There Really is a Problem with the Arbitrary Exercise of Government Power
This is the core problem with the New Right
It has been reported that the North Carolina Republican Party is in the process of removing a provision that allowed people to wear masks in public for health reasons, that was enacted at the beginning of the COVID pandemic. This would effectively ban anyone from wearing a mask in public, by law. They cited the need to identify protestors as their justification. However, given that there are actually immunocompromised people who need to wear a mask all the time, the proposal was rightly criticized for being crazily authoritarian. In response, the Republicans simply said that they trust the police not to abuse the law to arrest cancer patients or granny going to Walmart wearing a mask.
There is a serious problem with this: it's called the arbitrary exercise of government power, and it has always been the biggest enemy of classical liberals, going right back to the days of the Old Whigs in England. When a law is enacted with the intention for its enforcement to be arbitrary, this creates a problem for individual liberty, and a real slippery slope towards full authoritarianism. When the enforcement of a law is up to those with the power to do so to decide, on arbitrary grounds, we don't really have the rule of law anymore.
This actually reminds me that many of the actions the populist 'New Right' have been taking lately are also basically the arbitrary exercise of government power, in a different context each time. The drag bans are a good example of this. Drag is illegal if it is 'offensive', 'harmful to minors' or something like that, with the definition of offensive or harmful deliberately vague. Similarly, under Don't Say Gay, discussions of LGBT issues in classrooms that are not age appropriate are banned, again with there being no clear definition, or even guidelines, on what is age appropriate. This creates an atmosphere of fear, and effectively silences otherwise legitimate speech.
Looking back, the famous 2019 French-Ahmari debate was really about the arbitrary exercise of government power, rather than about minor issues such as drag queen story hour. Drag story hour was just used as a culture war wedge to introduce the idea that the arbitrary exercise of government power is good. French argued otherwise, because he saw that, with declining religiosity among younger generations, the arbitrary exercise of government power could lead to the persecution of religious conservatives one day. I think he is very smart here. If there is arbitrary exercise of government power, someone is going to be persecuted, and it is generally those who are unpopular with the wider community. As to who is unpopular, well, that changes from time to time. This is why nobody should embrace the arbitrary exercise of government power, lest they become the victims of it one day.
It is also important to note that various New Right thinkers have been effectively arguing both for the arbitrary exercise of government power and against the whole tradition of classical liberalism, going all the way back to John Locke and the Old Whigs. Locke, Smith, Burke, America's founding fathers, they want it all gone apparently. That's why they're not conservatives, but authoritarian revolutionaries that would destroy what most of us hold dear. The New Right's philosophy is very, very dangerous. We ignore it at our own peril.
TaraElla is a singer-songwriter and author, who is the author of the Moral Libertarian Manifesto and the Moral Libertarian book series, which argue that liberalism is still the most moral and effective value system for the West.
She is also the author of The Trans Case Against Queer Theory and The TaraElla Story (her autobiography).