Politics always seems to be about women. First it was soccer moms that swooned over midnight basketball. Then it was security moms that wanted the president to keep us safe. Then, in a less kinder, gentler era, it was the Republican war to make Sandra Fluke pay for her own contraception.

Now let's Move On -- to the age of the "privacy mom."

I've long had a cavalier attitude to privacy. My line was that the IRS already knows everything that anyone would want to know about me. So why worry about the rest of the government and the greedy corporate CEOs?

Even so, I have also appreciated that women are much more sensitive about privacy. We could speculate forever on this, but let's just say that nesting animals usually like to hide away until the fledglings are out of the nest.

But now comes Peggy Noonan writing about the importance of privacy.

Privacy is connected to personhood. It has to do with intimate things -- the innards of your head and heart, the workings of your mind -- and the boundary between those things and the world outside.

A loss of the expectation of privacy in communications is a loss of something personal and intimate, and it will have broader implications.

See what I mean? Now one of my rules of life is that when Peggy Noonan writes about something, you'd better pay attention. "You" means politicians and campaign consultants. Let the word go forth that the political future belongs to those that can get the "privacy moms" into the voting booth.

But does the politics of privacy mean go all the way to curbing our nation's intelligence agencies? In a word: Yes. Here's why.

The law of bureaucracies and generals fighting the last war suggests to me that the whole U.S. defense establishment is probably getting close to useless. I'm not talking about the quality of the soldiers, sailors, airman and coastguards that protect us, but about the system, unreformed since 1947. When the next war comes, as it will, we will have to throw away most of the defense establishment as worse than useless. Let's not worry about cutting into the meat. It's probably too tough to eat.

As for the National Security Agency, I suspect it is probably gathering huge amounts of data and doing very little useful work with it. See Mark Steyn's "Idiot Big Brother." But we've learned from the IRS scandals that bureaucrats sitting around with nothing to do can easily be conscripted into harassing and spying on the administration's opponents, particularly if the opponents are Republicans. So let's junk the NSA. Next time we need an NSA we'll get the Big Data boys from Silicon Valley to mash up something overnight, just like they did for the Obama campaign.

Now let's get back to first principles about surveillance, and that means James C. Scott in Seeing Like a State and Michel Foucault in Discipline and Punish. Governments do surveillance not to protect us from people that want to kill us. A ruling class wants to protect itself. It wants to know what we are doing so that they can easily tax us, conscript us, and discipline us. Who needs it?

We talk endlessly on the right about freedom and on the left about liberation, but the truth is that we moderns live in a disciplinary state as the most controlled and disciplined people in history, plantation slaves excepted.

In my view the heyday of the disciplinary state extended from the birth of social insurance in the 1880s to the last hurrah of Detroit in the 1960s. But there's a counter-current that starts with the German Army's turn from discipline to individual responsibility in the 1920s, to the mainstreaming of expressive creativity in the 1960s to the homeschooling movement and the startup business culture of today.

If the counter-current holds, we will look back on the Obama scandals as the bonfire of the vanities for the top-down administrative state: its intrusive surveillance, its rigidity, its control mania, its harassing of opponents, its stupidity, its bankruptcy.

And really, why would women support a system that wants to peer into their lives and their relationships and their loves?

John Berger asserts in Ways of Seeing that in Western art, "[A] woman's presence [in a painting] expresses her own attitude to herself, and defines what can and cannot be done to her."

"What can and cannot be done to her:" That is what the privacy moms will be discussing with their friends for the next several years. Will they be most threatened by Google scanning their email or the IRS harassing their political activity?

It's up to us to help them make up their minds.

Christopher Chantrill (mailto:chrischantrill@gmail.com) is a frequent contributor to American Thinker. See his usgovernmentspending.com and also usgovernmentdebt.us. At americanmanifesto.org he is blogging and writing An American Manifesto: Life After Liberalism. Get his Road to the Middle Class.