An Erosion Of Civil Liberties
Must America present herself as having an implicit over-ruling stake in the managing all of the world affairs while dismantling the very system of local self-governance at home?
By framersqool:
Though I hardly regard myself as any 'libertarian' in the currently-presented sense, every now and then, I encounter an essay in Reason Magazine that underscores many of my ideas and ideals on what this American experiment in the constitutional rule of law ought to mean.
There has been a theme coalescing in my thoughts over the past year or so. It has much deeper roots; in both my own experiences and the various political contexts of my life. There is a need to examine the direct historical correlation between the expansion and maintenance of American foreign-policy powers and the continual (if too often seemingly affordable) deterioration of Americans' own domestic liberties.
This article in Reason Magazine does not really touch on the other side of this equation, the home front. Still, it represents my overall 'isolationism,' if you will. An observation that America's now firmly-entrenched position states the world requires, and always will require, an America presenting herself as having an implicit over-ruling stake in managing all world affairs. The very position which has been enabling the DC establishment for generations to dismantle the very system of local self-governance at home and individual liberty.
"Federalism," to the unschooled, is a term easily misconstrued as its own opposite. It does not mean that a federal government is to be some over-arching dominant power over all things American at all times and in all instances. The very title 'united states' postulates that, among these states, there is both a requirement and a right for each to be governed as each may determine best for itself. Say what you will about 'States' rights' or the lengthy and ignominious chronicles of State governments being corrupt and ineffectual throughout our history. Still, the alternative is a central and unchallenged singular national regime. One for whom American lives, liberties, and pursuits of happiness are little more than administrative obstacles to sustaining a vast apparatus of pure bureaucratic power that rules, with or without law, as best suits its own murky and capricious interests.
My learning process over recent years has led me to conclude that this continual, mostly innocuous-looking incursion of federal authority has been done mostly, just as in the case of the Title IX/Dear Colleague wars of recent history, by means of offering lavish federal funding, and then subsequently adding new conditions to continuing to receive it, as Washington culture's wind-blown political whims and fads might come to require.
And now, the new crusade to Washingtonize all things public-sector nationwide is to be found in the latest be-all-end-all of threats to the general welfare, known as 'cybersecurity.'
The entire human experience has been turned over giddily and thoughtlessly to a vast mechanism of printed circuits without which ordinary human life is now regarded as inconceivable. Continual threats to America's IT systems from multiple actors would inevitably, by 2022, with a war raging, be an easy selling point for continual and expanding federal intervention to protect them.
And, by all appearances thus far, the rights of the people be damned.
What I am trying to develop in my thoughts these days is how to confront better the question of what it means that I am an American citizen. In addition, finding where the limits might be, in terms of what I will allow like everyone else in my country seems willing to, and what I will have to oppose regardless of what it costs me. The one thing I have never been willing to trade in is my freedom, as this rarely turns out to be a good trade.
framersqool is an aging bachelor of no particular consequence. He is in command of more opinions than facts (but occasionally the facts, or the lack thereof) and can make a thing seem worth writing about.