#FreeBritney? No thanks
Dear fellow center-righters: don’t adopt #FreeBritney as a cause.
Please. Don’t do it. Don’t waste your time and energy drafting a polemic on the dubious details of the pop star’s conservatorship. The ulterior motive is of the first water: using liberty theory to appeal to socialist-fond millennials and Gen Zers. It’s the cringey the the-yoothz-love-capitalism-cause-Uber argument all over again. Your desperate conservative youth outreach
is killing meeeeee
.
And I must confess, I still believe most liberty appeal campaigns are ineffectual, save for a few Nockian souls. That runs the gamut of age brackets: the impressionable young, the stuck-in-rut old, and the soft-bellied, thinning-haired middle-aged. Andrew Ferguson called the “fiscally conservative social liberal” a cryptid “jackalope” that nobody has ever seen in the flesh.
My point is: marketing liberty ain’t duck soup. Using someone quackers in the cranium as an object lesson in government oppression is bound to backfire. One might even say it’s
tox-iiiic
. (OK, I’ll stop.)
The peril isn’t stopping some Republicans from awkwardly leaping on the hot-pink Britney bandwagon. Congressmen Jim Jordan and Matt Gaetz have questioned the usefulness of the singer’s conservatorship. The Republican State Leadership Committee is selling #FreeBritney shirts for $25 a pop while questionably claiming “[l]iberal judges have denied Britney Spears her basic rights for years.” (The judge who granted the conservatorship, Reva Goetz, was appointed by Republican Governorator Arnold Schwarzenegger.) Some headline-chasing conservative bullhorners have wrapped themselves in the Free-Britney banner, framing the matter as an unjust stripping of rights.
Many of these protestations are see-through concern trolling, clumsily connecting radical nanny-statism to the caging of our beloved poppy songbird. How do I know? Because only a handful of people this side of paradise truly understand the state of Spears’s mental health. Everything else is internet conjecture.
Here’s what’s public knowledge, inasmuch as it exists apart from speculative tea: Britney Spears, the mega-famous, globe-trekking, chart-topping, Vegas sell-outing songstress, was put under a conservatorship overseen by her father in 2008 following a public crackup that splashed every tabloid wood from Dubuque to Timbuktu. Nobody upward the age of 30 needs a refresher on Spears’s high-dudgeon ungluing. There was self-tonsuring, attempted umbrella impalement, and popeyed mayhem. Spears was legally and obviously non compos mentis, unfit to wield a can opener, let alone parent her two sons. She was also being taken for an expensive ride by a jackleg lawyer and her pocketbook was rapidly depleting. The following year, another breakdown happened. She locked herself in a bathroom with her youngest child, violating the custody agreement with her ex-husband, and a 5150 was called in. Spears was wheeled from her home on a stretcher. The conservatorship was established not long after.
Spears has since petitioned the court to release her from the conservatorship, giving her back control of her finances, her personal communication, her career, and her daily goings-on. Britney’s mother, Lynne Spears, has even questioned the efficacy of the legal leash on her daughter’s neck, according to New Yorker journalist Ronan Farrow, a sensationalist hive-stirrer. From this scant information, she’s attracted legions of supporters who are convinced she’s a chattel money-maker for her imperious father.
Were it only a simple case of slavery versus freedom. Reductive accounts of events are just that: pancaked to the point of easy sanctimony. The Spears saga is no different. The narrative pushed by like-mongering conserva-Twitter hounds is but a shading of the truth. Even Farrow, who’s critical of the conservatorship, admits “that no one but Spears can really know the truth of the situation.” Libertarian writer and Britney-springing sympathizer Hannah Cox makes the same admission: “[Spears’s] conservatorship may or may not be warranted — that remains to be seen.”
Here’s where the obverse of Hayek’s knowledge problem comes in handy: trusting an authority on the subject. National Review’s Kyle Smith is that in-the-know source. “I was the music editor at People magazine for some of the peak years of Spears’s career,” Smith prefaces before taking a sharply pointed pen to the recent “Framing Britney Spears” documentary, which is slanted in favor of spiking the conservatorship.
Smith gives a sober assessment on the l’affaire Britney: “To be brutally frank, we all thought Britney Spears would long since be dead by now. Instead, for most of the period the conservatorship has been in effect she has appeared stable, fit, and healthy, and has worked regularly.”
The resuscitation of Spears’s career since she was put under the legal supervision of her overly vigilant papa would seem to justify the conservatorship. Or it may be self-reinforcing: getting Spears back on stardom’s hamster wheel and prodding her to run was bound to make money anyway. Whatever the case, Spears wants out from under the conservatorship thumb. She’s an adult who can draw six figures for one night of belting a few torch songs on any thrust stage in the country. She can’t be that irresponsible…can she?
A cursory glance at her social media doesn’t inspire confidence. In spite of the unbending control her father has yielded over her life, Britney somehow regained control of her Instagram account last year and immediately set about undermining her case for freedom. More scatterbrained than a Brownian-motion model, Spears’s musings, if the fargle bargle that curses her captions can even be characterized as the product of thought, are demented. She posts pictures and videos of herself acting like a wet-brained paramour. The entire feed is a portrait of mental illness.
Spears’s crackpot ravings muddle the free-Brit narrative. They show that, despite her competence in stage performance, Britney is
not level-headed, yet not a mental defective
. (Last one, I promise!) Perhaps it’s best then to let the conservatorship appeal process play out, rather than hasten its demise because of a biased impression.
Nota bene: none of the above is an unqualified defense of conservatorships, which, like any legal contrivance, have a history of abuse. But even in a free society, conservatorships would have a role in caring for mentally infirm. Arch anarcho-capitalist Walter Block has defended the “guardianship rights” that parents exercise over children — a conservatorship is little different.
I get it: the right wants to appeal to young adults by linking anti-big-government philosophy to the plight of a cultural icon. But Britney Spears’s conservatorship is not a slam-dunk case study in tyranny. It’s complicated. Turning it into a how-do-you-do-fellow-kids intellectual entrée is embarrassing.
