She’s the blushing girl from Flushing / the Nanny named Bloomberg

The New Republic has always been one of the loudest voices for technocratic, elitist, big-government liberalism in the United States. Its founder, Herbert Croly, summed up the magazine’s ideal with the phrase “Hamiltonian means to achieve Jeffersonian ends”, but the America he helped to create is decidedly lacking in Jeffersonianism. It comes as no surprise, then, that his magazine is cheerleading the latest manifestation of Rooseveltian progressivism – the nanny state. In an article entitled ‘Nanny Dearest: In defense of Bloomberg’s war on soda’, Timothy Noah lays out the case for supporting the ban on soft drink containers larger than sixteen ounces by the Mayor of New York and darling of the professional centrists, Michael Bloomberg.

Noah’s argument goes something like this: the 1960s left opposed ‘paternalism’ (whether it be state, corporate, religious, etc.), the right adopted this rhetoric and used it to justify ‘free market’ economic policies, therefore modern-day liberals should support the nanny state because right-wing libertarians talk about freedom. (He even adds a quote from a Fox News journalist opposing Bloomberg’s measure.) He singles out selling organs, drugs, and prostitution as things he wants the state to ban or discourage, overlooking the good arguments for legalising all three.

The scariest part of the article is where Noah tries to argue that his support for nanny-statism is different from social conservatism. “I disagree with conservative aspirations to install the nanny state in my bedroom, but I wouldn’t necessarily begrudge the state its power to play moral cop elsewhere,” he writes. The problem with this is that using the state to change people’s diets is social conservatism, regardless of whether its loudest supporters situate themselves on the left of the political spectrum. Strip clubs, for example, are equally illegal in Saudi Arabia (due to it being an Islamic theocracy) and in Iceland (where they were banned by a centre-left government on feminist grounds); what matters is not the motivation, but the fact that freedom is being denied. Similarly, the fact that today’s experiments with taxes on alcopops are not driven by the nativist prejudices which fuelled historical Prohibition doesn’t make them any less authoritarian.

For a social and civil libertarian like myself, Noah’s entire mindset is troubling. To him, freedom needs to be thrown under the bus whenever a public health problem arises that technocratic liberals want to solve. (And need I mention what horrors arose during the twentieth-century whenever the do-gooders decided that they knew what was best for the public’s health – eugenics, sterilisation, the system of chemical castration which drove Alan Turing to suicide…) To Noah, the state should “play moral cop” and “define the nation’s collective values”. And no matter how much he distances himself from conservatives, ascribing those role to the state plays right into their hands: the idea of the state as moral policeman and definer of collective values gave America laws against flag-burning, prayer in public schools, anti-abortion laws, discrimination against LGBTs, bans on interracial sex and marriage, and the Arizona and Alabama immigration laws.

The nanny state is simply incompatible with the values of 1776 and 1789. Not only does it directly infringe on the freedom of the individual to make her own moral, lifestyle, and dietary choices, but its existence is owed to the anti-humanist turn in statecraft which has arisen since the rise of neo-liberalism. The first nanny-state measure could be said to be the legislation enforcing the wearing of seatbelts by the (Liberal) Bolte government in Victoria in 1971, and the phenomenon is most pronounced in those jurisdictions most soaked in neo-liberal ideology: Reagan’s California, Thatcher’s Britain, and Bloomberg’s NYC. The justifications for these measures are always phrased in the language of cutting costs and maximising profits, such as when obese people are spoken of as a drain on the public health care system. If we are to overcome the twentieth century’s plague of authoritarianism and move from the ‘administration of things’ back to the ‘government of men’ that the Enlightenment-era revolutionaries envisaged, the nanny state must be destroyed.