Radley Balko flags a Gene Healy column discussing the apparent statis- er, progressivism of the millennial generation. Radley adds:
If there’s an upside to this it’s that the first generation that can’t remember a time before the Internet does seem to at least to care about civil liberties. They tend to be anti-war, anti-drug war, cognizant of and alarmed by police misconduct, and while they put too much trust in government, they do seem to be be genuinely motivated to force government transparency and accountability, two inherent Internet values. And frankly, if that motivation doesn’t fade, what they discover–either through government disclosures or through its refusal to disclose–ought to be enough to shake at least a few of them from their broader faith in the state.
But as I suggested late last year in discussing Matt Welch and Nick Gillespie’s “Libertarian Moment” cover story from Reason, even this diagnosis seems to rely on a good deal more optimism than is warranted in this instance. Most of the internet generation – and yes, that’s me – is indeed implicitly small-“l” libertarian when it comes to things like drug policy and stupid foreign wars, but the specific kinds of privilege and virtual freedom that technologies like the internet afford us can easily breed a dangerous complacency and a willingness, as I put it, to “accept an unfree world so long as we can find some freedom within it”:
A generation accustomed to carving out its own private spheres of freedom no matter the external circumstances might ultimately be one that lacks the revolutionary impulse that Gillespie and Welch assume is the natural outgrowth of a “hyper-individualized” culture. This is especially true when it comes to things like military policy and the drug war, where the worst effects of our government’s actions are borne primarily by those in society’s lower echelons: so long as no one takes serious steps toward instituting a draft or arresting a third of our high school students for drug use, you won’t find many people agitating for revolt. And it’s not that easy to start a revolution when you can’t pull away from the X-Box.
This is, of course, not all that far from the point that my friend James Poulos is making when he talks about the coming “Pink Police State”, and to be frank it scares the shit out of me. And as Radley himself has known to point out, even the “transparency and accountability” that were supposed to be the Obama administration’s calling cards have been a bit … slow to materialize, but somehow I find it hard to believe that Generation Obama is going to throw the bum out over that. There’s quite a bit more than a few of us who will need to be shaken back to reality before it begins to make a difference.
