In November, Massachusetts voters will have the opportunity to decide whether the state’s recreational marijuana law should be repealed. While the initiative, known as Question 8, is very likely to fail, its presence on the ballot suggests that even in deep-blue Massachusetts, many people are beginning to rethink whether the widespread acceptance of vices such as recreational drugs and online gambling has left America better off.
“Liberals also have good reason to worry.”
As a liberal, I am sympathetic to the idea that government should allow people to live their lives as they see fit. But liberals also have good reason to worry about how the vice economy damages lives, weakens families, and harms children. The right-wing response to vice can be excessively punitive. But liberals are likely to be caught between societal deterioration and resurgent interest in harsh laws unless they come up with an anti-vice politics of their own.
The permissiveness of contemporary liberalism was, in part, a natural response to the way some conservatives weaponized morality against minority groups. But this response, taken to an extreme, ate away at the liberal tradition of concern and solidarity. As the pseudonymous culture writer Cartoons Hate Her put it, the liberalism of “smoke a joint and leave gay people alone” slid into an atomized stance of “I don’t owe anyone anything.” Under the latter principle, just about any action that remains on the legal side of the line, no matter the collateral damage or moral implications, can fly.
Matthew Yglesias, the center-left commentator, has argued that there’s little policymakers can do about the trend. “It is absolutely true that more matters for human well-being than autonomy and material prosperity,” he wrote recently, but “the liberal claim is that it is hard to constructively instantiate these observations into politics.”
Hard, perhaps, but not impossible. As the late Democratic senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan once put it, “The central conservative truth is that it is culture, not politics, that determines the success of a society. The central liberal truth is that politics can change a culture and save it from itself.” In other words, government can set the conditions that make it substantially more likely that people live lives of flourishing and meaning, rather than ones of struggle and distraction.