A Conservative Defense Of Government: You’re A Fan Of Government, So Stop Pretending Otherwise
Everyone knows that Ronald Reagan famously said, “Government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem.” But as Ramesh Ponnuru recently pointed out, there is a “less famous yet crucial beginning of that sentence”: “In our present crisis.”
Conservatives rightly hate nanny-state government and big-spending bureaucracy. But too often, the word “government” has become unfair shorthand for what is actually only bad or oppressive government.
Conservatives aren’t anarchists, after all. We don’t want Big Brother, but none of us should want to live in a Hobbesian state where every person is absolutely and entirely for himself, either. Instead, we believe in ordered liberty via limited government.
Certainly, the size and scope of government has increased over the years. But still, we shouldn’t conflate all government with bad government. We need a functioning state, and yes, there is such a thing as a government that is too weak.
This is a lesson that goes back to our founding. And it’s one conservatives should appreciate. Judging from their colonial garb and tri-cornered hats, Tea Party activists are fond of the Constitution and its Founders. So you might expect that they, of all people, would appreciate the importance of having a government that isn’t laughably weak.
As Baylor professor and Patrick Henry author Thomas Kidd tells me, “Most of the major Founders became convinced that Americans needed a stronger national government to coordinate trade policy and protect against domestic and foreign threats.”
Under the Articles of Confederation, the government was impotent. “Major decisions — declaring war and signing treaties — needed the approval of nine states,” writes Richard Brookhiser in his book James Madison. Congress couldn’t even tax, and “as a result, the United States was perpetually broke,” Brookhiser adds.
To be sure, some patriots, like Patrick Henry and Samuel Adams, opposed the Constitution precisely because they feared big government. But as Kidd points out, “the majority of the best-known Founders believed that the new republic needed a bigger, stronger government for the United States to survive and compete on the world stage.”
“If men were angels, no government would be necessary,” wrote Madison, who (in fairness) added, “If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary.”
So, a natural question: What should a limited government do?
For starters, preserve law and order, ensure the rule of law, enforce contracts, provide for our defense — and yes, control the border. (I’m also partial to clean water, but that’s just me.)
Max Weber said the government has a “monopoly on legitimate violence in society.” This is needed to enforce law and order. Otherwise, whoever has the biggest gun — or the most brothers — takes your property.
“Government is the most common form of hierarchy,” Robert Kaplan recently noted. “It is a government that monopolizes the use of violence in a given geographical space, thereby preventing anarchy. To quote Thomas Hobbes, the 17th-century English philosopher, only where it is possible to punish the wicked can right and wrong have any practical meaning, and that requires ‘some coercive power.'”
But government functions don’t just keep us safe, they also make us prosperous. Sure, overregulation can be a job killer. But consider the extreme alternative. If you believe that someone could steal your business if he wants to, then you are much less likely to start one. If you believe that someone can break a contract with you — or steal your invention — without fear of punishment, that might make it less likely that you will go into business or to invest in research and development.
In their 2012 book Why Nations Fail, economists Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson provide a largely free market argument for why some nations succeed. For example, Acemoglu and Robinson fault protectionist policies instituted to avoid the process of creative destruction as a primary reason some nations fail.
But interestingly, they also frequently cite a lack of a strong central government as a prime reason nations fail. For example, the authors lament Somalia’s “lack of any kind of political centralization, or state centralization, and its inability to enforce even the minimal amount of law and order to support economic activity, trade, or even basic security of its citizens.”
I can’t imagine that any conservatives who decry government would prefer this sort of extreme chaos to our current, albeit imperfect, government.
So maybe the answer is to be more specific about our concerns with government. Attempting to do just that, Nobel Prize-winning economist James M. Buchanan distinguished between the productive state, the protective state, and the redistributive state.
Essentially, the productive state would constitute infrastructure like roads and bridges, the protective state would encompass the police, criminal justice, etc., and the redistributive state is obviously the entitlement state.
While most conservatives concede that we need some social safety net, they are mostly worried about the out-of-control growth of the redistributive state. And yet, too seldom is that distinction made. Instead, the criticism is usually directed at “government.”
When it comes to government, a lot of conservatives are probably too obsessed with size. Grover Norquist famously wants to shrink government to such a small size that you can drown it in a bathtub.
But I’m not sure most Americans want that. And trying to force it via draconian cuts doesn’t work, especially if they don’t address the specific problem, such as the need for entitlement reform. “You can’t make a fat man skinny by tightening his belt,” observed John Maynard Keynes.
Whether you’re a conservative who cares about preserving law and order, or a free marketer who appreciates the importance the rule of law plays in providing confidence and incentives to entrepreneurs, you’re a fan of government. Stop pretending otherwise.
By: Matt K. Lewis, The Week, May 9, 2013
“Fun And Games Until People Get Killed”: Constitutional Conservatism’s Non-Violent March To Threaten Violence
As readers have probably noticed, I’m on something of a campaign the last few days to train a spotlight on the revolutionary rhetoric and gun-brandishing of many Second Amendment activists and “constitutional conservatives,” which has leeched over into standard conservative and GOP messaging to an alarming degree. Like anyone shining a spotlight into previously dark shadows, I’m not always familiar with what I’m seeing. That’s definitely the case with Adam Kokesh, an Iraq War vet and omni-libertarian who is planning a non-violent march of armed citizens on Washington for Independence Day to show, best I can tell, that resistance to the demands of people like him that government radically retract its size and scope will eventually face real fire. Here’s Paul Szoldra’s write-up of Kokesh’s scheme at Business Insider:
Adam Kokesh, 31, is planning a July 4 rally of pro-gun activists openly carrying rifles from Virginia to Washington as an act of “civil disobedience.” The plan, according to his Facebook event page, is to march across Memorial Bridge with rifles loaded and slung across the back “to put the government on notice that we will not be intimidated [and] cower in submission to tyranny.”
The invite continues, stating, ” … This will be a non-violent event, unless the government chooses to make it violent.”
Kokesh writes that if 10,000 attendees RSVP by June 1st, “we have the critical mass necessary to pull this off.” He said he wants to have at least 1,000 actually marching in the event, and as of this writing, more than 1,400 have said they were going.
As the headline at Karoli’s post on this plan at Crooks & Liars rightly says: “Marching On DC With Loaded Rifles: What Could Possibly Go Wrong?”
But even if no violence ensues, this exercise is actually typical of an awful lot of the stockpiling-guns-to-resist-tyranny talk on the Right (and on rare occasions, the Left) these days. It’s actually the inverse of what Kokesh says: it’s an effort to intimidate political opponents with the threat, if not the immediate actuality, of violence. Otherwise, what’s the point of carrying guns to your nonviolent protest? The point, it seems clear, is to make extraconstitutional claims for the legitimacy of the “constitutional” protests against Big Government. We can peacefully debate, the potential “armed resistance” forces suggest, this or that aspect of gun regulation or Obamacare or drone policy or taxes or “welfare looters” via conventional politics. But in the end, our conviction that your “progressive policies” represent “tyranny” trumps all civil discourse, and that’s when the shooting may start.
And that, of course, is why this sort of talk is not limited to anarchists or even to the kind of “constitutional conservatives” who really do think the policies of Calvin Coolidge or Grover Cleveland or the doctrines of John C. Calhoun came down from heaven and were enshrined eternally by the Declaration of Independence. Consciously or unconsciously, regular conservative politicians see this sort of militancy as a crucial difference-maker (or in times of Democratic political success, an “equalizer”), and so they exploit it. It’s all fun and games until people start getting killed.
By: Ed Kilgore, Contributing Writer, Washington Monthly Political Animal, May 6, 2013
“Not Much To Chew On”: Conservatives Show A Lack Of Appetite For Sen Mike Lee
Whoever thinks there’s no such thing as a free lunch has not been to the Heritage Foundation.
After Sen. Mike Lee’s speech to the conservative think tank Monday, his listeners didn’t rush to the front of the room, where the Utah Republican was greeting well-wishers, but to the back to get in line for sandwiches, cookies and soft drinks provided gratis to the hungry young conservatives who sat through the hour.
Such an inducement may have been necessary to fill the room for Lee, who is not exactly an electrifying speaker. His colleague Rand Paul (R-Ky.), a fellow first-term senator with tea party backing, packed a much larger auditorium at Heritage in February. But Lee is no bomb-thrower; he is amiable and cerebral and uses phrases such as “We can start ensuring policy sustainability” and “The true and proper end of political subsidiarity is social solidarity.” Even Lee’s former Senate colleague Jim DeMint (R-S.C.), who took over as Heritage’s president this month, apparently had more pressing business elsewhere.
This lack of appetite for Lee helps explain why the vision he outlined for conservatives, though worthy, is unlikely to receive serious GOP consideration. He essentially wants a return to “compassionate conservatism,” but there are a few big problems: George W. Bush tarnished the notion (by giving it lip service but little else), Paul’s libertarian wing is ascendant in the party, and Lee has little to propose other than vague notions of federalism.
Lee, a young man with a round face and thinning hair, diagnosed the conservatives’ condition fairly well. “The left has created this false narrative that liberals are for things and conservatives are against things,” he said. “A liberal proposes an idea, we explain why it won’t work and we think we’ve won the debate.”
Lee sounded much like Bush when he campaigned in 1999 against the “Leave us alone” conservatives. “Freedom doesn’t mean you’re on your own,” the senator said. “It means we’re all in this together.” He even echoed Bush’s “No child left behind” phrase as he argued for a “voluntary civil society that strengthens our communities, protects the vulnerable and minds the gaps to make sure no one gets left behind.”
Lee criticized Bush for misapplying the philosophy, referring to “one politician’s occasional conflation of ‘compassion’ and ‘bigger government.’ ” He also criticized past conservatives for overusing federal power and for being intolerant (“The price of allowing conservative states to be conservative is allowing liberal states to be liberal”). His criticism of Paul’s libertarian wing was particularly colorful: “This vision of America conservatives seek is not an Ayn Rand novel. It’s a Norman Rockwell painting, or a Frank Capra movie.”
But as a practical matter, Lee wasn’t offering anything much different from the Rand acolytes. He spoke of an end to “corporate welfare” — an admirable goal, but his targets were the same old villains such as Planned Parenthood and public broadcasting. He employed the usual straw-man characterization of liberals: “They attack free enterprise. . . . Elite progressives in Washington . . . believe in community organizers, self-anointed strangers, preferably ones with Ivy League degrees.” (This from a man who is the son of Ronald Reagan’s solicitor general, grew up in McLean and went on to clerk for Samuel Alito.)
Lee’s grand solution is one that conservatives have wanted for decades: the devolution of power to state and local governments. “We must make this fundamental principle of pluralistic diversity a pillar of our agenda,” he said, in a typically airy phrase.
But how? A questioner asked the senator how to “translate what you’re saying to benefit the 40 percent at the bottom” rather than “protecting the 1 percent.”
Lee’s answer provided nothing specific. “When you take government out of the equation,” he replied, “it doesn’t have to be a zero sum game between this top percentage and that bottom percentage.”
Another questioner asked whether the government should support the “social entrepreneurs” who Lee said are crucial to strengthening society. Again, he had no specifics. He said the government should “establish a neutral set of rules” for all. To do more, he said, would be “destructive.”
A third questioner asked bluntly: “Which policies . . . help promote these vibrant communities which we as conservatives want to foster?”
Lee replied: “The single most important policy would be federalism,” which means making “as many decisions at the most local level as possible.”
That’s a philosophy, not a policy. If Lee wants conservatives to rediscover compassion, he’ll have to provide something more substantial for them to chew on.
By: Dana Milbank, Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, April 22, 2013
“Cherry Picking The Constitution”: Conservative Constitutional Hypocrisy On Gun Control And The 4th Amendment
The Second Amendment and the Fourth Amendment. They’re like kissing cousins, separated in the Constitution by a mere 32 words. And lately they’ve been all over the news.
Now, I don’t know how you feel about the amendments; maybe you have no opinion of them at all. But ask some conservatives and it’s like they don’t even appear in the same document. And when you think about it, that’s a pretty strange thing. Pretty revealing, too. Here’s why:
If you read the Second and the Fourth Amendments without knowing anything about the surrounding politics and then were asked which one conservatives like better, you might well pick the latter. If ever there was an amendment written to appeal to people who are skeptical of big government, this is it. There’s the big bad government, it wants to take your property and your freedom, but the Fourth Amendment says “no way, not on my watch.” It’s a Tea Partier’s dream.
But conservative courts have spent the past few decades carving one exception after another out of the Fourth Amendment and, if the reaction to the Boston Marathon bombing is any indication, a loud contingent on the right is intent on finding even more.
No, it’s the Second Amendment that most conservatives love. Try to pass even the most benign measure aimed at reducing gun violence, as the Senate did just days ago, and they’ll marshal their every resource to defeat it. The reason: They say it’s because they’re strict constructionists and any restraint on guns would violate the plain meaning of the Second Amendment.
One approach to one amendment, a very different approach to another. How to reconcile? There’s one thing that can help make sense of this mess: a marked lack of intestinal fortitude.
Let’s say your thinking about criminal justice is principally governed by being afraid. In that context, if you think guns are an effective way to protect yourself, you’ll want your right to have guns interpreted as expansively as possible, because you’re afraid of what will happen to you if it isn’t. And you’ll want the rights of people who have been accused of committing crimes to be interpreted as narrowly as possible so they are taken off the streets.
As it happens, that’s a pretty good summation of conservative doctrine when it comes to these amendments.
All of which reveals something else about how conservatives think when they look at the Constitution:
It matters who its provisions are perceived to be protecting. Conservatives think the Second Amendment protects them, so they want it as unfettered as possible; but they think the Fourth Amendment protects someone who they find threatening, so they want it to be as weak as possible.
You can take this approach to constitutional interpretation, of course, but if you do, please stop suggesting it has anything to do with fidelity to profound constitutional principles.
There can be no doubt that the Fourth Amendment makes it harder on law enforcement to solve some crimes, but it does so in the service of a larger goal: protecting the accused from the unfettered predations of an overreaching state or the passions of the mob. And, as has been roundly discussed, the idea that the Second Amendment was designed to allow every citizen to be a weapons armory all their own reflects a willful misreading of history.
Both amendments reflect trade-offs that the framers consciously made. We may not like them, but they’re there. And respect for the Constitution requires that we recognize them. If you call yourself a strict constructionist, you can’t pick and choose which provisions of the Constitution you are going to strictly construe. If that’s your approach, there’s another word that may provide a more apt description: hypocrite.
In a lot of cases, fear is a good thing. It’s a warning system that keeps us out of trouble, guides us away from danger, and, in some cases, keeps us alive. But when we allow fear to be the guiding principle of our public policy that gives rise to dangers all its own.
Many conservatives spend a lot of time portraying themselves as tough guys, straight shooters who don’t let emotion get in the way of what has to be done. In the same breath they are likely to portray liberals as weak and craven. But this is just one example of how the reverse is true.
Setting aside something that makes you feel secure on a personal level in the advent of reforms that will actually make many others safer and sticking to the principles upon which our country was founded even in times of crisis — that’s what takes guts. And it’s time for conservatives to show some.
By: Anson Kaye, U. S. News and World Report, April 25, 2013
“Going On The Attack, Again”: Immigration Opponents See Opportunity In The Boston Bombing Suspects
As soon as it became clear that the two suspects in the Boston bombing were legal immigrants from Dagestan, a mostly Muslim republic in Russia’s North Caucasus, opponents of comprehensive immigration reform went on the attack.
Purposely outrageous Republican columnist Ann Coulter tweeted, “It’s too bad Suspect # 1 won’t be able to be legalized by Marco Rubio, now.”
Christian conservative radio host Bryan Fischer didn’t bother with nuance: “I think we can safely say that Rubio’s amnesty plan is DOA. And should be. Time to tighten, not loosen, immigration policy.”
And Republican senator Chuck Grassley (R-IA), whose vote will help make or break any bill, made it clear that he feels the identity of the suspects should pause the momentum for reform.
“Given the events of this week, it’s important for us to understand the gaps and loopholes in our immigration system,” Grassley said. “While we don’t yet know the immigration status of the people who have terrorized the communities in Massachusetts, when we find out, it will help shed light on the weaknesses of our system.”
“How can individuals evade authorities and plan such attacks on our soil?” he continued. “How can we beef up security checks on people who wish to enter the U.S.? How do we ensure that people who wish to do us harm are not eligible for benefits under the immigration laws, including this new bill before us?”
Critics of the bill have been trying to figure out a way to slow or stop reform for months. And the suspects in Boston may have finally given them the opportunity they’ve been hoping for.
The Republican establishment is so sure that immigration reform is necessary for the future of the GOP that they recommended it specifically as part of its “Growth and Opportunity Project” autopsy rebranding. Rubio took the lead and negotiated a compromise with a bipartisan “Gang of Eight” that fit the president’s guidelines for reform while emphasizing the border security important to the Republican base.
Monday’s bombings slowed the rollout of the bill but an actual draft of the legislation was released late Tuesday.
Immediately far-right site Breitbart invented “MarcoPhones,” smearing Florida senator Marco Rubio (R-FL) with one of the right’s favorite attacks on President Obama during the 2012 election. It’s a claim as ridiculous and purposely mendacious as the Obamaphone slur — still, misinformation has a way of lingering on the right. Some Republicans criticized the site for cannibalizing one of their most popular politicians for pursuing an essential bill.
Despite the support from the party’s mainstream, Rubio’s attempts to sell the bill to Rush Limbaugh and other AM radio talkers didn’t go — to put it mildly — well.
Still most believed that this time was different — until the photos of the Boston bombing suspects led to a robbery and then a continuing manhunt that has the nation on edge.
As Americans winced at the violence, immigration reform’s opponents went on the attack.
One of the bill’s leading Democratic supporters, Senator Chuck Schumer (D-NY), pushed back Friday morning.
“I’d like to ask that all of us not jump to conclusions regarding events in Boston or conflate those events with this legislation,” he said. “In general, we’re a safer country when law enforcement knows who is here, has their fingerprints, photos, etcetera, conducted background checks … Two days ago, as you may recall, there was [sic] widespread erroneous reports of arrests being made. This just emphasizes how important it is to allow the actual facts to come out before jumping to any conclusions.”
The notoriously anti-immigrant Steve King (R-IA) made the case just hours after the blasts that the bombing on Patriots’ Day should halt reforms, surprising no one.
Rubio immediately responded, “We should really be very cautious about using language that links these two things in any way. We know very little about Boston other than that it was obviously an act of terror. We don’t know who carried it out or why they carried it out, and I would caution everyone to be very careful about linking the two.”
Now that the link is more easily made, Rubio doesn’t appear ready to retreat. The junior senator from Florida has launched a site to defend the reforms and his spokesman says that reform should continue despite the events in Boston.
Both he and his opponents recognize that the key moment for immigration reform has arrived. Whoever takes control of the argument now will likely decide the fate of those 11 million people waiting for an answer from Washington.
By: Jason Sattler, The National Memo, April 19, 2013
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