Government as All-Powerful Demon: The Emptiness of Pre-Trumpian Conservatism (a Dorf on Law classic)
Note to readers: Frankly, it bothers me that there is nothing new to read or watch this week. There is very little new content in the major papers, the late-night comedy shows are on hiatus, and pretty much everything else is on autopilot. This is in part because both Christmas and New Years Day -- which are both legal holidays, notwithstanding (for the former holiday) the separation of church and state (or what remains of it) -- happen to fall on a Sunday this year. But in any event, everyone seems to be on vacation right now.
Including us! Even Americans, who notoriously refuse to take time off, have decided that this is a dead zone. But at least we here at Dorf on Law are willing to dig into our archives to find classic columns that resonate with current events. With the post-midterms discussion having now turned to the once-unimaginable idea that the Republican Party might turn against Donald Trump, I am continuing my Classics theme (which I began last Thursday) of reviving columns that discuss how wrong it is to believe that a post-Trump Republican Party can return to something resembling a healthy conservative party. Even before Trump, it had long since stopped being anything resembling the party of Bob Dole (much less Gerald Ford), which was not particularly healthy in any event. And it is not going back.
Government as All-Powerful Demon: The Emptiness of Pre-Trumpian Conservatism
by Neil H. Buchanan
Big
Bird (who, I now know, is supposedly six-years-old) publicly announced
that he had been vaccinated as soon as anti-Covid shots were approved
for school-aged children. Ted Cruz found out about this and -- not
having any interest in doing his job -- used his Twitter-troll time this
week to grumble: "Government propaganda ... for your 5-year-old."
Notwithstanding
the various forms of snark that I tossed into the paragraph above, Cruz
is not my focus here. He happens to be endlessly mockable, but I want
to use his own-the-libs tweet simply as a recent, vivid example of
something that conservatives have been doing for generations:
personifying and then vilifying this thing called The Government.
This
particular culture-war moment will soon be forgotten. What is
interesting is that even after having become completely Trumpified,
movement conservatism still lapses back into tired tropes about Big
Brother. Is it good news that they still have nothing to say that is
non-embarrassing?
What
Cruz was complaining about is, of course, most definitely propaganda in
some literal sense. A group of people behind the Big Bird character
decided to do what they think of as a public service by getting a
beloved children's character to make kids feel less squeamish about
getting a shot. One person's public-service announcement is another
person's indoctrination video, I suppose. That is not at all to say
that there is any substantive equivalence between Cruz's anti-vaxxing BS
and what Big Bird is doing. If helping kids feel less scared to do
something that will help save lives is conservatives' idea of
propaganda, that is simply pathetic.
Note,
however, that the tweet in question did not say,"Propaganda ... for
your 5-year-old," or "Liberal propaganda ... for your 5-year-old," or
even "Woke propaganda … for your 5-year-old." No, it was government
propaganda that the good senator wanted to highlight for his legions of
adoring fans. This is the same government that, per Donald Trump's
version of reality, made it possible to create and approve the vaccines
in record time (because of him, of course); but stoking anti-government
hatred is just too delicious for any self-respecting member of the
Republican Party to pass up.
This
is, therefore, not about the new wave of insanity that has emerged on
the right over the last few years. No one, I suspect, imagined that
even the Bush/Cheney version of extreme conservatism would politicize a
pandemic or try to normalize an insurrection against the government.
The co-author of a bill passed by the Oklahoma House of Representatives
that would provide legal cover to motorists who run over protesters actually said:
“I simply want to make sure people on both sides of any issue are kept
safe.” So plenty of things are different these days. There is a lot of
new crazy, cynical stuff out there.
By
contrast, this anti-government rhetoric is as old as it gets, yet even
these extreme post-rational conservatives in America still are drawn to
it. Part of that, of course, is that they were all raised on Ronald
Reagan's infamous
(and supposedly funny) line: "The nine scariest words in the English
language: 'I'm from the government, and I'm here to help." Good one!
Those government workers are never there to help, are they? Just ignore
all of the times that they are.
Even that old groaner, however, at least has the virtue of talking about people.
That is, in Reagan's story, the government is actually made up of human
beings who go to work and do their jobs. And although he left it to
the listeners' imaginations why it was scary for them to show up at
one's door -- Are they themselves trying to do bad things on purpose?
Are they incompetent? Are they good at doing bad things that other bad
people have set in motion? -- he inadvertently allowed that the
government was not a disembodied force for evil in the world.
Cruz's
tweet might have been a conscious choice to vilify "government," or it
might be mere muscle memory for those who do the performance art that
passes for being a Republican officeholder in 2021. A more pure version
of this form of scaremongering showed up in a Washington Post opinion column that I discussed in a Dorf on Law column
a few weeks ago. That columnist, Henry Olsen, seems to perfectly
capture the phenomenon of the lazy right-wing columnist who jumped on
the Trump train but has generally not updated his material.
In a column
opposing the Democrats' now-abandoned proposal for a Billionaires Tax,
Olsen wrote: "The
government would love to get 25 percent of your 401(k)’s annual rise,
and our nation’s massive annual deficits and cumulative debt means it
will need that money sooner rather than later." The Government not only
has wants and needs but feels them so intensely that it loves to have
them satisfied. And The Government will itself need your money sooner
or later.
Set
aside Olsen's false invocation of solidarity between regular workers
with their 401(k) accounts and the billionaires of the world, and ignore
the equally lazy anti-deficit and anti-debt talking points. This is an
especially clear view into the compete emptiness of the anti-government
presumptions that have long fed the conservative movement. Who is against you? The government! What is the government? It's what is against you!
No
one who works for the government would "love" to get 25 percent of
anyone's 401(k) income. No one in Congress has proposed it. The
Internal Revenue Service has not tried to find a way to justify it under
some existing tax law. The Social Security Administration has not
suggested doing this. Why am I mentioning that particular agency of
government, and why would it even want to do that? Well, as long as we
are spinning paranoid conspiracies of personified desires, maybe the
disembodied thing called Social Security is emotionally insecure (pun
intended), and it would love to make itself feel important by forcing
people to rely more on Social Security benefits, after they have had
their 401(k)'s taxed away. Maybe that is what that greedy organization
imagines as it cries itself to sleep at night?
Again,
however, I doubt that Olsen even gave a moment's thought to that
particular line. He is so accustomed to simply asserting that
"government" is a tangible thing with (evil) intent and single-minded
will -- rather than the reality of being a human-led and human-staffed
organization created to represent and try to carry out the people's
desires, however imperfectly -- that he simply assumes that Americans
will read that sentence without even slowing down to ask: "Wait, what
the hell is this guy even saying?"