Progressives believe we’re ethically obliged to try to perfect the world. No crusade is too picayune, not even your coffee-cup lid. Your convenience matters not.
Josh Barro, columnist and host of the Serious Trouble podcast, recently provided the Democratic Party with some unsolicited advice:
Sound counsel, but it raises a good question: Can Democrats follow through with this directive even if they agreed that a more laissez-faire demeanor would yield political benefits?
After all, Barro essentially offered a similar critique of his fellow liberals eight years ago. He’s been updating the admonition ever since in legacy venues that are closely read by the influential and elite left. The argument clearly appeals to the intellect, but it has not captured the hearts of his co-partisans. Why? Perhaps because the imperative to be less of a busybody conflicts with the absolute self-confidence that accompanies the belief that average Americans are incapable of navigating their lives without proper — and, indeed, stern — guidance.
The Democrats didn’t become the party of mandates by accident — health insurance mandates, vaccination mandates, renewable-energy mandates, and so on. These and other policies sprang from the conviction that liberty licenses destructive behaviors. If that license is not restricted, the liberty of others to be free from will be impinged — free from excess risk, privation, want, and hardship.
In the abstract, this is a noble impulse. Practically, though, it turns its practitioners into obsessives unhealthily fixated on their neighbors’ private affairs.
This disposition isn’t new or unique to the American left. The old joke about the totalitarian principle — “everything which is not compulsory is forbidden” — pertains. If you are convinced that all of society’s oars must row in the same direction lest we invite tragedy through sheer negligence, a certain meddlesomeness is no vice.
Most Democrats do not resent America’s heterodox and competing cultures, but some do. And those who do are vastly overrepresented in academia, media, and political life — the commanding heights of center-left culture. From that vantage, they captured the party’s oars, and they’ve been rowing furiously ever since.
So it was that the party’s elected officials waged war on your gas-powered stove and furnace. They took from you the convenience of plastic shopping bags in pursuit of illusory objectives, and they held fast to that policy long after it was clear that its only observable outcome was to make life marginally more expensive and irritating. They trained their fire on your air conditioner, your dishwasher, your plastic straws, your light bulbs, and just about anything with a combustion engine. All for the greater good.
What is the limiting principle that should stop the left from withholding your coffee-cup lid? After all, it hasn’t been taken away from you. No, your withholding barista is merely asking you to languish in your shame as you meekly request that unnecessary hunk of plastic.
The unspoken but obvious goal of introducing one more minor hurdle to your morning ritual is to introduce a little more friction into your life. Its advocates don’t think of this as a nuisance. Rather, it’s a gift — an opportunity for you to confront your biases and privileges. Maybe, in that moment of introspection, you’ll devote yourself more to thinking about the world’s many crises and challenges. Even if you cannot contribute meaningfully to their resolution, the least you can do is feel bad about them and, by extension, yourself. Have a great day!
This is not an outgrowth of a policy debate. This is a manifestation of first principles. It is a sincere, bedrock belief among a certain type of progressive that it is one’s highest moral duty to dwell on the intractable and distant woes that plague the human condition. That is the mark of a decent, worldly, compassionate person.
Again, noble sentiments all around. It’s when this perceived obligation compels its adherents to impose their anxiety on everyone else, nobility crosses over into imperiousness. And yet, to shirk the responsibility the good-hearted have to promote conscientiousness, that’s a dereliction — a sin.
As Barro’s example attests, that sort of outlook is not one that liberals share. It does, however, describe the progressive approach to public policy. And as progressivism has risen to the ideological fore within the Democratic coalition, the party’s leading lights have adopted progressivism’s habits of mind. Among them, that meliorism is an obligation. If the world can be made more perfect through human effort, we are ethically obliged to engage in such endeavors. These efforts add up. No crusade is too picayune.
If that means your cup lid has to go, then it has to go. Your convenience matters not when the world is in the balance. That might sound a little crankish to most, but it clearly resonates with the cast of social reformers who make a federal case (literally, in some instances) of your consumption habits. To ask Democrats to “stop being so annoying” is to ask them to revert to an earlier form, or even to abandon pre-political tenets that should govern a righteous life. In short, it’s easier said than done.