Earlier today, a bipartisan majority in the House of Representatives passed a bill that would force ByteDance, the parent company of social-media app TikTok, to sell the evil app to an American company or have it banned in the United States. This is a welcome step. As National Review‘s editors explained yesterday, TikTok is a “national-security threat” because it is “spyware owned and controlled by the Chinese Communist Party (as all the nation’s technological products are), farming massive amounts of highly personal information from its users (down to mapping their keystrokes on other apps).”
The editorial dealt briefly with the objections of Senator Rand Paul (R., Ky.) to the bill on free-speech grounds. Paul called the bill “a draconian measure that stifles free expression, tramples constitutional rights, and disrupts the economic pursuits of millions of Americans,” while also “effectively banning TikTok and ignoring its substantial investments in data security.” But this is misleading: The bill does not regulate speech on the platform. As the editorial noted, “TikTok users can and will be allowed to carry on as they always have, so long as the platform remains out of the control of an avowedly hostile rival superpower.”
Accepting the objections of Paul (and of Thomas Massie, his kindred spirit and fellow Kentuckian in the House) as sincere, they demonstrate a shortcoming in the worldview that former National Review editor Frank Meyer would have described as “untrammeled libertarianism.” Today, Meyer might be better known for his arguments with others on the right whose comfort with expanded government meant they “threaten no danger to the pillars of the temple” that held up the statism against which he and NR fought. In his contests with L. Brent Bozell, Donald Atwell Zoll, and others, he outlined a fusionist worldview that favored limited, constitutional government. And he dissented from those on the right who believed that “if only governmental power can be seized and held by governors imbued with true principle, men can be forced to be virtuous.”
But these were not the only disputes in which the man NR founder William F. Buckley called the conservative movement’s “Air-Traffic Control” was involved. A former communist, Meyer stressed the need for an aggressive foreign policy to counter communism globally. As Matthew Continetti, author of The Right: The Hundred Year War for American Conservatism, recounted:
Some of Meyer’s fiercest arguments were with libertarians whose opposition to the state extended to the military and the police. Meyer believed that America needed soldiers and officers to fight barbarians at home and abroad.
Meyer’s own words speak to these commitments. In an essay pushing back against Bozell’s statism, Meyer also noted with disappointment the emergence of a “considered position, developed out of the ‘pure libertarian’ sector of right-wing opinion, which sharply repudiates the struggle against the major and most immediate contemporary enemy of freedom, Soviet Communism — and does so on grounds, purportedly, of a love for freedom.”
Meyer condemned the “monstrous misapprehension of reality” of these “‘pure libertarian’ pacifists” who attack “the militantly anti-Communist position of the leadership of American conservatism as moving towards the destruction of individual liberty because it is prepared to use the power of the American state in one of its legitimate functions, to defend freedom against Communist totalitarianism.” Theirs was a tendency that, if followed unchecked, was just as dangerous as that of the statists Meyer also disputed.
He reconciled his passionate attachment to freedom with this muscular foreign policy through recourse to history and to human nature. To believe that other men and other collections of men do not pose a threat to freedom that needs to be countered is to ignore both of these sources of knowledge. The “craven retreat of the pure libertarian” was, he wrote elsewhere, a consequence of “ideological abstraction from its functional foundation in the human condition.”
The reality is that the sort of civilized order in which freedom can prosper requires force to maintain. “It is only in civilization that men have begun to rise towards their potentiality; and civilization is a fragile growth, constantly menaced by the dark forces that suck man back towards his brutal beginnings,” he wrote in another essay. The “opposition to the maintenance of defense against Communism” espoused by “libertine libertarianism” would enable “the destruction of the civilizational order which is the only real foundation in a real world for the freedom it espouses.”
The fact that Meyer made these arguments when Soviet communism was America’s primary threat does not make them less relevant. For one, they are the arguments that helped to defeat that very threat. And the Chinese Communist Party today presents a threat of comparable stature. Indeed, Paul himself has rightly focused on one manifestation of its evil: the obfuscated complicity of some Americans in an attempt to bury the Chinese-lab-leak explanation for Covid-19’s emergence. Under its current ownership, TikTok is another danger the CCP poses.
Others in the libertarian space, such as the organization Americans for Prosperity, have recognized this, and advocated the legislation the Senate will soon debate. As Americans for Prosperity’s chief government-affairs officer Brent Gardner put it, technologies, such as TikTok, “deployed by foreign adversaries who wish to do us harm” pose a genuine “security threat” requiring action.
This does not mean all government actions justified on national-security grounds are inherently valid. But when they are consistent with our Constitution, in the national interest, and meant to counter a legitimate foreign threat — all true of this legislation — then the case for them is strong. It would, therefore, be a misguided persistence to abstract libertarian principle for Rand Paul and other Republicans to reject this wisdom, as well as that of Frank Meyer, on this matter.