Big Brother is teaching you

Mind your own damn business.

It’s a clever slogan, appealing to the most basic of human desires and American rights: the desire to be left alone and the right to be free from interference by an overbearing government.

Tim Walz, the governor of Minnesota and Democratic vice-presidential nominee, has made it his catchphrase. During the weekend his wife, Gwen, repeated the line without the profanity but with added context for emphasis. Speaking at an Educators for Harris-Walz event in Virginia, Mrs. Walz, a former high-school English teacher took aim at JD Vance, the Republican vice-presidential candidate, over a comment he once made criticising left-wing teachers who don’t have children of their own.

Mrs Walz said, “Let me use my teacher voice: Mr. Vance, how about you mind your own business?”

Her remarks were part of a campaign by Democrats to claim that pro-traditional-family statements by Mr. Vance imply opposition to non-traditional means of reproduction, including fertility treatments such as those the Walzes used to create their family. There’s no evidence Mr. Vance opposes those treatments, and last week Donald Trump committed — somewhat rashly — to compel insurance companies to cover in vitro fertilisation.

But it was the “teacher voice” remark that I found instructive.

Joe Biden holds up Kamala Harris's hand during a campaign rally in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Picture: AFP.

It unintentionally captured the Democratic idea of the polity they seek to lead and reshape. It spoke to how they view themselves — and us. They are the teachers, equipped with the knowledge and authority to direct their hapless charges. We are the students, naive and ill-informed, sometimes attentive but too often insubordinate, with minds that need to be shaped and disciplined.

This self-image of Democrats and their role in government as benevolent, omniscient educators emerges from a mindset that represents a greater challenge to our freedoms than any attempts at interference in the lives of law-abiding Americans the Republicans are accused of planning. The didactic ethic, in which our leaders treat us as people who can’t make good decisions for ourselves, has been vividly on display in the last decade

We aren’t well-informed enough to understand the damage fossil fuel-energy production is doing to the environment. So we need to be told what kind of car we can drive and what kind of stove we can cook on. We can’t be trusted with information from unreliable sources.

Tim Walz has made ‘Mind your own damn business’ his catchphrase. Picture: Getty Images via AFP.

Like schoolchildren reading naughty books and listening to schoolyard gossip, we must be protected from “misinformation.” We aren’t sufficiently developed to comprehend the dangers of firearms. So our leaders must determine who can have access to them. We didn’t have their deep grasp of the science behind pandemics. So we had to be instructed to stay home, wear masks and submit ourselves to vaccination on pain of losing our livelihoods. Lacking their sophisticated biological knowledge and understanding of geopolitics, we weren’t permitted to speculate about what caused Covid-19 either. We must accept the teacher’s word on the subject.

Not content with ensuring our compliance with their social studies and science curricula, our governor-didacts insist on teaching us ethics. We need to be educated in how sinful we are as white people, as Americans, guilty inheritors of Western civilisation. We must learn the new catechism of critical theory and expiate our sin.

The lesson, as it were, of all this is that only lifelong government employees like Kamala Harris and Mr. Walz (and, once upon a time, President Biden) can guide and instruct the rest of us on how we live, to reprimand and reform us when we go wrong.

Democrats want to make their idea of freedom the decisive issue in this election. They insist that “weird” Republicans want to take away basic liberties; they claim that in everything from “reproductive rights” and the status of immigrants to laws that regulate voting, Messrs. Trump and Vance and the Supreme Court would impose a right-wing despotism on the American people.

Kamala Harris onstage with Second Gentleman Douglas Emhoff, Tim Walz and his wife Gwen Walz at the DNC. Picture: AFP.

But their own conception of the continuingly expanding role of government as some benign teaching authority represents a much tighter limitation on the freedoms of most Americans. We can decry Mr. Trump’s personal autocratic sensibilities, but the claim that he is bent on imposing some form of theocratic tyranny is absurd. The justices are merely undoing decades of judicial activism in which judges got to make policy. Giving power — whether over abortion, or the ambit of regulatory agencies — back to voters and their representatives is liberating, not enslaving. Can we really look at what the left has sought to do in the last few years and deny that another administration of the current ideological tenor would further limit our freedoms?

Partisan hyperbole is our modern scourge, so let’s not call them communists. We should recognise them for what they are — like all government bigwigs through history they think they know better. The inevitable upshot of that self-assurance is their right to take powers away from the people.

So let me use my “student voice” to ask the Harrises and Walzes of the world: How about you mind your own business for once?

The Wall St Journal