Welcome To The Pink Police State: Regime Change In America
It is alleged—and not by libertarians—that the current American era is increasingly defined by a “libertarian moment.” Although some chatter did begin within the liberty movement, as libertarian lawyers found themselves gaining traction at last within the courts, the dominant sense is broader, more nervous, and even hostile. Libertarianism has long been negatively associated with personal recklessness and irresponsibility; now, thinkers Right and Left are shuffling toward a strange new consensus about the culture of irresponsibility that seems to characterize not just our fellow Americans, but our regime itself.
In a searching, pained essay at The New Republic, for instance, Mark Lilla warns that a libertarianism of radical self-entitlement now defines our age. “That is not because democracy is on the march,” he says, “(it is regressing in many places), or because the bounty of the free market has reached everyone (we have a new class of paupers), or because we are now all free to do as we wish (since wishes inevitably conflict).”
No, ours is a libertarian age by default: whatever ideas or beliefs or feelings muted the demand for individual autonomy in the past have atrophied. There were no public debates on this and no votes were taken. Since the cold war ended we have simply found ourselves in a world in which every advance of the principle of freedom in one sphere advances it in the others, whether we wish it to or not.
Lilla correctly intuits that something seemingly virtuous about democracy has led toward something vicious. He also senses that the relationship between the city and the soul, as Plato’s Socrates put it, might well be key to grasping how and why. (In the Republic, Socrates offers several different theories as to how a regime and the individuals within it mirror or pattern themselves upon one another.) Yet Lilla unaccountably downplays the massive contradiction at the center of our inexorable march toward autonomy. It is, of course, the state’s own march toward its own ever-greater—one might say tyrannical—autonomy. For decades, some theorists have fretted that history reveals humans endlessly hunger for more-autonomous conduct. Others have cheered the prospect! Either way, it is time to consider anew that political history reveals a related, inexorable hunger within the regime that rules us all.
The Latitude to Destroy Liberty
That creates obvious problems for libertarianism as a term to describe the age. We, like our government, take broader and broader latitudes. But almost as a rule, we do so at the expense of liberty—at the expense of the political freedom that has atrophied so dramatically under the past two administrations. Oscar Wilde once remarked that socialism would be wonderful, but it took up too much time on a Friday night. Today, millions upon millions of Americans live out a similar feeling toward civic republicanism (with no interest in being witty, or even self-conscious, about it).
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