Civil Liberties

The Scribes and the Idea of Freedom

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I haven’t read Jonathan Franzen’s novel, Freedom, but Erin O’Connor has been reading it and reviews it here. Based on her summary, it seems that Franzen’s basic opinion about freedom is this: he doesn’t like it very much. Consider for example these excerpts:

…the American experiment of self-government, an experiment statistically skewed from the outset, because it wasn’t the people with sociable genes who fled the crowded Old World for the new continent; it was the people who didn’t get along well with others.…also: The personality susceptible to the dream of limitless freedom is a personality also prone, should the dream ever sour, to misanthropy and rage.

Erin summarizes:

“Freedom,” for Franzen, is a red herring. As a national ideal, it paralyzes us, preventing government from behaving with the rationalism of European nations (there are passages about this in the book). And, on a personal level, it is simply immiserating. Every last one of Franzen’s major characters suffers from the burden of too many choices.

In a novel, of course, one cannot assume that opinions expressed by the characters are those of the author himself–but in this case, it seems to me that they likely are, and this opinion appears to be shared by most commenters at Erin’s post.

What really struck me in Erin’s review is her remark that I am starting to think that this novel may amount to a fictional companion piece for Cass Sunstein’s Nudge..the referenced work being not a novel, but a book about social, economic, and political policy co-authored by Cass Sunstein, who is now runnning the Office of Regulatory and Information Policy for the Obama administration. (See a review of Nudge, Erin’s post about the book, and my post about some of Sunstein’s policy ideas.)

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Free Speech Under Attack

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Molly Norris is–or was–a Seattle cartoonist, best-known for coming up with the idea of “Everybody Draw Mohammad Day” as a way of asserting American First Amendment rights. She has been threatened with murder for having violated Sharia law, and the threats against her have now reached such a level that–on the advice of the FBI–she is changing her identity and going into hiding. Her cartoons, at least for now, have stopped. The terrorists have silenced an American citizen.

This is not the first time that American individuals and institutions have been subject to intimidation by radical Islamic zealots, but it is one of the most blatant and serious.

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All I Want Is For Them To Get Off My Lawn

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San Francisco is considering banning the sales of Happy Meals inside the city limits. Near as I can tell, the justification is that toys included with meals intended for children cause them to eat like pigs.

What about parents, the people who actually earn the money that is used to pay for fast food?

They must be mindless drones to keep their children from constantly gulping down fattening grub. Once their larva starts to nag and whine, they have no choice but to mindlessly shell out the hard earned for a heart attack on a plate.

That means all of you jokers who spawned are sheep! Zombies ripe for the picking by the endlessly evil people at McDonald’s! Their vast intellects have wiped out any chance you have of resisting, since any sort of ability to form rational thought has obviously squirted out of the womb along with your get. All your corporate masters have to do is include a cheap plastic toy with food, and you fall into line like the dull-witted proletariat you are!

Thank goodness the Democrat-infested governments in California are there to keep you from destroying yourselves. Freedom of choice? You obviously can’t handle it, since a simple toy has defeated you! They must step in and pass arbitrary legislation which removes any chance you might have of making your own decisions, because you will just screw it up! I mean, think of the children!

And if you disagree with me, then you must be a racist. Or a parent.

Angelo Codevilla – America’s Milovan Djilas

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Older readers may recall the once famous but now largely forgotten Cold War figure of Milovan Djilas. While other dissidents from Communism like Andrei Sakharov, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and Whittaker Chambers acheived a more epic historical stature, Djilas was the first high Communist official, the adviser and likely successor to Yugoslavian dictator Tito, to turn against Communism as a system. More importantly, Djilas wrote New Class in 1957, a damning analysis that accurately castigated the hierarchy of Communist Party and government officials an exploitive and tyrannical ruling class that in the Soviet context was later termed “Nomenklatura“. For this act, Djilas would suffer in Tito’s prisons, but he outlived both Tito and Communism and his Party enemies were never able to shake off the truth of his bitter critique.

As related here in his post the other day by David Foster, Claremont scholar and Boston U. international relations professor Angelo Codevilla has published in The American Spectator a very lengthy, often brilliant, sometimes meandering, essay that is part analysis, part cri de coeur, but primarily the most devastating attack on America’s emerging, bipartisan, technocratic Oligarchy that I have ever read:

America’s Ruling Class — And the Perils of Revolution

….Never has there been so little diversity within America’s upper crust. Always, in America as elsewhere, some people have been wealthier and more powerful than others. But until our own time America’s upper crust was a mixture of people who had gained prominence in a variety of ways, who drew their money and status from different sources and were not predictably of one mind on any given matter. The Boston Brahmins, the New York financiers, the land barons of California, Texas, and Florida, the industrialists of Pittsburgh, the Southern aristocracy, and the hardscrabble politicians who made it big in Chicago or Memphis had little contact with one another. Few had much contact with government, and “bureaucrat” was a dirty word for all. So was “social engineering.” Nor had the schools and universities that formed yesterday’s upper crust imposed a single orthodoxy about the origins of man, about American history, and about how America should be governed. All that has changed.

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Thug-Tolerating and Corruption-Enabling at Obama’s DOJ

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I posted a couple of weeks ago about the DOJ’s decision to drop a voter-intimidation case–a case that had already been won–against the New Black Panther Party. Today, Congressman Frank Wolf (R-VA) is sending a letter to the DOJ Inspector General demanding a formal investigation of this matter. The letter is here.

Given that the independence of the Inspectors General seems to have been grievously compromised under the Obama administration, I’m afraid we can’t expect too much from this request for IG involvement.

J Christian Adams, the career DOJ attorney who resigned in protest over the handling of the New Black Panther matter, also asserts that DOJ is failing to enforce provisions of the “Motor-Voter” law which require states to periodically purge invalid voters from the rolls. WSJ:

Last year, Justice abandoned a case it had pursued for three years against Missouri for failing to clean up its rolls. When filed in 2005, one-third of Missouri counties had more registered voters than voting-age residents. What’s more, Missouri Secretary of State Robin Carnahan, a Democrat who this year is her party’s candidate for a vacant U.S. Senate seat, contended that her office had no obligation to ensure individual counties were complying with the federal law mandating a cleanup of their voter rolls.

The case made slow but steady progress through the courts for more than three years, amid little or no evidence of progress in cleaning up Missouri’s voter rolls. Despite this, Obama Justice saw fit to dismiss the case in March 2009.

There is growing evidence that the behavior of the Obama administration, together with that of its congressional enablers, represents a serious threat to the integrity of the democratic process and to the liberties of all Americans.