Saturday, Aug 30, 2008
Unfortunately, Wills doesn't explore specific examples of anti-governmentalism with the same depth he brings to his constitutional analysis. In place of a detailed examination of these varying issues and causes, he puts forward an abstract theoretical framework that, while thought-provoking, only seems to fit some of the cases he describes. The second half of the book, much weaker than the first, is a rather cursory survey of various movements, events and individuals that rejected government in a variety of ways. It's a worthwhile historical roundup, but inevitably superficial; and the subjects he looks at are so wildly disparate -- from "withdrawers" like Thoreau to "vigilantes" like the Ku Klux Klan to "insurrectionists" like John Brown -- that it becomes difficult to see what they have in common.
This feels like an opportunity missed. The prolific Wills (he is the author of 22 books on subjects ranging from John Wayne to St. Augustine) is one of our leading polymaths, a scholar who is also a keen student of contemporary culture; but he's not bringing everything he has to the subject. It would have been more stimulating to see him taking off his constitutional-scholar coat and taking on some hard contemporary cases, like gun control, affirmative action and abortion rights. With this caveat, "A Necessary Evil" is a stimulating and important analysis of a peculiarly American phenomenon.
The anti-governmental tradition in America, according to Wills, is due to a number of "confluent influences": "the lack of a symbolic center (religious or political) at our origins; the air of compromise in our Constitution's formation (which made it vulnerable to the reversal of Federalist and Anti-federalist values); the Jeffersonian suspicion of the Constitution (which Madison abetted at one stage); a jostling of competitive states' claims (reaching a climax in the secession of the South); a frontier tradition; the Lockean individualism of our political theory; a fervent cult of the gun. All these were added, in overlapping layers, to the general anti-authoritarian instincts of mankind."
Beneath all of these factors lie what Wills calls a "cluster of anti-governmental values," which he lists in table form next to their opposites, "governmental values." The anti-governmental values are "provincial, amateur, authentic, spontaneous, candid, homogenous, traditional, popular, organic, rights-oriented, religious, voluntary, participatory, and rotational." Their governmental counterparts are "cosmopolitan, expert, authoritative, efficient, confidential, articulated, progressive, elite, mechanical, duties-oriented, secular, regulatory, and delegative, with a division of labor."
Wills argues that Americans have a "deep emotional engagement" in this "cluster" of anti-governmental values, both because of the "confluent influences" listed above and because of their innate worth: "No one can really challenge them as valuable parts of the human outlook." In fact, so deep is our attachment to these values that we persistently rewrite history to make it accord with them. In particular, we distort the meaning of the Revolution, the Constitution and the views of the Founders, in particular James Madison.
The "national mythology" about the Revolution, Wills says, is that it was a "revolution against central authority in general. So great was the Americans' impatience with being told what to do, according to this myth, that they won their war and set up their government without needing a counter-authority to direct them." Government itself, no matter what its form, was seen as the enemy of the highest good, liberty. Accordingly, the Constitution was designed to be deliberately inefficient, intentionally made by a government "so distrustful of itself as to hamper itself." Pessimistic about human nature and convinced that all power corrupts, the Founders conceived of government as what Thomas Paine called "a necessary evil." "We are faced with a zero-sum game," Wills writes. "Any power given to the government is necessarily subtracted from the liberty of the governed."
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