Sublime

At every level of responsibility, Americans have lost the authority to do what they think is sensible.

Indeed, I will argue that liberty in the broad sense requires judges and officials, when applying legal principles, to assert norms of reasonableness. Otherwise, self-interested people will use law to claim almost anything.

Starting in the 1960s, the social and legal institutions of America were remade to try to eliminate unfair choices by people in positions of responsibility. The new legal structures reflected a deep distrust of human authority in even its more benign forms—a teacher’s authority in the classroom, or a manager’s judgments about who’s doing the job, o

People must have “everyday freedom,” by which I mean the individual authority, at every level of society and every level of responsibility, to act as they feel appropriate, constrained only by the boundaries of law and by norms set by the employer or other institution.

Americans didn’t abandon our belief in individual responsibility. It was taken away from us by a post 1960s legal framework that, with the best of intentions, made people squirm through the eye of a legal needle before taking responsibility.

Governance is the oversight system that removes the people and the processes if they aren’t working well.

Alienation has become a plague: Many Americans no longer believe in America. That’s largely because, I argue here, they no longer have the freedom to take responsibility in their daily choices. Persistent failures feed the frustration and seed a culture of distrust. Instead of focusing on how to make things work, Americans obsess about what might g