Frank’s Case Book

One of the problems with Liberals is that they often look for tyranny in all the wrong places, and are blind to real conspicuous threats to liberty that come with a smile. While I disagree, there is some value of the Liberals clamoring  to extend full Constitutional criminal rights to terrorists at war with us when captured on the battlefield. It is certainly of value to question the limits of enhanced interrogation techniques. Conservatives would like to return the favor to Liberals. We remind them that if the US were to experience tyranny it would likely not be of the jacked-booted variety. Such a despotism would not wrap us in chains, but a warm blanket from which escape would be difficult. Many have pointed out that French scholar Alexis de Tocqueville described this after his visit to the United States in the early nineteenth century. I repeat his words here, this week in the shadow of health care reform, because of their uncanny accuracy and eloquence.

I want to imagine with what new features despotism could be produced in the world: I see an innumerable crowd of like and equal men who revolve on themselves without repose, procuring the small and vulgar pleasures with which they fill their souls. .  .  .

Above these an immense tutelary power is elevated, which alone takes charge of assuring their enjoyments and watching over their fate. It is absolute, detailed, regular, far-seeing, and mild. It would resemble paternal power if, like that, it had for its object to prepare men for manhood; but on the contrary, it seeks only to keep them fixed irrevocably in childhood; it likes citizens to enjoy themselves provided that they think only of enjoying themselves. It willingly works for their happiness; but it wants to be the unique agent and sole arbiter of that; it provides for their security, foresees and secures their needs, facilitates their pleasures, conducts their principal affairs, directs their industry, regulates their estates, divides their inheritances; can it not take away from them entirely the trouble of thinking and the pain of living?

So it is that every day it renders the employment of free will less useful and more rare; it confines the action of the will in a smaller space and little by little steals the very use of it from each citizen. .  .  .

Thus, after taking each individual by turns in its powerful hands and kneading him as it likes, the sovereign extends its arms over society as a whole; it covers its surface with a network of small, complicated, painstaking, uniform rules through which the most original minds and the most vigorous souls cannot clear a way to surpass the crowd; it does not break wills but it softens them, bends them, and directs them; it rarely forces one to act, but it constantly opposes itself to one’s acting; it does not destroy, it prevents things from being born; it does not tyrannize, it hinders, compromises, enervates, extinguishes, dazes, and finally reduces each nation to being nothing more than a herd of timid and industrious animals of which government is the shepherd. .  .  .

I have always believed that this sort of regulated, mild, and peaceful servitude, whose picture I have just painted, could be combined better than one imagines with some of the external forms of freedom, and that it would not be impossible for it to be established in the very shadow of the sovereignty of the people.

This entry was posted on Sunday, July 19th, 2009 at 9:49 am and is filed under Economics, Politics, Social Commentary. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.