The Case for Big, Big
Government
October 12, 1999
Garry
Wills is a shameless liberal, unabashedly attached to the infinitely
expanding state. In his new book, A Necessary Evil: A History of
American Distrust of Government (Simon & Schuster), he argues
that government is really “a necessary good,” despite our long
tradition of “anti-government” thought and rhetoric.
It isn’t easy to make sense of an
argument in which the two key terms, “government” and
“anti-government,” are never defined. But in general, Wills
sees the growth of centralized government as a good thing, making few
distinctions between proper and improper, or constitutional and
unconstitutional, governmental powers. For him, insistence on such
distinctions is simply “anti-government.”
Thus, according to Wills, Southern
seceders were “anti-government” — though they were
actually arguing and fighting for the sovereignty of their state
governments. A more accurate and honest designation of the two sides in
this venerable debate would be “centralizers” and
“anti-centralizers.” Wills’s crude terminology loads
the argument and allows him to pummel a straw man for 320 pages.
The anti-centralizers rarely oppose
government as such; they merely wanted to limit the federal government
to the powers assigned to it by the Constitution. It’s absurd to call
Jefferson Davis, a former U.S. Senator, a former secretary of war, and
president of the Confederate States of America, “anti-
government.” If Wills wanted a truly “anti-government”
figure, he might have mentioned Lysander Spooner, the brilliant anarchist
who took Thoreau’s principle of civil disobedience to its logical
end: no man can impose obligations on any other, either by enslavement or
by legislation.
Wills rightly notes that Alexander
Hamilton and James Madison went to the Philadelphia convention hoping
that a new constitution would create a radically centralized state, with
the power to “negative” (veto) the laws of the states. And he
rightly observes that the federal judiciary’s modern use of the
Fourteenth Amendment to strike down state laws has created, in effect,
the single, centralized superstate Hamilton and Madison yearned for (and
Wills himself approves). But neither fact proves the merits of centralizing
power.
Wills forgets that most Americans in
1787 opposed a single “consolidated” central government, and
that Hamilton and Madison, in The Federalist Papers,
“sold” the Constitution on grounds that it would
prevent such consolidation. The Bill of Rights (which both men
opposed) was added for further assurance to the wavering.
Taking Lincoln’s side in the
secession debate, Wills contends that the Union existed before the
states, that the states in fact owe their existence to the Union, and that
they were never truly “sovereign.” He forgets that his book
Lincoln at Gettysburg argued that Lincoln was forced to
“swindle” the American people into a radically new
understanding of both the Declaration of Independence and the
Constitution. This amounted to a concession that Lincoln’s view of
these documents was ahistorical.
Alas, the Declaration declares plainly
that “these United Colonies are, and of Right ought to be, Free and
Independent States.” The Articles of Confederation said up front
that “each state retains its sovereignty, freedom, and
independence.” Wills does his clever best to play down these words,
but a “state” was by definition “sovereign” in
those days, and a “confederation” was by definition a
voluntary association of sovereign states. The federal government’s
powers were “delegated,” therefore contingent — not
absolute, final, total; in short, not sovereign.
Even The Federalist Papers
use “Union” and “Confederacy” interchangeably.
The right of a state to withdraw from the “Confederacy” was
both asserted (by several states in their ratification acts) and taken for
granted (Hamilton and Madison envisioned the states taking arms against
federal “usurpations”). Even the Anti-Federalist opponents of
the Constitution, in their wildest prophesies, never charged that the
Constitution would do away with the right of secession. Any perceived
threat to that right would have been uppermost among their concerns.
Wills avoids the whole problem of
“usurpation.” For him it’s not a problem at all. How are
the states’ reserved powers to be protected against the federal
government? Wills fairly gloats that they can’t be protected. The
more government, the better. Any other position is
“anti-government.”
The twentieth century has seen
governments kill tens of millions of their own subjects. It takes a
mindset I can’t fathom to apprehend danger from people who still
don’t trust the state.
Joseph Sobran
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