Authority and its Friends

 by Allan Levite  

| View comments |  Print This Post

The 1960s was a time of rebellion about authority, but due to the boisterousness of radical politics, it was mistaken for a rebellion against authority.

We live in a unique age. Conservatives, always known for their admiration of "law and order," are now assumed by the mass media to have "anti-government" sentiments. Actually, in America they always did. For their part, leftists sport "Question Authority" bumper stickers and see themselves as rebels. But trying to replace five generals and fifty police officers with 5,000 bureaucrats and 500 tax collectors is not "questioning authority." Liberals now criticize anti-terrorist laws while deploring "anti-government" attitudes!

Today's leftists and liberals are not called "anti-government," but are often seen as enemies of political authority, because they oppose capital punishment, anti-abortion laws, and military adventurism. Yet excoriating those who call for lower taxes is wholly inconsistent with a dislike of political authority. Not every authority figure wears a uniform.

Conservatives favor a strong military/police establishment, anti-abortion laws, and capital punishment, making liberals seem anti-authoritarian by contrast. However, the conservatives’ wish for greater authority in some areas is marked by an urge to have it used against foreign foes or domestic groups they dislike, but not against themselves. Conservatives advocate greater police power, but not past the point where they would see themselves becoming its victims. But liberals advocate a welfare state knowing full well that they are taxpayers.

Similarly, when abortion was illegal, pro-abortion activists seemed anti-authoritarian because they sought to repeal a government restraint. Simone de Beauvoir would have agreed with them, while at the same time arguing that no woman should be free to stay home and raise her children if she wished — a very pro-authoritarian position. Most pro-abortion activists would disagree with de Beauvoir about this, but still, many of them want government funding for abortions and day care. These are hardly anti-authoritarian stances.

Many conservatives want to outlaw abortion, thus appearing authoritarian while making liberals seem libertarian. But still, conservatives see authority not as an end, but as a means — to enforce order, tradition, and piety. Thus, their role for political authority is negative and reactive. Its task is to punish criminals, or to defend the nation or the status quo against perceived threats — but not to "eliminate" the "causes" of crime. Liberals, however, grant the state a positive and active role, trusting it implicitly and believing it to have complete and adequate knowledge to achieve many varied goals. The liberal state's task is not only to protect citizens — as their agent — but also to provide for them, as their parent.

This liberal model is more authoritarian, because it expects the state not only to control and govern, but also to transform and redeem. Mere governing accepts reality and its limits, while transforming society rests on the conceited belief that some official body has both the ability and the duty to change society's very structure. Incarcerating criminals or disciplining schoolchildren uses authority — when it seems necessary — but the effort to change the social environment is founded on authority, because it views society as a ball of clay, taking whatever shape the sculptor decrees. Society should not be allowed to take its own shape, because a "planned" design will outclass a spontaneous order.

Leftists, not conservatives, seemed to distrust the government in the 1960s. But while the Left opposed the military and the police, it favored a social-welfare leviathan. The media might regret now that during the late 1960s and early 1970s they did too good a job of convincing the public that the government is dangerous and dishonest. (The public includes conservatives.)

But complaints about government abuses do not necessarily represent a dislike of the state itself, just as complaints about bribe-taking police officers need not represent a visceral hatred of the police. The 1960s Left hated the U.S. government not only for what it did, but also for what it did not do — for not "ending" poverty, and thus not becoming the paternal government they envisioned. Trotsky's hatred of Stalin did not mean that he opposed Communism, just as the Left's reproof of the American government does not make the Left "anti-government." American leftists have not only tolerated, but also explained away the very things they would have denounced if they existed here: abolition of civil liberties, one-party dictatorships, and sham "elections."

As for conservatives, they often appear to have a monopoly on authoritarianism because their disciplinarian policies are the sort that must usually be enforced conspicuously, by police agencies. Liberal incursions on liberty (i.e., business regulations and racial quotas) are often the kind that occur quietly and out of sight, enforced by faceless bureaucracies. However, using less intrusive means does not make the ends any less authoritarian. While conservatives object to drugs, they have no desire to restore alcohol prohibition, and usually oppose the tobacco prohibition that many liberals seem almost ready to endorse. Conservatives demand stiff penalties for criminals, but unlike liberals, want citizens to remain armed — the most anti-authoritarian stance of all.

Liberals seem anti-authoritarian because they oppose state intervention in the most private and personal aspect of life — one's own body. But while conservatives support the Drug Enforcement Agency's ruthless interference in the right to decide which chemicals to ingest, liberals support the Food and Drug Administration's draconian efforts to do the same thing. Yet this form of interference with personal freedom is rarely recognized as such, even though both are "for your own good."

The conservative form of government authority always seems to be the more ominous of the two because paper-pushing bureaucrats are not nearly as rough a bunch as the police. But the former sometimes mobilize the latter. FDR made it a crime, punishable by imprisonment for up to ten years, for any American to possess gold. This lasted forty years. Prohibition, which he helped repeal because the voters demanded it, lasted 12 years, and no one obeyed it anyway — not even the police.

Admittedly, the two rival views of the state as panacea may seem similar. Liberals think that enough funding will "end" poverty, and conservatives that enough jails would "end" crime. But only liberalism can anticipate successful planned social change, because it assumes that man is basically gentle and virtuous, and that human nature is malleable. Conservatives see man as inherently savage, and deny that human nature can be altered. This requires them to admit that while crime can be reduced, it can never be eliminated– just as their belief that people have unequal abilities precludes conservatives from thinking that poverty can ever be "ended." By recognizing that social problems have no solutions, only trade-offs, conservatives allow political authority only a limited role. However, liberals' faith in being able to "end" social problems with "solutions" grants the state an unlimited scope for power.

Liberals also seem less authoritarian than they are because of their ceaseless effort to identify with the poor and the powerless. Indeed, for centuries conservatives have hated "the rabble" and feared "the mob"-and its counterpart, unrestrained democracy. But now that liberals incessantly complain about cultural philistines, "insatiable consumers," obese beer drinkers, religious fundamentalists, and "flyover state" yokels who own pick-up trucks with rifle racks, we must admit that conservatives have lost the leadership in mob-fearing.

Liberals are also believed to be "permissive." But a January 6, 1979 New Republic article by Henry Fairlie expressed horror that the 1970s had been reactionary, and condemned the libertarianism exemplified by Robert Nozick's book, Anarchy, State, and Utopia. Quite upset, Fairlie said that this trend was "really nothing but a self-indulgent permissiveness — which any true conservative should resist by instinct-speciously given the dignity of a moral system."

Criticizing liberal "permissiveness" made conservatives overlook that modern liberals are "permissive" by reputation but not by description. If anything, the "political correctness" mania indicates that liberalism — at least, the more extreme and dogmatic kind — is not at all tolerant. And while they may still indulge the poor and the eccentric, liberals seem to be anything but permissive toward themselves and whatever threatens compliance with the economic sacrifices they demand. One example was an article entitled "The Message from California," in the August 4, 1978 Commonweal, critical of the state's property-tax-cutting Proposition 13, which reverently cited Senator George McGovern's reference to it as "a degrading hedonism."

This might make it appear that the Senator, who thought so highly of the hedonistic 1960s generation, had changed his views. But he had not. Senator McGovern is a taxpayer too. Tolerating unorthodox lifestyles requires no sacrifice from taxpayers; supporting the welfare state does. People who glorify personal sacrifice hardly qualify as "permissive." Similarly, the views of the liberal social critics who denounce luxury and "conspicuous consumption" obviously do not qualify as expressions of self-indulgence or hedonism.

For their part, journalists often imply that activists who complain that the government is not exercising enough authority (i.e., spending enough social welfare money) are heroic dissenters, simply because they protest and complain. The media also make it appear that people who think of rights as government-provided entitlements rather than guarantees of freedom are daring rebels simply because they speak of rights. History books regularly refer to devout believers in big government as "foes of bigness," a common error. The New York Times' obituary of the famous writer and socialist H.G. Wells (August 14, 1946) declared that he had dreamed of a utopia without parliaments, politics, police, prisons, or private wealth. This sounds like anarchy. But the obituary also revealed that Wells had longed for a world government! He was against whiskbrooms not because he disliked whiskbrooms, but because he wanted to use a vacuum cleaner instead.

The 1960s was a time of rebellion about authority, but due to the boisterousness of radical politics, it was mistaken for a rebellion against authority. However, if economic and political issues are viewed as a whole, it was wrong to portray the 1960s generation as rebellious. If the protesters appeared to reject liberal orthodoxy, perhaps the reason was not that their values were new or outlandish, but that their behavior was unruly. Indeed, the 1960s civil rights protesters were pictured as idealists who believed in civil disobedience, because they used it to further their cause. But for employers to refuse now to enforce racial quotas would also be civil disobedience, and one cannot imagine such protesters upholding that right in this instance. When "the powerless" reach the point where their proposals attain the force of law, their beliefs — with amazing speed — stop being disobedient and rally to absolute compliance.

When members of the far Left are charged with a crime, their supporters always cry "trumped-up charge." But when the same government indicts a corporation for a white collar crime, the cries about "trumped-up charges" are absent, the same activists accept the government's case implicitly, and punishment is demanded. Rapists and thieves should be absolved because of their socio-economic hardships, but corporate polluters should be imprisoned.

Similarly, universities have long been wary of federal authorities such as the FBI, denying them access to faculty files. Official attempts to obtain this information were typically met with outraged resistance. But when the Department of Health, Education and Welfare sought to document allegations of racial discrimination and demanded access to such records, faculties were silent.

When Professor Marcuse advocated denying free speech to the welfare state's opponents in his essay “Repressive Tolerance,” he showed that such paternalistic authority was spared from being rejected — or even questioned — by the leftist temper of the time. The sixties' ethos was more a friend to authority than an enemy. This authority was as safe from 1960s turbulence as if it were attending a policemen's ball.

Therefore, a good litmus test for self-described "anarchists" is to remind them that with no government, there could be no welfare, no Head Start programs, no Social Security, no prospect of "free" health care, and no gun control. Tell them this and watch how quickly their "anarchism" disappears.

Political Theory, Humanities, Language, Academia, Histo

Read more articles by Allan Levite