On the dissolving of the dividing line of public vs private that was a foundational governing philosophy – a bug, not a feature:
…Today, indeed, we confront a transformation in the regulatory state so profound as to indicate a change at the regime level. Today, our regulatory state does not simply promulgate the kind of docile “soft despotism” Tocqueville feared, or blanket the human passions with the kind of bureaucratic uniformity Nietzsche derided as the “coldest of cold monsters.” Instead, as we still struggle to accept, it is aggressively intervening in the intimate details of everyday life as a friend to some kinds of civil liberties but an enemy of others.
Accepting this degree of change in our experience with the regulatory state requires reconsidering the durability of some of our most basic categories of sociopolitical thought. It is not just a question of political partisans running amok in an ideological or cultural war. The sharp divide between public and private life once defined our regime and our personal lives. Not only was limited government, of whatever size, thought to involve clear boundaries that marked those limits. Culturally, social and personal conduct was divided more or less neatly by what was done and not done in public. Among major institutions, religion uniquely straddled the public-private divide in a powerful way.
That era is over. Critical theorists have pushed to obliterate the foundational public-private divide since at least the late ‘90s. Their abstruse efforts have influenced legal reasoning. But our real-life experience has done the heavy lifting. From politics to mores and everywhere between, the public-private divide is losing its coherence, along with its hold on events, institutions, and individuals. Today, conservatives and some libertarians worry that religion is being forced into the worse end of a new sort of public-private divide. Because the whole conceptual framework of privacy and publicity is rotting away, the future of religion in America—along with the other constituent parts of our national character—depends on our understanding of what new framework has arisen to take its place…
– James Poulos, contributor at The Federalist
