The Temperature's Rising

At 8:30 am, the Dayton Tire Company plant in Oklahoma City was at work as usual, when the Secret Service escorted a man up to the gate, trailed by a host of television cameras.

It was Labor Secretar – Reich with a scowl and a large stack of papers. He announced that Dayton had committed 107 "safety violations," and therefore owed the feds $7.5 million.

Reich and his band then marched to a federal judge and got an order forcing the company to comply or be held in contempt of court.

The plant had to shut down for the day, just as the government intended. "American workers are not going to be sacrificed at the altar of profits," said Reich piously at a news conference.

It was D.C. totalitarianism in action, complete with the usual lies and propaganda. But this time it backfired, like so much else the central government does these days. Workers, managers, and local citizens agreed that the real enemy is not a productive corporation, but the government that would further damage it.

Reich "just didn't know what the Hell he was doing," said worker Larry Pierce, who, as the Wall Street 7ournal reports, was "sitting in his rusty pickup and drinking beer with co-workers" near the plant. "It was all political," added Virginia Jolley, who has worked at the plant since 1982. "I felt he was trying to further the Clinton administration. He was just so cocky." Alex Compton, who has worked there since 1984, called Reich a power-hungry outsider. "I don't trust government anymore," he said.

"Too much power," said Rick Chesser, a local farmer who grows wheat and alfalfa on Dayton Tire land. "It's kind of frightening, isn't it?"

Oklahomans don't "think much" of decisions handed down by "a person in Washington," said Joe Carter, a girls' basketball coach. His brother-in-law works at the plant and he used to buy the team's shoes. But higher taxes have made it impossible for him to keep doing so.

The Chamber of Commerce took out an ad saying: "We Support Dayton Tire." The Daily Oklahoman ran a caricature of Reich, not a hard man to caricature, and labeled it – "Time To Retire." The paper's editorial was headed: "Reich's Amerika."

As Reich lunges from raid to raid – against a tire company for safety, against burger joints for child labor, against law firms for "discrimination," against all businesses for smoking – he and his administration are increasingly seen as enemies of the people.

Far from being grateful for the central state, Americans are fed up with the entire arrogant enterprise: its abuse of power, its confiscation of income, its violation of property, its regulatory rackets, its pyramid schemes, its endless appetite, and its chilling disarmament of the people.

Whatever problems modern life seems to offer are best solved by individuals, families, companies, and localities, and not by D.C. For when Americans look at the central state, they see not public servants dedicated to the common good, but a criminal gang eying what's left of our money and our freedom. More and more, it is the government versus the rest of us.

This accounts for the remarkable results of a Time Magazine-CNN poll taken in August 1994. Americans were asked how much confidence they have that Washington, D.C., can solve our social and economic problems. A full 91% said: little or none. The rest probably work for the federal government.

In the last years of Soviet communism, we marveled at the occasional poll showing that only 20% of the public supported the government. We wondered how such a government could stay afloat. It couldn't. So what does less than 10% indicate?

Most Americans accept the view that a government is just only when it has the support of the people. But this is not just a moral judgment; it also reflects political logic. The state is a minority living off the majority. So long as the state doesn't become openly extortionist, there is no particular reason for the majority to revolt. People will give up a surprising amount of liberty and property in exchange for security, or the perception of it.

At some point, however, especially when the country faces no convincing foreign enemy and domestic security vanishes, people catch on. They begin to realize that they are in charge, and that all that is necessary to make Reich and his cohorts private citizens is the withdrawal of consent.

Every government, elected or not, ultimately depends on the consent of the governed. Withdrawing consent ended British rule in our country and communist rule in Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania, East Germany, and the Soviet Union. Cuba may be next, and then it may be D.C.'s turn.

There is reason to believe we are approaching this point, for we live under the biggest, most powerful government in world history. There are few aspects of modem life it does not pretend to manage.

Meanwhile, real income continues to decline, as it has since 1972. Official economic data look okay, but people know that their standard of living – measured by discretionary income, public safety, quality of schools, leisure time, prospects for raises and comfortable old years – are in continual decline. As just one example, wives went to work in the 80s to make family ends meet, and the state hailed it as a victory for equal rights. Now the newest census data show that three-job families are more and more common. The husband works two jobs and the wife one, and still they aren't keeping up.

Average taxpayers are being squeezed, and it is they, not the rich, who are on the other end of the government transfusion tube. When they have time to think about politics, it's only to despise the agencies that are eating out their substance. They have little interest in voting, because they are beginning to give up on the entire system.

The average American has to pay 40% of his income to government. Ms economic opportunities are constricted by an ever-expanding bureaucracy, and there seems to be no end to the march of the pseudo-victims. He is no longer free to speak his mind on the affairs of the day, for fear of investigation. So the common man is making the shift every politician dreads: he is thinking of the government as his enemy, not his protector.

A long-running debate among libertarians concerns whether political revolutions for liberty can best be achieved by converting the intellectuals, or by an anti-government revolt from the grass roots. Either can be useful, of course. But only one condition is both necessary and sufficient: the loss of support among average people, and that seems to be taking place, regardless of what the statist academic establishment says.

In Western Europe, the revolt against the welfare state is being undertaken by the poor and the jobless. More and more, they vote for the parties of the authentic Right, that seek to scrap the modem experiment in social democracy and restore liberty. The international press treats the disgruntled classes as cretins, unenlightened about the glories of the interventionist state. In fact, they are all too educated in what a hustle it is.

Note too how the Left, defender of the old order, increasingly speaks in elitist terms. When it loses a political battle, it says the people just don't know what's good for them. Notice the Left's hatred of talk radio. It can't stand any challenge to ruling-class power. Even when people write Congress and call the White House, the Left resents the public participation.

To be a popular politician these days is to be automatically hated by the media, to be called ugly names by the pundit class, and to be regarded as a threat by the academy. To be a friend of the Left is to say immensely unpopular things, and to govern without the support of the public.

The Left fears and hates the ground-swell of opposition to statism, which has only become dominant in the last two years. It has yet to reach its apogee.

There was a time when anything called a "Crime Bill" sailed through Congress. No longer. The degree of public cynicism – really, sophistication – has dramatically increased. Now people are more likely to demand the bad news from any piece of legislation, no matter what its name, and to oppose it simply because the Executive supports it. You can't go far wrong with that as your guide.

This popular shift has coincided with increasing government authoritarianism. The less support the state has, the more desperately it attempts to crush its opponents. That is why state enforcers think nothing of trespassing on rights that were considered inviolate only a few years ago.

The Left tries to convince us that it's okay to restrict free speech when civil rights are at stake. It's okay to shut down companies in the name of 49 worker rights." It's okay to close mom-and-pop grocery stores when they don't take full account of the rights of disabled people in absentia. It's okay to confiscate property without a trial. It's okay to throw people in jail for thinking the wrong thoughts.

It's the Left that cheers an expansive federal police power, whether in Waco, Ruby Ridge, Vidor, Ovett, Oklahoma City, Berkeley, or Wedowee. At last we are allowed to see the real face of modern liberalism: what Isabel Paterson called the humanitarian with a guillotine.

But with an increasingly angry people, the next time Robert Reich tries one of his tricks, he may be turned back. Under statism, as Auberon Waugh has pointed out, "the concept of the law-abiding citizen has changed." From "being the lynchpin of society, he is now society's fall-guy or mug. The wise man answers no letters from any department of national or local government," and "never lets any public employee into his house, if he can possibly keep him out." That's good advice for business too.