“Freedom? Freedom? That is a worship word. Yang worship. You will not speak it.” — Cloud William, after he hears Kirk say “freedom” (“The Omega Glory,” Star Trek TOS)
A large faction of Americans inhabit a cult of many colors, just not of the race, color, or national origin kind. In some ways, the United States is devolving into the world of Omega IV, on which people fought the biological war Earth avoided. The Yangs, an analogue of Yankees, have over generations forgotten the meaning of their “holies.” Words like freedom and phrases like “We the People” have been reduced to empty tribal markers. Shibboleths without meaning.
Into John Locke’s “life, liberty, and property,” Thomas Jefferson substituted “pursuit of happiness,” another Locke formulation, when he wrote the Declaration of Independence. Still, the defense of property for many conservatives remained a bedrock principle. Property = happiness. “Pursuit of happiness” just sounded loftier in Jefferson’s rendering.
David Frum remarks on the erosion of the defense of property among American conservatives. Older ideals have lost their meaning. What once were principles now are contingent, to be marshaled when convenient and ignored when they are not.
Several red-leaning states have over the last couple of decades passed laws limiting the rights of property owners to control their premises. Business owners, specifically, have been banned from prohibiting firearms on their premises. Not just inside them, but in parking lots they own. The rights of gun-owners to carry weapons in their vehicles trump the rights of property owners to ban them from private property.
The laws were leading indicators of a trend in which radical (not rugged) individualism has supplanted mutual respect and deference to one’s neighbors. Frum explains that first with guns, then with social media, and now with proposed “vaccine passports” for admission to private businesses, conservatives insist that when in conflict their individual rights are superior to others’ property rights. Republicans will muster state power to enforce them. Because freedom means my rights trumps yours. Especially, my right to trample yours.
“But the point is not to win the fight,” Frum writes, “or even really to fight the fight. The point is to announce the fight, and to keep raging about it, even if you do not in fact fight it very hard.” It’s all about the look. As the last four years taught Republicans, bluster sells:
To appease those cultural blocs, Republican politicians must be willing to sacrifice everything, including what used to be the party’s foundational principles. To protect the gun, or to avoid contradicting the delusions of anti-vaccine paranoiacs, property rights must give way, freedom to operate a business must yield. The QAnon-curious Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene expressed the new mentality when she took to Facebook to denounce vaccine passports as “corporate communism.” It sounded crazy. But if you understand that she interprets communism to mean “any interference in the right of people like me to do whatever we want, regardless of the rights of others”—then, yeah, the property rights of corporations will indeed look to her like a force of communism.
A sizable minority of Americans want to use airplanes belonging to others, theme parks belonging to others, sports stadiums belonging to others—without concession to the health of others or the property rights of owners. With guns, with COVID-19, with tech, the new post-Trump message from the post-Trump GOP is: Private property is socialism; state expropriation is freedom. It’s a strange doctrine for a party supposedly committed to liberty and the Constitution, but here we are.
“Logic clearly dictates that the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few,” Spock says in The Wrath of Khan. Among the freedomistas that spirit is replaced by a warped idea of freedom without responsibility and by a narcissist’s insistence on having every want.