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The Executive Empire
 The
great sociologist Robert Nisbet once
wrote that if America’s Founding Fathers could come back, the
feature of today’s America that would most astound and appall them
would be the vast scale of its military system
and  the
penetration of militaristic assumptions into American life.
As always,
Nisbet had a point, but I would put it just a bit more expansively: the salient
feature of American government today is the enormous expansion of the
executive branch, of which the military is only a fraction. Though we
commonly speak of our form of government as democracy, it is really
bureaucracy — unelected officials. The bigger the government gets,
the greater the ratio of unelected to elected rulers.
To put it as
simply as possible, if somebody from the government pays you a call today
(not a highly improbable event), it won’t be someone you voted for.
And if he treats you with contempt, see how much good your vote does you.
The vast majority of those who rule us — who wield direct power over
us — are hardly affected by elections and have no reason at all to fear
voters.
Yet, in
defiance of common sense, everyone talks as if this were a democracy.
Again, our Founding Fathers would be amazed — not only by the
metamorphosis of their constitutional republic into this gigantic
bureaucracy, but by our blindness to the change. Little changes may make
headlines; the really big ones pass unnoticed.
It’s
almost enough to make Darwinism plausible. If the modest republic of
Washington and Jefferson could evolve into this Hydra, why can’t an
amoeba evolve into an elephant?
Our
language has evolved too. Fewer and fewer of us can speak plain English. The
other day at the local McDonald’s, I met one who still speaks it. He was
a young black working man who doesn’t seem to have spent too much
time in classrooms, and his sanity is unimpaired. He pays taxes, and he
remarked that taxation is “extortion.” Pay, or else.
I laughed.
I’d have been wasting my time trying to explain to that kid that
extortion is now a “service,” just as war is now
“defense” and bureaucracy is “democracy.” Of
course he had a big advantage over me: he hadn’t had so much
education to unlearn. He is still free to utter thoughts no politician
(“public servant”) can afford to entertain.
![[Breaker quote for
The Executive Empire: Whately's Law]](2006breakers/061024.gif) Politics breeds evasion, abstraction, and
euphemism. A politician is someone who can discuss abortion for hours
without using the word kill.
Ah, the gift
of remembering the simple things! The great Anglican bishop Richard Whately
once wrote, “He who is unaware of his ignorance will be only misled by
his knowledge.” That is a priceless observation, worth several
encyclopedias — indeed, it’s a reminder of how little
encyclopedias are really worth if misused.
Think of a
movie based on historical events, like the recent United 93.
It’s a plausible, painstaking attempt to recreate one of the 9/11
hijackings. Though as accurate a guess as I can imagine, it’s still only
a guess. If we could miraculously get an eyewitness account from one of the
passengers, it might be very different from the film. All our history is like
that; even the best of it is more or less misleading. Though we have to try to
recreate and imagine the past — it’s almost a duty — we
can never fully succeed.
The Iraq
war illustrates Whately’s point. The government amasses fantastic
amounts of information, most of it withheld from us but available to the
president, who is then said to “know more than we do.” This has
turned out to be a very weak reason for trusting his judgment. And yet the
mantra of this administration has been no doubt. As when there was
“no doubt” about Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass
destruction and the threat he posed. Today the administration is
embarrassed to be reminded of the very things it once insisted there was no
doubt about!
Donald
Rumsfeld once made a valuable distinction, worthy of Whately himself,
between “the known unknowns” and “the unknown
unknowns.” But then he seemed to forget his own words, and the
unknown unknowns he failed to consider may prove his undoing.
That’s the trouble. Our Executive Empire is run by clever, Ivy
League-educated men who have never absorbed Whately’s Law.
Joseph Sobran |
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| Copyright © 2006 by the
Griffin Internet Syndicate, a division of Griffin Communications This column may not be reprinted in print or Internet publications without express permission of Griffin Internet Syndicate 
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