…As Long As It’s Mandatory

A political friend shared a quote on social media today:

“Liberals, I have heard it said, don’t care what we do as long as it is mandatory.” — Joseph Epstein

This echoes a popular meme (and T-shirt, and other merchandise. A thumbs up for free enterprise!).

I had an exchange the other day with someone purporting to be libertarian, but who appeared to have little concern for the authoritarian turn that progressive cultural politics has taken. It served to reinforce a particular cultural divide, expressed in various ways. In my search to provenance the Epstein quote, I found another of his observations:

Conservatives and those on the right are usually willing to settle for thinking themselves correct on political issues; those on the left have always needed to feel not so much that they are correct but that they are also good. Disagree with someone on the right and he is likely to think you obtuse, wrong, sentimental, foolish, a dope; disagree with someone one the left and he is more likely to think you selfish, cold-hearted, a sellout, evil-in league with the devil, he might say, if he didn’t think religious terminology too coarse for our secular age. To this day one will hear of people who fell for Communism in a big way let off the hook because they were sincere; if one’s heart is in the right place, nothing else matters, even if one’s naive opinions made it easier for tyrants to murder millions.

This one is summed up in the aphorism that ‘conservatives think liberals are stupid, liberals think conservatives are evil,’ and fits in nicely with the assertion of coerciveness. After all, if someone is “evil,” it’s presumably justified to force him to change his behavior away from that “evil.”

Of course, this is nonsense. The greatest body counts in history are rooted in leftist political doctrine, and the world’s most oppressive governments have been born of left-of-center moralizing.

But, set that history aside and simply ponder the notion of coercive governance. How can a society that purports to egalitarianism and to the protection of individual rights find any justification for the sorts of coercion today’s progressives impose and demand? The moment we accept that some should have the power to tell others how they are to lead their lives, we flush all those aspirations of liberty and equality down the toilet.

Culturally, I’ve long aligned more with the Left than with the Right. Freedom of expression, the rights of individuals whose lifestyles run contrary to certain religious teachings, the right to do with or to your body whatever you please, et cetera and so forth – those are libertarian in nature, and I was an advocate well before the Democratic Party decided to get on board.

The Left, however, has abandoned liberty and liberalism in favor of the sort of coerciveness that we witnessed in last century’s totalitarian regimes. Different in form, but coercive nonetheless, with the same notion that a few Best-and-Brightest should decide how we live and what we do.

Two and a half decades ago, Bill Clinton was faced with a political quandary. The policies of his first two years in office earned a substantial rebuke at the ballot box in 1994. His choices were to continue to hold to those ideas, or to shift with the political winds. It was a choice between pursuing dominance and pursuing success. He opted for success, embraced the most popular Republican positions (and tweaking them to make them “his own”) and ended up getting re-elected and retiring with a good reputation (his personal peccadilloes notwithstanding).

A decade ago, Barack Obama was faced with a strikingly similar quandary. He got faced in the 2010 midterms, and could have opted to walk the Clinton route and heed the voters. Instead, he opted for the dominance route, digging his heels in rather than adapting his policies, and embraced a behavior (executive orders, aka the famous “pen and phone”) that he had decried when a mere Senator.

In doing so, in deciding that political dominance was preferable to political success, he reinforced two points: that politics of today’s Left are about coercion, and that the will of voters not already in agreement with his views doesn’t matter.Jump to today’s climate, and we find Biden and the Democrats ignoring the voters’ message in favor of an imposition upon both the willing and the unwilling. We find this in many of his executive orders, which impose new regulations, new restrictions, new mandates, and a preferred social order. The reach of the federal government is being expanded, with aspirations to even greater expansion (and subordination of states’ self-determination). Moreso, the agenda being telegraphed is rife with coercion. Energy policy, for example (see: “Green New Deal”) is all about picking winners and losers (for a pointless “goal,” given that the developing world will not decarbonize itself no matter what we do), while imposing socialistic control over a huge swath of the economy and a vital aspect of our lives.

I have an acquaintance who loves to give advice, but gets rather irate and pejorative if the advice is not heeded, because she’s certain she “knows best.” That she’s a New York Times liberal is likely no coincidence – the desire to inform others of their errors and the means of correcting them is a pretty common character element therein. And, yes, there are certainly coercive tendencies among many conservative (which is part of the reason I’m not a conservative), but conservatives aren’t the birthers of coercion today, and the commonalities I once had with liberals are being relegated to history by their divergence from liberty.

I’m sure I’ll be accused of hyperbole (and histrionics) by some left-apologists, because today’s government doesn’t mirror Stalin’s or Mao’s or Xi’s or Putin’s. I remind them that totalitarian regimes didn’t appear whole-cloth. They achieved power by making the very same sorts of promises today’s big-government do-gooders are making.

As for my provenance-search re Epstein’s purported statement? I found this:

Liberals don’t care what you do as long as it’s mandatory. — Richard K. “Dick” Armey in his book, The Freedom Revolution (1995).

Perhaps Epstein read that book.