Human Dignity
Sometimes it feels like American culture is going through the spin cycle of a washing machine. Facts aren’t facts (“stop the steal”). Free speech means speech codes. Nondiscrimination means discrimination. Rights are a sword against others’ rights. Achievement is unfair. Human judgment is judgmental. Individuality is identity. Tradition is suspect. The rule of law is a minefield of legal risks, not a framework for social trust. Freedom is compliance.
Finding our balance is hard, especially when centrifugal forces have spun many Americans into opposing camps that loathe each other—generally, MAGA vs identity zealots. Pundits tend to analyze the divide as differences of economic needs and/or social values. But something else is also at work, causing a kind of cultural nervous breakdown.
Americans have been uprooted from their ownership of daily choices—unable to make a difference by doing things our own ways. Instead, America has become the compliance society. Do it this way. Do it that way. Is your paperwork in order? Measure your words carefully—you wouldn’t want to offend anyone. This could be our new national motto: Don’t be yourself.
Self-respect requires individual agency. We need freedom to act on our perceptions and intuitions, to take responsibility, and to be spontaneous, which Hannah Arendt considered the “most elementary manifestation of human freedom.” Today’s overload of mandatory protocols yanks us out of our intuitions: Just follow the rules. Without room for individual initiative, there can be no self-respect. Tocqueville considered “freedom less necessary in great things than in little ones...Subjection in minor affairs...does not drive men to resistance, but it crosses them at every turn, till...their spirit is gradually broken and their character enervated.”
In his recent newsletters and essays drawn from Everyday Freedom, Philip Howard has emphasized how human disempowerment by post-1960s governing structures causes public failure. In a lead essay about Everyday Freedom in First Things, Rusty Reno explains how the cultural harms from individual disempowerment are probably even more corrosive to our society, and must be replaced by framework that honors human responsibility: “We’re human beings, not machines, which means that we’re finite [and] imperfect...A culture of freedom champions virtue and holds accountable those in positions of authority. But it’s not utopian. Everyday freedom will never be perfect, and trying to make it so has brought us only mistrust, disquiet, and pessimism.”
Francis Fukuyama wrote a companion piece to Philip's recent essay in American Purpose, “Letting Leaders Lead.” In “Seeking Authority Rather Than Authoritarians,” he writes: “Philip’s argument is an important one that needs to be made. I just hope that people will engage what he has actually said…Getting people to listen and think about these ideas is the first challenge to be overcome.”
In his Substack Sanity Clause, former TIME columnist Joe Klein calls Everyday Freedom “short, sweet and smart,” adding: “I await the President—Democrat or Whatever Comes After Republican—who takes this to heart.”
AEI’s Kevin Kosar reviewed Everyday Freedom for The Hill, writing: “Everyday Freedom makes a persuasive case that an increasingly legalistic and rule-focused society is a less free society. Rules crowd out common sense, leaving us atomized and suspicious of one another.”