The bombs-away neocons are taunting principled libertarians who refuse to get sucked into the war fever. As usual, National Review Online editor Jonah Goldberg depicted LRC readers as nuts, and laughed off concerns about the erosion of liberties during wartime. Other conservative writers, even ones mature enough to know better, are trying to outdo each other with the most outrageous chest-pounding.
H.L. Mencken would have understood. "Wars are not made by common folk, scratching for livings in the heat of the day," he wrote in a 1939 Baltimore Sun column. "They are made by demagogues infesting palaces." Because these demagogues "quickly acquire a monopoly of both public information and public instruction," people find it harder and harder to resist the pressure of war to the point that even "the dissenter is not only suspected by all his neighbors; he also begins to suspect himself."
It's hard to understand why supposed conservatives, people who claim they believe in limited and constitutional government, are so eager to engage in the demagoguery. How can anyone with a straight face embrace "Operation Infinite Justice," a name so pretentious that it explains much about why so many people in the world hate us?
I know why most liberals – as opposed to the occasional anti-war leftist — are so eager to kill and maim tens of thousands of innocent sheep herders. These folks love the government. They thrill to the thought of national crusades that unify the nation behind an agenda that elevates the state and its symbols to near holiness.
On Wednesday, Los Angeles Times columnist Ronald Brownstein captured the sentiments of those who are pounding their chests for war, in a column titled: "The Government, Once Scorned, Becomes Savior."
"The erosion of faith in the federal government has been probably the most profound change in America's political landscape over the last generation," he lamented. "In a 1964 University of Michigan study, 62 percent of Americans said they trusted the federal government to do what's right most of the time. By 1994, that figure had dwindled to 19 percent." He recalled various statements by conservatives such as Ronald Reagan and Dick Armey who mocked the wonders of the almighty feds.
In Brownstein's view, this erosion of faith in Leviathan and the rising respect for the private sector is a troubling thing. Government, he argues, can learn lessons of efficiency from the private sector. And the private sector does a good job providing most goods and at making a profit. But only the government is capable of providing for the public good. It's during a crisis such as this that the public learns what it can truly depend upon, he argued.
"Only days before the attack, Bush was arguing that the shriveling of the federal budget surplus was a good thing because it meant Washington would have less money to spend on public programs," Brownstein wrote. "Yet in the attack's dizzying aftermath, where did almost all Americans turn for answers if not to the federal government?"
As he sees it, we've all learned this lesson from the World Trade Center bombing: "It's simply misguided to see the federal government as something divisible from America, when it is in fact the tool through which we meet collectively the challenges that we can't handle alone."
Either Brownstein is misguided, or the founding fathers were. Obviously, the nation's founders thought of the federal government as something divisible from the people. That's why they went to all the trouble of devising checks and balances, so that government officials could not usurp the natural rights that individual citizens hold.
But to modern liberals, the people and the government are the same thing. You know, when cops wrongly bust down your door and shoot your wife in the back by mistake, it's no different than if your wife had shot herself in the back. When government steals your property or infringes on your rights, no big deal either. You and the government are the same thing.
