Tibor Machan‘s latest column, “Why American Politics Has Gone Nuts,” he inquires into the reason for “the utter corruption of the nature of American government.” Machan contrasts the current state of affairs from the system established and envisioned by the Founders.
When they “embarked upon establishing the country, they laid out a vision about its basic ideals and ideas,” as stated in the Declaration of Independence. The government’s job was to secure “certain unalienable rights—to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, among others.” The government’s job was only to keep the peace. (Of course, “the government” here is ambiguous, since it could refer to the federal government only, or the feds and states; but the latter interpretation would be problematic, in my view, because the states already existed and the Founders were not “creating” the states by either the Declaration in 1776 or the Constitution in 1789.) According to Machan, “The Founders wanted a free country with a government of strictly limited powers for the purpose of securing our rights to be free to do what we needed to do in our highly diverse lives.”Machan laments,
Alas, this is now all gone. The party politics we have is not about fielding candidates for a specific job but about whether America will have this or that kind of government—big, small, democratic, welfare statist, liberal, conservative or whatever. [] It wasn’t supposed to be this way at all. But because now the dispute is about what kind of country we should have, party politics has degenerated into combat, with hostile camps peddling their respective conceptions of society and dismissing opponents as enemies instead of treating them as contestants. And that is not what American politics set out to be, not in its essence.
This makes me wonder. Maybe it wasn’t “supposed to be” this way. But this all reminds me of a favorite quote by Mises:
No socialist author ever gave a thought to the possibility that the abstract entity which he wants to vest with unlimited power—whether it is called humanity, society, nation, state, or government—could act in a way of which he himself disapproves.
Human Action, p. 692.
I have wondered before if what we have now is simply the predictable outcome of the system the Founders set up in 1789, or maybe even by their actions in 1776. Maybe they were just naïve utopians, whose grand experiment, like that of the Commies, has, inevitably, led to disaster. Maybe I should replace the prints of Jefferson in my office with Hamilton. Maybe his idea of having an American king was not such a bad idea after all.
As someone commented to me, “The American Revolution was a mistake. It’s not easy for an American to realize that the Founders, as great as they were in some ways, were also a bunch of Masonic nuts. Eighteenth century Masonry, a branch of which played a huge role in the French Revolution, was very Utopian and antinomian.”
11:08 am on April 14, 2005
