Hostile Takeover: Resisting Centralized Government's Stranglehold on America (41 page)

CHAPTER 14
T
HE
R
EVOLUTION
W
ILL
B
E
C
HOSEN

Don’t follow leaders. Watch the parking meters.

—Bob Dylan

“W
HERE IS THE NEXT
R
ONALD
R
EAGAN?”
I
T SEEMS THAT A DAY CANNOT
pass without someone, deeply concerned for the future of our country, asking me the question.
The Next Ronald Reagan
serves as a conceptual proxy for a jumble of aspirations, but when someone poses the question, they are likely on a personal quest to find a better president than the one we have now—someone principled
, who can take charge
and fix things in Washington, D.C.

Are you looking for the next Reagan? Finding that guy is the Holy Grail of American politics. In your search, you will quickly discover that virtually every politician fashions himself or herself, at one time or another, as The Guy. A quick Google search reveals that virtually every potential political challenger to the sitting president is, it is hoped, the “Next Ronald Reagan.” In 2008, Fred Thompson was supposed to be The Guy. Mitt Romney may turn out to be in 2012, according to some. Bobby Jindal, Sarah Palin, Newt Gingrich, Michele Bachmann, Chris Christie, and Herman Cain have all been, at one time or another, heir apparent to the NRR title.

According to the
Huffington Post,
the real Next Ronald Reagan isn’t even a Republican; it’s Stephen Colbert. The popular Comedy Central host, argues Jordan Zakarin, clearly has what it takes:

A mildly successful actor who spent years researching and refining his political beliefs, he reached a new level of fame and success after beginning a career of frequent, thinly-veiled activist speeches on the dime of a major corporation. During a time of national upheaval, he decided to take the next step, launching a campaign for office predicated on disciplining young protesters and preserving states’ rights to curtail progressive social progress.

Stripped of specific details, the political beginnings of Ronald Reagan and Stephen Colbert are remarkably interchangeable.
1

Even Barack Obama, whose conviction that history holds a special place for his presidency seemingly knows no bounds, sometimes sees himself as the next Reagan. “I think Ronald Reagan changed the trajectory of America in a way that Richard Nixon did not and in a way that Bill Clinton did not,” candidate Obama told the
Reno Gazette-Journal
in early 2008.

He put us on a fundamentally different path because the country was ready for it. They felt like with all the excesses of the 60s and the 70s and government had grown and grown but there wasn’t much sense of accountability in terms of how it was operating. I think he tapped into what people were already feeling. Which is we want clarity, we want optimism, we want a return to that sense of dynamism and entrepreneurship that had been missing.
2

Admit it. You, or someone in your family, or one of your dearest friends, voted for Barack Obama, wanting to believe the sales pitch. Everybody wanted to believe the unbelievable when the young, good-looking, half-a-term senator from Illinois told us, “I want to make government cool again.”
3
No one particularly knew what that even meant, but we didn’t dig too deep beneath the surface to figure it out, because it sounded like a step up from the Bush years. And we were desperate. We hoped against history that Obama meant it when he promised to kink the fire hose of new spending and impose accountability on the insiders in Washington. “The only way you can control [the out-of-control spending],” he said while soliciting your vote, “is if there is some sense of shame and accountability. The more we increase accountability the more we reduce the special interests in Washington.”

He sounded like the next Ronald Reagan, for sure.

WHAT WOULD GEORGE WASHINGTON DO?

W
HY DO WE, IN THIS DAY AND AGE, KEEP LOOKING TO A BETTER CHIEF
executive officer to solve our problems for us? We keep pursuing the quixotic hunt for a better benevolent dictator, hoping for change that we know can never come from the top down. Who is elected president matters, no question about it, but we will never restore liberty and the proper limits of government in America through a more “enlightened” implementation of the expanded powers, real and contrived, of the executive branch of government.

Isn’t top-down executive power exactly what the Sons of Liberty were fighting against in 1773?

Americans have always jealously guarded against the natural urge of those in power, and those in cahoots with those in power, to seize our liberties. It’s encoded in our moral DNA. “The ideology of the Revolution, derived from many sources, was dominated by a peculiar strand of British political thought,” writes historian Bernard Bailyn in his seminal work,
The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution
. “It was a cluster of convictions focused on the effort to free the individual from the tyranny of the state. But the spokesmen of the Revolution—the pamphleteers, essayists, and miscellaneous commentators—were not philosophers and they did not form a detached intelligentsia.”
4

In other words, the values and principles of our founding spontaneously came from, and were defended by, the people for the people. From the bottom up.

No one understood this better than our first president, who was a humble embodiment of the uniquely American ethos of bottom-up governance by the people. Time after time, George Washington would resist the temptations of more centralized authority centered in the executive branch of the federal government. He is reported to have turned down requests by members of his own army that he become king of America. Instead, he voluntarily resigned his commission as commander-in-chief. According to historian Paul Johnson, no one was more surprised by Washington’s decision than King George III. When told by American painter Benjamin West that Washington would “return to his farm,” the British emperor was incredulous. “If he does that,” said George, “he will be the greatest man in the world.”
5

Washington strongly resisted serving a second term as president of the United States. He finally refused a third term, declining to run for office in an open letter to the American people, what became known as his Farewell Address, first published in the
American Daily Advertiser
on September 19, 1786. His final missive reflected his belief that the people should be eternally wary of encroachments in the exercise of power by the branches of government:

It is important, likewise, that the habits of thinking in a free country should inspire caution in those entrusted with its administration, to confine themselves within their respective constitutional spheres, avoiding in the exercise of the powers of one department to encroach upon another. The spirit of encroachment tends to consolidate the powers of all the departments in one, and thus to create, whatever the form of government, a real despotism. A just estimate of that love of power, and proneness to abuse it, which predominates in the human heart, is sufficient to satisfy us of the truth of this position. The necessity of reciprocal checks in the exercise of political power, by dividing and distributing it into different depositaries, and constituting each the guardian of the public weal against invasions by the others, has been evinced by experiments ancient and modern; some of them in our country and under our own eyes. To preserve them must be as necessary as to institute them.
6

Washington worried about conflict between opposing political parties; what he did not anticipate was their collusion, together, in a bipartisan fashion, to expand the power of government beyond the bounds of the Constitution. But he was particularly aware of the threat that the “spirit of encroachment” and the consolidation of power would lead to “a real despotism.”

SUBTERRANEAN HOMESPUN VALUES

I
AM FROM THE
REPUBLICAN WING
OF THE
R
EPUBLICAN
P
ARTY.
M
Y
loyalty is not to a political party; I am committed to a set of values:
Jeffersonian republicanism.
I am this type of
republican
who, in the words of Senator Rand Paul, “actually believes in limited government and individual freedom.” Is that radical? If it is, that radicalism is deeply rooted in America.

America’s exceptionalism was never dependent on the wisdom and generosity of our chief executive officer. Our greatness never came from the beneficence of an exclusive board of directors—the “different depositaries” and departments, cabinet secretaries, senators, congressmen, and even Rules Committee staffers—that would guide the operations of the American enterprise from inside closed doors, armed with the best data provided by the most knowing experts, and vested with the responsibility to make budget allocations and production decisions for us.

No, the American spirit was different.

“What reasonable social and political order could conceivably be built and maintained where authority was questioned before it was obeyed, where social differences were considered to be incidental rather than essential to community order, and where superiority, suspect in principle, was not allowed to concentrate in the hands of a few but was scattered broadly through the populace,” asks Bailyn, referring to the Whig mash-up of republicanism, ideas from the Scottish Enlightenment, and the inherently stubborn independence of people who had by and large chosen to be free by traveling at great sacrifice to the New World.
7

The details of this new world were not as yet clearly depicted; but faith ran high that a better world than any that had ever been known could be built where authority was distrusted and held in constant scrutiny; where the status of men flowed from their achievements and from their personal qualities, not from distinctions ascribed to them at birth; and where the use of power over the lives of men was jealously guarded and severely restricted. It was only where there was this defiance, this refusal to truckle, this distrust of all authority, political or social, that institutions would express human aspirations, not crush them.
8

The intellectual foment of the 1760s, with its pamphleteers and grassroots rallies under the Liberty Tree, is not so different from the happy mob of Tea Partiers that gathered by choice in Washington, D.C., on September 12, 2009, to petition the government in defense of their liberties.

From beautiful chaos emerges an essential order. We don’t follow leaders. But we jealously watch the “parking meters”—the rules of the game, the limits on authority We the People temporarily grant to the government monopolist, and the nonnegotiable principle that everyone be treated exactly like everyone else under the laws of the land. If you choose to park here in America, you put in your quarter just like the next guy. But the meter maid cannot—will not—shake you down for tribute, steal your fruit scale, and slap your face, simply because she can, and simply because she works for the government.

THE HOSTILE TAKEOVER

O
UR NATION HAS ALWAYS BEEN ABOUT THE AUTONOMY OF THE SHAREHOLDERS
, stakeholders with an unalienable property right in their shares of the company. Our nation is about the men and women in the streets, in their hometowns, lacking the proper lineage, having no family connections, and absolutely no pull with the man in charge. The citizenry is free, operating outside the top-down structures of hierarchical decision-making; independent of royals, emperors, kings, and czars.

Is it possible that George Washington’s distaste for unfettered executive power, for kings and permanent presidents alike, was part and parcel of this bottom-up, uniquely American ethos? Was he, too, responding to how his fellow citizens might judge him? Did he value, as Adam Smith believed we all do, the positive judgments of others?

Did peer pressure from the public square, from the homespun values of grassroots America, make even George Washington more accountable?

Each of us is endowed by our Creator with certain unalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, and the wildly radical notion that potentates, governors, crony corporatists, and any and all manner of rent-seekers, lever-pullers, influence-dealers, and earmarking hucksters shouldn’t get special privileges. The elites have to drop a quarter in the meter just like the rest of us. No cutting in line, and no jetting to Washington in your Gulfstream V when your customers have deemed both your business model and your product unwanted. The insiders don’t get to decide, for you, how to spend your tax dollars, the value of those dollars, or even whether or not birth control pills will be included in your mandated, government-dictated health insurance benefits package.

Who do they think they are? Better yet, who do you think it is that’s going to stop them?

We know that politicians can’t be trusted with power; that, once in office, they will collude with other powerful elites to the betterment of their interests, not ours. But you want to believe it, knowing that the alternative would shift the blame of failure squarely back on your shoulders—the shoulders of the shareholders, of We the People.

All of them, the Republican and Democratic parties, the teachers’ unions, the crumbling media cartel, each and every one of them wants you to fail. They, the insiders, are hoping you will do what you did before, after rising up to demand accountability and throw the bums out. Last time, after you won, you went home, thinking that politics can be left to better politicians. Maybe a better president.