The New Criterion

It would have been interesting to have had Bill Buckley’s reaction to the implosion of Eliot Spitzer, prosecutorial bully, patronizer of expensive prostitutes, and former governor of New York. We suspect that he would have agreed with a recent article on the website TechCentralStation by the economist Arnold Kling. “It is a shame,” observed Mr. Kling, “that we only laugh at a Spitzer when his secret sex life is revealed to us. Instead of mocking Spitzers for their private foibles, we should be contemptuous of their public pronouncements. Whether it is ‘cleaning up Wall Street’ or ‘giving everyone health care,’ the Spitzers are making extravagant promises that only result in expanded government power.”

Short of dire national emergency, Bill Buckley knew, “expanded government power” is nearly always synonymous with “diminished individual liberty.” Elevated into a consistent policy, it is allied to the kind of collectivism that underwrote the tyranny of Communism. At the center of the totalitarian impulse is the belief that, at bottom, freedom belongs only to the state, that the individual should not be treated as a free actor but rather, as Lenin put it, as “‘a cog and a screw’ of one single great Social-Democratic mechanism.” The Spitzers of the world are, as someone said about the critic Philip Rahv, born-again Leninists. “What socialism implies above all,” said Lenin, “is keeping account of everything.” That is the goal, so prevalent among our most ambitious politicians these days, that requires checking. Keeping track of your health care, disposing of your money, regulating your food and drink and ration of tobacco: there they all are, ready, able, and willing to run your life for you.

The spectacle of Eliot Spitzer’s fall has provided a good deal of tawdry tabloid entertainment. But really, what matters about Spitzer were his actions as a public figure. He recklessly employed the power of the state partly to aggrandize himself, but more dangerously to insinuate state power into areas where it has no business intruding. Probably, few politicians are paid-up members of The Emperors’ Club. But how many patronize that other, more amorphous club of emperors, the one staffed by democratic despots whose overwhelming imperative is to relieve individuals of responsibility for themselves, transforming them from free citizens into clients of an increasingly bureaucratized, and increasingly insatiable, state apparatus?