Six decades later, America’s headlines could remain in “America.”

Memorials to Stephen Sondheim didn’t have to search far to find parallels between the musical West Side Story and a United States disunited by class and ethnic strife in 2021.  Sondheim’s lyrics “Everywhere Grime in America, Terrible Time in America” became Jacobin‘s headline for an anniversary retrospective on the 1961 film version two weeks before his passing on November 26.

Meanwhile, current-year academic contentions that “white identity is intrinsic to Western ideas about liberty” may as well have borrowed the couplet “Life is all right in America/if you’re all-white in America.”

Less fashionable are sentiments celebrating the right to be “free to be anything you choose” nearly two decades before Milton Friedman popularized a shorter version of the phrase. In contrast to the rejoinder that this meant a mere freedom “to wait tables and shine shoes,” Friedman documented how economic restraints, rather than their absence, trapped workers in low-paying jobs and kept goods out of reach of consumers.

Sondheim’s paeans to expanded personal options were likewise echoed at the end of the 1960s in Karl Hess’s “libertarian insistence that men be free to spin cables of steel, as well as dreams of smoke.”  Hess noted the emerging libertarian movement’s break with “patriots who sing of freedom but also shout of banners and boundaries.” West Side Story‘s wayward youth, faced with prejudice and legal harassment, refuse to be barred from the “sweet land of liberty” of another song named “America.”

Esquire‘s critic Dwight Macdonald saw West Side Story as replacing a “lively and disrespectful” musical style with a “schmaltzy” one at odds with urban grit. Ironically, the same Macdonald championed the cultural ferment of city-states “riven by faction, stormy with passionate antagonisms” squelched by the “uniformity and agreement” needed for “that achievement of power over other countries that is the great aim of modern statecraft.” As Hess observed in writings like Neighborhood Power, the decentralization of politics to the smallest possible scale need not result in social devolution. Freedom of choice has enough room for all of us.

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

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

1. “All Should Be Free in America” by Joel Schlosberg, Anchorage, Alaska Press, December 3, 2021
2. “All should be free in America” by Joel Schlosberg, Kenosha, Wisconsin News, December 4, 2021
3. “All Should Be Free in America” by Joel Schlosberg, OpEdNews, December 7, 2021
4. “Six decades later, America’s headlines could remain in ‘America.'” by Thomas L. Knapp [sic], The Glasgow [Montana] Courier, December 8, 2021

“Join me,” US Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) tweeted on November 29, “in demanding the #GhislaineMaxwellTrial be public.”

In reply, attorney (and former Libertarian National Committee chair) Nicholas Sarwark tweeted “Is the Congresswoman unaware that all Federal criminal trials are public, as required by our Constitution?”

Mr. Sarwark is correct, but Congresswoman Greene has a point.

The Sixth Amendment specifies that “in all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial.”

Traditionally, that’s been taken to mean that members of the public (and press) may plant their posteriors in seats in the courtroom and watch the proceedings. But don’t bet the ranch on even that seemingly reasonable concession to transparency.  I’ve seen municipal courts get around it by filling the courtroom with a whole day’s worth of defendants, then having a bailiff stop would-be spectators outside the door, claiming there’s only room for those defendants and their attorneys.

Additionally, many courts — including US federal courts such as the one hearing the Maxwell case — either don’t allow, or only selectively allow,  recording and/or broadcast of trials.

As a libertarian, I’m not big on appeals to “there ought to be a law.” Or on agreeing with Marjorie Taylor Greene.

But in this case,  I do agree with her.

It’s 2021, not 1821. Allowing an artist to draw pictures, and a reporter to take notes, for publication in a newspaper is neither necessary nor sufficient to make a trial “public.”

There ought to be a law.

Not a law that applies only to sensational or controversial trials like that of Ghislaine Maxwell, accused of procuring young girls for Jeffrey Epstein’s sexual predations.

A law requiring that all trial proceedings, from the local level to the US Supreme Court, be made “public” for real.

By law, all trial proceedings should be live streamed — audio and video — to publicly accessible platforms, with links to those streams prominently posted on the web sites of the courts in which those proceedings occur.

Just as the availability of everything from tape recorders to photocopiers to social media has extended the reach of the First Amendment, cameras and live streaming platforms can expand the application, and make real the promise, of the Sixth.

Yes, controversial trials will get the most attention. But the ability to see American justice in action at all levels and without filters is a key first step toward making it truly just.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) 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.

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