CAMPAIGN COUNTDOWN: THE DECREPITUDE OF LIBERTY

http://www.steynonline.com/content/view/3551/26/

Steyn on America
Thursday, 28 October 2010

All this week at SteynOnline, we're looking at what I regard as the key issues in this year's big vote. I'd love to hear your thoughts, so drop us a line at Mark's Mailbox. Following Monday's musings on money, Tuesday's on the new class divide, and yesterday's on hyper-regulation, we look today at the shriveling of federalism and the move toward the highly singular United State of America.

A few days after his inauguration, President Obama went to Congress to deliver America’s first State of the European Union address. It included the following:

   I think about Ty’Sheoma Bethea, the young girl from that school I visited in Dillon, South Carolina — a place where the ceilings leak, the paint peels off the walls, and they have to stop teaching six times a day because the train barrels by their classroom. She had been told that her school is hopeless, but the other day after class she went to the public library and typed up a letter to the people sitting in this chamber. She even asked her principal for the money to buy a stamp. The letter asks us for help, and says, ‘We are just students trying to become lawyers, doctors, congressmen like yourself and one day president, so we can make a change to not just the state of South Carolina but also the world. We are not quitters.’ That’s what she said. ‘We are not quitters.’

There was much applause, and this passage was cited approvingly even by some conservatives as an example of how President Obama was yoking his “ambitious vision” (ie, record-breaking spending) to traditional appeals to American exceptionalism.

In fact, the animating principles of the American idea were entirely absent from his vision – unless by American exceptionalism you mean an exceptional effort to harness an exceptionally big government in the cause of exceptionally massive spending. Today, the can-do spirit means Ty’Sheoma Bethea can do with some government money.

“She had been told her high school is hopeless,” said the President.

But surely a school lavishly funded by world and historical standards that needs outside help for a paint job is, by definition, “hopeless”?

What of the students’ alleged ambition to “make a change to not just the state of South Carolina but also the world”? Well, why not start closer to home? Instead of “changing the world”, why not try to change your crummy school and your decrepit town? Or does that lack the Obama-esque glamor of healing the planet? In practice, one-worldism conveniently absolves one of doing anything about more localized and less exotic concerns – such as peeling paint and leaking ceilings. And, if a schoolhouse is so afflicted, what’s the best way to fix it? Applying for federal funds and processing the building maintenance through a huge continental bureaucracy? Or doing what folks in my part of New Hampshire did when the (older than Dillon) grade-school bell-tower was collapsing? The carpenters and painters donated their time, and the materials were paid for through the proceeds of such non-world-changing activities as community square dances and bean suppers.

If that sounds sick-makingly Norman Rockwell, well, take it from me, small town life is hell and having to interact with folksy-type folks in a “tightly-knit community” certainly takes its toll. Still, forget the cloying small-town sentimentality: it’s the quickest and cheapest way to get the job done. It always is.

Ah, but instead of the can-do spirit we now have the can-do-with-some-government-funding spirit.

Tocqueville would weep. “It is in the township that the strength of free peoples resides,” he wrote. “Municipal institutions are for liberty what primary schools are for science; they place it within reach of the people… Without municipal institutions, a nation is able to give itself a free government, but it lacks the spirit of liberty.”

The issue is not the decrepitude of the building but the decrepitude of liberty. Maybe Big Government can spend enough of our money to halt the degradation of infrastructure. But the degradation of citizenship is harder to reverse.

What prevents the “state popular” from declining into a “state despotic”? As Tocqueville saw it, what mattered was the strength of the intermediary institutions between the sovereign and the individual. In France, the revolution abolished everything, and subordinated all institutions to the rule of central authority. The New World was more fortunate: “The principle and lifeblood of American liberty” was, according to Tocqueville, municipal independence.

Does that distinction still hold? In the 20th century the intermediary institutions were belatedly hacked away—not just self-government at town, county, and state level, but other independent pillars: church, civic associations, and not least (as the demographic profile of Dillon indicates) the basic building block of functioning society, the family. After the diminution of every intervening institution, very little stands between the central authority and the individual, which is why the former now assumes the right to insert himself into every aspect of daily life and why schoolgirls in Dillon, South Carolina think it entirely normal to beseech the Sovereign in Barackingham Palace to do something about classroom maintenance.

The other day, in a strikingly whiney speech even by his recent standards, Obama pleaded that he was merely the President, not the King. Well, how did large numbers of people such as young Miss Bethea get so confused on that point? For both the ruling class and a huge number of its subjects, it is not just routine but (as Obama suggested) somehow admirable to look to central government to supply your basic needs – shelter, sustenance, clothing, medication, painless sedatives both pharmaceutical and figurative. To Ty’Sheoma Bethea and her school chums, it sounds liberating: If the benevolent state takes care of all your needs, you’re free to concentrate on “changing the world”. In reality, you’ve already changed it – from a state of raw, messy liberty to one on the path to despotic insolvency. What would be the price of a gallon of paint once it’s been routed through a massive federal education bureaucracy?

Ah, but that’s not the point. In its debased contemporary sense, liberalism is a universalist creed. It’s why the left dislikes federalism. Federalism means borders, and borders mean there’s always somewhere else to go: the next town, the next county, the next state. I’m pro-choice and I vote - with my feet. Universal liberalism would rather deny you that choice. America has dramatically expanded not just government generally, but nowhere-else-to-go government in particular. As Milton Friedman wrote in 1979:

   From the founding of the Republic to 1929, spending by governments at all levels, federal, state, and local, never exceeded 12 percent of the national income except in time of major war, and two-thirds of that was state and local spending.  Federal spending typically amounted to 3 percent or less of the national income.  Since 1933 government spending has never been less than 20 percent of national income and is now over 40 percent, and two-thirds of that is spending by the federal government... By this measure the role of the federal government in the economy has multiplied roughly tenfold in the past half-century.

Even surviving local institutions aren’t as local as they used to be. The nearly 120,000 school boards of America in 1940 have been consolidated into a mere 15,000 today, leaving them ever more to the mercies of the professional “educator” class. Which is not unconnected to the peeling-paint problem.

The object is to reduce and eventually eliminate alternatives – to subsume everything within the Big Government monopoly. Statists prefer national one-size-fits all – and ultimately planet-wide one-size-fits-all. Borders create the nearest thing to a free market in government – as the elite well understand when they seek to avoid the burdens they impose on you. John Kerry, a Big Tax senator from a Big Tax state, preferred to register his yacht in Rhode Island to avoid half-a-million bucks in cockamamie Massachusetts “boat sales and use” tax. Howard Metzenbaum, the pro-Death Tax senator from Ohio, adjusted his legal residency just before he died from Ohio to Florida, because the former had an estate tax and the latter didn’t. This is federalism at work: States compete, and, when they get as rapacious as Massachusetts, even their own pro-tax princelings start looking for the workarounds.

Bazillionaire senators will always have workarounds – for their land, for their yachts, for their health care. You won’t.

Meanwhile, they’re relaxed about cities and states going broke - because it’s a great pretext for propelling government ever upward. When California goes bankrupt, the Golden State’s woes will be nationalized and shared with the nation at large. As with everything from mortgages to credit cards, so it goes for states: the feckless must have their pathologies rewarded and the prudent get stuck with the tab. Passing Sacramento’s buck to Washington accelerates the centralizing pull in American politics and eventually eliminates any advantage to voting with your feet. It will be as if California and New York have burst their bodices like two corpulent gin-soaked trollops and rolled over the fruited plain to rub bellies at the Mississippi. If you’re underneath, it’s not going to be fun.

A restoration of federalism offers America the possibility of a future. Further centralization will ultimately pull it apart.


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