Sestercentennial, oh, the time has come! (Apologies to Night Ranger.)
Each July, Americans celebrate the Fourth without most of them knowing what the historical significance of the date is. Instead of independence from England and the creation of the first nation explicitly based on Enlightenment-era arguments for individual rights, most just think it’s an occasion to remember that fireworks are awesome, which is also true. This past Saturday marked 250 times this land has circled the sun since the Declaration of Independence, in any case—and the rough midpoint of President Trump’s month-long Great American State Fair in D.C.
A dour, left-wing former friend of mine might’ve been pleased to hear that rapper Vanilla Ice’s performance at the Fair was canceled, apparently due to sparse attendance, in turn likely due in part to the oppressively hot weather. I imagine that she’d be pleased because, last I knew, she thought oppression in the political sense, even outright fascism, is made more likely by Americans’ obsession with frivolous pop culture.
Witness Weimar burlesque, she argued a couple decades ago—though burlesque has become so sacred to Third Wave feminism, she probably wouldn’t dare insult it now and would perhaps point instead to Trump’s reality-TV phase or right-wing cartoons of Pepe the Frog to show that the masses’ shallowness smooths the glidepath to evil.
I, by contrast, think it’s important to remember that although authoritarian regimes may promise bread and circuses (and occasionally, inefficiently, bureaucratically deliver them), it’s not the bread per se or the circuses per se that are evil. What’s evil is the fascism from which those relatively benign things are meant to distract us. Pop culture itself, for all the complaints intellectuals lodge about it, tends to be fairly moderate and even broadly speaking libertarian more often than not, even in dreaded Hollywood.
Take the virtually-random set of things I watched around the Fourth this year: Larry David displays, in the first episode of his new historical-comedy sketch series Life, Larry and the Pursuit of Unhappiness, the old-fashioned ability to lampoon without hectoring, which we once took for granted in comedy. One could even argue there’s a trace of libertarian thinking in his depiction of a ridiculous alternate draft of the Declaration of Independence that would’ve stuffed that document with all sorts of absurd impositions such as a ban on recounting one’s dreams.
I rounded Larry out with episodes of John Adams, 24, and The Batman, these four shows arguably mapping onto liberal, libertarian, right-wing, and anarchist conceptions of liberty, respectively—with liberty being protected in those shows by, respectively, subversive humor, constitutional checks and balances, the willingness to fight against those who attack the innocent even if it means government agents break some rules, and the willingness to fight against those who attack the innocent even if it means a rich vigilante routinely defies the Gotham Police Department.
I didn’t plan this. It was just a happy side effect of a pop-saturated society and mental life. The dour right-wing acquaintance who not long ago played the concern troll by worrying I consume too much pop culture can stuff it.
Vanilla Ice, in short, is morally superior to I.C.E., no matter how silly you may think he is. Keep your criticisms focused on the proper target: government.
But for a debate over what’s arguably the most fascistic arm of government these days, you can watch this video of libertarian economist and I.C.E. critic Bryan Caplan going up against Heritage Foundation’s law-and-order-loving Simon Hankinson at Soho Forum last month.
For related arguments, some rooted in pragmatic wisdom but dubious constitutionality, about whether to abolish the tag-you’re-a-citizen’s-parent system of “birthright citizenship,” look no farther than recent debates and decisions at the Supreme Court.
There, you’ll also find the Justices now recognizing presidents’ broad power to fire members of the federal bureaucracy, even at ostensibly-apolitical agencies (aside from the Federal Reserve, which gets protected for reasons of economic stability but probably ought simply to be abolished if changes to it can have such devastating ripple effects). Despite two of my nominally-libertarian acquaintances fighting furiously on Facebook about whether this is a welcome constraint on the bureaucracy or a horrible expansion of executive power, I hope none of these Court battles inspire retaliatory court-expansion/court-packing. You win some, you lose some. Try passing an Amendment once in a while, or even just passing a well-crafted law, instead of whining about how to restructure the Supreme Court.
But whatever you do, don’t get your Court news from NPR’s Nina Totenberg, who casually and mistakenly reported that Justice Alito—who is six years younger than Totenberg, incidentally—is retiring. When she retires, maybe NPR will give her a free Totenbag.
How infuriating that establishment-reinforcing parts of the bureaucracy like NPR endure (even if now mostly privately-supported) while D.O.G.E. (the Department Of Government Efficiency), the one part of the government explicitly dedicated to shutting others down, is itself shuttering. And make no mistake: D.O.G.E. is not shutting down because it was failing (most government agencies do that, at far greater expense). D.O.G.E. must go because its very existence might give people ideas—ideas about how to get rid of government in general. And getting rid of government would be good because, among other things, people could then stop fearing that newly arrived outsiders might be getting handouts at aging locals’ expense—or vice versa.
Government, unlike rock ‘n’ roll dance parties, divides us. And market-based, voluntary solutions will always exist. Or as a wise man said: Stop, collaborate, and listen.
—Todd Seavey is the author of Libertarianism for Beginners and is on X at @ToddSeavey