David Brat Says Something Entirely Uncontroversial; Journos Freak Out

Shock!!! Horror!!!

With just seven little words, the freakout began: “The government holds a monopoly on violence.”

We talked about this dustup a little on the podcast, as did Charles C. W. Cooke and Kevin Williamson on an episode of their lesser, but still enjoyable, podcast.

Cooke goes on:

These were written by David Brat, a professor of economics at Virginia’s Randolph-Macon College and, now, the Republican party’s nominee for the state’s seventh congressional district. “Unusual” and “eye-opening” was the New York Daily News’s petty verdict. In the Wall Street Journal, Reid Epstein insinuated darkly that the claim cast Brat as a modern-day fascist. And, for his part, Politico’s Ben White suggested that the candidate’s remarks “on Neitzsche and the government monopoly on violence don’t make a whole lot of sense.” As is its wont, the progressive blogosphere lost its collective marbles too: One contributor sardonically described Brat’s claim as a “doozy,” while another contended that such opinions were sufficient for “one to question his, shall we say, cognitive coherence.”

This reaction is rather surprising, for what Brat wrote is not merely a statement of fact, but a thoroughly neutral statement of fact.

Cooke attributes the reaction of the chattering classes largely to their hearing a truth they know but are uncomfortable with. Instead of acknowledging this simple and wholly uncontroversial point, they recoil in horror and run back to gauzy platitudes like "government is simply the name we give to the things we choose to do together".

I'd add that this is what's become of modern media, where producing clickbait driven by the outrage of the day, real or imagined, is the primary goal, and the content is a mere afterthought.

Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry picks up the theme today in Forbes but comes at it from a different angle:

What’s wrong with this picture, America, is that the concept of the state having “a monopoly on the [legitimate] use of force” is a quotation from the highly reputed and important German sociologist Max Weber, and is a concept that is absolutely basic to our modern understanding of the State. Anyone who has taken polisci 101 or sociology 101 or political philosophy 101 or history of ideas 101 ought to have encountered the phrase. It is about as offensive as saying that donuts have holes. (Cooke, maybe because he went to college in the UK, knows this.)

...

... when a bunch of people, whose job is to write about politics, who presumably have nice-sounding educations, who have editors, don’t know one of the very basics of the political thought that gave us the world we live in, the hour is very late indeed.

Both pieces are well worth reading in full, and I encourage you to do so before answering the following:

posted by Andy at 05:00 PM

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