{"id":2473,"date":"2002-05-18T20:58:55","date_gmt":"2002-05-18T20:58:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/staging.armedliberal.com\/?p=18"},"modified":"2002-05-18T20:58:55","modified_gmt":"2002-05-18T20:58:55","slug":"are-there-any-liberals-in-the-skyboxes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/?p=2473","title":{"rendered":"ARE THERE ANY LIBERALS IN THE SKYBOXES?"},"content":{"rendered":"

I\u0092ve been thinking about \u0093Liberalism\u0094 (as opposed to Lockean \u0093liberalism\u0094) for a while \u0096 after all, I need to justify the title of this blog. I am trying to unify the examples of what mostly goes for Liberalism in this day and age, which I\u0092m calling \u0093SkyBox Liberalism\u0094 \u0096 which is v. different from what I\u0092m promoting.
\nWhile the theory percolates, let me explain by example.
\nIn the late 1970\u0092s, I was a graduate student at UC Berkeley. It was good for me, got me almost exactly the job I wanted when I got out, and convinced me that none of my sons will go to mega-public universities as underclassmen.
\nWhile I was there, there was a small controversy that I followed. It involved the effort of the student government to evict from the student union one tenant, and to replace it with another. This is to me, the perfect example of SkyBoxing, and I hope that telling the story will help define what I mean.
\nIn the 60\u0092s in Berkeley, there was a movement to create a series of co-ops that would allow student-radicals to both generate jobs outside the hated-but-paying-their-rent capitalist system, and provide a living example that (for all I know) Trotskyite anarcho-syndicalism could triumph in the Belly of the Beast.
\nMost of these communal businesses failed mercifully quickly, as far as I know (this is all ancient history to me, so if I\u0092m getting part of it wrong, drop a note). By the time I got there, there were two survivors \u0096 Leopold\u0092s Records (\u0093Boycott Tower Records, keep Berkeley Free\u0094) and the Missing Link<\/a> bicycle shop.
\nLeopold\u0092s was off-campus somewhere near Telegraph, but the bicycle store was a part of the mini-shopping area that was in the ASUC building.
\nThe student government decided that they were going to evict it to make room for a small-electronics (Walkmen, stereo, calculators, etc.) annex to the Student Store. Why??
\nThe small-electronics store could pay as much as $50,000 more in rent every year.
\nNow this is an appropriately cold-hearted landlord kind of decision to make. But the people making the decision weren\u0092t sweater wearing conservative Young Republicans, driven by their vision of the purity of the market.
\nThey were a bunch of New Left, ethnic-identity, progressive communitarian kind of kids.
\nWhy did they want to make this decision? Because it would mean $50K a year more for their organizing budgets; $50K more in pork they could carve up in the hopes of building their perfect communitarian future.
\nNow I don\u0092t know about you, but I have a hard time imagining anything more keyed to a progressive communitarian future than a cooperatively owned bicycle store. I mean, how much better does it get? Nonprofit. Cooperatively employee owned. Bicycles, for chrissakes. If you really wanted to educate people in alternatives to the \u0093mass consumerist repressive capitalist paradigm\u0094 (I think I got the buzzwords right), wouldn\u0092t that be a good way to do it?
\nBut reality couldn\u0092t stand a chance against the cold need for this elected group to make sure that they and their friends were rewarded.
\nSee it\u0092s not about what you really believe in, in the SkyBox world\u0085it\u0092s about making sure you and your friends can be very comfortable while you think and write and feel very very seriously about it.
\nI\u0092m not touting bicycles or co-ops right now (although there are things to say for both); it\u0092s the fact that one group put their beliefs into practice in the world, while another made it a point to live comfortably while thinking<\/u> really hard about making the world a better place.
\nOne of those is a Liberal \u0096 the other is doing something else, but is definitely doing it from a SkyBox.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I\u0092ve been thinking about \u0093Liberalism\u0094 (as opposed to Lockean \u0093liberalism\u0094) for a while \u0096 after all, I need to justify the title of this blog. I am trying to unify the examples of what mostly goes for Liberalism in this day and age, which I\u0092m calling \u0093SkyBox Liberalism\u0094 \u0096 which is v. different from what […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2473"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/8"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2473"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2473\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2473"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2473"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2473"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}