Tag: nanny state

mong the more curious developments in modern liberal orthodoxy is its increasingly schizophrenic disposition towards political authority. Liberals are infinitely permissive with what they deem to be matters of personal expression, such as drug use, abortion, and various sexual contrivances. Yet, at the same time, on other sets of issues, liberals have adopted stringently authoritarian attitudes, supporting without compunction such draconian measures as censorship bureaus, speech codes, election nullification, and invasive medical overreach.

What is interesting about both these developments is how liberals will justify both moral laxity and political repression by invoking expert authority. The Left largely grounded its support for medicalized gender-affirmation on the judgment of purported expert institutions like WPATH; they justified permissive “harm reduction” approaches to managing homelessness by citing organizations like Harm Reduction International. Meanwhile, on the authoritarian end of the ledger, the Left invoked authorities like the Disinformation Governance Board (run out of DHS) and the Stanford Internet Observatory to argue for flagrant state censorship. Whether the cause of the hour is of the libertine or authoritarian variety, the Left invariably justifies it by appeal to scientific or technical expertise.

These developments in liberal politics — the schizophrenic lurching between permissiveness and authoritarianism, the endless exaltation of experts — are rooted in a vulnerability inherent in liberalism itself, namely that liberalism is inherently deconstructive. It is a political formula for dismantling social customs and hierarchies in pursuit of ever greater individual autonomy and equality — that is, in theory.

The problem for liberals is that this process only goes one way. Once Liberalism becomes the dominant social ethos, it discovers that it lacks the internal resources to construct and legitimate any social hierarchy. This creates problems for the exercise of governance, which is inherently hierarchical and authoritarian. (For evidence of this, the next time one is pulled over, one should deny the authority of the officer on the scene on the grounds of the inherent equality of all human beings; see what happens.)

In light of this, liberals have striven, over centuries, to devise some system that can justify hierarchical governance structures within their egalitarian ethos, postulating such schemes as Social Contract theory, Proprietorial Libertarianism, the Veil of Ignorance, Popular Sovereignty, and countless others. Historically, the only such systems that have proven politically viable are those ostensibly grounded in ‘technical expertise,’ that is to say, managerial liberalism.

The political viability of managerial liberalism has nothing to do with the inherent justness or validity of this solution. On the contrary, institutions of technical or professional authority, once leveraged for political authority, immediately become compromised. Their ‘expert opinions’ quickly degenerate into flagrantly pretextual covers for purely political machinations. Note that the various institutions cited at the outset, WPATH, the Disinformation Governance Board, and so forth, have since collapsed in a heap from their own corruption.

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