A recent essay
in the NY Times Opinion section by Jamelle Bouie included a
link to FDR's first inaugural address.i
This is perhaps the first time FDR used the phrase “We have
nothing to fear but fear itself.” He is speaking directly to the
American people in the midst of the Great Depression, blaming the
“money-changers” for the crisis and promising to put people back
to work. What followed was what we remember as the New Deal, which
did indeed put many people back to work and created safety nets for
many more, including Social Security.
It is partly in
reaction to FDR's New Deal and LBJ's Great Society programs that
modern Republicans have embraced the concept (what they think of as
the ideal) of small government. One result is that we now have a
President who forebears to use his powers to have American industries
produce so many of the products we need in the present coronavirus
crisis. The Republican party is clearly committed to removing all or
some of the safety nets established earlier by FDR and LBJ.
I could never
understand the meanness of the Republican party until I recently read
an essay about Never-Trumpers: “You can’t have a successful
limited government unless you have a population that itself is
virtuous.”ii
The problem is that Republicans start with the abstract idea of
small government and work from there, rather than starting with the
reality of how people live and their strengths and weaknesses.
Republicans don't want to help people in general because that would
challenge the ideal of small government. They want people to help
themselves instead.
In other words,
to reach the ideal of small government, the people must be virtuous.
But how do we define virtue—according to whose values? This is
why many conservatives want to preserve a white Christian country, so
that all people hold the same values. We can, ideally, elect a
fairly virtuous person to be President or to serve in Congress. But
there is, of course, no way to create or sustain a virtuous
population of many millions of people, even if they were all
culturally alike—as we Americans certainly are not.
Idealists don't
want to accept inconvenient realities, however. People have to
become more virtuous, presumably also less sick and more wise, rather
than need government to help them—just because it is important to
have a small government.
When liberals
become too extreme, the result can be disorganization, even chaos.
But this tends not to last long, because we do have laws and ways to
implement the laws. And crazy liberals do tend to grow into more
moderate liberals, as a recent essay by Mark Rudd, one of the radical
Weathermen of the late 1960s and early 1970s, demonstrates.iii
When conservatives become too extreme, however, the result is
fascism or tyranny—the control of the many by the few. We seem to
wander into this quagmire much more often than we wander into
anything resembling chaos. And it is much more dangerous. Some
degree of chaos would not randomly extinguish six million Jews.iv
What we have to
fear, really, is absolute ideology. If it is deemed absolutely
necessary to have small government and if the people must be virtuous
to attain that—or suffer the consequences of their natural human
fallibilities, then again the few will be dominating the many and the
many will suffer.
ihttps://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/27/opinion/trump-coronavirus-new-deal.html
iihttps://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/20/opinion/nevertrump-conservatives.html?searchResultPosition=1
iiihttps://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/05/opinion/weathermen-greenwich-village-explosion.html?searchResultPosition=1
ivSome
might argue that Stalin is an argument for the atrocities of an
extreme left orientation, in this case Communism. But Russia did
not stay communist for long, if it ever was. What began as a
collective leadership (a liberal, communist idea) devolved into
Stalin functioning as a dictator in a totalitarian government (an
extreme conservative orientation). The deaths of millions of
peasants in the famine and then the Great Purge of those who did not
think right are clearly the actions of an extremist right point of
view, an insistence of only one right way to think. The excesses of
the Reign of Terror in revolutionary France might be a better
example of extreme violence by the left. But, as Wikipedia puts it,
“Robespierre was eventually undone by his obsession with the
vision of an ideal republic and his indifference to the human costs
of installing it.” This is quite different from the liberal ideal
as quoted by Voltaire: “Every individual who persecutes a man,
his brother, because he is not of his opinion, is a monster.”
