The Devil’s Theater

Laws in a free society generally seek to protect the individual’s right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Extensions of that see laws that protect the population from the most egregious expressions of religiosity and capitalism that, unrestrained, would install extremist ideology, poison every well, and destroy every ecosystem in pursuit of power and profit.

Common sense would dictate that there’s ultimately a self-imposed moral hazard protecting against these acts of violence. An individual wouldn’t want the extremist’s beliefs of another infringing on their own rights. A company won’t pollute a river that its owners’ families drink from.

Shockingly, we continue to discover that’s not true. On the economic side, this is probably one of the greatest lessons Alan Greenspan - the once-lauded Chairman of the Federal Reserve - who discovered the hard way that greed, in fact, does NOT have a self-protective instinct when it’s drunk on the mindless pursuit of material wealth and power.

Given the room, it will eat itself.

This was the great lesson of the 2008 market crash.

Libertarianism, alas, is a beautiful concept on paper but ultimately fails when human psychology as it actually is plays itself out.

The same is true with unrestrained religiosity. The west regularly looks at extremists like the Taliban as terrorists. Yet are unable to see that it’s precisely the same thing when the Quran is swapped out for the Bible.

Religiosity that’s weaponized to control others fails in its understanding of the nature of an ever-evolving universe.

It’s a small-minded attempt at keeping the earth from its rotation. To suppress the very nature and variety that enables living things to exist and grow and thrive.

It’s necessary to modify or eliminate oppressive laws as we grow in our understanding of the truer nature of human psychology.

The laws that help protect our society’s individuals must grow. To protect the individual, laws must grow with them.

We are currently seeing a wave of laws from the Republican Party that are radical departures from this general liberalism that defines free societies.

Liberalism that protects an individual’s right to practice whatever belief system they prefer. Or none at all.

We are seeing laws enacted that are the exact opposite of protecting the rights of individuals. We are seeing laws that give the government control over that personal expression by individuals. That single, most fundamental right the original framers intended. Individuals who largely are not asking for radical deference from a society but simply the right to be left alone and treated equitable.

Rights that used to be the bedrock of traditional conservatism.

And are, in fact, the foundational premise of the United States. A premise that has yet to be fully realized for all of its citizens.

What has happened over the last three decades is that the Republican Party has discovered that great power can be mined by people who fear the life they are comfortable with adjusting to accommodate this truer nature of the individual. Accommodations that are far less invasive or egregious than simply denying the rights of these individuals altogether.

This realization that this fear has the ability to mobilize and give power to this extremist side of the Republican Party has warped the party from one of individual rights and sovereignty to one that wants government control over the individual.

At least some of its citizens.

This is the precise communism and tyranny they are constantly warning is the boogeyman of the left.

When we see radical laws enacted specifically denying the rights of minority populations, we are seeing performative legislation. Laws that, by most polls, are unpopular with the majority.

Laws that have no real purpose other than to deny the rights of the few and seek to legislate into law the most extremist views of radical individuals.

These laws are not designed to actually “protect the children” as the constant sales pitch assures us.

These laws are designed to oppress the few and signal to the most extreme individuals in society that they are entitled not to equal rights but to superior rights.

It’s a theater of extremist legislation that exists entirely as a performance of dominance.

Distinctly un-American theater.

Or, in the parlance of these radical, anti-American extremists…

The Devil’s Theater.