South Pork Republicans

John Tierney has a NYT column this week, behind the subscription wall, about how the "South Park Republicans" are looking to abandon the GOP this fall. If you're not familiar with the term, it refers to the joyously vulgar cartoon series and the staunchly "libertarian" politics of its creators, Matt Stone and Trey Parker. Apparently, Bush's recently-revealed penchant for loud, demonstrative farting (designed to humiliate new staffers) has failed to burnish his image with the "Terrance and Phillip" demographic.

It may come as a surprise that the creators of South Park, a show known for its anti-religious satires, obscene language, and talking poops ("Hidey-ho!"), are Republicans. But it's really common sense. Stone and Parker are perpetual adolescents: they hate paying taxes and eating vegetables, and they love blowing stuff up. Nobody tells them what to do. Plus, despite their popular image, they're unrelentingly preachy and moralistic. Their satire is fueled by an exaggerated sense of annoyance at society's rules combined with intense personal grievance over minor injustices. They're obsessed with the superficiality of media culture but clueless about the nuances of public policy. Perfect Republicans. (As if the talking poop didn't already give it away!)

I don't really want to denigrate South Park, which, it must be said, is often great bi-anti-partisan comedy. Although not a regular viewer, I've been impressed with several of the episodes I've seen, especially the skewering of the Terry Schiavo incident last year. The South Park movie may be the best musical made in the last thirty years, and Team America certainly had its moments, including the funniest and most vulgar sex scene ever filmed with puppets and the incomparable theme song, "America, Fuck Yeah!" I also can't complain much about a Tierney column where he documents the collapse of the GOP's internal alliances, especially its loss of the "hipper" and "younger audience" it so desperately craves.

On the other hand, there's something to be said here about libertarians, generally. In an interview with Salon.com at the time of Team America, Stone and Parker discussed their politics and why they supported the Iraq War. Their argument was that, yes, Bush was being a "dick," but that Saddam was being an "asshole," and Democrats were being "pussies," meaning that the latter two groups needed to get "fucked." Has there ever been a clearer statement of the underlying logic of today's GOP? Talking with Tierney, Stone and Parker tell him that "The Republicans didn't want the government to run your life because Jesus should. . . less government, more Jesus. Now it's like, how about more government and Jesus?" It really is remarkable that, with foreign policy reasoning as subtle as the "dick-asshole" theory, Stone and Parker took so long to figure out the GOP didn't really want "less government." For cynics, these guys sure are gullible.

That's also my problem with libertarians as a group. They often start from perfectly good anti-authoritarian attitudes only to spiral into credulity and incoherence. They fear concentrated power in government but then worship the private sphere power found in corporate wealth, not recognizing that the latter will always buy the former. They cry about every threat to their "freedom," but they're so anti-government that they can't develop logical policies to promote individual choice and opportunity. They advocate unlimited self-interest, but then express shock when that manifests itself as the perqs and pork of big government corruption. Perpetual adolescents. All grievance, no gravitas. This makes for good comedy, but it's not so funny when the "dicks" in power actually start governing that way.

Libertarians haven't always been like this. Many of the early ones, like John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon, who authored Cato's Letters, the namesake of today's whorish Cato Institute, understood that private liberties could not flourish without public virtue. But such recognition would require that the South Pork Republicans turned off the TV and picked up a book. When's the last time you saw an adolescent do that? Hidey-ho!