Nov 1, 2005
We are a superstitious species.
Like Reason magazine's Gene Healy, I too have been interested, although only mildly, in what the politics would be of Geena Davis's character in the new ABC drama,"Commander in Chief." I assumed her politics would be an unthinking left-wingism, like every"good" politician portrayed by Hollywood before her has been: businesses are evil, businessmen are pathologically selfish, the government is good and must save us, the poor are poor only because they have been exploited by people who have had life's gifts undeservedly bestowed upon them, etc.
So far my interest in finding out whether this latest incarnation of a Hollywood president fits the pattern has not been great enough to actually move me to watch the show. But I was interested to see that Healy's main criticism concerns the show's apparent premise that the American president has no limits to her power, other than what she can get away with. So, no statutory, constitutional, natural-right, or other limits: only budgetary limits and the constraints, malleable as they are, of popular opinion. Healy is worried about the long-term ramifications of a presidency that an increasing number of citizens view, though not explicitly, as imperial.
I share Healy's worries, and I fear for the future of an America in which people believe, as my college students frequently profess, that the government owns all the land and property anyway--so there aren't really any property rights after all, but, really, what's the big deal? It requires a surprising, and disconcerting, amount of effort to bring students even remotely to understand what the American revolutionaries were exercized about. Sure, no one likes the English, they say, and everybody knows that monarchies are 'stupid'; that's why we have an all-powerful, all-knowing, and all-loving congress and presidency instead. (It makes no sense to me either, but that is essentially what many of my students seem to believe.)
But the idea that all we have done in the English-speaking world is exchange one divine ruler for another is an old one. Herbert Spencer wrote an essay in 1884 called"The Great Political Superstition," part of his excellent The Man Versus the State. In this essay Spencer argues that the former"great political superstition," now (in 1884) universally mocked, was the notion of the 'divine right of kings'; we cannot now even imagine what heights of benightedness could have possessed earlier minds to subscribe to such sheer and utter nonense. Yet, Spencer argues, all that the current enlightenment on which we congratulate ourselves has gained us is the erection of a new divine ruler: parliament. How right Spencer was, and how much truer is his claim for Americans today. For verily I say unto thee, what, truly, lies outside the ambit of the power and the de facto authority of today's American federal government? Onto what areas of human life may it not intrude? Where, I ask, would its presence be regarded as trespass because beyond its moral authority?
If the answer is, as I suspect,"nowhere," and if most people in America believe, as I suspect, that the federal government's job is to address and alleviate all felt ills of its citizens, then it is quite understandable that the calls for liberty around which the American revolutionaries rallied seem utterly alien to many Americans today. And that does indeed make America's future uncertain.[Originally posted on Proportional Belief.]