A year after the man dubbed the “Insane Clown President” by Matt Taibbi was voted out, Trump-era dread still haunts the USA.

As the end of October approached, numerous news outlets debunked online rumors that “clowns are allegedly planning their own purge the night before Halloween.” Yet while madcap maniacs’ mayhem was conspicuous in its absence, so was skeptical scrutiny of the similarly apocalyptic anxieties over the off-year elections of November 2.

When the forerunners of 2021’s clown warnings circulated in 2016, Mad magazine noted that common features with the concurrent presidential campaign included “men wearing makeup and disturbing grins” and being “like something out of a horror story.” If anything, such comparisons are too flattering to the political circus.

The campaign trail’s rivalries are more obnoxious than the one between Crazy magazine mascot Obnoxio the Clown and Mad‘s Alfred E. Neuman, who himself became a clown rather than merely clownish on the cover of Mad Clowns Around. Insane Clown Posse is not the threat to civil society that the FBI’s classification of the fanbase of the horrorcore hip hop duo as a gang itself became.

Election results confirming the Pew Research Center’s report that “support for reducing spending on police has fallen significantly” likewise reflect the premise of the Purge films (the second was subtitled Anarchy) that the absence of law and order would lead to chaos. Yet as Howard Zinn observed half a century ago, a society where “order based on law and on the force of law” preempts “harmonious relationships” and nonviolent settling of disputes “is the closest to what is called anarchy in the popular mind — confusion, chaos, international banditry.”

In an interview for their July 1976 issue, Karl Hess told Playboy magazine that “the Presidency could be overthrown tomorrow if the American people suddenly began laughing at it, or ignoring it” and that there was no need to “reach for the musket if all you need is a custard pie.” Looking back on that same bicentennial year’s presidential race for Vanity Fair, Wavy Gravy recalled that he was considered “too weird to arrest” when a bulge in his pocket turned out to be from gag teeth rather than a firearm, with the jester-protester choosing to follow its chattering rather than that of the candidates since “nobody should have that much power.”

Voting with one’s feet without passing through a polling site can be an effective path to change, even if those feet are wearing clown shoes.

New Yorker Joel Schlosberg is a senior news analyst at The William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

1. “Was it a Clown Car or a Cop Car I Saw?” by Joel Schlosberg, CounterPunch, November 5, 2021
2. “Was it a clown car or a cop car I saw?” by Joel Schlosberg, Miles City, Montana Star, November 5, 2021
3. “Was it a Clown Car or a Cop Car I Saw?” by Joel Schlosberg, OpEdNews, November 10, 2021
4. “Was it a Clown Car, or a Cop Car I Saw?” by Joel Schlosberg, Roundup Record-Tribune & Winnett Times [Montana], November 10, 2021

New York Times columnist Ross Douthat could use a refresher on Freudo-Marxist psychiatrists.

Douthat chides libertarians — or at least “the kind of libertarian who identifies forever with his 13-year-old self” — for taking a laissez-faire attitude to “a novel, obviously addictive technology that might well be associated with depression and self-harm” (“Instagram Is Adult Entertainment,” September 30). Douthat refers to social media websites, but he should take a closer look at “the people who panicked over the moral effects of comic books” before dismissing a parallel.

Seduction of the Innocent author Fredric Wertham was sure that the shift of comics from the funny pages to funnybooks was causing psychological harm to young readers, a diagnosis drawn not from old-fashioned prudery but the Frankfurt School’s suspicion of commercial culture. Wertham cited the Progressive Era’s forays against reckless robber barons in his efforts to clean up crime comics. Ironically, such regulation allowed cartelized industries to get away with lower safety standards (and higher profits) than possible under the pressure of market competition.

By the 1960s, Mad magazine was spreading as a primer for rebellious adolescents after the Comics Code Authority forced its publisher to discontinue horror comics like Tales from the Crypt and The Haunt of Fear. Meanwhile, psychoanalyst Erich Fromm introduced American audiences to a British import that became an icon of the youth counterculture. While the Beatles were proving that rock and roll would outlast Elvis Presley leaving for the Army, Fromm highlighted how “the idea of education without force” was being put into practice at the alternative school Summerhill.

Fromm insisted to those who saw an excess of permissiveness in pedagogy that, just as in the realm of politics, “it is not that authority has disappeared, nor even that it has lost in strength, but that it has been transformed from the overt authority of force to the anonymous authority of persuasion and suggestion.” Freedom did not fail when it was genuine.

Douthat’s inistence that the state save social life from social media likewise ignores Fromm’s insight, drawn from Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, that social organization can only be a social benefit if its “associations are free and spontaneous, and not state imposed.” What Fromm called Proudhon’s “drastic condemnation of the principle of authority and hierarchy” as “the prime cause of all disorders and ills of society” should serve as a warning to those who see it as the cure.

New Yorker Joel Schlosberg is a senior news analyst at The William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

1. “Libertarianism – No Infantile Disorder” by Joel Schlosberg, The Glasgow, Montana Courier, October 6, 2021
2. “Libertarianism: No Infantile Disorder” by Joel Schlosberg, Ventura County, California Citizens Journal, October 6, 2021

Linguist Noam Chomsky is known for mincing no words about the corruptions of political power. Yet when asked whether “government of the people, by the people, for the people is just a sham” at the end of an interview by John Rachel for CounterPunch (August 27), Chomsky insists that it is only “if we let it be,” and that Americans could instead “choose to exercise” their ability to turn their nation into a “cooperative commonwealth.”

This is at odds with Chomsky’s preceding replies, which detail how the United States wages war in ways that not only contradict popular opinion but violate its own laws. Chomsky’s 1973 book For Reasons of State took its title from a passage by Mikhail Bakunin about how “the State is the organized authority, domination, and power of the possessing classes over the masses.”

Chomsky holding out hope in 2021 that the people can and should “take the reins of government into their own hands” likewise ignores Bakunin’s observation that the state’s use of force necessarily “shatters the universal solidarity of all men on the earth, and brings some of them into association only for the purpose of destroying, conquering, and enslaving all the rest.”

Chomsky himself documented in Objectivity and Liberal Scholarship how the “organs of power and administration remained separate from the central Republican government” in the social movements fighting the fascist seizure of power during the Spanish Civil War, yet he reinforces what Larry Gambone calls “the myth of socialism as statism,” the very conflation of popular and political power for which Chomsky famously took mainstream historians to task.

Modern-day popular movements seeking an end to social warfare could do well to rediscover the forms of voluntary socialist organization noted by Chomsky and Gambone. They should also revive Bakunin’s vigilance against the “bold plunder” and “shabby betrayal that [is] daily being perpetrated by the representatives of the states.”

Correction: In the original version of this op-ed, John Rachel was misidentified as John Roberts.

New Yorker Joel Schlosberg is a contributing editor at The William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

1. “More Reasons of State, More Troubles” by Joel Schlosberg, OpEdNews, September 3, 2021
2. “More reasons of state, more troubles” by Joel Schlosberg, Lake Havasu City, AZ News, September 3, 2021
3. “Sham Government?” by Joel Schlosberg, Salt Lake City Weekly, September 8, 2021 (both online and print)
4. “More reasons of state, more trouble” by Thomas L. Knapp [sic], Madill, Oklahoma Record, September 9, 2021
5. “More reasons of state, more trouble” by Joel Schlosberg, Sidney [Montana] Herald, September 11, 2021
6. “More Reasons Of State, More Troubles” by Joel Schlosberg, Ventura County, California Citizens Journal, September 12, 2021
7. “More Reasons of State, More Troubles” by by Joel Schlosberg, Roundup Record-Tribune & Winnett Times [Montana], September 15, 2021