Republicans: The Fake Party of Small Government
Posted by Kevin Carson on Jul 17, 2009 in Commentary • 7 commentsPeople who vote Republican in the belief that the GOP is the party of small government need to get out of their codependent relationship.
Republicans claim to be the party of the head rather than the heart, the party that never lets wishful thinking trump the law of unintended consequences — unless, of course, proper reverence for the Flag or Fatherland is involved. And recognizing that actions have consequences, in the realm of foreign policy, is just a fancy way of saying “defeatism.”
Come to think of it, there really seems to be a lot of messy Freudian stuff lurking beneath that Republican facade of stern common sense, doesn’t there? Just consider how prominently accusations of being “soft” on this or that, or “getting tough” on something or other, or “showing them” or “teaching them a lesson,” figure in their rhetoric. The Republicans: party of penis envy?
Republican claims to be the party of small government are equally nonsensical.
First of all, it’s a rather odd conception of “small government” that doesn’t count the military and police as part of “the government.” It’s hard to believe that conservatism in this country was once identified with an opposition to foreign entanglements and large military establishments, or that the perpetual warfare state was originally created by liberals. In fact, the legal precedents and constitutional arguments that the neocons appeal to in order to justify their wet dream National Security State all come from paragons of conservatism like Lincoln, Wilson and FDR.
Today, we’re constantly reminded by self-described “conservatives” that loyal Americans rally around their “Commander-in-Chief” in wartime, and “politics stops at the water’s edge.” Sean Hannity got his knickers in a twist because some Democratic senator accused “our Commander-in-Chief” of lying–in (gasp) WARTIME! Not only does “politics stop at the water’s edge” for Republicans, but apparently Acton’s Law stops there as well. Seems to me that if patriotic Americans are required to suspend their normal distrust of government in wartime “for the duration,” that’s a mighty powerful incentive for the “Commander-in-Chief” to STAY at war as much as possible. As Dubya said some time or other, it’s a lot easier when you’re a dictator.
(Ever notice, by the way, that the same people so outraged that Pelosi would accuse the “heroes” in the CIA of lying were themselves making the same accusation back when it involved Valerie Plame and Doug Feith?)
It’s also an odd conception of “small government” that tasks it with making sure no two people with the same kinds of pee-pee get married, that nobody sees Janet Jackson’s tit or hears one of George Carlin’s “seven words,” and that everybody “Just Says No” to drugs (other than Ritalin and Gardasil).
But even stipulating that “small government” principles only refer to domestic economic and regulatory policies that don’t involve drugs or genitalia, the Republicans’ “free market” rhetoric is a bunch of buncombe. The Reaganite agenda of fake “deregulation” and “privatization” usually involves, in actual practice, the same kind of kleptocratic insider dealing that characterized Yeltsin’s Russia. The GOP’s “small government” economic policy, when you get right down to it, is even more corporatist than that of the Democrats–and you’ve got to go a ways to beat them.
What about the Republicans as the party of “strict constitutionalism” and “original understanding”? What that translates into in plain English, Jeffrey Toobin says, is “a view that the Court should almost always defer to the existing power relationships in society.” Chief Justice Roberts, in every major case, “has sided with the prosecution over the defendant, the state over the condemned, the executive branch over the legislative, and the corporate defendant over the individual plaintiff.” And come to think of it, I don’t recall Madison and Jefferson advocating a set of Executive “national security” prerogatives as unbounded as those of Charles I.
(Did you notice, by the way, that these enemies of “judicial activism” were pressuring Sotomayor to discover a new fundamental right–the right to keep and bear arms–among those incorporated in the Fourteenth Amendment?)
You folks out there with “Democrats Care” bumper stickers shouldn’t be enjoying this overmuch. Behind all the crap about “America’s working families,” the Democrats are really just the other corporatist party. Democrats need to get over their own codependent relationship. But that’s another column.
C4SS (c4ss.org) Research Associate Kevin Carson is a contemporary mutualist author and individualist anarchist whose written work includes Studies in Mutualist Political Economy, Organization Theory: A Libertarian Perspective, and The Homebrew Industrial Revolution: A Low-Overhead Manifesto, all of which are freely available online. Carson has also written for such print publications as The Freeman: Ideas on Liberty and a variety of internet-based journals and blogs, including Just Things, The Art of the Possible, the P2P Foundation and his own Mutualist Blog.
Their small government credentials are sound when it comes to abusing poor people, however as the party of family values, not so good.
For example, the Republican insistence that no able bodied man reside in a home where welfare benefits are received as led to the collapse of marriage among the poor and the rise of illegitimacy. The lifetime limits imposed on recipients has also led to a rising abortion rate among beneficiaries. Pro-lfe party? In which universe?
"What do you hate America?", Mr. Carson?
Actually the right to keep and bear adequate self-defense tools (arms) is a fundamental human right. And a right which the Southern States often denied their black freedmen after the civil war, and a right which was vital for black families defending themselves against Night Riders and similar scum. Do some research on the Tulsa Riots of 1921 some time.
The judiciary may not have consistently "incorporated" the 2nd Amendment into the 14th, but a good case can be made that they should. Granted Republican hypocrisy and political opportunism, this is one issue where they happen to be in the right, perhaps despite themselves.
I flubbed that joke up big time. What = why.
Scott: But they can't consistently call themselves originalists, and at the same time advocate the doctrine that the Fourteenth Amendment incorporates the Bill of Rights. I believe Raoul Berger made a very good case that the Fourteenth did not guarantee any substantive rights, but rather simply required that the entire citizenry of a state be equally protected in the enjoyment of whatever civil rights were recognized in that state, without any discrimination based on the categories of race, foreign birth or birth in another state.
Michael: The problem is that, in the legislative history of the Equal Protection clause, it was almost exclusively discussed in the context of unequal treatment of former slaves and aliens or persons born in other states. The problem with taking "equal protection" outside of the historical context of the
Fourteenth Amendment, and the specific evils it was drafted to remedy, is that granting an open-ended authority to the federal courts to overturn state law based on such a broad abstraction can backfire. It was just such a broad interpretation of Due Process that led to the corporate excesses of Fourteenth Amendment jurisprudence in the late 19th century. A government with the power to "grant" liberty can also use the same "living Constitution" authority to take away liberty. That's why–to repeat–I am not a libertarian centralist. So long as government exists, and claims to be bound by law, it should–at the minmimum–be held to Blackstonian rules of construction in interpreting its own "authority."
Kevin, equal protection for every individual is a bit of a radical concept, especially reading the plain language of the Amendment. Also, the drafters of the Amendment were a part of a larger movement which included the women’s movement, who made concessions on sufferage but not on their basic rights. Of course, once you concede gender you must concede that all gender based protection includes other sexual minorities, most especially homosexuals.