VOTING FOR "NEITHER"
August 5, 2004

by Joe Sobran

     I recently quoted G.K. Chesterton on the flaw in a 
two-party system: "The democracy has the right to answer 
questions, but it has no right to ask them. It is still 
the political aristocracy that asks the questions. And we 
shall not be unreasonably cynical if we suppose that the 
political aristocracy will always be rather careful what 
questions it asks."

     In fact, the two big parties always ask the same 
irksome question: Which of us do you prefer? If your 
reply is "neither," you may, like half the electorate, 
stay home on election day.

     The proof that both parties are really the same 
party is simple: Neither wants to repeal much of what the 
other party has achieved. The Republicans now promise to 
preserve and even aggrandize all the Democratic programs 
and agencies they used to oppose. One "neoconservative" 
journalist, Fred Barnes, approvingly calls President Bush 
a "big-government conservative."

     Actually, the phrase is slightly misleading, even 
apart from being a contradiction in terms. Bush is a 
bigger-government conservative, or rather a 
much-bigger-government conservative, for whom there are 
no limits on the size and scope of government. You might 
as well call him a totalitarian conservative.

     So our "choices" are liberal and conservative 
totalitarianism. Both parties are one in seeking an 
indefinite, irreversible accumulation of power by 
government. They differ slightly on the immediate 
direction this growth should take, but there is no debate 
on the shared premise that government should just keep 
growing. When they promise "change," they always mean 
more government; never that the premise itself will 
change.

     Those who want to choose "neither" but don't want to 
stay home on November 2 may want to consider Michael 
Anthony Peroutka of the Constitution Party. Peroutka is a 
pleasant, good-humored Maryland lawyer who sings and 
plays the guitar at his campaign rallies. No extravagant 
claims should be made for his singing and strumming, but 
his campaign theme may be sweet music to your ears: 
finite government.

     Peroutka doesn't just want to halt government 
growth; he wants to prune away most of the jungle of laws 
that has already grown. The Constitution Party is 
dedicated to repealing the vast body of legislation, 
including overweening judicial rulings, that isn't 
authorized by the U.S. Constitution. It wants to change 
the two parties' premise.

     It's a sign of the times that a party that stands 
for recognizing the limits imposed by the Constitution is 
regarded as extremist, unelectable, radical, outside the 
mainstream. This is a phase new political movements 
always have to endure, as the "political aristocracy" 
tries to keep them good and marginalized. It happened to 
the Goldwater/Reagan movement.

     Peroutka denies that he's a "spoiler" hoping to move 
the Republican Party rightward. He's not trying to spoil 
anything; he's trying to restore something. And, like 
most members of his party, he has long since given up 
hope that the Republicans will ever restore it.

     Everything old becomes new again, and the 
constitutional paradigm Peroutka wants to bring back 
would by now seem like a novelty. Only serious students 
of American history are aware that it once existed. Not 
only did it exist, it worked far better than most other 
forms of government, despite all pressures to change.

     As Chesterton also wrote, "It is futile to discuss 
reform without reference to form." For Peroutka, reform 
means a return to form. And the form lies close at hand: 
in the Constitution. The two parties pretend to honor it, 
take oaths to uphold it, and ignore it. The Republicans 
sometimes try, in their gauche manner, to amend it, but 
the Democrats have long since learned to circumvent it 
(especially through the judiciary) by inflating a few 
passages and forgetting the rest -- the "living document" 
approach, which denies that words have objective meaning.

     But no real rule of law can emerge from subjectivist 
interpretation, by either legislators or judges. So in a 
sense, Peroutka isn't just running for office; he's 
fighting for an honest political language that has become 
almost extinct among us. The Constitution presupposes 
that words do have objective meaning, and that a shared 
and reliable political language is one of the deepest 
preconditions of a free society. If you doubt that fuzzy 
language can lead to tyranny, look around you.

     Michael Peroutka doesn't expect to win this year. 
But he is confident that in the end, the truth is never 
offered in vain.

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