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.
Read the rest of this piece at Aaron Renn Substack.
Aaron M. Renn is an opinion-leading urban analyst, consultant, speaker and writer on a mission to help America's cities and people thrive and find real success in the 21st century. He focuses on urban, economic development and infrastructure policy in the greater American Midwest. He also regularly contributes to and is cited by national and global media outlets, and his work has appeared in many publications, including the The Guardian, The New York Times and The Washington Post.
Photo: Tony Webster/Wikimedia, CC BY-SA 2.0
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