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Bruce Ramsey looks back on two decades of Liberty's
best! Twenty Years of
Liberty Confessions
of a Liberty Editor by Stephen
Cox What, exactly, happens atop the
precipitous staircase at Liberty HQ?
When you read Bruce Ramsey's article on the
history of Liberty, you'll see that, to a remarkable extent, the history
of this journal is also the history of the modern libertarian movement.
You would have to think very far before you thought of anyone who has
been important in that movement who hasn't written or been written up in
Liberty. It's an avalanche of names, and it hasn't stopped. There are
always new people — writers like Jayant Bhandari, Michael
Christian, Jon Harrison, and Gary Jason, to list a few of the names that
have recently added luster to our pages.
| | Stephen Cox is a founding editor of Liberty.
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The people who try to herd this avalanche are Patrick Quealy, Drew
Ferguson, Mark Rand, Jo Ann Skousen, and Kathleen Bradford. I do some of
it too, but those are the really important people at Liberty HQ. Sitting
in the front row at this circus are Liberty's senior editors, John
Hospers, Jane Shaw, and Bruce Ramsey himself. They're not just long-term
ticket holders; they often leave their seats and join the action. No
journal could have better friends than they are — and, after all, a
journal is nothing but its friends, the people who stick with it and
contribute their best. It's hard to go wrong when you have friends like
the people I've mentioned. There's a common idea that writers
are very different from their writing, that when you meet someone whose
work you like, you're certain to be disappointed. That idea is mostly
true — except about the people who contribute to Liberty. When I
meet our authors, I almost always find that they are just as interesting
as their writing. They even look the way you'd expect them to look
— something that's notoriously untrue of writers in general. Still
stranger is the fact that when these people assemble at a Liberty
conference, they are remarkably polite, tolerant, gracious, gentle to
one another. Writers usually aren't like that, and you would expect
libertarian writers to be very unlike it: they're individualists by
definition, advocates of dissenting ideas, no one of which they manage
to agree on. If you haven't already gathered this by reading
Bruce's essay, you won't be surprised to learn that the people of
Liberty are an astonishingly various, opinionated, intellectually
assertive, complex group of people. Actually, every one of them is a
group, individually, and that goes for the editor as well. That's what
makes a group interesting, and apparently we realize that it does, and
are therefore determined to be gracious to one another, at least when
we're all present in person. When it comes to writing and editing,
though, you can expect to see some combat. Every journal editor
is constantly in combat with somebody over something, usually something
completely unpredictable. Who could have guessed that the scholar who
wrote with such judicious calm about the events of the Peloponnesian War
would have become so angry about that colon I wanted to insert in
paragraph 6, especially because (can't he read?) the colon is
necessary to make his damned writing make sense? Who could have imagined
that the distinguished author of a history of labor legislation should
have undertaken a 5,000-word essay on the significance of the Wagner
Act, only to show up, a week behind deadline, with a 2,000-word essay,
1,800 words of which were devoted to his recent visit to Singapore? Who
could have guessed that the essay we commissioned against the
global warming theory, to balance the essay we commissioned in favor
of the global warming theory, would have turned out to be in favor
of it after all, just at the time when we were going to press with "The
Great Global Warming Debate" as the centerpiece of our current issue?
| When I meet our
authors, I almost always find that they are just as interesting as their
writing. |
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The incidents just mentioned have been altered to protect the
guilty, but something like them is bound to happen in any normal
editorial day. Just as likely to happen are moments of miraculous
largesse: the author you haven't heard from in five years suddenly sends
you an article on exactly the right topic and of exactly the right
length to fill that enormous hole in Features; the world-famous writer
modestly inquires whether he may submit a contribution on the hottest
news topic of the month (oh yes, that might be interesting . . . ); the
writer who is always fighting over every detail of his copy replies to
your voluminous suggestions for changes in his last article with a
laconic, "All OK. Yr. suggestions helpful." Once again, the people of
Liberty prove that they are really the best people in the world —
but you shouldn't kid yourself into thinking that you know how the daily
drama will turn out. Bill Bradford, the founder of Liberty, was
the only editor I've ever known who never lost his cool. Everybody else,
including me, has that moment when the manuscript goes flying off the
desk and the embittered finger launches the retaliatory email (usually
to disastrous effect on the sender). Occasionally I heard Bill utter an
anguished "Jeeze!" or a question like, "How can he write a thing
like that?" But more often I heard an amused and sarcastic, "Oh,
wonderful! Just what we needed!", when some disastrous literary event
took place. Bill did become agitated when he couldn't get something good
on a topic that he wanted to cover. But basically, he was a long-haul
guy, prepared to enjoy both the successes and (shall we say?) the
challenges of writing and editing. He realized, as every writer and
editor should, that the important thing wasn't what he felt, but what he
published. Since I succeeded Bill as Liberty's editor, I've
learned a lot. I've also confirmed a lot of the things I learned from
him. All of them, in fact. Here are a few of those things. 1.
Anger is (almost) beside the point. Some literary people are shocked and
infuriated when they are denounced in emails, blog posts, letters to the
editor, or anonymous notes slipped under their door. Bill never was. He
knew that if you were that easily demoralized, you probably wouldn't
publish much of anything. But he also knew that there is a healthy kind
of anger, and it can be useful: it can get people to write. Some of the
noblest words ever uttered were prompted by anger. Think of the
Declaration of Independence. Think of "Give me liberty, or give me
death!" I know editors who would change that to something with a calmer
tone, something like, "In my own opinion, a significant degree of
personal freedom may well be a necessity for a successful life." Bill,
by contrast, always considered it his duty as editor to demand that
sentences like the second one be converted as quickly as possible into
sentences like the first. Nevertheless, anger shouldn't be the
final product. A lot of our editorial correspondence has been devoted to
convincing would-be authors that writing and ranting are not precisely
the same. You may be right to hate George Bush, or the Roman Catholic
Church, or the International Communist Conspiracy; still, you need to
say something informative about the subject, or no one will take you
seriously. And you need to say it in an interesting way. That means
expressing something more than anger itself. There are few pleasures
equal to making fools out of your enemies, but the effect won't come off
if your anger is all that people see. 2. You are not H.L.
Mencken, nor should you try to be. Mencken, the great libertarian
journalist, was always Bill's idol. Bill loved the abuse that Mencken
showered on the leaders of his country. And not just the leaders.
"Democracy," Mencken said, "is the theory that the common people know
what they want and deserve to get it good and hard." Mencken's abuse had
charm; it had a shimmer to it. But Bill never tried to write like
Mencken. He agreed with Isabel Paterson, who thought that people who
tried to imitate Mencken's style would inevitably screw it up. You could
say that about any kind of literary cloning: it always results in
deformity.
| Once again, the
people of Liberty prove that they are really the best people in the
world — but you shouldn't kid yourself into thinking you know how
the daily drama will turn out. |
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This is because, as Mencken himself said, everyone has his own
style. It can be improved; things can be done with it; but it will
always be that person's individual style. You can't change it, and if
you try, you will twist it till its head falls off. Authors ruin
themselves that way, too. A significant amount of a libertarian editor's
job consists of the attempt to convince otherwise talented people that
they don't have to call every politician they discuss a "fungus-ridden
scion of the scoundrel class," just because they think that H.L.
Mencken would have written that. 3. People almost never tell
you that you're right. The most common remark that writers make to
editors is, "Why should I write? Nobody cares about my stuff." Of
course, when someone makes that remark, he's probably looking for
reassurance, which is easily provided — and on excellent grounds.
If you're waiting for people to gather round and say good things about
your work, you might as well just go and hang yourself. People don't do
that. Basically, they send letters to the editor only when they hate
your work. The fact that you never hear from them probably means that
they admire your work. And if they actually do hate it, and they
publicize the fact, well, they're also publicizing you. What can be
wrong with that? The good thing about writers is that they have
imaginations; they can picture things. So you can tell them, "Look, I
know your stuff is good, and you know your stuff is good, and we both
know that there are other intelligent people in the world, people who
want to read good stuff. Can't you picture those people out there,
reading what you write? OK, keep writing for them." This isn't
flim-flam; it's the truth. It's what Albert Jay Nock said, two
generations ago, in one of the greatest of libertarian essays, "Isaiah's
Job," where he says that all a writer has to do is keep pumping out his
best stuff, secure in the knowledge that good people are reading it.
Naturally, however, you still have to be prepared for abuse. As
every libertarian editor knows, 4. The audience can turn on
you. There are four issues that make libertarians really, really
mad: war, immigration, religion, and the Libertarian Party. Let me break
it down: (A) War. Virtually all libertarians are
isolationists, despite the fact that we can never agree on what
"isolation" means in practice. Hence our constant fights about wars and
rumors of wars. (B) Immigration. If you want to arouse passions,
run an article either favoring or opposing open borders, or anything
resembling that idea. (C) Religion. Many libertarians regard
religion as the principal enemy of liberty. Many others believe that
liberty arose in a Judeo-Christian context and cannot long exist in an
atheist society. Each group is constantly being amazed at the existence
of the other. Neither can conceive that the ridiculous and
wholly discredited attitudes of the other group could possibly
find expression in a libertarian journal. Please cancel my
subscription! (D) The Libertarian Party. Many people equate
small-l libertarianism with large-L Libertarianism. Many others just
wish that the Libertarian Party would go away. These two groups don't
get along, at all, and there's really no way to please them both, any
more than there's any way to please both the pro-religious and the
anti-religious people.
The only intellectually
honest course is to publish whatever is well written and well argued
from any significant point of view. That's the course Liberty tries to
follow. But don't have any illusions: the most visible result will
always be a torrent of letters expressing shock that "Liberty is no
longer a libertarian journal." Oh, and for the third time this year:
cancel my subscription. 5. Please don't parse. I hate to
use that Clinton-era verb, but there are authors and editors who want to
justify everything they do by reasoning in a word-by-word way. Bill was
amused by these people, but I'll admit that they usually get my goat.
| The only
intellectually honest course is to publish whatever is well written and
well argued from any significant point of view. That's the course
Liberty tries to follow. |
|
To cite an example: I am very unsympathetic to anything associated
with the word "Roosevelt," but if an author says, "Franklin Roosevelt
was committed to the destruction of America," I believe it's my duty to
object. Listen, I say. Do you mean that Roosevelt wanted to perform
genocide on the American population, or sell off the land to Canada?
Clearly, the answer is No. So please revise your sentence. But now comes
the exercise in "parsing." "What is distinctive about 'America'?" the
author says. "Surely it's America's constitutional system. And what is
'destruction'? The ending of that system. And what does 'committed'
mean? It means that Roosevelt consciously decided to do something. Now,
can you deny that Franklin Roosevelt, when he proposed the institution
of Social Security, which he must have known was nowhere mentioned in
the Constitution, was committing himself to destroying the American
constitutional system, i.e., America?" Well, yes, I deny it.
Although I still don't like Roosevelt. Furthermore, I won't sign off on
your article, no matter how many pointless messages we exchange. The
difficulty is that, while you are reasoning in a word for word way, your
audience will be reading you sentence by sentence, and paragraph by
paragraph. And wondering what in the hell you're talking about.
6. All good writing is about the present. The news that appears
in Liberty is news, but so also, ideally, is everything else we publish.
There's no point in rehashing what people already know, especially if
you're going to sling that hash in the way it's always been slung. All
right, I guess there's some point to it, because many people (including
some libertarians) read simply to be reassured that they are in the
right, in precisely the same way in which they always thought they were
in the right before. Bill never regarded those people as meriting any
attention at all. As far as he was concerned, they could get their
sedative from some other source. I agree. Even if you're writing about
basic libertarian principles, you need to say new things about them.
There is no subject — no subject on earth — that can't
become news. Several Liberty writers have written about the affairs of
ancient Iceland, and they've made them as fresh as the latest gossip.
The rule is simple: treat the past as if it were the present. If you're
writing about the books and people of the past, you should treat them as
passionately or respectfully or disdainfully as you would treat the
books and people of today. If you treat them like a bag of bones, that's
what your writing will be. Admittedly, these ideas, though
obvious, are sometimes difficult for authors (or editors) to understand.
That is because 7. Authors and editors know what they want to see in
print (whether anyone else does or not). An erudite author (and
Liberty has many such) will always have something in his prose that he's
particularly proud of, something that he would rather die than part
with. Maybe it's a final paragraph that concludes with the words, "Any
politician who follows that program will end as Stevens Thomson Mason
did!" To the author, this is precisely the right allusion: it is fresh;
it is vivid; it expresses everything he wants to say. To him, the fact
that almost no one else will be able to follow it means only that almost
no one else has bothered to be educated. To the editor, this is
nonsense; and it is now his job to persuade the author, first, that the
editor really does know who Stevens Thomson Mason was*; second, that the
editor agrees that the allusion is very appropriate, for people who can
understand it; third, that practically nobody will understand it; and
fourth, that the climactic allusion can be made only at the risk of
ruining the article. The ensuing dialogue will be amusing, if
you're neither a writer nor an editor. But so far, I've told the story
from the editor's point of view. Let's see it from the author's. It's
always the author's job to insist, and keep insisting, that editors
would not exist if it weren't for writers, and not the other way around;
and that if Shakespeare had been saddled with an editor, we wouldn't
have any of his plays. Author and editor have different interests and
ideas, and the best that can be said is, Let them fight it out.
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| If you're
waiting for people to gather round and say good things about your work,
you might as well just go and hang
yourself. |
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This sentiment leads to my eighth and last observation: 8.
Libertarian ideas are really true. Ideas about people, I mean. The
libertarian notion is that people are self-motivated, unpredictable,
unquantifiable, incapable of being reduced to a single dimension, and
that the great engine of social progress is the individual's interest in
. . . what's interesting to him. The range of interests,
motives, and responses that characterizes our readers and writers never
ceases to amaze me. The greatest reward of every writer is simply to
write and express himself in his own way — and every writer
has a unique definition of what is rewarding to him. For some, it's
arguing the main point; for others, it's a subtle manipulation of
adjectives. I know writers who will accept wholesale revisions of their
argument, but would rather kill their cattle, burn their seed corn, and
sow their fields with salt, than change one word of a thematically
irrelevant description. Different people set different values on
different things. As for readers, you'll go very wrong if you
think that the audience for Liberty is people whose first and only
concern is public policy or strictly libertarian ideas. Sometimes,
indeed, that is their primary concern. But sometimes it's the latest
movie. Sometimes it's the true cause of the Civil War, or whether George
Washington was a Christian; or why the Mesoamericans didn't use the
wheel, except in little toys. Sometimes, it's the price of tea in China.
You really can't predict what the audience, or any of its members, will
applaud in the current issue. You can only try to come out with the best
you can find of a lot of different things. You can only try to keep
contributing your best, whatever it is. That's what all of us
contentious people at Liberty, both writers and editors, have been
trying to do, and that's what we're going to keep on doing.
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| * | Stevens Thomson Mason (1811–43), first governor of Michigan, suffered an abrupt descent from immense popularity to total obscurity. |
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