Loathing Liberty

Bruce Bawer: Hating America.

One excerpt:

Hutton is a true statist, the sort of person who feels less than fully comfortable in societies where the government fails to make its presence sufficiently felt: “In a world that is wholly private,” he writes, “we lose our bearings; deprived of any public anchor, all we have are our individual subjective values to guide us.” Part and parcel of this philosophy (which might well be straight out of Mao’s Little Red Book) is an enthusiasm for, as he puts it rather clunkily, “publicly owned TV stations with a mandate to provide a universal public service as guarantors that ordinary citizens will have access to core news and comment delivered as objectively as possible.” In other words, the way to ensure objective reporting is to put the government in charge! Hutton is dismayed that the U.S. spends too little money on public TV and that “only 2.2 percent of viewers” watch it; by contrast, he’s delighted with “European governments and the EU,” because they’re “aggressive in their regulation of broadcasting content” and ban, for example, “racist expression.” He favors, in short, allowing government bureaucrats to decide what is and isn’t racist (or, for that matter, sexist or homophobic) and to punish transgressors. It’s breathtaking to see a writer so eager to quash freedom of speech.

Read the entire piece.

Comments

[Laura(southernxyl)]

In 1984, didn't Winston have a TV he couldn't turn off? And he had to exercise every day with the exercise program, and they could see him and make sure he was really exercising? I guess if the EU got just a little more aggressive ...

[MikeT]

Some people are just like herd animals. Despite their pretensions to the contrary, they are just not comfortable acting on their own, outside of the safety of the group.