Our Divided Political Heart (24 page)

Only by appreciating the Founders’ sense of balance can we put an end to the practice of reading the Constitution in a highly partisan way that always seems to place it on one side of our debate. More decisions along the lines of
Bush v. Gore
and
Citizens United
will, as Justice Stevens argued in both cases, undermine the legitimacy of the Supreme Court and trust in the Constitution as a document that transcends party and interest. Stevens articulated this with particular power in his dissent on
Bush v. Gore:
“
Although we may never know with complete certainty
the identity of the winner of this year’s Presidential election, the identity of the loser is perfectly clear. It is the Nation’s confidence in the judge as an impartial guardian of the rule of law.”

Misreading our past is especially troublesome with respect to the Founding period because of the centrality of the Constitution to all of our debates. But it is also a problem when it comes to our attitude toward the role of government itself. Our contemporary arguments seem to assume that government played only a minor role in the development of our nation, and that laissez-faire was the rule in America until the Progressives and New Dealers entered the scene. This view is badly mistaken, and it will have a pernicious impact on our future if it goes unchallenged.

Spend some time with the Republican presidential candidates who gathered to debate
at St. Anselm’s College in New Hampshire in June 2011
—or any of the many, later GOP debates—and you’ll encounter a powerful consensus about the federal government and its proper role in American life: shrink it and get it out of the way. One after another, each in his or her own way, the candidates declared that productive citizens and private companies would bring back prosperity and solve the nation’s problems on their own.

“
This economy is stalled
,” declared businessman Herman Cain, who briefly rose to the top of the GOP lists before being pushed out by accusations related to his sexual past. “It’s like a train on the tracks with no engine.” And he offered a rather striking metaphor for President Obama’s policies. “The administration has simply been putting all of this money in the caboose,” he said. “We need an engine called the private sector. That means lower taxes, lower the capital gains tax rate to zero, suspend taxes on repatriated profits, then make them permanent.” Thus was the government of the United States of America reduced to a lowly caboose.

Next came former senator Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania, who proved to be a more formidable candidate than his competitors or most of the media expected. “
What we need
,” he declared, “is an economy that’s unshackled.” The Obama administration had “passed one oppressive policy and oppressive regulation after another,” with the president’s health care plan “being first and foremost.”

The answer, said (or, perhaps more accurately, reiterated) former governor Tim Pawlenty of Minnesota, who dropped out of the race two months later, was a government that “
cuts taxes
” and “also dramatically cuts spending.” He went on with the litany so favored that evening: “We need to fix regulation. We need to have a pro-American energy policy. We need to fix health care policy. And if you do those things, as I’ve proposed, including cut spending, you’ll get this economy moving and growing the private economy by shrinking government.” Note that again, “growing the economy” and “shrinking government” were seen as synonymous.

“
Every time the liberals get into office
,” declared Representative Michele Bachmann, whose campaign ended after the Iowa caucuses in January of 2012, “they pass an omnibus bill of big spending projects. What we need to do is pass the mother of all repeal bills, but it’s the repeal bill that will get a job killing regulations. And I would begin with the EPA, because there is no other agency like the EPA. It should really be renamed the job-killing organization of America.” Her extraordinary proposal to abolish the Environmental Protection Agency, created under Republican president Richard Nixon, was met with nary a dissent from any of the Republicans onstage.

Representative Ron Paul, the purest libertarian of the bunch, offered the most direct answers. Asked what standards there should be for government assistance to private enterprise, Paul flatly rejected the premise of the question. “
There shouldn’t be any government assistance
to private enterprise,” he said. “It’s not morally correct, it’s [il]legal, it’s bad economics. It’s not part of the Constitution . . . when the politicians get in and direct things, you get the malinvestment. They do the dumb things.” Government equals politicians equals dumb. That was that.

Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich had once talked with some sympathy about a mandate to require all Americans to buy health insurance. Not anymore. “
If you explore the mandate
, which even the Heritage Foundation at one time looked at,” he said, seeking cover from the staunchly conservative think tank, “the fact is, when you get into a mandate, it ultimately ends up with unconstitutional powers. It allows the government to define virtually everything. And if you can do it for health care, you can do it for everything in your life, and, therefore, we should not have a mandate.”
A slippery slope, indeed, from health insurance to “everything in your life”—though he did not explain whether Medicare or long-standing government mandates for drivers to buy car insurance were also way stations to oppression.

Former governor Mitt Romney of Massachusetts recited from the same catechism when asked about the federal government’s rescue of the American auto industry. A bad idea, he insisted. “
There is a perception in this country
that government knows better than the private sector, that Washington and President Obama have a better view for how an industry ought to be run,” Romney said. “Well, they’re wrong. The right way for America to create jobs is . . . to keep government in its place and to allow the private sector and . . . the energy and passion of the American people create a brighter future for our kids and for ourselves.”

Just a week earlier, Romney had provided an even sharper definition of the country’s struggle over government in what was almost a throwaway line in the formal speech announcing his candidacy. “
Did you know
,” Romney asked, “that government—federal, state, and local—under President Obama has grown to consume almost 40 percent of our economy? We’re only
inches away from ceasing to be a free economy
.”

For the record, the federal government of which Obama was in charge “consumed” about a quarter of the economy at the moment Romney spoke—and this after a severe recession, when government’s share naturally goes up as the private economy shrinks.

But even granting Romney his addition of spending by all levels of government, the notion that we are “inches away from ceasing to be a free economy” was remarkable. It suggested that the only way to measure freedom was by toting up how much government spent and comparing it with the rest of the nation’s activity.

It implied, whether Romney intended to do so or not, that we were less “free” because we spent money on public schools and student loans, Medicare and Social Security, police and firefighters, roads and transit, national defense and environmental protection. It also implied that we would be more free if government spent zero percent of the economy on such things.

If freedom, as Romney seemed to be insisting, came down primarily to the quantity of government spending, then a country such as Sweden,
where government spends quite a lot, would be less free than a right-wing dictatorship that had no welfare state and no public schools—but also didn’t allow its people to speak, pray, write, or organize as they wish. It was a peculiar way to measure freedom.

This was the nearly unanimous view across the conservative spectrum in 2011. Former Utah governor Jon Huntsman wasn’t at St. Anselm’s that night because he entered the contest afterward. But in an interview given to the
Wall Street Journal
a few weeks later, he pledged fealty to the same doctrine as his rivals had, even if he was milder-spoken and more given to talking about civility. “
I think the appropriate role of the federal government
is to carefully measure out the nation’s competitiveness,” he said. “When are taxes too high and making us less competitive than our major trading partners? When do we reach the point of onerous regulation and have to throttle back so we can maintain a competitive posture?” Note again: Huntsman (who dropped out during the 2012 South Carolina primary) defined no positive role for government in this interview, just more tax cutting and deregulating.

And if this field of candidates was not sufficiently anti-government, it was augmented in August 2011 by the entry of Texas governor Rick Perry, whose views about federal power were more akin to those of mid-nineteenth-century nullifiers or even secessionists than to Lincoln’s. Compared with Perry, Mitt Romney looked far more like his liberal father, George Romney, the governor of Michigan who during the 1960s had been a champion of civil rights and progressive government. Indeed, Mitt Romney made much of Perry’s argument in his right-wing libertarian manifesto
Fed Up!
that Social Security was a
“failure” and an “illegal Ponzi scheme”
, and might even be unconstitutional. It was, Perry had written, “
by far the best example
” of a program “violently tossing aside any respect for our founding principles.”

Perry also questioned judicial interpretations of the Constitution’s commerce clause that permitted “
federal laws regulating the environment
, regulating guns, protecting civil rights, establishing the massive programs and Medicare and Medicaid, creating national minimum wage laws, [and] establishing national labor laws.” He even suggested that the direct election of United States senators had been a mistake because taking the power to pick senators away from the state legislatures had undermined states’ rights. He had gone even further in 2009 when he declared:
“We’ve got a great union
.
There’s absolutely no reason to dissolve it. But, if Washington continues to thumb their nose at the American people, you know, who knows what might come out of that?” Secession had come back to life. Perry’s campaign failed after a series of debate gaffes. But he, along with Paul, offered Tea Party thinking in its most unvarnished form.

The notion that Republicans believe in less government and lower taxes—and nothing more or less—is so ingrained that we often forget the Republican Party was not always defined this way, and neither was the tradition from which the party sprang. Once upon a time, the Republicans proudly and unabashedly constituted the party of national action.

So let us go a bit further back, to a 1964 book by a then prominent Republican named Jacob K. Javits. It’s inconceivable today that a Republican would even consider expressing the views Javits put forward then.

New York’s senior senator, it should be acknowledged, was unabashedly in the party’s liberal wing—and it tells us something that liberal Republicans in those days embraced the words “liberal” and “progressive,” feeling no need to retreat meekly behind the more anodyne moniker “moderate.” In
Order of Battle: A Republican’s Call to Reason
, Javits argued that his progressive views were more in keeping with his party’s tradition than those of the then ascendant conservatives. He did so by explaining his “choice of ancestors,” casting his political approach as standing in a direct line from Alexander Hamilton, Henry Clay, Abraham Lincoln, and Theodore Roosevelt. There was nothing eccentric about his view. Historians have usually traced the lineage of the Republican Party this way. Hamilton was a federalist devoted to a stronger national government. Clay started political life as a Jeffersonian Republican but became an ardent nationalist. Javits was right to argue that Clay “
revitalized the federalist strain in the one-party politics
of his day and made it the basis of the newly formed Whig Party.” Lincoln, in turn, was an ardent follower of Clay and a loyal Whig who only reluctantly joined the new Republican Party after the collapse of his old party had become plain and the issue of slavery and its extension had been forced to the forefront of American politics by the Kansas-Nebraska Act. And Teddy Roosevelt was squarely in the Lincoln tradition and entered politics at a moment when the cult of Lincoln was strongest in the Republican Party and the country.

Javits then proceeded to offer brief intellectual biographies of his four heroes showing how each cut against the grain of the kind of conservatism he was battling inside his party in his day.

Because of “
the loose and barren rule under the Articles of Confederation
,” Javits wrote, Hamilton came to understand the need for a strong federal government “
free of the incubus of states’ rights
.” Absolute power corrupts absolutely, but “
Hamilton’s experience with the semianarchic states
’ rights and individualism released by the Revolution brought home to him the reverse truth—that the absence of power can corrupt just as thoroughly as its overbearing presence.” Javits offered lavish praise for Hamilton’s 1791
Report on Manufactures
, which foresaw a commercial and industrial future for the United States. “
If published today
,” Javits said, “part of that report would find the Radical Right—and even some authentic ‘conservatives’—anathematizing Hamilton as a ‘left winger.’” In particular, he noted they would reject Hamilton’s claim that “the inspection of manufacturers by agencies of government” was sanctioned by the Constitution’s clause allowing Congress to regulate interstate commerce.

Javits found much to like in Henry Clay’s “American System,” which sought to use protective tariffs to build American manufacturing, and used the revenues from the tariffs for “internal improvements” in the form of roads and canals. Under Clay’s leadership, Javits argued, the Whigs “
had a coherent public-land policy
, a coherent tariff policy, a coherent fiscal and monetary policy and a coherent policy on public education—all of which had as their point of departure and point of return the internal improvement of the American Commonwealth.”