INTRODUCTION

PUBLISHING BOOKS is at the center of what we do at Encounter. But a book is by nature a long-gestating creature. Even after being written, a book typically takes six to nine months to make its way to the market.

Books offer essential, thoughtful perspectives on the issues that confront us. But in the age of the 24-hour news cycle, the crucial work performed by books needs to be supplemented by a form of commentary that is efficient enough to be timely yet extensive enough to elaborate a case thoughtfully. The rise of the Internet, the blogosphere, and outlets like Twitter have provided a deluge of nearly instantaneous commentary on every conceivable subject. Valuable as that new media has been, however, it has tended to be ephemeral in its effects and abbreviated in its analysis. A tweet of 140 characters can tell you that a fire has broken out. But it cannot elaborate on the causes, the culprits, or the right remedial action.

What is needed is a new – or rather, a revival of an old – genre that is supple enough to respond quickly to unfolding events and yet authoritative and detailed enough to have an important effect on the debate over policy – over, that is, the direction of our country, our government, and the way we live our lives.

Enter Encounter Broadsides. In an age in which debate about critical matters is often compressed into the literary equivalent of a geometric point, we saw that there was a new opportunity for commentary that is brief but thoughtful, authoritative yet timely. With Encounter Broadsides, we aimed to capitalize on that opportunity, providing new ammunition for serious debate. At 5,000 to 7,000 words, Encounter Broadsides are short enough to be read in a sitting but long enough to bolster assertion with argument. Throughout the series, we’ve aimed to combine an 18th century sense of political urgency and rhetorical wit with 21st century technology and channels of distribution.

We started thinking about this new publishing venture in the spring of 2009 and published our first Broadside that autumn. To date, we’ve published more than 30 Broadsides on a wide variety of subjects, from the battle over health care and the economic crisis to immigration, the attack on national sovereignty, the higher education bubble, and the war on terrorism.

It is no secret that this is a critical moment in the history of the West and of America in particular. The economic crisis has precipitated a loss of confidence in the value of free markets unlike anything we have seen in decades. Socialism, and the soft totalitarianism that follows in its wake, is making a comeback everywhere. At the same time, radical Islam confronts democratic society with a categorical and intransigent threat to its existence even as newly rampant authoritarian regimes from Russia and Iran to China and Venezuela are flexing their muscles. Truly, as the old Chinese curse would have it, these are interesting times.

We hope Encounter Broadsides will be to this troubled period of American history what broadsides like The Federalist Papers and Tom Paine’s Common Sense were to an earlier revolutionary period. A wake-up call. An alarm bell. A blueprint, if I may employ a once popular phrase, for hope and change. Accordingly, we have aimed not merely to comment on but also to intervene in the debate, bringing fresh perspectives to controversies that too often have been interred in the shallow grave of politically correct orthodoxy. The goal of Encounter Broadsides is to change minds, not merely to add to the pile of commentary. Ultimately, we have sought to help shape policy and rescue the American dream from the nightmare of the new collectivism that is threatening our liberty, our prosperity, and our national security.

In The New Leviathan: The State Versus the Individual in the 21st Century, we’ve gathered a revised and updated baker’s dozen of Encounter Broadsides that bear on the pressing issue adumbrated in the subtitle of the book: the relationship between the state and the individual in this increasingly regulated and bureaucratized world.

Back in March 2012, the pollster Scott Rasmussen published a brief essay called “The Real ‘Entitlement Mentality’ That Is Bankrupting America” on his website RasmussenReports.com. Republicans, Rasmussen noted, often grumble about the “entitlement mentality.” Usually, they dilate on the growing habit of dependency and appetite for “goodies provided by the government and financed by taxpayers.”

It would be hard to overestimate that aspect of the problem. It is a corollary of that “psychological change” in a people that Friedrich von Hayek diagnosed in The Road to Serfdom: a transformation from the practice of autonomy and self-reliance to the habit of dependency. It was, Hayek wrote, both a regular result and precondition of “extensive government control.” Cause and effect fed upon and abetted each other. It was (as Hayek also noted) a textbook case of what Tocqueville described in his famous paragraphs on “democratic despotism” in Democracy in America. How would despotism come to a modern democracy?, Tocqueville asked. Not through the imposition of old-fashioned tyranny. No, that instrument is too blunt, too crude for modern democratic regimes. Much more effective is the disguised tyranny of infantilization. Turn government into the sole provider of all those “goodies,” and you enslave the population far more effectively than old-style tyranny ever managed.

All this is true, and it deserves our constant attention. But Rasmussen shifted his focus to the other side of the equation. In order to work, the dependency agenda needs not only to cultivate the sheep, a population of dependents. It also needs to foster a population of controlling bureaucrats, the shepherds or warders of the system. And this brings us to what Rasmussen calls “the real entitlement mentality that threatens to bankrupt the nation: A political class that feels entitled to rule over the rest of us.”

Let’s pause over that observation: The “real entitlement mentality” revolves around “a political class that feels entitled to rule over the rest of us.” As Rasmussen noted, this mentality is not solely a Democratic or a Republican trait. It affects – or infects – “the nation’s political leaders of both parties.” Hence the intractability of the problem. It’s not just our habits of dependency that need to be broken. The habits of control and the penchant for feeding dependency on the part of our political leaders also need to be curbed. Rasmussen is right: “While most voters view excessive government spending as the problem, those who feel entitled to rule over the rest of us see the voters as the problem. And that’s the real entitlement crisis facing the nation today. The political class wants to govern like it’s 1775, a time when kings were kings and consent of the governed didn’t matter.”

Back in the 1770s, some exasperated and enterprising American colonists demonstrated that the consent of the governed did matter by littering Boston Harbor with English tea. It is part of our ambition in The New Leviathan to recall that exemplary demonstration, reminding the world that the soft tyranny of 1775 gave way to the ferment of 1776. Those presuming to be our political masters believe we are inured to dependency and Big Government. Not everyone, however, likes being a ward of the state. More and more people, it seems, wonder how the warders got their keys and authority to force the rest of us to accept their bidding. This, at bottom, is what The New Leviathan, endeavors to ask: Will we be wards or free citizens?

ROGER KIMBALL