[Back to the top from November 6, 2009. –GSS]
The national Republican party is riven by an insuperable internal contradiction.
Out of one side of their mouths, Republicans wish to portray themselves as tax cutters, red-tape slashers, champions of liberty fearlessly hacking away at the slimy tentacles of the leviathan state. Ignore for the moment that they’re spineless jellyfish when it comes time to cut, slash or hack; this is how they wish to present themselves.
Out of the other side of their mouths, Republicans offer American voters an alternate set of slimy tentacles for the same old leviathan. The state they promise to shrink will simultaneously promote a nebulous family values agenda and forbid abortion. Republicans will simultaneously dismantle the Department of Education and supplant ecosocialist indoctrination with theocratic indoctrination. The leviathan state will lose the power to ban cancer drugs but gain the power to ban rap records.
Things fall apart. The center cannot hold…
Whatever the Republican party seeks to be in the states, in the counties, in the towns, what it cannot be at the national level is the party of both smaller and larger government. It can’t because as a strategy it makes no sense, and it can’t because there is no common ground between the liberty-seeking Republicans and the theocracy-seeking Republicans. Those two wings of the party can only fly apart in the long run.
But: There is a way around this: The Tenth Amendment to the United States Constitution:
The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.
If the national Republican party were to concentrate solely on shrinking the Federal leviathan to a strict adherence to the Constitution, devolving all of the usurped tentacular powers to the states to do with — or do away with — as they choose, the party could achieve these goals:
- It would actually deliver on a promise, prompting universal amazement.
- It would present to both of its contradictory wings the opportunity to achieve at the state and local levels what they cannot hope to achieve nationally.
- It would result in something much better than campaign finance reform: A Federal government that’s not worth buying because it has nothing to sell.
- It would result in something much better than tax reform: A massive reduction in the Federal tax burden.
- It would give Republicans a lasting national agenda. Moreover, it would protect American voters from the predations of the Democrats even when Republicans are out of power.
I myself am a libertarian, and I suppose it’s important to answer the libertarian objection: Fifty small tyrannies is not preferable to one large one. This is false on a number of grounds.
First, the only devolution of power that can be effected by the Federal government is the devolution of Federal power. Whatever else you might hope to do at other levels of government must be done there.
Second, tyranny is most onerous where escaping it is most costly. So long as free-thinkers can easily move to New York or California, it doesn’t matter as much what happens in Iowa or Alabama. Moving from the U.S. to New Zealand is a much higher hurdle.
Third, the irrationality of bad laws is most obvious where comparison is easiest. If it turns out that the Iowans scare away their best and brightest with irrational laws, the Iowans will either change their ways or pay the consequences of failing to.
The Framers of the U.S. Constitution anticipated that the states would comprise laboratories of democracy, each seeking to find the best balance between individual rights and collective authority. Devolving political power from the Federal government to the states, and from there to the counties and municipalities, most closely mimics the grand idea expressed in the Declaration of Independence: The consent of the governed.
In effect, I am offering to the national Republican party the choicest cut of the libertarian steak, the insufferable confiscatory Federal nanny-state. What Republicans choose to do on the state and local levels is their business. What they will stop trying to do is to find a common national ground between Connecticut country-clubbers and Texas bible-thumpers. There is none.
Cut Federal agencies one by one, and cut taxes in lockstep. Sell Federal assets to reduce the national debt. Pass Constitutional amendments that clarify the meaning of the Preamble to the Constitution, the Interstate Commerce Clause and other clauses that weasel-wording lawyers have used to feed the leviathan. Repeal the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Amendments to restore to the states their power over the Federal government. Do everything necessary to give us the Federal government provided for in the Constitution, and then start whittling away at that. Ecosocialists and theocrats can impose their views on those who share them. Those of us who don’t can get on with the business of building a civilization.
That is a national Republican agenda that can win. It gives the liberty-seeking Republicans the liberty they seek. It gives the theocracy-seeking Republicans a fighting chance to achieve their goals locally. And it will appeal to many, many Democrats, Independents and Libertarians, each for their own reasons.
This can win. And nothing else will.
Further notice: I wrote this in November of 1998. Nothing has changed since then, alas, and nothing will now, either, I’m afraid.
Jerry Robertson says:
Excellent article! It is my hope that we will find a game changer and that the American people will understand what we have is not found anywhere else in the world. One of my mentors just returned from speaking in several European countries. Heading out to speak in Italy he was asked to help ‘make our people ambitious’. Americans do not need anyone to ‘make us ambitious’. We have and are part of the best place on Earth.
I love the idea that we could have 50 places to express our ambition and our diversity to see what actually works the best or just have the variety required by the many different people we have without judging one ‘better’ than the other.
Thanks for your article. I will be connecting people to it for their edification. Maybe in the next 10 years we will see a change that shows our true character and ambition in this country rather than the continuous attempt to ‘please everyone’ when we all know that simply does not work.
November 6, 2009 — 5:57 am
jimi says:
Agreed, 50 tyrannies competing for the talents of the populous trumps one giant monopolistic tyranny. Otherwise, the parasite ultimately consumes the host.
November 6, 2009 — 6:19 am
Robert Worthington says:
Greg, correct me if I am wrong, but it’s seems that the independents are normally conservatives and are integrating themselves with the republicans. Even though this is not out rep. or dem. the dems are still in control. Overall I think both parties equally need a makeover. Amen to protecting the constitution.
November 6, 2009 — 6:24 am
James Boyer says:
Fat chance, the Republican party is run by people who are extreme on one issue or another and the jellyfish who go along with them. Until the leaders who are extreme on such issues as abortion, or gay issues, or … they will likely never be a majority party.
Can they win with these people in power, yes!! can they win without tearing people down, distorting, and using fear and derision with the extreme in charge? NO THEY CANNOT!!!
Should we see what you are talking about, sure that would be great, will we see it, NOPE!!
Just my informed opinion.
November 6, 2009 — 7:49 am
Al Lorenz says:
Yes, I think it would be a winning strategy. I’m not optimistic that they’ll do it, but talking about it is a great start.
November 6, 2009 — 11:39 am
James Wheelock says:
I hate parties. I think the formation of the Republican party was the death of Republicanism. The idea of governing not along petty differences but rather by making decisions that are best for all the people. The formation of any party is in total contradiction to the Republican ideal. Parties focus on a shared set of differences.
All in all I wish the people as a whole understood just one thing. That government cannot give you anything without first taking it away. This alone should encourage people to strive for smaller government.
November 6, 2009 — 1:22 pm
Sean Purcell says:
@James – That government cannot give you anything without first taking it away
I would add: “…without first taking it away in greater amounts.”
@Greg – Interesting article. I share the same thought: the greater the distance of the government from the effects of their decisions… the more evil government necessarily becomes.
November 6, 2009 — 2:50 pm
Greg Swann says:
> I share the same thought: the greater the distance of the government from the effects of their decisions… the more evil government necessarily becomes.
I’ll do my best to be nice about this: I don’t see how that follows at all.
We are inclined to paint the Soviets and the Nazis as having been the worst governments in human history, and that’s a plausible claim. They certainly win if the standard of judgment is sheer quantity of political murders, the slaughter of innocents for refusing to toe the ideological line.
The various flavors of Marxism account for at least 160 million political murders in the twentieth century, and the murders continue at a slower pace even now. But I can’t ascribe that murderousness to a detached kind of distance.
All of the big name Marxists — Stalin, Hitler, Mao, etc. — were murderous thugs in their own right. They availed themselves of assembly-line-like technologies to effect much of their slaughter, but that was a practical matter, not a function of distance. I don’t doubt that Stalin would have killed each one of the Kulaks with his own hands, if he had had the time.
The same holds for historical governments: Some were large and some were small, but, if anything, the smaller tyrants were the more bloodthirsty. Big organizations like the Roman Empire might be generally oppressive, but the specific atrocities we can think of — such as the persecution of the Christians — were locally-managed affairs.
The next step in the argument would seem to be that direct awareness of the unhappy consequences of tyranny might lead to a self-imposed mitigation of those consequences, but this again is belied by the Roman Coliseum: The games were put on by and for the gruesome amusement of the Emperor himself, with the rest of the crowd being emotional free-riders to the tyrant’s sadism.
Another way of thinking of the same thing: Every persistent human social organization is in the broadest sense a “government.” Every three weeks or so, some pimple-faced Sophomore Communist will show up here to point out that the family is an example of socialism that works. (I kill dipshit spam comments, so you never see this stuff.) Even so, the claim is true: Parents give far more than they get in return, children consume far more than they produce, and everybody’s happy. Why? Because the arrangement is mutually voluntary. When mom, dad or the kids have had enough, the family falls apart — even though it may persist as a completely-non-socialist filial affiliation.
But imagine a marriage between a batterer and a victim — and, since 50% of all batterers are women, we won’t assign sex roles to the parties. This is also a government, but it is a tyranny in the smallest possible form-factor. “The distance of the government from the effects of their decisions” could not be smaller, and yet the actions of that government could not possibly be more evil. Hitler, Stalin and Mao may have the body count, but a brutal marriage is 100% slavery — with the battered party actually being the more free, existentially, of the two victims of this awful micro-civilization.
The problem that I am having with my own argument is that I am willfully conflating unlike terms. I am using the word “government” to mean three things, where in fact your argument only actually means one of them. My uses are these:
1. Cooperation: The mutually-voluntary coordination of shared goals, drawing upon assets each party brings to the association, possibly in differing quantities, with the rewards accruing therefrom being disbursed among the parties, again possibly in differing proportions.
2. Conciliation: Any mutually-voluntary means of resolving disputes that may arise, either in the type of cooperative organization described above or among people who were essentially strangers prior to the incident leading to their perceived conflict.
3. Coercion: The imposition of force upon an involuntary victim. Usually this is just crime, but the category of coercion called “government” is crime that is justified and rationalized by reference to abstract concepts — in my view, always insane concepts.
In fact, when you say “government” you are speaking only of coercion. How do I know this? Because there is absolutely no need to talk about cooperation or conciliation. These things already take care of themselves, and we are so busy bitching that other people won’t obey the orders we are kind enough to bestow upon them that we don’t notice that 99.8% of all normal human social interaction consists of cooperation, with the next one tenth of one percent being made up of conciliation.
The final one tenth of one percent? That’s crime, and the proper answer to crime is not more crime. You will not rid the world of cannibals by eating them.
This is what you said, originally, with the word coercion inserted where it belongs:
By defining the word “government” properly — as coercion — we can see that this is complete nonsense. First, coercion is obviously never necessary. The implication would be that a true marriage cannot exist without battery. Second, the evil that is coercion is not somehow modulated by distance — nor by proximity. You as much injured no matter where the injury originates.
The only way that any of this makes sense is by pre-supposing the rarest kind of good luck for the victims of coercion: To belong to a society that attends to some degree to the consent of the governed. That is, to be a citizen of a democracy or a republic. The original quotation still fails, except as poetry. What it actually says is that Andy Taylor, because he knows Otis the town drunk, is more likely to be merciful to him than would be, say, Hillary Clinton. That’s plausible, case by case, but Andy Taylor is always replaced by Barney Fife, who is always replaced by Jimmy Carter — who never more than a gust of October’s winds away from Joe Stalin. In other words, it would seem to be poetry about what might be, at best, a temporary situation — and is more likely simply a fantasy borne of the insane premises that lead people to think in terms of “morally justified” crime.
In any case, this is what I actually said:
The quote pre-supposes our current style of republican coercion at all levels of government, so that it is still possible to escape with one’s life. But the argument that is being made here is not one of distance, but, rather, of fungibility: By moving in a relatively free society, it is possible to distance oneself from coercion that is itself entirely too proximate.
Now I’ve gone at this at enormous length, and I cannot believe that anyone is interested in the least. But here is where I leave it: Neither your original quotation nor your restatement of it today bear any close resemblance to reality. To the contrary, they amount, at best, to a sort of wishful thinking that is too much belied by entirely too much brutally hard evidence — ancient history, recent history and the unbearably bad marriage next door.
There is no relationship between the severity of any particular flavor of coercion and the proximity of the tyrant. The counter-claim has some merit, but only with a great many caveats. As a matter of truth, the proposition seems to me to be essentially useless. It is possible to make truthful similar statements, but only with a stricter kind of language and a lot more attention to existential details. Even then, the whole idea that “coercion is necessary” falls apart completely.
For what it’s worth, the longer it takes for you to think through your response to me, whatever it might be, the more you will learn. Cathleen, after ten years of “yeah-buts” has finally conceded that there is no peril to human civilization worse than “government.” A useful lens for thinking about coercion in general: If it’s not just in a marriage, it’s not just anywhere else.
And: Urf. I wanted to write an essay about feminism and guns — a true feminist is armed and dangerous. Not tonight. I wish you peace, in any case.
November 6, 2009 — 5:53 pm
Don Reedy says:
Greg,
Spoken from the past. Repeated for the present. Here, another voice added to yours.
November 6, 2009 — 5:04 pm
Greg Swann says:
That’s was a cool video, Don. I like zero government at all levels, but the smaller the better, in any case. I wish Ol’ Fred would take on the chairmanship of the RNC. He’s as good as Reagan was at connecting with people and communicating difficult ideas.
November 6, 2009 — 5:41 pm
Sean Purcell says:
Greg,
Now I’ve gone at this at enormous length, and I cannot believe that anyone is interested in the least
I doubt very much that I am alone in finding a discussion like this interesting.
Cathleen, after ten years of “yeah-buts” has finally conceded that there is no peril to human civilization worse than “government.”
I could not have said it better myself; although I have tried. This, from my post right here last fall:
The original quotation still fails, except as poetry
Poetry (of a most base level) was, of course, my target. But that does not excuse a looseness with words and so I will endeavor not to commit that sin again.
I agree with many aspects of your comment and disagree with others. I most emphatically agree with your idea that the more one thinks something through, the more one learns. Greater still is the learning induced by writing – at least for me. I look forward to doing both.
November 6, 2009 — 10:36 pm