"As I would not be a slave, so I would not be a master. This expresses my idea of democracy."
If a man is not a master of himself, however, he will be a slave . . . to his passions, which include the desire to rule others.
In The War Between The States we exchanged the one tyranny over the Negro for a still more universal and thorough-going tyranny of the self.
The only free man who exists is the one who can say No to himself.
Seen here:
The political questions are not unimportant, but they pale in comparison to the importance of the moral and religious aspect of our lives. As Frank Meyer put it in his book In Defense of Freedom, “in the moral realm freedom is only a means whereby men can pursue their proper end, which is virtue.”
This is a defect of that poor thing, the libertarian mind, which compartmentalizes reality into aspects, repudiating, with the rest of modernity, the pre-Englightenment understanding that the moral realm is the only meaningful realm inhabited by humanity.
Perhaps the more important defect of this libertarian mind is viewing freedom as a means or instrumentality, rather than as a result of virtue.
In truth, freedom is a condition, a by-product, a sign. It is subsidiary and not the main show. You can't wrangle enough of it and produce virtue with it. That's putting the cart before the horse, as we used to say. In fact quite the opposite. An excess of freedom makes a monster, because men are first and foremost not angels. The excess of freedom in the United States is the precondition for its licentiousness, making it the world capital for obesity, indolence, drug abuse, empty celebrity, sexual perversion, immorality, violence, entertainment, self-loathing, and a host of other ills. Eventually such a people tyrannized by themselves will require an actual tyrant to rule them.
You will not have a good society without good people, as Meyer did recognize as parents in the 1960s gave up being good and expected "institutions" such as schools and churches to take over their responsibility to be so.
This failure of nerve already had the country firmly in its grip by Meyer's time. Today we see the same shirking phenomenon but now writ even larger, as we expect a Trump, a political party, the Conservative Movement Inc., the Federalist Society, the rule of law, the police, the courts, or constitutional parchment to fix what only the individual can fix.
Only you can fix what is wrong. You must, as Bill Buckley once famously said, "Cancel your own goddam subscription". You can. You must. Or it's over.
If you don't the woke will fix it for you. The current rage for and of "woke" is nothing if not a response of the young "nones" to this libertarian misunderstanding. Their chief enemy is freedom. The woke see all too clearly that American culture is incapable of saying No, which is the only true mark of the free man. Instead we think being free means saying Yes, to everything.
And if history is any guide, we'll say Yes to that, too, to the new tyranny of woke.
