“Civilization,” H.L. Mencken wrote in 1918, “grows more and more maudlin and hysterical; especially under democracy it tends to degenerate into a mere combat of crazes; the whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, most of them imaginary.”

The more things change, the more they stay the same. A century later, American politics seems almost entirely centered around such hobgoblins.

Immigrants (especially “unvetted” immigrants).

Drugs (especially fentanyl, but pretty much anything purchased without a prescription).

Sex trafficking (which seems to consist of pretty much anyone buying, or selling, sex, known as “the world’s oldest profession” for a reason).

Moral panic — defined on Wikipedia as “a widespread feeling of fear that some evil person or thing threatens the values, interests, or well-being of a community or society” — has become our chief political currency.

It’s in the driver’s seat.

It has the wheel.

And it manifests as a form of puritanism, also conveniently defined by Mencken: “The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.”

We can’t have that! Something must be done! There oughtta be a law! And the laws always  come down less to prohibition than to permission.

You can cross an imaginary line on the ground if you’ve been “vetted” and received a “visa.”

You can get high if you have permission from a doctor (who got permission from someone else to be a doctor).

You can have some fun in the sack if you pay for a marriage license or buy someone dinner and drinks, but not if you cut out the middlemen.

As a long-time libertarian, I naturally oppose any laws that forbid or regulate voluntary, peaceful actions undertaken by and between consenting adults.

I’ve come across many complex arguments for that position. I’ve made quite a few of those arguments myself. But more and more, I see it as a simple matter in both its both moral and practical aspects.

We don’t live in anything resembling a free society. Most of us don’t want to. We’ve let politicians use our irrational fear of Mencken’s hobgoblins turn us into, for all practical purposes, Mencken’s puritans — and that puritanism, in turn, generates new hobgoblins on demand to keep the merry-go-round turning.

The cycle is an ongoing and recurring feature of history. It has its ebbs and flows. It never goes away completely, but it comes on more strongly at some times than others.

At the moment, it’s at the worst I’ve seen it in my five decades or so of being old enough to observe it. The 1970s and 1980s had their down sides, but they were far more free (and far less irrational) than the 2020s.

How to we turn the tide and get things flowing in the other direction?

Instead of regaling you with schemes for panarchy, pleas for repealing this or that law, etc., let me propose a four-word position (which I got from “dL,” a pseudonymous commenter on my blog, years ago) that, if widely adopted, would make America a much better place to live.

The four words are: “Don’t need your permission.”

If an action doesn’t violate the rights of others, you shouldn’t need anyone else’s permission to do it.

If an action does violate the rights of others, no one can rightfully give you permission to do it anyway.

Everything else, including the entire body of libertarian political theory, is just details.

Anything else, including the entirety of political theory justifying the rule of some by others, is just excuses.

Act accordingly.

Thomas L. Knapp (X: @thomaslknapp | Bluesky: @knappster.bsky.social | Mastodon: @knappster) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

In a January 31 Texas special election to fill a vacant state Senate seat, union official Taylor Rehmet beat conservative political activist Leigh Wambsganss by 14 points — in a district where voters picked Donald Trump for president by 17 points only a little over a year ago.

It’s the latest of election victories boosting Democrats’ hopes for a “blue wave” this November and sending Republican political strategists into full-blown panic over the prospect of losing control of one or both houses of Congress.

Even if you’re convinced that the right electoral outcomes can really change the trajectory of events, though, it’s a little early to start celebrating — or mourning.

As Harold Wilson once pointed out, “a week is a long time in politics.”

The midterm congressional elections are, as I write this, 38 weeks away.

A lot can change in 38 weeks. Only 22 weeks separated Abraham Lincoln’s election in November of 1860 from the Confederate bombardment of Fort Sumter in 1861. Only 33 weeks separated George Bush’s inauguration in January of 2001 from the 9/11 attacks.

Events of much less long-term import have their effects as well.

Yes, the party in power historically tends to lose congressional seats in midterm elections. Sometimes a few, sometimes more. Beyond that obvious likelihood, trying to predict the mood of the electorate nine months out is a fool’s errand.

I can, however, confidently predict how much will change as a direct result of the elections’ outcomes, whatever those outcomes may be:

Not much.

Aside from a few firebrands and gadflies — some of whom may even get lucky at the polls — both parties will spend the next nine months tacking toward a wholly imaginary “center.”

We’ll hear a lot, from both sides of the aisle, about not throwing out the baby with the bathwater (even if, as Harry Browne suggested, it’s Rosemary’s Baby).

On immigration enforcement, tariffs, healthcare, you name it, we’ll see a bunch of proposals for tweaking, rather than truly disrupting, business as usual. The only reliable way to tell the two sides apart will be to listen to them yell “fascist!” and “commie!” at each other in between the echoes.

And hey, who knows? Maybe a few of those tweaks will actually get implemented in 2027. The Titanic will still be sinking, but by golly the deck chairs will be nicely arranged for just a little while longer.

Politics won’t get us out of the mess that politics got us into.

But once the celebration that’s already prematurely cranking up ends, we’ll hear endless explanations of, and excuses for, why it didn’t work last time, why it didn’t work this time, and why it will no doubt, for sure, pinky promise work next time if we just keep on voting really, really hard.

Thomas L. Knapp (X: @thomaslknapp | Bluesky: @knappster.bsky.social | Mastodon: @knappster) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

When David Brooks claims that his preferred “moderate conservative political philosophy” is in 2026 “so fantastically successful … that moderate Republicans are now the dominant force in American politics,” his intentional sarcasm is clear before the fourth paragraph of his final New York Times column (“Time to Say Goodbye,” February 1): “I’m kidding.”

Even if a reader missed out on the decades of Brooks’s commentary as resolutely as literally-frozen-in-time Futurama protagonist Philip J. Fry, its remainder would beg for the response of Fry’s snarky robotic sidekick Bender: “Oh wait, you’re serious. Let me laugh even harder.”

The very next paragraph, Brooks sees “a weird market failure” failing to provide programs addressing “the fundamental questions of life” (like Cosmos and Star Trek?) and asking “Does America still have a unifying national narrative?” without specifying when one ever existed.

To Brooks, the 2003 of his earliest op-eds was a time before widespread suspicions “that experts are not to be trusted, that elites don’t care about regular people.”  He should have heeded the line in The Matrix Reloaded, as applicable to those thronging theaters that year as its in-universe insurgents, on how “we well know that the reason most of us are here is because of our affinity for disobedience.”  A “faith that capitalism when left alone would produce broad and stable prosperity” would have had to explain the long-burst dot-com bubble well before the housing bubble followed (both inflated by the political patronage implied to have left it alone).

The twentieth century is at least distant enough by now to understand how Brooks’s non-total recall pigeonholes the Sixties counterculture as one “less conformist … more creative than the one that came before, though also one that was more atomized” — not one that Reason magazine’s Jesse Walker could quip “gave us both drum solos and drum circles.”

It’s even easier to recount the turn-of-the-twentieth-century Progressives moving beyond the nineteenth’s supposed “social Darwinist culture, with its individualistic, survival-of-the-fittest emphasis” that would eventually recur in “four decades of hyperindividualism” culminating in the “nihilism personified” of Donald Trump.  After all, even most historians of the period ignore how many of the Progressives, rather than seeking Brooks’s “antidote to nihilism,” remained advocates of the Henry George for whom “all that is necessary for social regeneration is included in the motto of those Russian patriots sometimes called Nihilists—’Land and Liberty!'” Both sides of Georgism derived from the Herbert Spencer who insisted that far from endorsing or excusing “the rebarbarizing effects of the struggle for existence carried on by brute force,” he “had chosen the expression ‘survival of the fittest’ rather than survival of the best because the latter phrase did not cover the facts.”

Brooks acknowledges that “the Iraq war shattered America’s confidence in its own power” (while omitting his role in promoting it).  Cynics who seek not “permission to embrace brutality” but what the Council for Democratic and Secular Humanism’s Tim Madigan calls “an enjoyment of worldly pleasures, and a disdain for worldly power” could warn future pundits about similar blunders.

New Yorker Joel Schlosberg is a senior news analyst at The William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism.