Our Puritanical Despots

Ninety-eight years ago, the inestimable H.L. Mencken pithily defined puritanism as:

The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.

Shortly after this quip appeared in print, the Pittsburgh Press printed a letter to the editor, in which a certain B. J. Cannon responded to the blue laws and other restrictions imposed by local mandarins:

What concern is it of theirs if I wish to attend a movie on Sunday, and thus go dashing pell mell to damnation? What care they if I enjoy myself while I may? Yet they do. They are obsessed by the haunting fear that someone, somewhere may be happy. After all, more than half of us have little belief in hell. Surely we have some rights and privileges.

Mencken's aphorism popped into my head as I read an op-ed by Michigan Congressman Bill Huizenga excoriating Gary Gensler, the chair of the Securities and Exchange Commission, for proposing a series of sweeping changes that would eviscerate individual investors' ability to trade stocks in the retail market.

This particular bit of freedom-crushing revealed to me a pattern in this administration and today's culture: Our self-purported Best-and-Brightest don't much care for letting the unwashed masses live their lives as they wish. Like the most controlling of helicopter parents, they want to manage our decisions down to where we can only choose what they allow. Or, as the late, great Bill Hicks shared:

You are free!.. to do as they tell you!

People whose companies provide 401Ks are already stuck with Biden-era rules allowing (encouraging?) fund managers to consider ESG in the investments made on participants' behalf. Hint: adding any consideration into the stew that isn't "maximize return for investors" is going to produce a lower return for investors.

The same goes for public pensions, with state comptrollers routinely using the power of the funds they're supposed to manage to maximum return for political leverage and social-justice, ESG, DEI, and other non-fiduciary purposes.

That's just your money. Countless other individual choices are under attack. Gas stoves (and heat) are the latest poster child for over-nannying, but they merely join an already-long list. Vaping, menthol cigarettes, raw milk and unpasteurized cheese, gasoline engine vehicles, plastic shopping bags, plastic straws, foie gras, and that's just the start.

Your words and thoughts are also anathema to them, as any regular reader of this blog is aware.

As are your gun rights, your freedom of religion, your mobility, your freedom to live where you want and how you want, and all sorts of other individual life choices.

All these infringements, we are told, are to make our society better (by their definition, of course) and to protect us from harm (though the biggest harmer stares them in the face whenever they look into a mirror), but I cannot help concluding that they simply dread other people's liberty.

Progressivism: The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be free.

The saddest thing about all this is that liberals of not-too-yore were at the fore of rejecting the anti-liberty views of the conservative Right. Blue laws such as the “no movies on Sunday” referenced at the head of this article were born of religious dogma, no matter an individual’s belief or non-belief re a particular rule set. Same for many other liberties, including speech and bodily autonomy (as in, the government has no business telling me what I may or may not eat, drink, smoke, or otherwise put into my body). It’s as if the Right’s loosening of our corset strings invited the Left to tighten them again.