Social Matter

Libertarians and other sensitive liberals tend to oppose between one and three of the major ‘war’ initiatives of the post-World War II American government. With nuclear weapons intimidating major powers away from conflicts between one another, they turn towards internal struggles to provide a collective sense of purpose and motivation while addressing what the press and the general public see as pressing crises.

All of these conflicts arise from the contemporary understanding of equality. When the concept of citizenship becomes diluted to include absolutely everyone — and potentially ever-larger groups of people from around the world — then no one enjoys a secure, privileged social position. Because the people are wary of any sort of hierarchy, any perceived or real inequality will often be portrayed as a problem to be corrected. When some people are poor and other people are rich, this tends to be portrayed as an affront to the natural order rather than something which is entirely natural to humans and animals of all kinds.

Liberals critical of these ‘war’ measures tend to criticize them because they correctly see that, when all people everywhere are held to be equal, any oppressive treatment towards one group in society can and will be extended to everyone in society. In some cases, this policy tends to be preemptively extended to everyone immediately, as with humiliating & ineffective airport security measures put into place after the attacks of 9/11/2001. To avoid damage to the equality principle through the use of extensive profiling, the state put into place a policy which harasses everyone who comes through the security lines equally, while compromising a bit by providing some extra roughing-up of people on a special list. The point of the mass pat-downs is to provide some political cover for the special watch lists (which disparately impact Muslims, who are supposed to be equal citizens). Without the need to defend ever broader expressions of the equality principle, the security measures would probably be restricted to the people who posed the greatest risks of bombing or hijacking planes.

The War on Drugs emerged in the 1970s and 1980s in response to the rapid increase in crime following the Civil Rights and judicial reform movements. Under the pretext of controlling drugs, the state presumed a long list of new powers to wield over all citizens equally in an attempt to suppress crime. It wielded these powers unequally, violating the sometimes-historically-observed rights of some groups of citizens while leaving others mostly to their own devices.

In this, liberals correctly see that when the state rounds up Muslim citizens to detain without trial, the practice could easily be applied to all citizens within the state. They are correct in this, but tend to fail to see the larger problem presented by the extension of citizenship to anyone with a pulse. Retraction of citizenship and the franchise tends to be seen as impossible — liberals portray each extension as a historical advance on the same level as the development of vaccines and antibiotics. Because of this, it becomes much harder to resolve the actual problems posed by a relatively small religious minority. The inability of the state to recognize differences between groups of people, owing to the myths it tells itself about itself, results in a maddening decay of the underlying society that supports it.

Because the state proclaims to treat all citizens equally, the SWAT raids and aggressive pat-downs which tend to be restricted to some portion of the population in a furtive manner are sometimes seen as a threat to the liberty of the population as a whole. The state, being run by not-entirely-stupid people, doesn’t actually want to oppress the entire population. Just the segment of the population that causes more problems than they provide in revenue and opportunity to the state itself.

In this, liberals tend to sabotage their own state which enforces the pretense of the equality principle. If the state decides to not aggressively control crime, it loses valuable industrial centers to blight. When it does use aggressive measures against crime (‘victimless’ or otherwise, on pretense of drug control or without the pretense), then liberals complain about the violation of the equality principle in abstract. But the liberal way of life can’t survive without that sort of aggressive enforcement — as we’ve seen in the destruction and scattering of countless American cities and towns since the middle of the 20th century.

Further, without basic peace and order, there is no liberal way of life. Your butcher shop can’t go on selling meat if it’s being used as a place for hostage rescue dramas. It becomes harder to operate a train system if at any moment, assault rifle wielding bandits can start shooting it up. It becomes harder to run a shop downtown if at any moment some intellectuals at a national newspaper might raise a mob to burn down the local businesses. Less dramatically, it becomes more challenging to maintain bourgeois life when a large portion of a town’s inhabitants are derelict drug addicts. Also, it becomes impossible to live a bohemian, individualistic, hedonist lifestyle if your neighborhood comes under the authority of shariah law or local gangsters. But in the name of preserving their own autonomy and authority, liberals will often extend their umbrella of toleration to startlingly illiberal groups.

Liberal intellectuals tend to regard these threats to order as secondary to threats to the popular assumptions which provide them with power and influence. If the general population loses fervor for the equality principle, then it loses fervor for providing the liberals with the authority to administer the government. And that group of people goes far beyond what the popular press usually calls ‘liberals’ — it applies to broader groups than that.

One of the reasons for this is that new frontiers in inequality are occasions for power grabs and new job opportunities for new cadres of liberals, who are much greedier for protected, make-work positions than the old aristocracy ever was. Inequality as a fact of existence is a sort of zero point energy source for the creation of new bureaucracies for the care and feeding of new classes of pious liberals. Resolving the problems is impossible — but what is possible is to create ever larger occasions for job opportunities for educated bureaucrats.

Fortunately or unfortunately depending on your perspective, the cycle can’t go on forever.