MayerBlog: The Web Log of
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Demopublicans and Replicrats
It is becoming more and more evident that there’s no essential difference between Democrats and Republicans – or between left-liberals and conservatives. Both major American national political parties, and both sides of the traditional left-right political spectrum, have abandoned the key elements of America’s founding principles: principally, individualism (the three fundamental natural rights of the individual mentioned in the Declaration of Independence, “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness”) and limited government (government of limited powers, using coercion only as necessary to safeguard these individual rights). Instead, both sides offer varying versions of a collectivist political philosophy that has turned America’s founding principles on their head, constraining individual freedom and expanding the coercive powers of government in an ever-growing “welfare” and regulatory state. The Democratic Party, since the early 20th century, has betrayed the libertarian principles of its radical Jeffersonian/Jacksonian founders of the early 19th century. Woodrow Wilson’s presidency marks the critical turning point in Democratic history: Wilson, a former college president who was part of the misleadingly-named “Progressive” movement, in 1912 ran on a platform that called explicitly for abandoning Jeffersonian limited-government principles and instead embracing the policies of the regulatory/welfare state. In Orwellian fashion, Wilson dubbed his program “The New Freedom,” redefining the word freedom itself, saying that “freedom today is something more than being let alone” and calling instead for “positive freedom,” his new name for living under governmental controls. FDR’s so-called “New Deal” programs merely expanded on these “Progressive” foundations, grandiosely erecting the modern regulatory state and concentrating political power in Washington, D.C. The new political coalition that Roosevelt built expanded the constituency of the Democratic Party, making it the party of special-interest groups – particularly Big Labor – that benefited from the Nanny State. Since the 1930s Democrats, with varying degrees of consistency, have been the proponents of socialism – if not of outright government ownership of the means of production (the technical definition of socialism) then of such pervasive governmental controls over business that, for all practical purposes, their program emulates socialism. They support ever-increasing regulations on people’s lives, in the name of furthering the “general welfare,” but undermining individual responsibility. They support the current scheme of federal taxation, relying on income taxes, under which a small number of wealthy Americans pay for the vast majority of government spending – in effect, penalizing the most able and productive Americans, simply because they’re able and productive. And they support using the coercive powers of government to take the wealth those Americans have earned and to redistribute it to those who have not earned it, under the rationale that they “need” it – thus realizing, to a degree, the Marxist policy, “From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs,” the truly evil policy that has accounted for the most misery in the history of the world. Some of my libertarian friends, recognizing how little most Democrats and left-liberals value economic freedom, maintain nevertheless that they’re OK on many matters of “personal” freedom – pointing, for example, to Democrats’ support of women’s freedom to obtain abortions or their support of particular kinds of “civil liberties” threatened by the USA Patriot Act or other governmental efforts in the war on terrorism. But Democrats’ broader view of some “personal” freedoms is highly selective: very few Democratic politicians have called, for example, for the decriminalization of drug laws or laws against prostitution, gambling, or other victimless crimes. Democrats can be just as draconian as social conservatives when it comes to government censorship of offensive speech (that is, speech that they find offensive). In the name of cracking down on child pornography, for example, they would support many restrictions on adults’ access to erotica (and some Democrats who are radical social feminists would go further than many religious conservatives in their anti-sex crusades). On college campuses across the USA “liberal” professors and administrators support all sorts of restrictions on freedom of speech, in the name of protecting against “offensive” (that is, un-“p.c.”) expressions. And in the name of preventing “corruption” in politics (which really is a smokescreen for their actual efforts to protect incumbent politicians from competition by challengers), nearly all Democrats support government restrictions on free speech in the context of political campaigns, with regard to both contributions and expenditures. Furthermore, very few Democrats support Americans’ Second Amendment right to keep and bear arms – or their Fifth Amendment right not to have their property seized by the government, except for “public uses” and with just compensation. Property rights, among the most (if not the most) important “personal” freedoms, are viewed as not at all important by most Democrats – thus proving the lie that they’re not so bad on matters of “personal” freedom, as opposed to “economic” freedom (a false distinction, anyway, since liberty, properly understood, is an undifferentiated whole, with many aspects). Those of us who value individual freedom and limited government have concluded, quite confidently, that the Democratic Party and left-liberals are not our friends and are virtually worthless as potential political allies, except for some very limited, ad hoc issue advocacy. The world has learned that socialism is a failed public policy; those Americans who still cling to the socialist policies of the Democratic Party and the political left – sadly, the vast majority of professionals in journalism and higher education – have yet to learn that lesson and so continue to advocate paternalistic governmental policies. They call themselves “progressives,” but they are really reactionaries, for rather than carrying out the Enlightenment policies of the American Revolution – completing the libertarian vision of America’s Founders – they’d have the United States embrace the collectivist policies of Europe, from medieval feudalism to the 19th-century welfare state of Bismarck’s Germany. For most of my lifetime, the national Republican Party has offered a home – albeit, at many times a not-wholly-welcoming home – for those of us who share the ideals of individualism and limited government. Barry Goldwater’s presidential candidacy in 1964 helped redefine modern conservatism, bringing it closer back to the limited-government principles of Jeffersonian Republicanism. Goldwater stated these principles with his characteristic bluntness, in his book The Conscience of a Conservative: "I have little interest in streamlining government or in making it more efficient, for I mean to reduce its size. I do not undertake to promote welfare, for I propose to extend freedom. My aim is not to pass laws, but to repeal them. It is not to inaugurate new programs, but to cancel old ones that do violence to the Constitution, or that have failed in their purpose, or that impose on the people an unwarranted financial burden. I will not attempt to discover whether legislation is `needed' before I have first determined whether it is constitutionally permissible. And if I should later be attacked for neglecting my constituents' `interests,' I shall reply that I was informed their main interest is liberty and that in that cause I am doing the very best I can." Although Goldwater was soundly defeated in the 1964 presidential election – LBJ was elected in a popular wave of enthusiasm for the Democrats in the wake of JFK’s assassination – the ideas that Goldwater expounded survived to reenergize a new generation of Republicans (including me – for I, at age 8, became first interested in politics due to my enthusiasm for the Goldwater campaign). Richard Nixon’s election marked the political success of the GOP in breaking the monopoly the Democrats formerly held in Southern states; the new coalition that supported Nixon in 1968 has helped make the Republicans the nation’s new majority party. Apart from abolishing the military draft, however, Nixon’s record as president was quite un-libertarian, which isn’t surprising because Nixon was (under today’s standards) a “moderate,” not a conservative. His administration, besides escalating the war in Vietnam (before our cowardly withdrawal), also expanded the regulatory/ welfare state beyond LBJ’s so-called “Great Society” (which really was “Great Big Government”); it was Nixon, for example, who added the EPA to the long list of federal “alphabet,” or regulatory, agencies. The expansion of federal governmental powers, including the folly of wage-price controls that exacerbated the energy crisis of the 1970s, was the real scandal of the Nixon presidency – not Watergate. Ronald Reagan’s election in 1980 at first seemed the triumph of Goldwater conservatism in the Republican Party, and in national American politics. Reagan’s rhetoric certainly was reminiscent of Goldwater, from his classic 1964 speech “A Time for Choosing” all the way up to his First Inaugural Address, with that wonderful line stating the obvious truth, “Government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem.” Unfortunately, however, the actual record of Reagan’s administration did not live up to the promise of his rhetoric; the “Reagan Revolution” was vastly exaggerated and is a realistic concept only because the presidencies that followed – the one term of George Bush the elder, the two terms of Bill “Slick Willy” Clinton, and the two terms of George Bush the younger – expanded government far more than did Reagan. Other than winning the Cold War and bringing about the collapse of Soviet Communism – a truly tremendous achievement – the actual record of the Reagan presidency left very little about which libertarians and limited-government conservatives could cheer. Today, the Republican Party – which has controlled both houses of Congress since 1995 and has held the presidency since 2001 – has a largely abysmal record, when it comes to real reforms that would change the direction of ever-expanding government. In President Bush’s first term (fiscal years 2002-2005) federal discretionary spending increased a whopping 35% -- and that figure, of course, does not include the rest of the fiscal year 2005, with hundreds of billions of dollars of supplemental spending relating to Hurricane Katrina and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. That increase in discretionary spending cannot be attributed solely, or even primarily, to defense spending (which, regardless one’s opinion about the war in Iraq, is a legitimate constitutional exercise of federal government powers), for non-defense discretionary spending increased 23% during Bush’s first term. Entitlement spending continues to hemorrhage, with Republicans adding an expensive prescription-drug program to the already-bloated Medicare. And thanks to Bush’s “No Child Left Behind” law, federal government control over education also has increased to a staggering degree – despite the fact that the Constitution delegates absolutely no authority over education to the national government. This disgraceful record is the result of the policies of not only George W. Bush but also those of a large number of so-called “moderate” Republicans in Congress – aptly called RINOs (“Republicans in name only”) by those of us who see them as virtually indistinguishable from Democrats. Most Republicans in the Senate are RINOs; they include both the Ohioans, Voinovich and DeWine, as well as virtually the entire New England delegation, plus the Democrats’ favorite Republican, McCain. (Incidentally, my friend and colleague Brad Smith, former FEC chair and commissioner, has an excellent essay in the December issue of Reason magazine, “John McCain’s War on Political Speech,” which exposes the hypocrisy of the Senator and other campaign finance “reformers” who use the law to trample First Amendment rights – and to try to muzzle their critics.) Weak-kneed, mushy-brained moderate Republicans already have derailed the one truly worthwhile initiative proposed by Bush, his plan to partially privatize Social Security, because these RINOs are too timid to criticize even this socialist, insecure, shitty legacy of the New Deal era (see my previous entry, “Socialist Insecurity,” Feb. 15). Last week, a group of 25 House RINOs – many of them who earlier had insisted that President Bush reimpose Davis-Bacon union wage levels on Gulf reconstruction projects – demanded that a provision allowing oil and gas drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge be stripped from the budget bill. Like Democrats, these “moderate” Republicans are allowing radical environmentalism to stand in the way of sensible national energy policies. At the same time they’re insisting on preventing the energy industry from exploiting huge deposits of oil and natural gas in Alaska and on the Outer Continental Shelf, these so-called Republicans – like Democrats – are engaging in shameless demagoguery, scapegoating “Big Oil” companies for alleged “price-gouging” and forcing executives from major oil companies to defend the profits they’ve earned! When Congressional Republicans try to make profits a bad word and threaten to impose special taxes on a particular industry simply because it earned profits, they’re using anti-capitalist, class-warfare rhetoric that displays an ignorance of basic economics and market principles equal to that of most Democrats. Social conservatives, whom many pundits see as the core of the Republican Party “base,” are even more unfriendly to individualism and limited-government than the RINOs. Although I once believed that libertarians and conservatives could forge alliances, working together on particular issues they both support (such as reducing taxes or relaxing government regulations of business), I now believe that conservative Republicans are as hopeless as left-wing Democrats when it comes to the perennially essential political issue of our times, which Ayn Rand correctly identified as “the individual versus the collective.” Today’s conservatives have betrayed the limited-government roots of the conservative movement and instead have embraced collectivism just as fervently as today’s left-liberals. Last week, I attended the Federalist Society National Lawyers Convention in Washington, D.C. The Federalist Society was founded in the early 1980s as a coalition of conservative and libertarian law students, law professors, lawyers and judges, to help counter the left-wing orthodoxy that prevails in legal education and in the organized bar. Conservatives always have dominated within the Society, and so it was not surprising to see just a few token libertarians on the panels at the conference. This year’s conference took as its general theme “Originalism,” in celebration of the 20th anniversary of former Reagan Attorney General Edwin Meese’s famous 1985 speeches announcing that administration’s policy of nominating judges who adhered to what Meese called “a jurisprudence of original intention.” With the exception of those few libertarian speakers, most of the speakers at this year’s panels showcasing this theme advocated what they considered a jurisprudence of “judicial restraint.” For some of the speakers (most notably, Professor Lino Graglia of the University of Texas School of Law), judicial “restraint” really meant abdication of judges’ responsibility to use their powers of judicial review to limit governmental powers: Graglia and many other “judicial restraint” conservatives at the conference not only denied the Supreme Court’s authority to protect unenumerated constitutional rights but also, like many left-liberals, denied that the Court could draw limits on Congress’s powers under the Commerce Clause or the Necessary & Proper Clause. Indeed, in the conference’s final panel, on “The Original Meaning of the Commerce, Spending, and Necessary & Proper Clauses,” one speaker – a self-described “conservative Republican” law professor (Michael Paulsen, of the University of Minnesota) advocated an “adequate powers” theory of federal government powers that would have shocked even Alexander Hamilton, for in practice his theory would permit Congress to legislate on whatever it wanted, thereby eviscerating completely the system of limited, enumerated federal powers that was (as Thomas Jefferson recognized) the “foundation” of the Constitution. This form of “judicial restraint” conservatism is not a new phenomenon – Robert Bork championed it during his failed nomination to the Supreme Court in 1987 and in a series of books and op-ed pieces he has since authored – but it was noticeably dominant at this year’s Federalist Society conference, given its general theme. Remarkably, although the evidence is overwhelming that Americans of the Founders’ generation had a broad view of liberty and believed that both written and unwritten constitutional limitations restrained the powers of government (particularly the federal government), these “judicial restraint” conservatives believe they’re being “originalists” – adhering to an objective, “original” meaning of the text of the Constitution – when they turn the Founders’ view virtually on its head, taking an extremely narrow view of constitutional protections of liberty and allowing Congress virtually unlimited powers to legislate. In practice, Borkian conservatives advocate a majoritarianism – a political philosophy that permits government to restrict individual freedom in whatever ways a presumed majority of the community wants to do – that is virtually indistinguishable from that of leftist liberals, who similarly adhere to a positivist view of law that would allow the collective to run roughshod over the rights of individuals. For further evidence that many of today’s conservatives are just as opposed to individual freedom as today’s left-liberals, consider the new book written by Senator Rick Santorum (R.- Pa.), It Takes a Family: Conservatism and the Common Good. Santorum’s answer to Hillary Clinton’s It Takes a Village really agrees with Clinton’s collectivist premises although it enthrones a different collective: for Clinton, it’s “the village,” or the entire community, that ought to be responsible for raising children; for Santorum, it’s “the family,” which he defines in strictly traditional terms (i.e., as a monogamous heterosexual couple, husband and wife, who are the biological parents of their children). (Individualists or libertarians would agree that the biological parents of a child should be responsible for raising that child; but philosophically, what “it takes” to raise a child properly, according to individualists or libertarians would be at least one responsible adult – not necessarily a biological parent at all, but someone who has assumed the responsibility for child-rearing.) Like Clinton and other leftist liberals, Santorum is contemptuous of individualism. He emphatically denies one of the basic principles of classical liberalism, or libertarianism, that the individual is the basic unit of social analysis, instead maintaining that it’s the family – meaning, again, the traditional family. Indeed, in an NPR interview in August, Santorum bluntly criticized individualism and what he called “the libertarianish right”: “You know, the left has gone so far left and the right in some respects has gone so far right that they touch each other. They come around in the circle. This whole idea of personal autonomy, well I don't think most conservatives hold that point of view. Some do. They have this idea that people should be left alone, be able to do whatever they want to do, government should keep our taxes down and keep our regulations low, that we shouldn't get involved in the bedroom, we shouldn't get involved in cultural issues. You know, people should do whatever they want. Well, that is not how traditional conservatives view the world and I think most conservatives understand that individuals can't go it alone. That there is no such society that I am aware of, where we've had radical individualism and that it succeeds as a culture.”
What Santorum is actually doing is trying to redefine conservatism along collectivist lines; it’s his kind of conservatives – and not libertarians – who are guilty of being philosophically indistinguishable from the far left, with whom they share their collectivist premises. As Jonathan Rauch notes in a perceptive review of Santorum’s book in the December 2005 issue of Reason, Santorum’s version of conservatism is as much a repudiation of Goldwater and Reagan as Goldwater’s Conscience of a Conservative had repudiated the middle-of-the-road politics of Dwight Eisenhower and Richard Nixon. “It’s now official,” Rauch writes: “Philosophically, the conservative movement has split. Post-Santorum, tax cutting and court bashing cannot hold the Republican coalition together much longer. . . . With It Takes a Family, Rick Santorum has served notice. The bold new challenge to the Goldwater-Reagan tradition in American politics comes not from the left but from the right.” (“Goodbye to Goldwater: Rick Santorum’s Republican crusade for big government,” Reason, Dec. 2005, pp. 60, 62.) “Conservatives” in Congress today are just as guilty of their left-liberal counterparts, across the aisle, of ignoring the limits the Constitution places on the federal government and instead using the coercive powers of government to impose their policies on America. As Robert Bidinotto has argued in a recent post on his blog, “Reflections on the Republican betrayal of individualism,” both sides view the individual as “their private plaything, a sacrificial lamb for their respective pet causes”: “To the Left, government should whip individuals into collective lockstep regarding its PC-egalitarian agenda on such issues as smoking, diets, guns, cars, nature-worship, land use, political speech and rhetoric, equality of income and `access’ to things that don’t belong to you, drafting kids for `national service,’ using schools to push PC propaganda, etc.”
“To the Right, government should whip individuals into collective lockstep regarding its traditional moral agenda, including abortion, sex, Darwin, cultural speech and rhetoric, marriage, national demographic purity, drafting kids for military service, using schools to push religious values, etc.”
Bidinotto adds that “it used to be that the Right – including its political front group, the Republican Party – at least paid lip service” to individualism, but “after decades of betrayals, culminating with the reign of Bush II,” they have dropped even that “rhetorical fig leaf.” What’s left, he notes, is the Right’s “often-explicit endorsement of the redistributionist welfare state – one that will impose, by force, `traditional values’ instead of liberal relativism”: “Their treason against America’s founding philosophy of individualism has now paralyzed and virtually silenced the last right-wing opponents of welfare statism. Indeed, Bill Clinton and the Dems could never have managed to expand government spending programs and regulations as ambitiously as has the philosophically drifting Mr. Bush and his `conservative’ congressional minions. With the likes of Sen. Rick Santorum pushing an authoritarian conservative statism, Sen. John McCain trying to channel bully-boy statist Teddy Roosevelt – heading a long gray line of Frists, Hasterts, Lotts, Specters, Chafees, etc., all trying to impersonate their Democrat counterparts across the congressional aisle – we are now ruled, in effect, by a homogenized statist Uni-Party – a party of unprincipled, pragmatic careerists, who gleefully, competitively exploit the unbridled power of the redistributionist welfare state in order to perpetuate themselves on their thrones within the federal caliphate.”
Neither side in American politics today is acceptable to those of us who do value individual freedom and limited government as our highest political ideals. It is not surprising, then, that an increasing number of Americans are opting out of politics altogether, for they find that none of the politicians or programs offered by either major national political party to be worthy of their support. I believe it is not “apathy” but rather disenchantment with the “Demopublican/ Replicrat” monopoly that explains why so many Americans do not vote in elections: they are staying home and, in effect, casting their ballots by choosing “none of the above.” We are at a fateful crossroads in American political history. For over 200 years, the two-party political system has given the United States remarkable stability, politically and socially, by offering the people real choices between competing policies. But today, with no real choice being given to those of us who remain committed to America’s founding principles of individualism and limited government, an increasing number of us are no longer participating in elections. (A popular libertarian bumper sticker from several years back – “Don’t Vote: It Only Encourages Them” – nicely expresses this sentiment.) By not voting, we are withholding our consent – and refusing to sanction the agents of collectivism. It doesn’t have to be this way, however. The optimist in me believes that perhaps the USA is long overdue for a realignment of its two major national political parties. The last major realignment (not counting the new coalitions that FDR and Nixon helped create in the 1930s and late 1960s) was in the 1850s, when the Second Party System (the term political historians give to the Jacksonian Democrat vs. Whig party divisions of the early 19th century) ended with the collapse of the Whig party (which had virtually disappeared in the deep South and disintegrated in the North) and its replacement by the Third Party System (the one that lasts to the present day, of the Democrats vs. the Lincoln Republicans). Lincoln’s Republican Party formed in the 1850s out of the remnants of the Whig Party in the North, coupled with various third parties, principally the Free Soil Party, which gave the new party one of its key principles, the exclusion of slavery from western territories. Will a third party today – perhaps the Libertarian Party (if it could broaden its appeal beyond anarchists and pacifists and include minimal-government libertarians, or “minarchists,” like myself, who belief in incremental change) – serve as the core of a new coalition of individualists? Such a “Freedom Party” would counter the collectivism of both the left and the right by consistently advocating reforms that would maximize individual freedom: privatize Social Security, repeal the drug laws, replace the federal income tax with a national sales tax, broaden the definition of marriage to include same-sex couples, repeal federal labor laws and antidiscrimination laws, abolish regulatory agencies such as the FDA and FCC (allowing free markets to work), replacing government-controlled schools with vouchers that would enable poor parents to have their children educated at private schools of their choice, etc., etc. Unless a viable third party starts challenging the Demopublican/Replicrat monopoly, individualists like myself may need to start planning the next American Revolution.
| Link to this Entry | Posted Thursday, November 17, 2005 | Copyright © David N. Mayer |
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