Thankful for "Don't Tread on Me" Conservatives
They drive me nuts — but they’re the last line of defense between us and soft totalitarianism
Tomorrow is Thanksgiving here in the US, one of our best holidays.
This year I want to express thanks for a group of people who often drive me nuts, the folk libertarian, get-off-my-lawn, don’t-tread-on-me conservatives.
These are the people who form the core of the populist base. They are suspicious of government and institutions. No matter how little money the government spends, it’s always too much. No matter how low the taxes, they are always too high. No matter what the change or initiative, they seem to oppose it.
They are ornery and defiant and generally make it difficult for government and society to get things done. They very often oppose things I’d like to see, which frustrates me to no end.
But they might be the only thing standing between us and the kinds of Orwellian regimes that exist in places like the UK.
As you know, I’m a big fan of the sociologist E. Digby Baltzell, and his study of the American upper class and elite. He viewed the old WASP (White Anglo-Saxon Protestant) Establishment as necessary to avoid excesses in which society might devolve into a bureaucratic despotism, corporate feudalism, or charismatic Caesarism.
His student and collaborator Howard Schneiderman said of this, “A moral force within the putatively amoral world of politics and power elites, an establishment of leaders drawn from upper‑class families, is the final protector of freedom in modern democratic societies.”
That establishment is long gone. Today, the final bulwark of freedom in American society is that ornery folk libertarian conservative who simply refuses to go along with encroachment on his personal liberty.
Multiple times in the last decade, there was a full-spectrum institutional push to impose top down controls on society that, if successful, would have created a mechanism for essentially ruling the public from beyond democracy.
One could think of Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign, where essentially every institution in America lined up to oppose him in a united front. Even within movement conservative institutions that I know about, few people supported Trump.
Post-2016, there was a public-private push to censor the Internet that was at least partially successful for a period of time.
Every institution in society went all in on BLM and other aspects of woke. People were getting fired for questioning it. Cowardly, terrorized leaders refused to speak out when people - sometimes even their personal friends - were cancelled unjustly. Broadly speaking, every aspect of America was being subjected to regime of DEI, willingly or not.
The Covid response led to rule by decree for months on end, with attempts to force people to take vaccines against their will.
If the Covid lockdown push had been fully successful, if the DEI push had worked, America would now be much closer to a European Union like entity, in which all the major decisions of society are made by Brussels-like bureaucrats and incumbent elites who make decisions and operate outside of and above democracy. Self-government, and even a great measure of freedom would have effectively been abolished.
By and large, the people who resisted these and prevented them from working were those folk libertarian populist types who simply refused to comply, even at great personal cost to themselves.
I met a guy earlier this year who isn’t a classic populist personality, but operated in that mode during Covid. He was from California, but was living in an off the beaten path small Midwestern city. I asked what brought him there. It turned out he was a TV anchor, and was hired to be the main anchor of a local network affiliate there. But when I met him, he was working for a non-profit. It turned out that his network demanded all employees get the vaccine as a condition of their job. He refused and was fired.
TV news anchor jobs are incredibly desirable and very hard to get. But this guy threw that away in order to stand firm for his own freedom.
I’m a pro-vaccine person who happily got the Covid vax, but I can recognize that the freedoms I have to do things like write what I want here are in part made possible by guys like that. We all owe them a debt of gratitude for our own freedoms.
The same applies to some extent to similar people on the left. The “resistance” types who say that they will never go along with Trump can play something of the same role. Though unlike the folk libertarians who really do want the government to leave people alone, those on the left sometimes harbor authoritarian ambitions of their own.
Too much of this type of person can also be bad for society. You don’t have to like Trump, or the things people are using their freedom of speech to say on an uncensored internet, or believe that the anti-vaccine movement is a good thing.
But we should recognize than in the absence of the don’t-tread-on-me conservative, we’d be living in a much less free society. And for that, I’m very thankful.
Cover image: Tony Webster/Wikimedia, CC BY-SA 2.0
Like you Aaron, I find folk libertarianism a hindrance but you are right that it is also a bulwark and I needed to hear that. Great piece.
Good thoughts. I think it is healthy not only to have friendships with people like this (many of my friends are like this), but also to see this ingrained in the American political fray from the earliest times in our Nation.
I recently finished a biography of Alexander Hamilton, and one is struck by the themes that push and pull within American political, religious, and economic life. On the one hand, we really do need something that unites us. We need strong institutions that people can rely upon and trust. Hamilton was a political and organizational genius and put some things in place that we benefit from to this day. At the same time, we need some of that impulse that pushes back on the establishment and keeps men honest. I think our political system was originally designed toward that end, but there is also a healthy, broad segment of the populace that pushes back when power is consolidated, and institutions serve elite interests rather than those of the people.
It's messy, but like you, I prefer a population that would never comply with a British parliamentary system that would impose a one-size-fits-all solution as much as we're looked down upon for having "backward" elements in this country, our collective liberty is served by those who just won't buy into that kind of system.
I will hasten to add that it is these salt-of-the-earth types that provide the bulk of our military and defend our right to be smart or stupid.