Former Sen. Gary Hart was carrying on in predictable fashion in a recent fund-raising email for Sen. Michael Bennet, sounding a lurid warning about radicals on the right and the “struggle for the soul of our nation,” when his appeal veered off in a most unexpected direction.
“This radical movement would guarantee budget deficits forever through its tax cut policies for the rich, military intervention as a replacement for diplomacy, and government intrusion into the lives of our citizens,” Hart declared (my italics). So Hart (and, by extension, the liberal donors he addresses) thinks “government intrusion into the lives of our citizens” is a bad thing?
Who knew?
Certainly they don’t consider such intrusion regrettable in health care. There, they insist, government has the power to order every citizen to purchase a commercial product — a mandate that will, if upheld by the Supreme Court, “fundamentally alter the relationship of citizen and state,” according to Georgetown law professor Randy Barnett.
Indeed, it is difficult to think of any area of economic activity in which liberals generally support less government intrusion than their opponents, from property rights to trade, from taxes to regulation, from professional licensing to commercial advertising.
Many liberals did deplore a Supreme Court ruling five years ago that the federal government could prosecute sick people who grow pot under state laws solely for themselves, while many conservatives hypocritically applauded this expansion of federal supremacy, but this was an exception to the rule.
As for other policy areas, there was a time when conservatives favored more censorship than liberals — against radicals who burned the flag, for example, or of publications deemed pornographic — but those days are past.
For several decades, the most active enemies of free expression have resided on the left — imposing speech codes on campuses, penalizing the motives of criminals through hate-speech laws and even censoring speech in political campaigns. Revealingly, the left went ballistic this year when the high court ruled the government couldn’t bar a nonprofit corporation from releasing a political film via video-on-demand and buying TV ads to promote it.
And we haven’t even mentioned today’s single most potent rationale for government meddling in our lives: to reduce greenhouse emissions. Politicians are now determined to dictate not only the kinds of cars we drive and appliances we buy, but the size of our homes as well. Even our bathing habits are not off limits. In May, the Department of Energy fined four companies for selling spa-like showerheads that the government believes use too much water and heat.
To be sure, many conservatives seem uncritically willing to sacrifice personal freedom in the “war on drugs” (as do many liberals) and in the effort to hunt down terrorists and deport illegal immigrants. Conservatives also tended to support George W. Bush’s shameful policy of detaining indefinitely and without charge U.S. citizens suspecting of being “enemy combatants.”
Maybe Hart believes that Tea Party enthusiasts are plotting to impose a Taliban-like theocracy on us — a popular charge by left activists regarding the religious right. Now that would require nightmarish government intrusion, but actual support for such an agenda is virtually non-existent.
Meanwhile, in the real world, government’s urge to micromanage private affairs is so comprehensive that the administration will soon be dictating how calorie counts appear on drive-up menus. So, yes, this election really is about government intrusion, if not quite in the way that a former senator imagines.
E-mail Vincent Carroll at vcarroll@denverpost.com.
