Originally Published by American Thinker
The greatest
threat to individual freedom is not the machinations of political parties –
noxious though those machinations may be – but the attitude toward authority
which pervades the populace itself. When
people no longer feel threatened by a centralization of power – demagogues can
do as they like.
I had a
brief exchange with a friend recently which perfectly illustrates my
point. We were discussing what was, at
that time, the president’s threat to suspended the deportation of additional
categories of illegal aliens. My friend’s
stance was all too typical: Obama
only wants to do the right thing, and he has to do it because congress won’t. While this position is basically an echo
of the president’s own public rationale, it is still worth examining what it
means when it is repeated by an ordinary mortal. The first thing that it means, unarguably, is
that the person speaking has no fear of living under an oppressive
government. He lacks the conviction,
universal among our founders and common among many generations of immigrants,
that the concentration of political power in too few hands is a moral evil and an
obvious threat to civil liberties. Believing
the president is justified in ruling by decree rejects two and a half centuries
of American history with little more than a casual shrug. Moreover, such an attitude just assumes that
what matters about a political system is that it produces immediate desirable
effects – not that it preserves the rights of citizens. A belief in doing the right thing tends
to be minimally concerned with repercussions and maximally concerned with
feelings. Obama, like any other
demagogue, is quite savvy enough to understand this. When he actually made his decree, he didn’t
trot out any evidence that current and future immigrants would not displace
American workers – which they probably will – he trotted out Astrid Silva, her
family, and their expediently pitiable story.
The hard
lesson of history is that life has been dangerous and unforgiving for the vast
majority of people who have walked the earth.
For a variety of reasons, some of which involve the wisdom of our
founders and the diligence of our ancestors, Americans now live in remarkably
comfortable times. Despite what some
would have you believe, no one starves in the United States for want of cheap
(or free) food. Many of our poor have
automobiles, and almost all of them have televisions. Our middle class, though in decline, are
still quite rich by world standards. We
have lived under these conditions for generations now, and most of us have lost
all appreciation for both their historic peculiarity and for the policies and
institutions which brought them about.
Millions of Americans take their lifestyles as a given, almost as a
bequest of nature – so the idea of denying any number of foreigners access to
those same conditions doesn’t seem like an act of self preservation, but simply
like an act of cruelty. A knee-jerk
public policy of doing the right thing assumes the well of resources is
bottomless, and that technology and sheer goodness will rescue us from hunger,
labor, and poverty if we only let it.
Believers in such a worldview can only see conservatives as
pathologically backward, bigoted, or simply stupid. If a person is enthusiastically acclimated to
the current pace of technological and social change, it is unlikely he will
venerate a constitutional framework that is now more than two centuries old. Checks and balances are inefficient. Dictatorship, on the other hand, is
efficient, simple, and attractive – especially when it comes clothed in all the
trappings of modernity and fairness.
What could fit our celebrity culture better than a popular dictator?
The
political elites can only get by with the continued centralization of their
power because most of the public either tacitly approves or doesn’t care. While the market crash of 2008 did damage to
the economy, most people didn’t lose their jobs and have only felt the erosion
of their standard of living slightly and gradually. Likewise, though nearly 3000 Americans died
in the 9/11 attacks, it is a plain fact that over 300 million didn’t. It takes brutal and sudden events, far
reaching enough to impact almost everyone directly, to impress upon the public
imagination that something isn’t just a media event – a narrative they can weep
about appropriately for a few minutes before switching channels and getting
back to their still comparatively comfortable lives. Like it or not, however, there is no law of
nature that ensures that the awful things that have happened to other great
nations cannot happen to America. That kind
of exceptionalism we do not have.
It is
impossible to say with any certainty just what fraction of the public has to
become outraged to overcome the dead weight of their complacent brethren. The power of any minority depends on many
factors. Frankly, if the current
political elites were as competent as they believe they are, our civil
liberties would be doomed. Almost two
millennia ago, the Romans figured out that bread and circuses were all that the
average Roman wanted. The ancient elites
kept up their end of that bargain successfully for hundreds of years. The average American is now little more
concerned with political rights than his Roman counterpart was. Bread and circuses have simply taken on more
modern forms. The only hope left to
those of us who want to retain some meaningful degree of freedom is the fact
that our political elites have grown so insulated from the rest of us that they
now hold us in complete contempt. The
political class think little better of American citizens than 19th
century European elites thought of their African or Asian subjects. How else could one explain their attempts to
replace even the bread and circuses with cheap and indigestible lies? It may not take much to keep the public happy
– but it does take something.
