Milo, Consent And The Liberal/Conservative Political Divide

Milo, Consent and the Liberal/Conservative Political Divide
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When he said 13 -year-olds can give consent for sex with older men, Milo Yiannopoulos said nothing that many conservatives don’t say about consent more generally, in the sexual sphere and in the broader economic and political spheres.

In fact, if you listen to the tape that got Milo axed as a speaker at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), he was explicit that his comments were about attacking the general push by the left for stronger consent standards. “This is one reason I hate the left… This sort of arbitrary and oppressive idea of consent.“

On one level, his argument that there are 13-year-olds wise enough to responsibly give consent for sex with older men is absolutely true, just as it’s true that there are people completely drunk and even people verbally saying no who actually want to have sex.

But the issue is that their potential partner is not a mind-reader and can’t magically determine which underage kids are mature enough, which drunk people are clear-headed enough and which people saying no or remaining silent actually want sex. Anti-rape activists argue for the older, non-drunk and sexually demanding partner to be responsible and wait to have sex until their partner is clearly of age, mentally clear-headed and willing to verbalize consent.

The reality is that CPAC is shunning Milo now, but I have no doubt they will welcome other speakers who will mock anti-rape activists and campus demands for personal responsibility. Milo hit the gay trip wire where the contradictions of rightwing tolerance for sexual predation became exposed, but his views are of a piece with the rest of the rightwing view that those with power have no responsibility to ensure that “consent” is real and not based on coercion ― which extends to their views on deregulating economic, sexual and racial exploitation across the economy.

In that broader sense, Milo saying 13-year-olds can give consent for sex is much like conservative organizations Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos worked with who argue for child labor, that children can agree to be employed beyond bounds set by law.

The liberal response is of course that we know that children who give up their education at an early age to work often doom themselves economically for the rest of their lives, just as children can be psychologically scarred for life by early sexual exploitation. So liberalism argues for rules that say no child can give consent in ways that limit their future beyond their comprehension.

For adult consumers and workers, liberalism extends this view to requiring right-to-know laws to equalize information about the transaction to make consent between parties more real and promote collective bargaining so that the collective of workers aggregating their information and power are on an even playing field with the collective of capitalist investors negotiating “consent” for wage and benefit levels.

Most debates between conservatives and the liberal-left is precisely over the terms of “consent” and where there is sufficient equality in power and knowledge that the consent is valid. Modern conservative theory is largely that verbal assent or even silent acceptance is enough to make the relationship legally valid, whether it’s a worker accepting a sub-minimum wage job or a spouse or sexual partner continuing a relationship with a domestic batterer. This idea that consent is easily recognized and obtained is at the heart of conservative opposition to most economic regulation of what libertarian philosopher Robert Nozick once deemed “capitalist acts between consenting adults.” Modern liberalism in turn is defined by the areas where it feels such silent consent fails and where regulation is required to prohibit inherently unequal bargains or attempt to shore up the power of the weaker party.

Where the left traditionally diverges from liberalism is when it argues that the inequalities of capitalism inherently make all relationships non-consensual, that regulation never fully makes consent real when the alternative to consent is starvation or the suffering of one’s children. One definition of socialism is a system where every decision is consensual, made out of positive desire for each social and economic relationship and never based on the sexual, racial and economic inequalities that make all “consent” suspect in our society.

“Consent” – what it is and when it is valid - is the underlying fulcrum for much of our modern political debate.

That Milo relentlessly assaults liberal ideas of consent is precisely why a gay iconoclast was a star in the conservative world.

That his pedophilia comments expose an embarrassing logical endpoint of the conservative philosophy on consent is an embarrassment they may try to bury quickly, but there’s a reason why Trump’s top aide Steve Bannon made Milo a senior editor at Breitbart and had him headline the RNC Convention’s “Gays for Trump” event.

This fight over the idea of consent is the core issue that unites the so-called “culture war” with the corporate economic war on liberal regulations like the minimum wage and consumer banking laws. So with or without Milo, his spirit will live on in the conservative media id.

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