Small-Minded Government

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.”