes, while Ron Paul finished second with 1,996 votes.

According to the Associated Press, the chairman of the Washington County Republican Party, Chris Gardner, a Romney supporter, called state party leaders and expressed his “complete and utter dismay.” Washington County Republican leaders, who moved their caucuses to this coming Saturday after snow made it difficult to meet last weekend, will convene these postponed caucuses this Saturday, and County Chair Gardner is hoping that state party officials will change their mind and accept the results.

He shouldn’t hold his breath.

Do libertarians like Peter Thiel really want to live in America?

Sally Kohn

Sep 1, 2011 11:45 EDT

By Sally Kohn The opinions expressed are her own.

It sounds like “Fantasy Island” meets “The Twilight Zone” — a privately funded island nation created for the sole purpose of escaping government.

In the olden days, corporate titans just hired pricey lawyers and accountants to dodge the watchful eye of government regulation and the law.  But thanks to record economic inequality that has enriched the already-wealthy more than ever, a group of investors has the spare millions to build an entirely man-made ocean-bound nation where they can make the rules up themselves.  It’s Libertarianism 2.0: the final, floating frontier.

In a recent profile by Details magazine, it was revealed that PayPal founder and libertarian activist Peter Thiel has contributed $1.25 million dollars to the Seasteading Institute, a plan hatched by the grandson of free market economist Milton Friedman to establish “new sovereign nations built on oil-rig-type platforms anchored in international waters — free from the regulation, laws, and moral suasion of any landlocked country.” The Details profile explains, “They’d be small city-states at first, although the aim is to have tens of millions of seasteading residents by 2050.”  Already, plans are underway to launch an office complex off the coast of San Francisco next year, adding full-time housing settlements on the island seven years later.

Don’t like the idea of tax dollars paying for public schools or highway construction or Medicare — or don’t like the idea of taxes at all?  The brave new floating world offers just the solution.  And if the self-appointed creators wish it, there would be no restrictions on guns or automatic weapons.  Or, for that matter, no prohibition against murder.  Pesky “moral suasion”!

The seasteading project is a bright and shiny warning buoy, heralding the dangerous agenda of otherwise tame-seeming libertarians.  It raises the question of whether libertarians want to prune back American government or eliminate it altogether. This is not an idle concern. Prominent Libertarians want to abolish the Federal Reserve, FEMA and the TSA and that may be just the start. Until 2006, the Libertarian Party Platform explicitly supported the right of political entities, private groups and even individuals to secede from the federal government. Fearing this seemed too extremist, Libertarians replaced that platform plank with a clause about the right of people to abolish the government anytime it destroys individual liberty — a very narrow and ominous reinterpretation of the Declaration of Independence.

Fringe movements, of course, rarely cast themselves as obviously fringe.  Racist, anti-civil rights forces cloaked themselves in the benign language of “state’s rights”.  Anti-gay religious entities adopted the glossy, positive imagery of “family values”.  Similarly, though many Libertarians embrace a pseudo-patriotic apple pie nostalgia, behind this façade is a very un-American, sinister vision.

Will Jared Loughner discredit the gold standard?

Chadwick Matlin

Jan 11, 2011 11:25 EST

By Chadwick Matlin Matlin, a guest contributor, is a freelance writer. The opinions expressed are his own.

Jared Lee Loughner used the American dollar like the rest of us. He used it to pay for classes at Pima Community College, he used it to buy a handgun and he used it to pay for a taxi to the Safeway where he shot Rep. Gabrielle Giffords and 19 others on Saturday.

But apparently the dollar is a currency he despised. Loughner’s YouTube videos are consumed with the idea of creating a “new currency,” one that is nothing like our current, Federal Reserve-controlled greenback. In “Hello,” he writes, “my ambition — is for informing literate dreamers about a new currency.” (All of Loughner’s videos are composed of text or diagrams. He never appears.)

What “new currency” implies is unclear. He seems to oscillate between a new currency backed by gold and silver, and one that allows the individual complete control. But it’s evident that monetary policy was one of Loughner’s many pet peeves. Past violent psychopaths have had their tics — John Hinckley thought he could impress Jodie Foster by shooting Ronald Reagan, John Wayne Gacy dressed as a clown — but Loughner appears to be the first obsessed with the particulars of monetary policy.

In a video called “Introduction: Jared Loughner” he writes, “No! I won’t pay debt with a currency that’s not backed by gold and silver!” But then later, in the same video, he also suggests that it’s not a gold standard he’s after, but a personal one. “Every human who’s mentally capable is always able to be treasurer of their new currency,” he writes in the same video. Later, he speaks about creating a “new language” in the same terms he uses to describe a “new currency.”

What any of this means is difficult to say. Based on his videos and friends’ accounts, he is clearly a man not in control of his faculties, a deficiency that led to the slaying of six innocent people, and the wounding of 14 more. He seems to operate on a logic all his own — a logic that is in part on display in the numerous, confused proofs he posits in his videos.

But if we can’t divine Loughner’s motives, we can better explain the larger monetary context that seemed to influence him. Loughner picked up threads of two different subcultures: one that demands the Fed stop manipulating the dollar, and the other that seeks to remove the Federal government from manufacturing currency altogether. This is not to say that these monetary subcultures drove Loughner to kill. But it does suggest they were two of his ideological sanctums.