by Joe Miller
30 Minutes or Less (2011) is not a particularly good movie.
The plot involves a couple of half-wits (Danny McBride and Nick Swardson) who hatch a plan to force a slacker pizza delivery guy (Jesse Eisenberg) to rob a bank by strapping a bomb to Eisenberg’s chest and threatening to detonate it if he doesn’t deliver the cash by a specific time.
Eisenberg enlists his roommate (Aziz Ansari) and together they rob a local bank branch in a heist that is a deliberate homage to/parody of the bank robberies at the heart of Point Break (1991).
Point Break is also not a great film, but it’s a lot more fun than 30 Minutes or Less. That one, of course, centers on an FBI agent (a young Keanu Reeves) who goes undercover with a group of adrenaline junkies (led by Patrick Swayze) who are suspected of a string of daring bank robberies.
30 Minutes or Less is an example of what TV Tropes calls “Forced Into Evil” – a common plot device involving characters who take on the actions that we would typically associate with the villain, but who do so only because they, their loved one(s) or possibly the entire world will suffer if they don’t perform the evil act.
Most of us share the intuition that characters who are Forced into Evil are less blameworthy (or maybe not even blameworthy at all!) than Patrick Swayze’s surfer crew in Point Break. Choosing to commit crimes for the thrill of it (and/or to fund surfing and skydiving adventures) is pretty clearly wrong.
When someone is genuinely coerced into performing a bad action – either through force or through deception – we don’t generally hold them morally responsible for their bad action. Rather, we typically blame the person who did the coercing.
Having the ability to choose our actions is what makes us capable of morality. Consider, for example: if a shark eats a swimmer’s leg, you’d probably say it’s an unfortunate accident, but you wouldn’t try to charge the shark with a crime or call it evil. Sharks act on instinct. They don’t make choices.
But if I were to cut off the leg of a swimmer and eat it, you would (quite rightly) charge me with a bunch of crimes and call me evil.
Put simply: the ability to make choices is what separates persons from animals and machines. When you interfere with someone’s ability to make choices, you are treating them as if they are an object instead of treating them like a person. So, I really should respect your choices, and you should, in turn, respect mine.
Western-style liberalism—and, like last week, I’m using “liberal” in an older, philosophical sense, not in the modern American sense—rests on the idea that governments should also respect people’s choices.
For liberal political theorists like John Locke and Thomas Jefferson, this requirement that government respect choices entails two important principles.
1. A government is legitimate only when its citizens have consented to it.
2. A government retains its legitimacy only insofar as it protects its citizens’ freedoms.
After a few fits and starts, western liberals largely settled on Constitutional democracies as the best way of realizing these principles.
Free and fair elections give citizens the opportunity to consent. A Constitution places limits on what the government can do, either through explicit prohibitions or by enumerating a particular set of individual rights.
In Europe, liberalism originated against a backdrop of hereditary aristocracy and powerful state churches. To be a European conservative in the 18th century was to back the authority of the monarch and the head of the church against those who would let commoners vote.
The United States was founded as a liberal, Constitutional democracy. In America, our conservatives are mostly looking to conserve liberalism, because that’s the entire history of our country. And American-style liberals are small-c conservative because liberalism is a thing they want to preserve.
We may have disagreed on lots of particulars, but Americans have long been, well, united in our belief that governments require the consent of the people and that our Constitutional rights place sharp limits on what the government can require us to do.
And, as we’ll see over the next couple of weeks, that shared belief in the importance of individual choices grounds liberalism’s commitment to equality and to state neutrality.
joe.miller@fountaindigitalconsulting.com
