Who Needs It?

The most significant public statement of Bill Clinton’s presidency was not “I did not have sex with that woman,” but “The era of big government is over.” For with this pronouncement in the 1996 State of the Union address, Clinton turned his back on his party’s modern tradition of viewing federal authority as an active and beneficent force in American life to embrace the demonization of government associated with Republicans since the days of Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan.

Of course, from the revolutionary era, when Tom Paine declared, “Government, even its best state, is but a necessary evil,” to recent Supreme Court decisions resurrecting the long-abandoned idea of state sovereignty, hostility to the federal government has been a familiar American refrain. Somehow, a nation that prides itself on democratic institutions seems to view public officials as bent on undermining the liberties of the very people who elected them. Today, surfers on the Internet can encounter anti-government Web sites posted by libertarians, advocates of “free enterprise,” militia groups and self-proclaimed “freedom fighters,” complete with catalogs of antigovernment quotations by Americans from Jefferson Davis to Eugene V. Debs. Sites affirming the virtues of “big government” are conspicuously absent.

In “A Necessary Evil,” Garry Wills seeks to chronicle and explain American distrust of government. The indefatigable Wills is the author of some two dozen books, including a biography of St. Augustine published last June. More relevant to the present work, however, are his earlier studies of pivotal American documents--”Inventing America” on the Declaration of Independence, “Explaining America” on the Federalist Papers and “Lincoln at Gettysburg”--and studies of the popular image of public figures like John Kennedy, Richard Nixon and, in a different mode, John Wayne. Rather than the history of attitudes toward government promised in the subtitle, “A Necessary Evil,” like these earlier works, is an extended discussion of the founders’ intentions and legacy and of the enduring power of myth in American politics and culture.

Wills offers various reasons for the persistence of anti-government attitudes--the nation’s birth in a rebellion against authority, the frontier tradition, the lack of a single political-cultural-economic center like London or Paris to concentrate nationalist loyalties. Ultimately, however, his explanation rests not on historical circumstances but on a cluster of self-reinforcing values shared, he insists, across the political spectrum, which view legitimate social activity as local, spontaneous, populist and religious and national government as cosmopolitan, efficient, elitist and secular--and therefore alien and threatening. What most interests Wills is how these values are nurtured by a misunderstanding of the founding era and the Constitution. When it comes to their system of government, Wills announces at the outset, Americans “live with a mythical history and jurisprudence.”

With more than one eye on the present, Wills devotes the first half of the book to refuting a series of myths concerning the revolutionary era that underpins anti-government attitudes today. Wills’ greatest bete noire is the popular notion that the Constitution guarantees an individual the right to bear arms as a shield against overbearing government. Opponents of gun control, he insists, persistently exaggerate the role of local militias in winning the War for Independence. Actually, Wills shows, they were disorganized, poorly armed and generally ineffective militarily; the militia’s most important role was suppressing slave insurrections and persecuting individuals loyal to the crown. Later, he argues that the Second Amendment does not mean that every citizen has a right to procure an arsenal of weaponry and refutes the idea that widespread gun ownership helped bring order to the Old West. Gun control, he points out, was born on the frontier: The West was won not by unleashing gunfighters but by limiting the ownership of guns.

Other widely held misconceptions fall before Wills’ critique: The Revolution was fought by states that considered themselves sovereign entities; the founding fathers were mainly concerned with restraining the power of the federal government lest it become tyrannical; the system of government they created rests on a series of checks and balances designed to limit abuses of power. Through a close reading of the founding era’s writings and speeches, Wills systematically dismantles these and other notions.

The discussion of constitutional debates and theories will strike many readers as somewhat arcane. But Wills’ main point is clear and persuasive: The Constitution was created by men who wanted to strengthen national authority, not weaken it, and who believed state governments were more likely than the national to abuse power and threaten individual liberties. Yet somehow, the Anti-Federalist critique of the Constitution, which warned of the danger to liberty posed by overweening federal authority, became the common understanding of what the founders had wrought.

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Illuminating and salutary as a discussion of constitution-making two centuries ago, “A Necessary Evil” is less successful as a history of anti-government sentiment. The book’s second half, which deals briefly with various manifestations of hostility to federal authority in American history, is episodic, difficult to follow and not always on target. Individual chapters examine “nullifiers” who insist that state governments possess the power to abrogate federal laws; “insurrectionists” who take up arms against authority (apart from the Confederate rebellion, American history has produced remarkably few of these); “vigilantes” who dispense their own brand of justice rather than relying on the courts; and founders of short-lived communal experiments.

Wills’ purpose seems to be to demonstrate the futility or perniciousness of anti-government groups. Prone to a “hysterical” belief in imagined conspiracies against popular liberties and often, like the Ku Klux Klan, arrayed against federal authority for explicitly racist reasons, their actions pose a greater danger to freedom than national authority. But his account lacks coherence and is weakened by ill-considered detours, such as Wills’ denunciation of “academic nullifiers” and “insurrectionists” like law professors Bruce Ackerman, Mikhail Ammar and Sanford Levinson, whose views he sometimes distorts to demonstrate that they give scholarly legitimacy to anti-government mythologies.

Wills fails to demonstrate that any genuine tradition unites the hodgepodge of anti-government individuals and groups he brings forward. Does Daniel Shays, who in 1787 led disgruntled Massachusetts farmers in closing local courts to prevent the seizure of their lands for nonpayment of taxes, really have anything in common with blacklisters of the McCarthy era, who felt the government was not vigorous enough in fighting communism, or with Timothy McVeigh, bomber of the federal office building in Oklahoma City? Do people who criticize corporate influence over governmental policy share the same values as segregationists defending local autonomy against national intervention?

But the problems with “A Necessary Evil” as history run deeper still. Americans’ love-hate relationship with the federal government is more complicated than a catalog of anti-government actions and sentiments can suggest. Invoking timeless myths and values to account for distrust of government cannot explain how attitudes toward federal authority have ebbed and flowed over time. Today, anti-government sentiment predominates; perhaps for this reason, Wills ignores eras of active government like Reconstruction, the New Deal and the Great Society, when, in the words of Charles Sumner, the abolitionist senator from Massachusetts, federal power was seen as the “custodian of freedom” rather than a threat to it.

Anti-government sentiment may be deeply rooted in our history, but so too is the impulse to use government for one purpose or another. Attitudes toward government, in other words, have been instrumental as well as ideological, based on interests as well as values. Throughout our history, even the most committed foes of federal authority have sought to use the government in Washington for their own ends. The most vigorous exercise of national power in domestic affairs before the Civil War was the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, which overrode state authority and individual rights at the behest of the slave South, otherwise a champion of local autonomy. Many of the same conservatives who today call for dismantling federal authority also want the government to make decisions concerning the most intimate details of personal life.

When Clinton proclaimed the end of big government, he neglected to say why government had become big in the first place: because little government had failed to address so many of the problems of modern American society. He blithely ignored that many Americans--blacks, workers, communities left behind in the onward rush of the “free market”--have often looked to government to redress their disempowerment. If Wills’ history leaves something to be desired, he is decidedly on target in affirming that “sometimes greater power is precisely what leads to greater rights” and in identifying the likely victims of the now-popular process of devolution: “the millions of poor or shelterless or medically indigent who have been told, over the years, that they must lack care or life support” rather than be enslaved by big government. In the end, “A Necessary Evil” makes a persuasive case that government is, in fact, “a necessary good.” Like any human institution, it can become oppressive, but it can enhance liberty as well as restrain it.