In a day after lament Lileks opines:
[…] I thought about a friend who’s pro-small business, pro-military, pro-religious freedom – of course! This is America! – and she will vote for Obama. She believes that the state should take more property from people who die with X amount of money in the bank and give it to other people, and while she’s not exactly sure about what X should be, this is necessary because of Fairness.
That does seem to be the dominant idea in the land these days, no? The State shall have the power to do X if the objective is Fairness. The details – and the actual result – are less important. If you believe the State should do these things, why, it stands to reason that it can, and and hence any limitation of the powers of the State is a mulish obstruction of a better world.
Good people do not vote against such things.
Later in the piece Mr. Lileks nicely captures the core of my lament:
But. I see the world through skewed eyes, I know. It strikes me from time to time that this is an exceptional nation, as flawed as any human endeavor, but unique in human history: a society whose foundational concepts are not rooted in blood or clan, or impossibly airy proclamations of transnational brotherhood and human rights granted by, and subject to revision by, a council of our betters who regard the governance of man as a blade that scrapes everyone level. Rather, we were devoted to something rare in human history: liberty. (I use the past tense because the word’s been replaced by Freedom, which has come to mean The Fun Things, and also means freedom from being judged for any reason.)
I disagree only insofar as I believe Fairness has replaced Liberty in this country. It has become the highest virtue according to those who would turn up their noses at the quixotic few who still cling to their silly notions of idealism, such as “Liberty.” We should, these nose-turners insist, cast our favor instead toward the directives of Fairness dictated by the State. You want to ask these people, “Now who’s being quixotic?”
It is tempting to think a Romney presidency might have championed the goals of the quixotic few, those of us like Mr. Lileks who see the world through “skewed” eyes, but I really don’t think it would have. Knowing there was never really a choice is truly something to lament about.