What do you see?

You read stories like this and you can get one of three things out of it. What you get out of it will tell you what kind of person you are. Do you see an example of how SWAT culture has begun to pervade general police work to an extent that cops are increasingly prone to make "shoot first, ask questions later" mistakes? Do you see a simple, honest mistake, even though the police should have noticed that they were raiding apartment #36, not #38? Or, do you see a complainer? Maybe he was a drug user, maybe he hates the cops.

This is a good example of how the groups that can be called the political right can be broken down. It is increasingly obvious that left-right doesn't work anymore. I don't even pretend to know enough about the practical nuances of the left, but I do not some about the groups that get lumped into the right. The left-right spectrum has not been valid since the French Revolution, and it's time to switch to something more appropriate. I propose the liberal/libertarian-authoritarian spectrum between a "presumption of individual freedom and conscience" and "collective control of the individual."

Let's not pull any punches, there is no ultimate difference between anyone who comes down hard on the latter, whether they think they are a God-fearing conservative or are a flaming Communist. It is within this context that it is painfully clear these days that the right is not even remotely close to a melting pot of aligned-ideals, but rather is a hodge podge tossed salad of groups that are sometimes better off with members "the other camp." There are many conservatives who are, quite frankly, no more practically supportive of individual rights than your average state socialist. Many political social conservatives fit into this camp without even the slightest mental friction.

I used the example above to illustrate the divide because I am in the first camp, as I am a classical liberal (I call myself libertarian only because calling myself a "liberal" today would not be pleasant in mixed company). There are two value sets here. Those who lean toward the authoritarian end of the right do so here from a mixture of fear of moral degeneracy and fear of harm. All societies succumb inevitably, as collectives, to the former. It cannot be prevented. However, the one thing that the War on Drugs has done is increased the militarism of police forces without increasing the standards of conduct and common sense in police.

Many, probably most, drug raids that go bad do so because for one reason or another, there are fundamental barriers toward a culture of intelligence gathering. The military does not suffer from this problem not only because of the inherent danger in attacking the wrong target, but because the military also comports itself with a generally much higher regard for civilian safety and pride in its accuracy and efficiency. No one in the military would ever want to admit that they ordered a series of deadly raids on bad civilian targets because they were afraid of taking light casualties. Yet, that is precisely the justification that the police use in many cases to justify SWAT deployments against suspects who aren't very well-armed and known to be very violent. Better a "civilian," than a cop.

The fear of moral degeneracy, which is a significant reason why many "on the right" allow such far-reaching state power, even when it is abused at an alarming rate and there is a high probability that statistics are under-reported, is a legitimate fear. A society that is morally rotten at its core cannot maintain civic virtue, but the state is a function of the society that produces it. A corrupt society will yield a corrupt government. This fundamental truth is where the political right has started cracking. Those of us who lean toward the liberty end of the right, accept this, whereas those on the authoritarian end do not. It is increasingly clear, though, that the differences between these two "right-wing" tendencies are as night and day in their own right as Communism versus Capitalism.

One need only look to Senator Rick Santorum to see a perfect example of the authoritarian right. Having eschewed individualism for collectivism, openly, he espouses moral plattitudes that seek a subjective "greater good," while steadfastly refusing to accept that the "greater" is composed of the "individual lesser." Just as the state is a function of the society that created it, society is a function of the individuals within it.

Whether or not individuals can and should be "autonomous," and that is a deceptive and loaded word, is non sequitor. It is a strawman that is used in a cowardly fashion to escape a few obvious flaws in the logic of the authoritarian right, as well as the paternalistic left. I will, for the sake of brevity, simply enumerate them:

• True autonomy is the goal of an insignificant minority. The vast, truly overwhelming, majority do no seek autonomy from good laws such as prohibitions against murder, theft or laws that obligate parents to support minor children.
• It is irrelevant whether an individual knows what is in their own interests. A person who acts against their own interests may not in fact do any harm to others or themselves.
• It is statistically unlikely that a bureaucrat could know what is in someone's own interests, if they do not know it themselves. Since we are talking about public policy, statistical probability here is the only way to gauge the effects on the aggregate.
• Most immoral actions have no empirically provable impact on the life, liberty and property of others. The only way to provide justice is to enforce matters of morality that simultaneously have a demonstrably (and typically reproducibly) destructive effect on others against their will, are not such that enforcing them causes more damage to the victim than failure to do so does and do not have a propensity for victimizing only the individual who does them.
• In many cases, trying to end an immoral behavior that does not meet the criteria of the previous point causes worse problems for the greater society than they prevent.
• Civic virtue can only be freely chosen. Forcing the issue has never worked in the past, and has always served as a distraction that has enabled, rather than prevented, the decline of societal morality.

I blame a lot of the divide between libertarian and authoritarian leaning people on the right on the unease by which my of the latter have with the concept of "spheres of sovereignty." They are uneasy about the idea of the church and family reassuming some meaningful degree of actual control over their roles in society. For example, many authoritarian conservatives do not like the idea of a renewed church that has sufficient influence over its members that its leaders can actually persuade businesses to not hire individuals who are drug addicts, adulterers and generally prone to immoral conduct. They don't like the idea that in a free society, the church, not the state, might be what keeps them from getting a job or that the church might be able to put its foot down and say "your second spouse is not legitimate."

Many liberty-minded individuals on the right are uneasy with this too, but consider it to be the lesser of the two evils by a wide margin. In fact, it usually is a healthy arrangement. It distributes the use of power throughout society so that it doesn't end up in one section's hands, it allows for non-coercive control of anti-social behavior such as dysfunctional drug addiction (drug addicts who refuse to support their families and work, for example) and it increases freedom--for free.