Mike Johnson is No Individualist
Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson rambled off into fantasyland when he asserted Republicans are individualists while Democrats are collectivists. If anything the opposite is true. In reality both have collectivist tendencies but Republicans are far, far worse when it comes to treating people as collective entities and not as rights-bearing individuals. Traditionally this was true in regards to how Republicans saw social freedoms, but with the rise of the fanatical religious Right it is even true about economic policies as well. It’s Democrats who are more likely to support free trade, not Republicans.
Johnson’s flight of fancy claimed the following:
“The Democrats think and act like a union. They’re collectivists. You know, they move in a herd. Many of them are not deeply principled or philosophical folks and so you can command them, and they’ll move as social animals. They’re socialists, right?
We, on the other hand, are rugged individualists, and we’re deeply principled and philosophical. And it’s difficult to get us to move in tandem sometimes.”
More bizarre is this claim is his explanation for the likes of rabid authoritarians such as Thomas Massie and Marjorie Taylor Greene — people utterly opposed to individualism.
Consider how the GOP, especially social authoritarian such as Johnson, have pushed for measures to wipe out entire classes of people so only those approved by evangelicals are visible.
The world of the GOP is one of total social conformity. They are so rabidly “socialists of the soul” they want all books that even mention LGBT individuals banned from schools and public libraries. Only books evangelical bigots approve of are to be allowed.
Migrants come from different cultures — ban them. Gay people are different — don’t say gay. Some people are trans — make treatment and care illegal. Some people need reproductive freedom — make it a criminal offense.
At each step of the way Republicans demand social conformity to their own private religious doctrines. I won’t even call them religious values as we repeatedly see these preachers of “morality” live very differently in private from their public pronouncements. In those circles morality is not a code of personal conduct but a means of bashing others and grabbing power.
Exactly where was the individualism Johnson now asserts?
Johnson went around to evangelical churches preaching the gospel of Christian Nationalism — a concept openly at war with individualism itself. As economist Deirdre McCloskey noted, nationalism includes “intrinsic collective coercion” with a “tendency to define minorities such as Jews and Muslims and Mexicans as ‘not us…’” Individualist thinker F.A. Hayek warned there is “close connection between conservatism and nationalism” and “this nationalistic bias… frequently provides the bridge from conservatism to collectivism…”
Another individualist, Ayn Rand, said individualism argues everyone has “an inalienable right to his own life” and “a group, as such, has no rights other than the individual rights of its members.” But Christian Nationalism is inherently collectivistic, not individualistic. It asserts one religion dominates the law and claims the “rights” of the nation and the church supersedes the rights of individuals.
Johnson, as an attorney for the vehemently collectivist Alliance Defending (sic) Freedom, openly argued individuals should not be allowed the legal right to marry their adult partner of choice but only those sanctioned by evangelicals such as himself. He claimed individual freedom in marriage threatened, “God’s created order.”
Worse, he argued the collective has the right to make all gay people criminals by imposing Christian morality by force of law.
In his career as a lawyer Johnson had one goal — the imposition of evangelical teaching on all individuals whether they believed or not. He argued courts may not protect individual rights if those rights are in conflict with what he called “fundamental American values and millennia of moral teaching,” both of which are collective concepts.
Johnson argued the state, has the right “to proscribe same-sex deviate sexual intercourse” in the name of morality. But whose morality? In the logic of Johnson ONLY evangelical morality counts, not individual rights but a collective version of private morality.
Individualism says individuals may act as they choose provided they do not violate the rights of others. As Karl-Maria Kertbeny put it, “The constitutional state is only concerned with questions of sexuality insofar as the rights of others are infringed upon.” Oscar Wilde put it this way: “Freedom, individualism and being yourself so long as you don’t hurt another’s physical person or property.”
Johnson argued against this individualist view of rights and said the collective had the right to infringe any area of life provided it did so in the name of traditional morality. While Johnson’s religious-based laws would turn all gay people into criminals it doesn’t stop there. He would criminalize most heterosexuality as well.
Johnson wrote, “States have always maintained the right to discourage the evils of sexual conduct outside marriage….” That would turn 95% of all American adults into criminals as most have had sex outside or before marriage.
When it comes to social freedoms Johnson and Republicans are rabid collectivists while Democrats tend to be individualists. But anyone who is aware of evangelicalism and its history knows they have always opposed individual rights in favor of a collectivist view demanding social conformity for you and political power for them.
That is precisely what Johnson was doing in his crusade to make it a criminal offense to be gay — impose social conformity, not individualism. Individualism actually is a threat to evangelical conformity. Oscar Wilde hit the nail on the head when he wrote:
“Individualism is a disturbing and disintegrating force. There lies its immense value. For what it seeks is to disturb monotony of type, slavery of custom, tyranny of habit, and the reduction of man to the level of a machine. It seeks to show new perspectives and other choices. It is a way to help expand and liberate the consciousness; our experiences, understandings, imaginings, options and thereby our lives.”
When you read Johnson’s diatribes they were not individualism, they promoted “slavery of custom” and “tyranny of habit” in the name of traditionalism.
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