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April 27th, 2013 
Peter Nolan To be attacked
by a Gore Vidal, or an H.L. Mencken, one of the great wordsmiths
of American criticism, while surely unpleasant, must have been
oddly exhilarating for the poor souls on the receiving end. I,
on the other hand, have the more dubious and prosaic distinction
of being a regular target of Ian Millhiser.
So you’ve
never heard of Ian Millhiser. You’ve never seen him. But you only
think you haven’t. You have.
Ever met
someone who’s dying to let you and the rest of the world know
he holds all the approved opinions? Then you have met Ian Millhiser.
In every
hysterical reaction to dissident voices – i.e., voices that (gasp!)
differ from both Barack Obama and Mitt Romney! – you have
seen him.
You have
seen Ian in every social climber who would die a thousand deaths
before entertaining an unconventional thought.
In literature
and television we have the stock character: the absent-minded
professor, the stuck-up cheerleader, the backwoods yokel. Millhiser,
too, is a stock character. He is the thought controller: impatient
with diversity, predictable, establishment, banal, humorless.
Millhiser
typically insinuates that people who disagree with him strongly,
like me, are probably indifferent to or even privately supportive
of slavery. Slavery. But consider this: abolitionist political
parties were lucky to receive two percent of the vote. How likely
is it that someone desperate to hold approved, establishment-friendly
opinions would have been – of all things! – an abolitionist?
Ian has no
scholarly accomplishments I can uncover – no peer-reviewed articles,
no books from major scholarly publishers, indeed no books from
any publisher at all. That in itself doesn’t make Ian a bad guy,
of course. But it’s kind of funny that the entire Millhiser corpus
of panicked articles about the takeover of the United States by
unlettered rubes is composed by someone of no scholarly distinction
whatever.
Once or twice
a year I reply to another one of Ian’s pieces. They’re all pretty
much the same: uncomprehending analysis, stern rebukes of dissidents,
and stolid, sledgehammer prose without elegance or nuance. He
is a self-parody, the epitome of the hectoring, p.c. automaton.
Millhiser
pretends my replies to him do not exist. He continues to make
the same inane arguments, in the full confidence – alas, probably
justified – that his limited audience has not read my refutations.
In fact, he refuses to quote anything I have written in the past
15 years.
That’s about
what one can expect from ThinkProgress and the other left-wing
thought-control sites that monitor and censure unapproved thoughts.
My Nullification
FAQ was largely inspired by Millhiser, who raises the same
long-exploded arguments again and again, no matter how many times
I refute them. I finally decided to write up a FAQ and leave it
at that. You will not be surprised to learn that Millhiser pretends
the FAQ does not exist.
I have written
a
whole book about nullification of unconstitutional federal
laws. Millhiser has attacked and smeared me for years without
once quoting from that book, or from anything I have written on
the topic. In my book I included many primary documents, in part
so readers wouldn’t have to take my word for things, and in part
to make it harder for the world’s Millhisers to erase them from
history.
His latest
is an interview
at AlterNet, with editor Joshua Holland, called “American Right-Wingers
Are No Longer Conservative – They’re Extremists.” Oooh! Well,
we can’t have that!
Extremist
is one of the commissar’s favorite words. Nothing gets under the
thought controller’s skin more than an uppity peon who thinks
there might be more to political philosophy than John Kerry and
Mitch McConnell. Be satisfied with the range of debate we allow
you, citizen. Any opinion a reasonable person might want to hold
can be found in that yawning chasm that separates these two men.
You have an opinion that differs from both of them, you say? Why,
you’re an extremist.
Millhiser
and Holland are appalled at conservatives’ lack of respect for
“long-standing precedent” and “venerable tradition.” (These would
make excellent rebukes of Socrates and Copernicus, I note in passing.)
Falsehoods
and abuses, we are to believe, become truths and virtues if perpetrated
long enough. And for heaven’s sake, venerable tradition?
Is this what AlterNet, which advocates social policy that would
have horrified even the left-liberals of two generations ago,
is now pretending to favor?
Of course,
Millhiser does not care one whit about “precedent” and “tradition,”
else he would be writing articles about the risible jurisprudence
of the New Deal Court and its transparently political departures
from longstanding precedent. What Millhiser cares about are nationalism
and government power, just like the neoconservatives he pretends
to oppose. Law school taught him the nationalist theory of the
Union, and he is going to defend this
preposterous notion come what may.
So in the
interview we are treated to the following analysis. Some Tea Party
groups are attempting to resist government power in unapproved
ways. Some of them even think the states can nullify unconstitutional
laws. This makes them reactionaries. If they were real
conservatives, they would roll over and die like the good losers
left-liberals expect them to be.
According
to Millhiser, these conservatives supposedly have a faulty understanding
of the Tenth Amendment:
About four
years ago, you started to hear these weird noises about how
things violate the 10th Amendment. And not just, you know, the
Affordable Care Act – that’s when they made this argument
over and over again – but it was also people claiming that Medicare
violates the 10th Amendment. Social Security violates the 10th
Amendment. And what I started to hear at these Tea Party rallies
that were popping up is speakers got up and they were saying
things that very closely resembled this discredited constitutional
theory that existed about 100 years ago. At the time, it led
to child-labor laws getting struck down, it allowed pretty much
any law protecting unions getting struck down, that led to minimum
wage getting struck down – all of these essential worker protections
getting struck down…. And while we were asleep at the switch,
they were writing books and they were educating their partisans
about how awesome it would be if we had this crazy theory of
the 10th Amendment, and then I guess we wouldn’t have to be
stuck with these terrible child-labor laws anymore.
As usual
with Millhiser, it is enough for him simply to point out his opponents’
view; he need not trouble himself to refute it. So we never actually
learn why these people are wrong to read the Tenth Amendment the
way they do, apart from the fact that this reading makes Ian Millhiser
unhappy. Theirs is a “discredited constitutional theory.” Discredited
by what? By anything relevant?
Source Article from http://lewrockwell.com/woods/woods231.html
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