It’s been a bad week for the government-is-your-trustworthy-benefactor crowd. On Wednesday, three credible witnesses torpedoed Obama Administration claims about what officials knew and when they knew it during and after the terrible September 11, 2012, attack on our consulate in Benghazi, Libya, which left four Americans dead. Then on Friday morning, ABC News reported that the much-debated talking points scripting what officials should tell the citizens about the attacks were revised 12 times, downplaying the terrorist nature of the attack and perpetuating the notion that it was triggered by a video. In one example of what was changed, an acknowledgement that the CIA had “produced numerous pieces on the threat of extremists linked to al-Qa’ida in Benghazi and eastern Libya” was deleted after State Department spokesman Victoria Nuland warned in an email to White House and intelligence agency officials that the information “could be abused by members [of Congress] to beat up the State Department for not paying attention to warnings, so why would we want to feed that either?”
Later on Friday, the Internal Revenue Service–the agency tasked with ensuring your compliance with the (Un)Affordable Care Act (Obama-“care”)—admitted that it had “inappropriately” targeted conservative groups for scrutiny, in some cases improperly requesting names of donors.
So it was fairly bad timing for the government and its cheerleaders that President Barack Obama on Sunday delivered the commencement address at Ohio State University and chose to caution the Class of 2013 not against the dreadful job market they’re entering but against those “voices” that “warn that tyranny is always lurking just around the corner,” advising the young graduates, “You should reject these voices. Because what they suggest is that our brave and creative and unique experiment in self-rule is somehow just a sham with which we can’t be trusted.”
This is of course hardly the first time that Mr. Obama has perverted the meaning of the American system. The question of how to protect against tyranny lies at the very heart of the American founding, because the framers understood the reality of human nature. As Bernard Bailyn, a premier scholar of the founding and its philosophical roots, reminds us in The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution:
[W]hat turned power into a malignant force, was not its own nature so much as the nature of man—his susceptibility to corruption and his lust for self-aggrandizement.
On this there was absolute agreement.
There was less absolute agreement on how to guard against the threat of tyranny while still empowering a government. That’s why the founders argued so passionately over the text and ratification of the Constitution and ultimately settled on a Bill of Rights—to protect the people from tyranny by explicitly limiting the power of any federal government.
Over several months, the delegates to the Constitutional Convention argued over ideas and ideals, words and phrases, as they hammered out a document that would both empower and limit a national government. Even after the Constitution was drafted, there were concerns that it could too easily yield to tyranny, and the question was debated primarily through what we now know as the Federalist Papers (written by those who favored the government created by the Constitution) and the Anti-Federalist Papers (written by those who opposed it).
“Brutus”, an Anti-Federalist author, for example, warned on October 18, 1787:
In so extensive a republic, the great officers of government would soon become above the controul of the people, and abuse their power to the purpose of aggrandizing themselves, and oppressing them. The trust committed to the executive offices, in a country of the extent of the United-States, must be various and of magnitude. The command of all the troops and navy of the republic, the appointment of officers, the power of pardoning offences, the collecting of all the public revenues, and the power of expending them, with a number of other powers, must be lodged and exercised in every state, in the hands of a few. When these are attended with great honor and emolument, as they always will be in large states, so as greatly to interest men to pursue them, and to be proper objects for ambitious and designing men, such men will be ever restless in their pursuit after them. They will use the power, when they have acquired it, to the purposes of gratifying their own interest and ambition, and it is scarcely possible, in a very large republic, to call them to account for their misconduct, or to prevent their abuse of power.
But in any form of government of and by the people, political officials are not the only ones susceptible to tyranny. To the extent that power is lodged with the people, the people themselves are at risk of falling to its temptations. This concern animated the Federalists and was in particular addressed by James Madison in Federalist 10:
[A] pure democracy, by which I mean a society consisting of a small number of citizens, who assemble and administer the government in person, can admit of no cure for the mischiefs of faction. A common passion or interest will, in almost every case, be felt by a majority of the whole; a communication and concert result from the form of government itself; and there is nothing to check the inducements to sacrifice the weaker party or an obnoxious individual. Hence it is that such democracies have ever been spectacles of turbulence and contention; have ever been found incompatible with personal security or the rights of property; and have in general been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their deaths. Theoretic politicians, who have patronized this species of government, have erroneously supposed that by reducing mankind to a perfect equality in their political rights, they would, at the same time, be perfectly equalized and assimilated in their possessions, their opinions, and their passions.
A republic, by which I mean a government in which the scheme of representation takes place, opens a different prospect, and promises the cure for which we are seeking.
We can debate whether history has vindicated the Federalists or the Anti-Federalists, or both, or neither, elsewhere, but what’s beyond debate is that the patriots on both sides viewed tyranny as an ever-present threat wherever power is lodged and were motivated by the cause of safeguarding against it in the new government, and both argued that their victory would serve that cause. This was the issue of the Constitutional debates. Only if now people are lulled into a cozy but false sense that tyranny–either of the government or of the majority–is no longer a threat has their “experiment” failed.
Indeed by many measures, our government is more oppressive than the one against which our forefathers fought. As background to the targeting by the tax-collecting agency of groups supporting tax reform and reduction, for example, lies the fact that the taxes to which the colonists so strongly objected were miniscule when compared with ours today, even as the envy lobby clamors for taxes to go yet higher–on other people.
But even more to the founders’ concern, human nature hasn’t changed. There are still people who lust after power and personal aggrandizement. Not coincidentally, many of those who lust after these things the most seek positions in government. Others simply seek goodies from government, at the expense of their fellow citizens.
Yes, tyranny is always just around the corner. That’s why, as Thomas Jefferson reminds us, eternal vigilance is the price of liberty.
