Another day, another moral war

Steve Chapman looks at the well-organized campaign against McDonald’s by food moralists demanding government crackdowns on foods and restaurants they don’t like. In an all-too-familiar pattern, the food moralists see tastes in food the way the sex moralists see tastes in sex. There are no free choices. Instead, there are mindless victims brainwashed by purveyors of evil:

The food moralists imagine that McDonald’s marketing magic renders its targets helpless to resist. Ronald McDonald might as well be rounding up kids at gunpoint and forcing them to choke down burgers and fries.

But children young enough to be seduced by Ronald McDonald or Happy Meals rarely visit restaurants without parents. These adults are free agents experienced at saying “no” to protect the interests of their sometimes ungrateful offspring.

Parents who dislike McDonald’s sales tactics have a wealth of dining alternatives. And anyone who wants a low-fat, low-calorie meal can easily find it underneath the Golden Arches: Health magazine ranks McDonald’s among the 10 healthiest fast-food restaurants.

It may be argued that many parents are too weak or ignorant to make sound decisions about the food their kids eat. If so, McDonald’s and its unstoppable brainwashing machine could vanish tomorrow without making the slightest difference in obesity or other diet-related ailments.

People don’t like cheap, tasty, high-calorie fare because McDonald’s offers it. McDonald’s offers it because people like it. In McDonald’s absence, patrons would seek it out at other fast-food places, sit-down establishments or grocery stores.

What the food moralists are really mad about is the fact that some people don’t want to eat what they want them to eat. Instead of munching on arugula in vegan restaurants, they actually like McDonald’s. Horror of horrors, there are people who actually want to eat meats, fats, salt, even sugar! Just as there are some people who like Playboy. Blaming Ronald McDonald makes about as much sense as blaming Hugh Hefner.

But moralists who want to regulate people’s choices are not happy with the concept of free will or free choice, free markets, or any kind of freedom. That is why they invariably see those who like the things they want prohibited as victims of one Great Satanic puppeteer or another holding the strings, or behind the controls. People don’t take drugs because they want to; they take them because of “The Pusher,” or because Evil Rock Music (or Evil Rap Music, or some evil celebrity) made them. People like porn because Playboy, Hustler and Big Porn made them. People who think they are gay aren’t really gay; they are victims of sinister influences like Marcuse, Kinsey, and Hefner who told them it was OK to do what they want (presumably so the latter could make millions ruining the culture).

Back in the days leading up to Prohibition, activists worked themselves into a frenzy against the evil forces said to be responsible for the human appetite for alcohol. For decades people like the fanatic Carrie Nation had targeted saloons and smashed them up (not a very persuasive tactic in itself) but the activists eventually smartened up, and tapped into the anti-German hysteria accompanying World War I. Many of the brewers were Germans, and temperance could be packaged as the American Way, with drinking as un-American, impure, alien, and with a distinctly treasonous flavor.

A dry Wisconsin politician named John Strange summarized how the ASL was able to use World War I to attain its final goal: “We have German enemies across the water,” Strange said. “We have German enemies in this country, too. And the worst of all our German enemies, the most treacherous, the most menacing, are Pabst, Schlitz, Blatz and Miller.” That was nothing compared with the anti-German—and pro-Prohibition—feeling that emerged from a Senate investigation of the National German-American Alliance (NGAA), a civic group that during the 1910s had spent much of its energy opposing Prohibition.

The Senate hearings were a disaster for wets. At a time when most Amerians reviled all things German—when the governor of Iowa declared that speaking German in public was unlawful, and playing Beethoven was banned in Boston, and sauerkraut became known as “liberty cabbage”—the NGAA was an easy target. When the hearings revealed that NGAA funds came largely from the beer barons, and that beer money had secretly secured the purchase of major newspapers in several cities, ratification proceeded, said the New York Tribune, “as if a sailing-ship on a windless ocean were sweeping ahead, propelled by some invisible force.”

People who sold the liquor were evil, while the people who drank it were victims. Such a mindset infuses activists with moral authority, and the more they see themselves as leaders working together to save the rest of us, the more momentum they build.

If only it weren’t such a pattern. I have long since lost count of the number of posts I have written attempting to explain the way activists seek moral authority leverage over the villains they want to defeat and the victims they imagine themselves saving.  But their “wars” are almost always against one personal freedom or another.

Almost makes me want to become a “peace” activist.

I said almost because I don’t want to fall into the activist trap. I don’t want to tell people what to do with their personal lives. I only want people to be allowed the freedom to decide for themselves — not for me, though — what they should do. It is one thing to tell people that you think some behavior they like is wrong (I am the first to admit that freedom has a dark side). It is quite another to demand that the government stop people from making personal choices that their self-appointed cultural betters deem harmful.

Whether people being victims of their own choices is one of the dark sides of freedom, I don’t know. Maybe it’s because I’m a libertarian, but I tend not to blame my choices on other people, even when they have influenced me — whether out of a desire to make money (like advertising), a desire to use me, help me, hurt me, or even out of love. And naturally, if I think it is wrong to blame other people for my own choices, I’d be just as wrong in blaming externalities for the choices of other people. If someone eats himself to death with fast food, it is no more the fault of McDonald’s than it is the fault of Seagram’s if someone drinks himself to death. Or Big Tobacco if he smokes.

The problem is, saying that people’s choices are the fault of no one else is not much by way of an organizing principle. People who are drawn to activism want things to be emotionally rewarding, and what could be more emotionally rewarding than saving powerless victims from powerful villains?

Activist demagoguery is easy to understand. What I cannot figure out is why so many of the people that activists consider victims apparently want to continue to enjoy their unhealthy choices while also enjoying their victim status.

Which is like saying “I love what’s bad for me and it’s all your fault!”

As long as there are suckers who think like that, there will be no shortage of activists to gleefully enable their delightful suffering.