With the rise of the Tea Party, it’s become fashionable for folks on the right to warn that the Obama administration’s policies are pushing us down the “road to serfdom.” Tea Party favorite Rand Paul, for example, warns that reckless deficit spending could lead to the conditions that led to Hitler’s rise to power. And AEI’s Arthur Brooks and Rep. Paul Ryan argue that “the road to serfdom in America does not involve a knock in the night or a jack-booted thug. It starts with smooth-talking politicians offering seemingly innocuous compromises.”
There are a couple of problems with this “road to serfdom” argument. One is that it’s a misreading of Hayek’s famous book with that title. But the more serious problem, as Conor Friedersdorf points out, is that we live in a society in which actual “knocks in the night” and “jack-booted thugs” are increasingly common:
I regard the actual, ongoing abrogation of civil liberties in America as the clearer, more present danger, as compared to the unintended consequences of “smooth-talking politicians offering seemingly innocuous compromises.” Indeed, these issues seem to me unsurpassed in their importance.
Americans are on an assassination list already. Innocents are imprisoned today. SWAT teams took out countless doors in no-knock raids this week. The last two presidents have asserted authority unprecedented in American history… and even when they break the law it goes unpunished.
If you’re not worried about the actual jack-booted thugs staging actual midnight raids in America today, you can’t expect to be taken seriously seriously when you warn that some policy you oppose could lead to jack-booted thugs staging midnight raids at some point in the future. And the party that has pushed relentlessly for warrantless surveillance, imprisonment without trial, and the normalization of torture has no business lecturing us about how the other party’s policies will, eventually, lead us to a police state.
The New York Times reports that the Obama administration is planning new legislation to give the government even-more-sweeping powers to spy on Internet users. It will be interesting to see if Tea Party candidates denounce this proposal, which really could facilitate future tyranny, as vehemently as they’ve denounced Obama’s spending proposals.
To me, the drug war (and all the other things you list above) are the super-liberal civil rights issues that liberals should be rightly chiding Republicans (and republican-leaning libertarians) for ignoring. Yet there isn’t really much support (to varying degrees of course) for ending these policies amongst Democrats and the vast majority of people on the left either.
Liberaltarianism is not only about convincing libertarians to see how liberal principles should be upheld, but apparently also about trying to also convince liberals of the same thing. The Democratic party seemed to bail on the civil liberties issues when they came to power on the last wave of “throw the bums out” sentiment, so I’m pretty sure that when these tea party candidates get elected in November, they’ll forget all about it as well. I think that’s a feature of power, rather than evil Democrats or evil tea party people.
Honestly, I am completely dumb-founded, even as a libertarian, that we saw thousands of people marching and angrily electing new candidates over ostensibly economic issues before these civil rights issues. I mean, I get angry about out of control spending too, but read Radley’s site on police/drug war abuse and I get a lot angrier.
I guess we did see some of those “war on terror=civil liberties violations!” protesting people during the Bush administration, but then that leads to two questions: 1) where are they now, as those abuses still remain and 2) why aren’t they up in arms over the drug war as well, given that one could make the case that the abuses there are even more widespread. (honestly the new powers claimed by the government to fight terror often end up abusing people’s rights not in a anti-terror capacity, but in an anti-drug one)
Great stuff, I agree 100%. It’s depressing that a fairly mainstream progressive political and fiscal approach garners orders of magnitude more vitriol than Obama’s shameful continuation and even escalation of the slowly encroaching police state, on both domestic and international fronts.
Ultimately that’s what will likely prevent me from doubling down on him at the booth in 2012, not the rest of his often wrong-headed but fairly predictable political activity.
Totally right. Obama’s economic policies have been miserable, but it’s his horrendous record on civil liberties that will keep me from voting for him again. I voted thinking that I’d get a centrist-y Democrat who would waste a bunch of money domestically but at least end the worst of Bush’s policies. Instead, Obama’s turned out to be just like Bush on civil liberties, *and* have terrible economic policies.
Worth pointing out: http://www.democracynow.org/2010/9/27/fbi_raids_homes_of_anti_war
Great analysis. I hope that the Tea Partiers will react to this assault on liberty with the same vehemence that they have for Obama’s economic proposals. I fear that they will accept increased surveillance quietly or support further curtailment of civil liberties with trite phrases such as “if you’ve done nothing wrong, you have nothing to be afraid of.”
Revolution comes from the left wing, and always has– including in the American Revolution. People like yourself have done everything possible to create an anti-leftist atmosphere in this country and its intellectual environs that is not only actively scornful of the left, but genuinely eliminationist towards us. Your compatriots at Cato don’t want to argue against any actual, internationalist, socialist leftists like me (as opposed to the left wing in name only crowd like Matt Yglesias and Ezra Klein); they’d rather assume us away and silence us preemptively.
If you’d like to reignite genuine anti-government sentiment– as in, some small shred of the impulse that says “this government is unsalvageable and must be replaced”– you might try participating in an effort to stop libertarians from knee-jerk censoriousness towards the socialist left. But I have a feeling you won’t.
The name I’m going to speak garners only contempt in today’s America but Theodor Adorno wasn’t entirely wrong regarding authoritarianism. I’ve worked in and around law enforcement and the criminal justice system since 1979. Personally I find it horrifying the degree to which much of America has become submissive toward police power and the authoritarian state. The Drug War, forfeiture laws, arming of local police departments as para-military forces, an openly corrupt clown like Joe Arpaio; Oh what have we wrought — where is this all going?
“The New York Times reports that the Obama administration is planning new legislation to give the government even-more-sweeping powers to spy on Internet users. It will be interesting to see if Tea Party candidates denounce this proposal, which really could facilitate future tyranny, as vehemently as they’ve denounced Obama’s spending proposals.”
So….you read a report about a terrible act the President is planning, an act that “really could facilitate future tyranny,” and your gripe is with the Tea Party??
But there probably won’t be a column attacking the administration that’s actually being a tyrant, will there?
Freddie:
“People like yourself have done everything possible to create an anti-leftist atmosphere in this country and its intellectual environs that is not only actively scornful of the left, but genuinely eliminationist towards us.”
Uh, are you actually talking to Tim? You leave the same type of comments on Will’s site. Why on earth are you complaining about the anti-leftist sentiments of people who constantly advocate vastly more left-oriented ideas than the average libertarian, and indeed often argue against those other libertarians about the value of liberal principles? You’re attacking the very people who are attempting to understand and cooperate with your side with charges that they’re dishonest and just hate your side irrationally.
If there’s any “knee-jerk” reaction here, it’s not on behalf of the libertarian person who is saying “the liberal cause civil liberties issues is more important than economic ones”, it’s on the behalf of the self described leftist who is attacking their integrity — because you certainly aren’t arguing with the ideas of “the government is violating civil liberties”, because I know you agree with them. Why would you constantly post about how libertarians just hate leftists in the exact same posts where they advocate for ideas near and dear to all leftwing people?
David:
“So….you read a report about a terrible act the President is planning, an act that “really could facilitate future tyranny,” and your gripe is with the Tea Party??
But there probably won’t be a column attacking the administration that’s actually being a tyrant, will there?”
This post is explicitly an attack on the current administration, since he catalogs all the bad things they’ve (and their predecessors) done. The tie-in to the tea party was simply the recognition that if the current guys are doing lots of bad things, we want to find out if the people who are currently clamoring to replace them to actually support the right things. I think that’s a pretty reasonable segue 2 months before a midterm election where lots of these people are running for office.
Brian-
The post was NOT explicitly an attack on the administration. Read the article again–from the first paragraph to the last, the focus is on the Tea Party and what they are and aren’t reacting to. That it catalogs some of the sinister things done by this and the former administration does not make it an explicit attack. The reference to the Tea Party is not a “tie in” as you call it; it is the theme of the post. The thrust of the article is to discredit the Tea Party’s “road to serfdom” claim.
Anonymous:
“The thrust of the article is to discredit the Tea Party’s “road to serfdom” claim.”
Yes, by saying that that the current administration is already doing many of the terrible things that they claim might occur. I guess depending on your definition of “attack” or “explicit” it might not qualify, but it’s hard to get more negative than noting that someone is doing terrible unconstitutional things. The reason it doesn’t focus on the current admin is because the terrible, unconstitutional things have already been outlined in great detail and are a matter of public knowledge — it’s a given assumption. Do you need more persuasion on this front?
Whether the Obama administration is wrong and bad for doing these things is not up for debate — it is. The question is, are the people who are opposed to him and who wish to supplant his political allies going to be better? That’s a fair question to dedicate a post to discussing. If you think it’s insufficiently critical of Obama to say “will his political opponents stop doing all the terrible things he’s doing if they come into power?” then okay, but if you want to go slam people for being insufficiently critical, surely there are more deserving targets.
Brian:
“The reason it doesn’t focus on the current admin is because the terrible, unconstitutional things have already been outlined in great detail and are a matter of public knowledge — it’s a given assumption.”
I would disagree with that. Maybe I simply missed them, but I haven’t seen many (any) “Obama Administration Guilty of Shocking Tyranny” articles, at least not on television news channels, major newspapers, or left-leaning blogs. If they exist, I’d be surprised but happy to see them.
My main point is simply that each side–right and left–does almost no policing of its own side; they are only concerned with sport of denigrating the opponent. This to me was an absurd example of that; it’s the equivalent of you walking with two friends down the street, and one friend mugs an old lady, and you turn to the other friend and say “how dare you for not stopping him.”
There are LOTS of deserving targets for being insufficiently critical. But this case involved the President acting as a tyrant. A Democratic president who came to office accusing his predecessor of massive tyranny. Had the author previously written an article whose sole purpose was to criticize the administration, your argument would hold more water
(As a side note, this article was picked up on AndrewSullivan.com, under the heading “one act of true American tyranny that the Tea Party didn’t dare protest.” No direct criticism of the tyrant.)
-David (the last anonymous was me too)
Hi David,
Thanks for the thoughtful comment!
You say I should police my “side,” but that’s exactly what I’m doing here. I’m a libertarian, so the Tea Party is the closest thing I have to an ideological home. The problem is that the Tea Party has not been living up to its supposed principles.
Another reason I haven’t written more about Obama’s abuses of power is that other people on “my side” have, in fact, been doing a thorough job of it. In particular, my Cato colleague Julian Sanchez has done lots and lots and lots and lots and lots and lots of work on the subject. Frankly, Julian (and other Cato scholars such as Tim Lynch and David Rittgers) do good enough work in this area that there isn’t much I can add. If you follow me on Twitter (I’m binarybits) you’ll see I link to their stuff pretty frequently.
Timothy-
Thanks for the reply. You’re right, and I appreciate the links you posted.
I’ll admit I found the article here through the AndrewSullivan link, and that post was exclusively a calling-out of the Tea Party, with Obama’s tyranny mentioned only in passing in reference to the Tea Partiers. That reaction (along with some of your commenters) was really my main critique.
“Party”? Parties. There is no difference between D’s and R’s when it comes to enthusiasm for unlimited executive power.