Power and passion require restraint. When the state cannot restrain itself there is tyranny, where individuals cannot control themselves, there is anarchy. The passions of political power must be limited and constrained so that tyranny and anarchy do not arise. The instruments of freedom and order are constitutional restriction, political checks and balances, enforcement of just laws, and an intricate web of restraints upon will and appetite. A just government maintains a healthy tension between the claims of authority and the claims of liberty.
It is curious to me that people are so incredulous about “ending the corruption” and “bringing the trust back” when it comes to government, politics and campaigning. Indeed, every candidate runs on and every politician publicly professes some version of the “trust me” moniker. We fuss and we prosecute, theorize and acquiesce, as though we have some sort of hope that government was intended to be trusted. On the contrary, the mechanism of government, its elected officials or any characters who participate in government should never be trusted and should always, at the very least, suspected and actively scrutinized.
Stories about former Illinois Governor George Ryan’s recent conviction portray him as part of the “good old boy network” and the “pay to play” cadre, as something of an exception. He might be – probably is. It is likely that most elected officials are, in fact, pretty solid human beings.
But our perception of Ryan as a criminal in an otherwise largely esteemed body is wrong. We can’t “bring trust back” to government because if there ever was a trust in government, it was ill given. Government is not designed to be trusted; it is designed to be under our control because of its inability to be trusted.
Certainly, we can hope for trustworthy politicians, and maybe even respect of few of them. However, placing even the most honest citizens in positions of power (i.e., in government) cannot and should not moderate our vigilant and jealous watch over freedom. Since we should not trust the body of government with such lease on power, then we cannot trust the individuals who run it. While the parts may be healthy, the whole of government is by nature multi-polar, sociopathic, and schizophrenic.
All government should be suspected and, for that matter, reviled for it’s intrinsic compulsion to limit the freedom of the individual, and our aim should be to limit governments intrusion beyond only those functions deemed constitutionally necessary. Clearly, those “necessary functions” are debatable and vary with circumstances and individuals. But our foremost sense, when allowing government some role in our lives, ought not to be a sense of security, comfort, or joy. We should feel reluctance and regret, and a sense of anxiousness to curtail government’s role as much and as soon as possible. This is precisely the intent of our Constitution – limitation and restraint of government.
Government exists because of our inherent failure to behave ourselves. In order to control our ignorance, stupidity, and otherwise shady inclinations, government becomes an unfortunate necessity. It is bred from our willful knack for being corrupt. The whole conception of government starts on the wrong foot.
Government has two concerns: to have power and to exert power. The trick is to form a governmental structure (albeit flimsily built on the foundation of man’s failings) that has sufficient testicular fortitude to control people’s bad behavior, but is emasculated enough to prevent it from getting away with too much.
The only place that has most effectively struck that balance is the United States. Clearly, it’s neither completely efficient nor foolproof; it’s not supposed to be. Only liberals, fools and madmen believe, paradoxically, that there can be Utopia with government in tact. For that matter, only liberals, fools and madmen (and maybe 3-year-olds) can conceive of Utopia at all. The only way to completely stop human corruption is to….well, there isn’t any way and there never will be – at least not in the Kingdom of Man. The best hope is to strike that balance between too much and too little power in government.
In America, legal citizens are sovereign. The power in our civil society is in us. Government power is by nature manifest in the people: not city hall, not the state capital, and not Washington D.C. Political authority rests on the consent of those restrained by that authority. In this nation power and authority are not given by divine right, inheritance, purchase, or thievery. Power and authority is borrowed from you and me.
“But they have all the power to control our lives!” you say. Well, you’re right. But it’s only lent to our elected officials, temporarily only as long as we want them to have the power. It’s called a Republic. When that power overextends itself, that’s when need to step up and put a stop to it.
Our power in government is limited as well. Contrary to popular semantics, we don’t live in a democracy. We don’t want 51% of the people dictating to 49% of the people how the minority interest should live. A majority, no matter how voluminous, cannot be allowed to directly remove the freedoms guaranteed to the minority, which is what ultimately occurs in a democratically run government. Freedom, our most precious entitlement, is imperiled when government is so vigorous, prevalent and powerful.
A state of liberty is not a state of license. Liberty is the absence of government intrusion, not the freedom to behave like a wild animal. When a government, like a democracy, demands so much of its citizenry, freedom is forfeited. Most of us care to play golf, fish, enjoy friends, or hang out with the family far too much to be constantly thinking about government. Freedom is about keeping an eye on government and controlling our own behavior, but not actively governing, save voting.
Moreover, how efficient would it be to run a referendum for every issue? Imagine the logistics, imagine the contradictions and inconsistencies of laws, imagine the tyranny. Democracy in its purest form (i.e., anarchy) would prove more fatal to the health, happiness, and well-being of the people than the very worst dictator. Again, I’m just too busy with life to spend it worrying about government, good or bad.
Instead, we use the mechanism of democracy to elect our representatives, to whom we lend power to govern our nation within the bounds of the Constitution. To generally represent our interests, we elect other citizens limiting them by charge, by deadline, and by constitution. Whereas we then have the obligation follow the laws they enact; they, in turn, have the obligation to use power to conduct the business of government disinterestedly and without caprice.
There is something to be said for trusting the general will of the people, even if we don’t trust them to run a pure, democratic government. As people vote on an issue, say in a referendum, they are voting for their own self-interest. But as people vote for a candidate, and while they still vote self-interest, their judgment is tempered by party influence, the character of the candidate, the state of world, and the fact that no one politician will completely share the same ideas as any one voter. The election of politicians is less an exercise of laundry-list agreement than the general will of the people. And in that general will, we may harbor a modicum of trust.
This is why an understanding of an enduring moral order is so important. Any reasonable American wants our politicians to be moral, with the obvious (and embarrassing) exception of anyone who ever supported President Clinton. Elected officials and government employees are surrounded by power, imbued in it, dripping wet in it. And for that reason alone, we can’t trust our politicians, nor should we be expected to. of them. We can and should like them, support them, and hope for the best in them. But at no time should we drop our defenses, for our own government is by far the greatest threat to our liberty. They’re only human beings and the temptation to exploit that kind a real power to affect so many people’s lives and liberties is far greater than any temptation the average citizen has ever faced.
However, our concern is not the expectations of morality in our representatives. We can hope and pray that they are moral, ethical and otherwise trustworthy, and to be sure, many politicians are above reproach; so it’s nothing personal. We do want them to be moral, because a lack of moral compass demonstrates a lack of character. And character defects are precisely what cause failure in a person’s – any person’s – behavior, judgement, actions, intentions, &tc. But it’s an immature and ignorant lout that places their fate in government’s hands. Freedom is too much to risk. It belongs to you and me, not to anyone in government no matter how trustworthy they might be.
No, the morality that our nation requires is the morality found in us. Morality isn’t some human innovation or conception, nor is it unique to the individual. It is by definition a natural standard of behavior and existence. There is enduring moral order beyond what we can concoct or comprehend. The best we can hope for is to understand that it is there so we might attempt to grasp it in any given circumstance. It takes a sense of morality to do everything…to judge people, issues, ideas, events, things, beliefs, tastes, &tc. It takes moral order to keep government under control – otherwise government will invent its own moral order. A civil-social state without moral order is chaos.
Aside from criminals, only government can remove us of our freedom, which is, in the end, all that our government truly ensures by keeping out of our lives. And only the citizens (the legal ones) can keep government out of our lives through the mechanisms of government that we employ in America. With so much at stake, shouldn’t we always guard our liberty with jealous tenacity and a jaundiced eye on the only authority that can extinguish it?