Get Uncle Sam off my back! and other misguided impulses

American government-bashers like to wrap themselves in a constitutional flag. But Garry Wills argues that the Founders wanted a strong government, not a weak one.

By Gary Kamiya

Nov 3, 1999 | For the past 20 years, it has been the most familiar applause line in American politics: Government is bad, and Big Government is worse. This belief did not originate with Ronald Reagan: Barry Goldwater sounded the theme decades earlier, and it has roots that precede the Revolution. But Reagan rode it to victory, and Republicans (and sometimes Democrats) have been profitably flogging that horse ever since. The '94 congressional election, in which a freshman class of virulently anti-government Republicans were voted in, marked its political zenith, and though Newt Gingrich's hubristic folly prevented the GOP from a complete triumph, it remains a potent force -- so much so that President Clinton was forced to pay homage to it with his 1996 declaration that "the era of big government is over."

Triangulating Democrats notwithstanding, the real home of anti-governmentalism remains the GOP -- and the more right-wing the Republican, the more extreme the rhetoric. GOP front-runner George W. Bush must play to the middle, but the True Believers who run Congress -- Dick Armey, Trent Lott, Tom DeLay -- are under no such constraints. These worthies have scarcely pulled their legs out of their pajamas before they've given the corrupt, bureaucratic, meddling elites in Washington their first whacking of the day. Since the deliverers of these speeches are themselves career politicians whose own snouts have snuffled deeply in the loamy D.C. soil, this spectacle is oddly surreal -- somewhat like the Reni Magritte painting of a pipe that declares, "This is not a pipe."

Partly for this reason, but mostly because the endless flagellation of Big Government never seems to result in it getting any smaller (under Reagan, the high priest of government-bashing, the federal government grewenormously), the GOP's anti-government screechings have begun to sound merely formulaic, scarcely taken seriously even by those who invoke them, like the warm-up patter of a used-car salesman. The intellectual flexibility, to use a charitable word, of the congressional anti-government ideologues does not inspire much respect, either: The same fire-breathers who treat state's rights like Holy Writ when the issue is, say, restrictions on abortion found no problem in pulling on their federal jackboots last week to trample the "sovereign" state of Oregon, which had legalized physician-assisted suicide. (Even more farcical are those congressional Young Turks who piously promised to serve only one term, but after ascending the marble steps of power somehow changed their mind.)

But if the anti-government impulse is often incoherent, hypocritical or unevenly applied (often it is little more than a thin justification for anti-tax resentment), it has a deep appeal. Throughout American history it has flared up again and again. Its newest frontier is the Web, where libertarianism, its purest and most intellectually rigorous form, is the dominant ideology.

Garry Wills' new book, "A Necessary Evil: A History of American Distrust of Government," is a penetrating but uneven look at the history and causes of American anti-governmentalism. Wills started writing the book in 1994, when Gingrich's troops had taken Washington, and insofar as it has a goal, it is to undercut the historical arguments -- in particular, the appeal to the Founders -- employed by today's anti-governmentalists, whether politicians, militia members, or anti-gun-control zealots.

To a large degree, Wills succeeds in stripping the mythical 1776 garb from anti-government arguments. Since the minutemen, Jefferson, Madison and other patriotic icons are a cornerstone of those arguments, Wills' book is sure to stir up right-wing intellectual circles. (As Wills reminds us, anti-governmentalism is not confined to the right wing -- '60s New Left radicals also attacked government. But statistically, to paraphrase what Roland Barthes said of myth, anti-governmentalism is on the right.)

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