John McCain and the Autonomous State
February 17, 2000
John
McCain is that rare candidate who has a way of making people
believe in him even when they have only the vaguest idea of what he
stands for. Ross Perot inspired similar enthusiasm in 1992, until he
suddenly withdrew from the race. Likewise Colin Powell in 1996, though
he never actually became a candidate.
All three men symbolized an
undefined patriotism and general disgust with partisan politics. None had
a clear program or principle to speak of. McCain poses as a conservative,
but his attachment to conservative principles is iffy, and his chief appeal
is not to conservatives but to liberals, independents, and moderates. He is
often described as a Republican maverick because he favors
such measures as campaign finance reform and punitive taxes and
restrictions on the tobacco industry.
Though McCain himself speaks of these anomalous positions as
principled, he never actually explains what their governing
principle is. He is certainly less consistent than those conservative
Republicans who steadily oppose centralizing power in the federal
government. His campaign reform would give incumbents
more power to regulate their opposition an odd way to improve
republican self-government, to which unfettered opposition is vital. His
anti-tobacco crusade similarly aspires to make a large sector of American
life and industry less free than it has traditionally been.
Far from being a
maverick (except in terms of party discipline), McCain
conforms to the dominant principle of twentieth-century politics: the
autonomous state, the state that is the source of its own authority and
recognizes no authority above itself that may limit its power. The most
egregious examples of this principle were Communism, Nazism, and
fascism. But there is a milder American version as well.
In civilizations better
moments, the state has acknowledged limits on itself. When it claims
authority from God, it is bound by divine law; when it claims authority by
custom and succession, it is limited by positive law; in other cases it has
recognized what Catholic theology calls natural law, by
which it has been accordingly controlled.
The American Republic was based on
an interpretation of natural law, under which government existed to
secure mans natural rights and derived its specific powers from
the consent of the governed. The U.S. Constitution was the instrument by
which the governed We the People delegated
certain specific powers to the federal government. All the powers that
werent delegated to that government were forbidden to it.
Abraham Lincoln recognized that
slavery was contrary to the natural rights of man; but he also recognized
that the Constitution had delegated to the federal government no legal
power to meddle with it in the states where it existed. In the
Emancipation Proclamation he merely claimed the military authority to
deprive slaveowners in the rebellious states of their slaves; and even so,
many other Northerners thought he had exceeded his constitutional power.
Everyone agreed that abolishing slavery throughout the United States
required a constitutional amendment.
The principle at stake was limited
government. All Americans understood that it was dangerous to allow
government to exercise any power that had not been specifically assigned
to it, no matter how righteous the cause or how great the evil to be
remedied. When alcohol was seen as an evil to be banished, they amended
the Constitution. However misguided Prohibition was, at least they
recognized that such an exercise of federal power required a formal
change in the basic rules of American governance.
The original consensus broke down
during the New Deal, when Franklin Roosevelt claimed that the Great
Depression had created emergency conditions requiring both centralized
power and lax interpretation of the Constitution. Constitutional
restrictions on the federal government became meaningless as Roosevelt
construed such phrases as general welfare and
interstate commerce to be almost infinitely elastic. During
World War II, the general welfare warranted the
incarceration of all Japanese-Americans; there was no logical reason why
it couldnt have been invoked to justify killing them all.
With Roosevelt, the United States
moved from limited government to the autonomous state that could define
its own powers as it pleased. John McCain belongs to this recent tradition,
under which the Founding Fathers, Lincoln, and even Woodrow Wilson
would qualify as extremists.
Joseph Sobran
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