Letter to Andrew Sullivan #2, or,

A Missive to Marquess of Queensbury Mugwumps.

Dear Sir or Madam:

        Having engaged in some heated facebook controversy on the subject
of my natal Boston and Chick-fil-A, I thought I'd respond briefly to your
well-intentioned, though thoroughly naive, and frankly Mugwumpish,
position.

        First, cities and towns are still democracies, and if a powerful
private actor, in this case a large corporation, wishes the privilege of
operating within these polities while expending significant resources (as
in, money to anti-gay groups, not speech alone, which you neglect to
mention) to corrode the  very social and political mores that undergird
these polities -- in Boston's case, respect for the equal personhood of,
inter alia, LGBTQs -- it is fully within that community's right to refuse
permission to the corporation to operate within its borders. The 'free
market' (i.e., the imaginary world of Manchester School economics and
Milton Friedman) does not have any prior claim to the sovereignty of these
democratic polities. There is no universal right of opening franchises, and
if you seek to give material aid to bigotry against Group Y, and then find
yourself denied permission to operate within a city that is an oasis for
Group Y, you have no grounds for surprise. Polities construct and maintain
so-called "free markets", and polities may govern them as they please.

    Indeed, the idea that a self-regulating market must be the ne plus
ultra, the final arbiter of economic questions, is a relatively new one,
having only taken hold -- and then irregularly and as the result of
enormous violence -- in the middle decades of the 19th century. Before
that, and indeed, during and after that, both governments and popular
crowds had no problem telling commercial concerns deemed destructive of the
social and political order to take a hike -- for instance, the Michigan
Railroad War of the 1850s, or the anti-turnpike riots in England a century
before that. It is the supreme (small 'l') liberal arrogance to 1) assume
that any individual's right to profit supersedes that of the community to
its lifeways; and 2) to equate the poor injured business-owner, denied the
chance for even more money, with any number of put-upon minorities -- in
this case, the minority whose oppression the poor businessman seeks to use
his profits to finance.  You and Greenwald are both small-l liberals of
varying stripes, and so you presume these things; but not everyone in this
country is a small-l liberal, so I don't think your presumptions hold.

    Finally, in terms of practical politics, it is no surprise that a
supporter of the House of Lords would feel the need to blindly adhere to
Marquess of Queensbury rules -- but politics in this country is now the
inverse of Clausewitz; it is war by other means, and for too long we have
seen the polite center-left hold to your oh-so-fastidious rules of
engagement, and get slaughtered, while the Right sharpens its swords and
prepares for battle -- enough! If this 'bullying' makes business-owners
more afraid to use their power to attack gays, that is fine with me. You
are obviously not from a big northern city: this is small-fry stuff in
terms of political intimidation. You may be an immigrant and an Irishman
(by descent only -- what true Irishman comes out for the House of fucking
Lords?!), but you don't understand whatsoever the Boston- or Chicago- Irish
experience that politics is personal, and it involves throwing some sharp
fucking elbows. You may think of this as bullying; in reality, it is
fighting, which a comfortable fellow such as yourself may not be accustomed
to having to do. Indeed, you didn't have to fight precisely because guys
with the courage to engage in overt confrontation came before you and paved
the way for you: it's no surprise that Larry Kramer finds your entitlement
in this regard insufferable.

  This idea that we can all reason together with some tea-and-cakes is so
much middle class bullshit, of which you and Greenwald are representative
-- the Right and Left poles, as it were. The working class has long known
that politics is a tough and dirty fight, and the other side is playing for
keeps.

  There is a reason Malcolm Tucker emerges, in the end, as the most
consistently likable character in "The Thick of It" -- because he knows all
this, and his goal, unlike the careerists around him, "is to keep the other
wankers out of government."

  Just as libertarians free-ride on the liberal (US sense) political order
they so deride, so do you and Greenwald free-ride on the brawlers like
Larry Kramer -- or Tom Menino -- who fight your fights for you.