Salon writer Amanda Marcotte — a walking, talking caricature of upper-middle-class liberal feminism — weighed in this past Friday on the still-burning gas-stove debate. Unsurprisingly, Marcotte is an enthusiastic proponent of the Current Thing — i.e., government intervention to keep these dangerous weapons of wok out of the hands of private individuals. But one reason for that interventionism, Marcotte argued, is that it would allow individual citizens to escape the unbearable guilt of taking personal responsibility for gas-stove ownership.
“If you have a gas stove (like I do) or don’t, you really shouldn’t get into your feels about it,” Marcotte wrote on Twitter. “Your moral worth as a person has no relation to it. That’s why we need thoughtful regulation, so these questions can be systematic and not about messy individual morality.”
That’s convenient, given that apparently — and here’s a statistic you never knew you needed — “more than two-thirds” of the nation’s gas-stove-owning households are situated in states that Joe Biden won. But more to the point, this is an amazing thing for Marcotte to come out and admit. To her credit, the Salon writer is being much more open and honest about the point of centralized technocratic governance — one of the core premises of progressivism — than many of her peers. Bureaucratic rule, as envisioned by American progressives, is at odds with individual moral agency; the two are, in important ways, fundamentally opposed to one another. It’s just rare to hear a proponent of that centralized bureaucratic state say so openly.
If you entrust decision-making to faraway, faceless bureaucracies, you subtract the role traditionally played by families and local institutions. And in doing that, as Marcotte so candidly points out, you erode the traditional moral doctrines that those institutions form and perpetuate. In the absence of alternative sources of moral authority, or of a basic republican suspicion of centralized power, citizens will have no alternative but to embrace the therapeutic embrace of the federal leviathan. This is, of course, diametrically opposed to the basic precepts of republican self-government. But it’s a feature, not a bug, of the progressive political project.