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Donald Trump and Obi-Wan’s Gambit – Article by Daniel Bier

Donald Trump and Obi-Wan’s Gambit – Article by Daniel Bier

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The New Renaissance HatDaniel Bier

You Cannot Win By Losing

In Star Wars: A New Hope, the last Jedi Knight, Obi-Wan Kenobi, is confronted by his former pupil, Darth Vader, as he races to escape the Death Star. The two draw their lightsabers and pace warily around each other. After deflecting some heavy blows from Vader, Obi-Wan’s lightsaber flickers, and he appears tired and strained.

Vader gloats, “Your powers are weak, old man.”

The hard-put Obi-Wan replies, “You can’t win, Darth. If you strike me down, I shall become more powerful than you can possibly imagine.”

Obi-Wan backs away from Vader but finds his escape cut off by storm troopers. He is trapped. He gives a mysterious smile, raises his lightsaber, and allows Vader to cut him in half.

This is Obi-Wan’s gambit, or the “win by losing” strategy. Lately, it has emerged as a distinct genre of commentary about Donald Trump.

Take, for example, “The Article About Trump That Nobody Will Publish,” which promotes itself as having been rejected by 45 publications. That’s a credit to America’s editors, because the article is an industrial strength brew of wishful thinking, a flavor that is already becoming standard fare as a Trump presidency looms.

The authors give a boilerplate denunciation of Trump (he’s monstrous, authoritarian, unqualified, etc.), but then propose:

What would happen should Trump get elected? On the Right, President Trump would force the GOP to completely reorganize — and fast. It would compel them to abandon their devastating pitch to the extreme right. …

On the Left, the existence of the greatest impossible dread imaginable, of President Trump, would rouse sleepy mainline liberals from their dogmatic slumber. It would force them to turn sharply away from the excesses of its screeching, reality-denying, uncompromising and authoritarian fringe that provided much of Trump’s thrust in the first place.

Our daring contrarians predict, Trump “may actually represent an unpalatable but real chance at destroying these two political cancers of our time and thus remedying our insanity-inflicted democracy.”

You can’t win, Donald! Strike me down and I shall be… forced to completely reorganize and/or roused from dogmatic slumber!

The authors assert these claims as though they were self-evident, but they’re totally baffling. Why would a Trump win force the GOP to abandon the voters and rhetoric that drove it to victory? Why would it reorganize against its successful new leader? Why would a Hillary Clinton loss empower moderate liberals over the “reality-defying fringe”? Why would the left turn away from the progressives who warned against nominating her all along?

This is pure, unadulterated wishful thinking. There is no reason to believe these rosy forecasts would materialize under President Trump. That is not how partisan politics tends to work. Parties rally to their nominee, and electoral success translates into influence, influence into power, power into friends and support.

We’ve already seen one iteration of this “win by losing” fantasy come and go among the Never Trump crowd: the idea that Trump’s mere nomination would be a good thing, because (depending on your politics) it would (1) compel Democrats to nominate Bernie Sanders, (2) propel Clinton to a landslide general election victory, or (3) destroy the GOP and (a) force it to rebuild as a small-government party, (b) split it in two, or (c) bring down the two-party system.

But, of course, none of those things happened. Clinton has clinched the nomination over Sanders (his frantic protests notwithstanding). Meanwhile, Clinton’s double digit lead over Trump has evaporated, and the race has narrowed to a virtual tie. Far from “destroying the GOP,” Trump has consolidated the support of the base and racked up the endorsements of dozens of prominent Republicans who had previously blasted him, including Marco Rubio and Paul Ryan.

The GOP is not being destroyed — it is being gradually remade in Trump’s image, perhaps into his dream of a populist “workers’ party,” heavy on the protectionism, nativism, and authoritarianism. Meanwhile, knee-jerk partisanship and fear of Clinton are reconciling the center-right to Trump.

Moderates win by defeating the fringe, not by losing to it. Yet, for some reason, conservatives, liberals, and libertarians all like to fantasize that the worst case scenario would actually fulfill their fondest wishes, driving the nation into their losing arms — as though their failure would force the party or the public do what they wanted all along. This is the bad-breakup theory of politics: Once they get a taste of Trump, they’ll realize how great we were and love us again.

But the public doesn’t love losers. (Trump gets this and has based his whole campaign around his relentless self-promotion as a winner.) Trump’s inauguration would indeed be a victory for him and for his “alt-right” personality cult, and a sign of defeat for limited-government conservatives and classical liberals — not because our ideology was on the ballot, but because all our efforts did not prevent such a ballot.

Trump embodies an ideology that is anathema to classical liberalism, and if he is successful at propelling it into power, we cannot and should not see it as anything less than a failure to persuade the public on the value of liberty, tolerance, and limited government. Nobody who is worried about extreme nationalism and strong man politics should be taken in by the idea that their rapid advance somehow secretly proves their weakness and liberalism’s strength.

This does not mean that we’re all screwed, or that a Trump administration will be the end of the world — apocalyptic thinking is just another kind of dark fantasy. As horrible as Trumpism may be, it cannot succeed without help. And here’s the good news: Most Americans aren’t really enamored with Trump’s policies. The bad news is that they could still become policy.

Classical liberals who oppose Trump should realize that things aren’t going to magically get better on their own. We cannot try to Obi-Wan our way out of this. We will have to actually make progress — in education, academia, journalism, policy, activism, and, yes, even electoral politics.

If this seems like an impossible task at the moment, just remember that the long-sweep of history and many trends in recent decades show the public moving in a more libertarian direction. It can be done, and there’s fertile ground for it. We have to make the argument for tolerance and freedom against xenophobia and authoritarianism — and we have to win it. The triumph of illiberalism will not win it for us.

Daniel Bier is the site editor of FEE.org He writes on issues relating to science, civil liberties, and economic freedom.

This article was published by The Foundation for Economic Education and may be freely distributed, subject to a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which requires that credit be given to the author.

Star Wars: Intellectual Property Strikes Back – Article by Matthew McCaffrey

Star Wars: Intellectual Property Strikes Back – Article by Matthew McCaffrey

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The New Renaissance HatMatthew McCaffrey
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IP Deflates the Expanded Universe

Star Wars: The Force Awakens is already one of the most successful films of all time, and the Star Wars franchise is poised to grow at .5 past light speed for the foreseeable future. Yet, while Disney rapidly develops new chapters for the saga, it’s also quietly deleting some old ones: in 2014, Lucasfilm announced that to make way for the new films, the Star Wars Expanded Universe (or EU) would no longer be considered canon, a decision that disappointed many longtime fans.

The EU refers to the vast number of novels, short stories, comics, and games that explore the Star Wars universe outside the major films. These works enjoy an enormous following but are now consigned to a kind of alternate universe called Star Wars Legends. In other words, they will be disregarded by Lucasfilm’s officially licensed material, and any new Star Wars stories will have to fit the new canon. The original EU is discontinued, which understandably has fans feeling abandoned.

Why should the EU pose a problem, though? Why can’t artists and fans simply continue developing the canon they love, while Lucasfilm does the same? The answer is simple: intellectual property law.

Disney’s ownership of Lucasfilm allows it to license the Star Wars brand and all related intellectual property rights, especially its copyrights and trademarks. Anyone adding to the universe can only do so with permission, giving Lucasfilm power over any content within the universe or even similar to it.

In fact, Lucasfilm has a long history of aggressively litigating its IP, suing everyone from small businesses to major corporations. One of the most infamous cases was brought against the original Battlestar Galactica TV series, which was accused of copying at least 34 distinct ideas from Star Wars. These included such astonishingly original concepts as a friendly robot, an imprisoned heroine, and a movie ending with an awards ceremony.

Returning to the EU, it does make some artistic and financial sense for Disney to steer the franchise in a new direction by discontinuing older content. At the same time, artists and fans want to enjoy the EU they already know and love, something Lucasfilm legally prohibits by enforcing its IP.

My point is not that one stream of content is objectively better, but that it’s vital for all involved to freely choose the kind of content they want to create and sell. By increasing costs to both consumers and innovators, IP has already played a role in the decline of art forms like classical music, and copyrights and trademarks have similar effects in the world of pop art.

For Star Wars, original content mainly revolves around trademark rights, of which Lucasfilm owns many. Its usual defense of these properties is that unlicensed content causes confusion: without legally enforceable restrictions, consumers might think they’re buying “genuine” products when they’re actually getting cheap imitations. Furthermore, products similar to those created by Lucasfilm might be used to earn profits for noncreators who capitalize on confusion. A licensing deal from the original source ensures people won’t be taken in by unskilled or unscrupulous artists.

Assuming this is the real motivation for trademark protection, the argument is still weak. Like many consumer-oriented regulations, trademark law is patronizing: its basic assumption is that people are too dim to distinguish between official products and knockoffs or other free riders on the brand. But consumers, especially the kind of devoted fans Star Wars inspires, are perfectly capable of figuring out for themselves which content they prefer. The real issue boils down to revenue: Lucasfilm doesn’t want other businesses profiting from ideas it “owns,” and it’s perfectly happy to use monopoly privileges to protect its bottom line.

But Lucasfilm doesn’t need to litigate its trademarks to preserve profits or brand identity, which would likely be stronger in the long run without IP. For example, without trademarks, Lucasfilm would continue to officially sanction content it approves of and let consumers know which works are not “official.” If fans respect its judgment, the official Star Wars brand would thrive as people adopted Lucasfilm’s endorsement as a benchmark for quality and narrative continuity.

Competition for fan loyalty would drive official and unofficial creators alike to produce high-quality content. Different groups of creators would specialize in their own alternate universes that would succeed or fail based on their ability to satisfy fans. This would also eliminate the uncertainty surrounding fan fiction, which exists in the complex gray area of “fair use” laws. Most importantly, we’d all be able to decide for ourselves which works we treat as canon and which we abandon to the garbage masher of history.

The only truly expanded universe — one that’s creative, innovative, and prosperous — is one without IP protectionism. When we embrace genuine competition in ideas instead of competition through legal privilege, then, as Obi-Wan Kenobi would say, we’ve “taken a first step into a larger world.”

Matthew McCaffrey is assistant professor of enterprise at the University of Manchester and editor of Libertarian Papers.

This article was published by The Foundation for Economic Education and may be freely distributed, subject to a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which requires that credit be given to the author.