(The following is a response to an extreme Libertarian who posted the New Hampshire Constitution’s endorsement of a right to revolution as a justification and encouragement to his ideological fellow travelers.)
The only problem is that you are “rebelling” against a government that is both Constitutional and, within those constraints, democratic. You resent the will of the majority, which differs from yours, and misname the will of the majority, with Constitutional restraints to protect minorities, “tyranny.” By your definition, any use of government of which YOU disapprove is automatically tyranny. Rather, you would wish to overrule the will of the majority, and discard the Constitution, in order to impose your radical, economically illiterate, ahistorical, impractical, inegalitarian, and nationally self-destructive ideology on the rest of us. You can utter all of the magical rhetorical incantations you want, but it remains what it is: A cultish, glassy-eyed fanaticism rearing its ugly head in our own country and our own time, as it has reared its ugly head in so many other times and places.
The government you are rebelling against is Constitutional because your main objection, to the taxing and spending of Congress, is a Constitutionally granted power. Article I, Section 8, Clause i of the United States Constitution grants Congress the unlimited power to tax and spend in the general welfare. You can argue about what constitutes the general welfare, and, in perhaps some extreme instances, can find a Supreme Court that would hold that some use of that power was too clearly NOT in the general welfare to pass Constitutional muster (e.g., Congress taxed and spent in a manner which was unambiguously and incontrovertibly only on the welfare of the members of Congress), but none of the programs that are in controversy fall into that range. The Constitutional limitation on Congress’s power to tax and spend in the general welfare is the electoral system, by which we can fire those members of Congress whom we feel have abused that power, or have not executed it as faithful agents of our will and interests.
The government you are rebelling against is democratic, because the people making the decisions with which you disagree were elected according to our electoral process, administered with a relatively high degree of legitimacy and precaution against fraud and abuse. You oppose the will of the majority, appropriately constrained by Constitutional protections of minorities, and wrap that anti-Constitutional, anti-democratic inclination to impose your own factional will on all others, in defiance of both our Constitution and our electoral process, in a faux-nobility and patriotism, though it is, in fact, exactly the opposite.
The government you are rebelling against is the one that has been honed by the lathe of history, in part through a Civil War and Civil Rights Movement which institutionalized the recognition of the fact that minorities and individuals don’t just need to be protected against the tyranny of the federal government, but also against the tyranny of state and local governments, and, in some instances, the tyranny of private corporations or individuals (e.g., against racist employment discrimination).
And, ironically, the consequences of your efforts, to the extent that they are successful (whether through legal or extralegal means), is the increase of real tyranny, not only by rolling back such protections, not only by reducing our national commitment to equality of opportunity, but also by transferring de facto political power from those public institutions which are (imperfectly) Constitutionally and democratically constrained, to those powerful private institutions that are not.
This is a subtle and complex world we live in, in which the lathe of history works on the raw material produced by our Constitution and by our basic values as a nation. The development of our political economy, of our administrative state, of our need to rein in not just governmental power but also private corporate power which in many instances has grown to the size of medium-sized nations, are not developments to be tossed away because a group of blind ideological fanatics believe that there is some single platitude which overrules all other knowledge and historical experience. You counsel for a kind of imposed mass stupidity, a quasi-religious fanaticism which rejects all knowledge in deference to generally misinterpreted sacred documents and ancient prophets. You may succeed; there’s enough lunacy in this country for that to be a real possibility. But to the extent that you do, it will be an immeasurable tragedy for those hundreds of millions who must suffer the consequences.
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I believe in the human endeavor. I believe in our ability to become ever wiser and more compassionate as a society. I believe that the technological and social institutional innovations we’ve come to take for granted, many of which were unimaginable just a few short generations ago, are ripples on the surface of an unfathomable sea of possibilities, and that what we accomplish in generations to come, like what has come before, will appear in retrospect not just to be more of the same, but rather profoundly revolutionary and transformative, and acceleratingly so.
But there is nothing automatic about the direction this punctuated evolution takes, and no guarantee that it will be benign rather than malignant. In what ways and to what extent, in service to which emotions and inclinations always vying for dominance within and without, we free the genius of the many, this captive giant fuming within her prison of oppression and repression, of intolerance and intransigence, will determine what wonders and what horrors we unleash.
Will we find new, more sterile and yet more virulent ways to enslave minds and souls, to shackle the human spirit by overlords of fear and bigotry, using our genius against itself in acts of brilliant inhumanity? Or will we harmonize more deeply and fully, through soaring but disciplined imaginations, with the malleable but coherent dream of which we are but a part?
Our minds form an ecology of their own, with flora and fauna of our fancy reproducing, evolving, giving way to new forms. We thrive best when we harvest most of that cognitive diversity, articulating the novel into the complex, sublime whole, accommodating more, suppressing less. So it’s no surprise that a sociologist such as myself, who perceives us less as a collection of individuals and more as slightly individuated moments of a shared consciousness, would become an advocate for mental diversity and mental freedom, for that mind we share does not best thrive by imposing as much conformity as fear and convenience counsel, but rather by tolerating as much non-conformity as wisdom and compassion allow.
If this movement, and this organization, were just about helping those in mental or emotional distress to find greater harmony within and avoid the ravages of a brutally destructive psychopharmacological paradigm imposed from without, that would be more than enough to inspire me to join in the effort. But it’s also about all of us together finding a richer and subtler harmony among ourselves and beyond ourselves, about that mind we share spiralling toward enlightenment, and about the increased wealth of joy and wellness we can produce together, from which we all can draw.
It’s to that latter ideal that all of us who believe in the human endeavor ultimately aspire.
(For essays and vignettes related to this one in various ways, see, e.g., Kick-Starting A ClearMind, Symptoms v. Root Causes, An Eddy In The Stream, The Politics of Consciousness, The Fractal Geometry of Social Change, The Hollow Mountain, and A Proposal: The Politics of Reason and Goodwill.)
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As I began to discuss in the third installment in my series on “Political Fundamentalism”, “Liberty Idolatry,” the notion of individual liberty divorced from recognition of social interdependence just makes no sense. We are all aware of the most dramatic limitations on individual liberty in service to mutual responsibility: Laws against violence and predation. We are not free to act in ways which hurt others for our own benefit. Everyone understands, implicitly, that that is the limiting factor in defining individual liberty: One’s freedom ends where another’s rights begin.
We each have the right not to be assaulted, robbed, defrauded, or otherwise victimized, though there can certainly be legitimate debate over how far the law should reach to protect each from the victimization of others (few, for instance, would recommend criminalizing being a dishonest and self-serving “friend,” and the gray area between that which obviously should be legally prohibited and that which obviously should not be is bound to be contested terrain).
But, while most would agree that poisoning someone else is not an ambiguous instance of when my liberty to poison ends at the point where your right not to be poisoned begins, many can’t even contemplate the possibility that poisoning the air or water with toxic wastes might fall into a similar category, and that governmental regulations preventing it might be as necessary and appropriate as governmental enforcement of the law against poisoning less incidentally.
My point is not to argue that there is no difference between the two: Some relevant considerations are how harmful to others something is, how much an action harmful to others is also helpful to others, and how much something harmful to others is a traditionally acceptable practice embedded in our social norms and customs. But all acts that are harmful to others fall on the continuum defined by these variables, and all must be subjected to an analysis weighing them in a well-reasoned manner. And that is exactly what our regulatory agencies do, in a very well-developed procedure that explicitly considers all of these dimensions, and involves both experts and the affected public in the process.
It should be obvious that the need to balance the liberties of each against the rights of others permeates our social institutional landscape. One can argue whether it is enough to inform consumers of unhealthy or dangerous ingredients or parts in consumer goods, and that to fail to do so should be criminal in the same way that other intentional or reckless inflictions of harm are. But none can argue that that is sufficient for by-products of commercial or private activities which adversely affect others who are not willing participants (such as consumers of given products are). The demands imposed by our interdependence simply cannot be denied.
There are many gray areas to be discussed and explored: At what point does your right to smoke infringe on my right to breathe unpolluted air? At what point does your right to engage in unhealthy and dangerous activities infringe on my right not to have to bear the public costs (e.g., higher insurance premiums for those who do not engage in those activities, and higher tax burdens to pay for the emergency services sometimes involved)? Defining where one’s liberty ends and another’s rights begin is an information intensive, case-by-case requirement of good governance, and one which cannot simply be ideologized away.
This is just one of the many ways in which the Small Government Idolatry of the political fundamentalists is untenable: We need as much government as we need to address the challenges that government has to address. Doing so with complete consideration of all relevant concerns does not mean imposing one and only one imperative on government (that it be shrunk), but rather weighing all concerns in a complete c0st-benefit analysis, on a case-by-case and comprehensive basis. The concerns expressed by Tea Party fundamentalists are not irrelevant; they simply aren’t the only relevant concerns, nor the only relevant considerations. Often, ironically, they even lead to a government that is both more expensive and less functional (avoiding proactive services that both increase human welfare and reduce more crushing reactive costs).
Perhaps the best way to conceptualize how to balance all relevant considerations is captured in John Rawls’ “A Theory of Justice”, since a fully-informed and rational decision about what social institutions and policies would be optimal from a position of not knowing one’s own location in the social firmament (including not knowing whether one would be alive today or in the future) would include consideration of both the value of personal liberty and the value of being protected from the harmful effects of others’ exercise of their personal liberty. It would also include considerations of economic consequences, including a balancing of efficiency, fairness, and sustainability. Public policy subjected to the tyranny of a single fixation is harmful and destructive; public policy which balances competing values and concerns is healthy and rational.
Debates over where to draw the line are necessary and useful; debates over whether to draw the line are absurd and dysfunctional. Those political fundamentalists who fight tooth and nail to impose an absolutist, unbalanced notion of “liberty” on the rest of us are not contributing to a healthy public dialogue over how best to govern ourselves, but are rather arguing outside the bounds of reason, trying to advance the cause of harmful irrationality.
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Not everyone understands that there are two clauses regarding religious freedom embedded in the First Amendment: One which prohibits government from establishing (i.e., “favoring”) any religion, and one which prevents government from interfering with the free exercise of any religion. But too many fundamentalist Christian organizations in America are constantly pushing for a complete reversal of this cornerstone of American freedom: The establishment (legal favoring) of their religion, and the curtailment of the free exercise of at least some others.
A good example of this is the blatant hypocrisy of those religious organizations that call, for instance, for the prevention of the construction of the Muslim interfaith center in Manhattan (not, in fact “at ground zero”), while invoking a federal law which prevents the implementation of any local land use law which burdens the free-exercise of religion (resulting in the ability of religious organizations to build anything anywhere, regardless of zoning laws that would have prohibited the structure were it any other entity that were building it). In an archetypal example of this very un-American belief in the privileging of some religions over others, a leader in the conservative religious organization American Family Association, which in 2003 successfully fought to prevent Georgia from implementing a land-use law limiting the locations where a church could be constructed, is now calling for a complete moratorium on the building of mosques anywhere in the United States (http://news.yahoo.com/s/yblog_upshot/20100812/pl_yblog_upshot/conservative-activist-calls-for-nationwide-mosque-moratorium).
America has always had a split personality when it comes to religion: A politically secular nation by Constitutional decree, founded by puritans and infused with an ever-present undercurrent of religious fanaticism. The reason for this, of course, is that the colonies had many who had come to practice (and proselytize) their own religion freely (all Christian denominations, originally), but not all such groups wanted to practice (and proselytize) the same religion freely. The necessary compromise was the legal institutionalization of “live and let live” when it comes to religious exercise: Government will neither favor nor disfavor any religion.
But, while this doctrine may have matured into the enlightened vision of the framers of the Constitution, it originated in religious zealotry, not tolerance. Each of those original religious sects would have gladly imposed itself on others, were it able to. And their descendants have much the same attitude.
Where such attitudes prevail, we wind up with theocracy and draconian religious laws, such as Muslim sharia law. The irony in this particular contest, between radical Islam and radical Christianity, is that the two sides, vehemently opposed to one another, are so strikingly similar.
And, of course, the radicals on both sides oppose the Moderates who seek only a peaceful, prosperous, and mutually respectful coexistence. The Muslim interfaith center in Manhattan is just such a voice of reason, and should be embraced as the epitome of what Americans stand for: Mutual tolerance and mutual goodwill, and the free exercise of religion for all.
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