On Ideological Puritanical Libertinism

I was doing some research based on the phrase I used in an essay this past week – ideological puritanical libertinism – to describe how progressives seem to talk out of both sides of their mouths about freedom and governance, promising freedom on the one hand and enacting restrictive controls on the other.

I went to ChatGPT, Claude and Grok to see if that was even a semi-original idea and learned quickly that I’m only one of many who have stumbled across that idea or another that is closely related to it.

I also found a link back to Herbert Marcuse and the Frankfort School because, of course, the Frankfurt School is where committed collectivists go to get their bad ideas.

I mean, somebody must take one for the team and check out what the enemies of freedom have thought and are thinking.

What I learned from Marcuse’s 1965 essay titled Repressive Tolerance was that he was not a big fan of universal tolerance. As a matter of fact, he explicitly rejected indiscriminate tolerance (I’m sure he was aware of Karl Popper’s Paradox of Tolerance). Marcuse argued that genuine liberation could require intolerance toward ideas and movements regarded as repressive and tolerance toward movements regarded as liberating. He eventually put it starkly: “liberating tolerance” would entail intolerance toward movements of the Right and tolerance toward movements of the Left.

I’ve always joked that the left promises total freedom, but it can only be achieved through giving them total control over all facets of your life.

So, how do we deal with the contradiction of freedom versus control?

It is a question that extends even to the policy level. President Trump’s Iran policy is an example – Trump has expressed his distaste for war and promised no more foreign wars, and yet, using the justification of preventing a much more damaging global nuclear conflict, he chose war anyway. Is that a policy contradiction or simply a reasonable and rational preemptive action?

As I started to break the idea into falsifiable parts, I recognized that pretty much every “movement” of the left, right and center does the same things and the deeper question underneath all of it is this:

Is restraint an unavoidable feature of civilization?

Because if it is, then we are literally back to Lenin’s question of “Who, Whom?”

The great political and moral argument isn’t really between restraint and liberation at all. It is over which restraints, imposed by whom, justified by what authority, and directed toward what conception of the good.

But isn’t that the question that our Founders were dealing with as they sought to create a new nation over 250 years ago?

Their answer to that deeper question was a qualified “Yes, civilization requires restraint, but we are going to go with the least external restraint possible and count on the internal restraints of citizens to cover the rest.”

That, in my opinion and limited scholarship, is how we were bequeathed the principles set forth in the Declaration of Independence and the structure and limitations enumerated in our Constitution designed to create and preserve liberty through extremely limited oversight of individual actions, at least from a national level.

What could go wrong?

Or the better question is this: What went wrong?

I think Charlie Kirk hit the nail on the head when he proposed that America has a government established on Christian principles for a Christian citizenry, and it stops functioning when that same government tries to govern a population no longer Christian.

That mismatch creates a gap too wide for our founding ideals to bridge.

I have to note that while I was always aware of Charlie while he was alive, I never really spent a lot of time listening to him, but over the past year since his assassination, I have consumed hours upon hours of his debates and appearances, and I firmly believe that had he not been executed by those who feared him, in the fullness of time he would have been recognized as one of America’s great intellects, possibly rivaling that of Thomas Jefferson.

You should watch Charlie’s exposition linked below in the comments, it is only a couple of minutes long – alternatively, you can read about it at the second link. It will likely enrage those who hated Kirk, those secularists who don’t believe America was founded as a Christian nation and anybody who does is a “Christo-fascist” or a “Christian Nationalist”, and the atheist “French Revolutionaries” who believe secularism and reason are sufficient replacements for religion.

I guess they can just be mad, which should make them happy – that’s what they want anyway, because they don’t want answers, especially if those answers include Christianity or the reality that America was – and is – a Christian nation.

Once again, my quest for knowledge took me down the rabbit hole with Alice, but as it turns out, it was a worthy journey. Camus was right, just because everything is permitted doesn’t mean nothing is forbidden and as Humpty Dumpty noted, it only matters who has control over meaning.