Great American Hypocrites: Toppling the Big Myths of Republican Politics (29 page)

Those who made such arguments in 1997 when Democrats were in power were deemed by the right wing to be great patriots defending core American liberties. But once Bush was ensconced in the White House, anyone who urged limits on government power was an ally of the Terrorists working subversively to destroy America. In fact, in 2002, then–Attorney General John Ashcroft went before the Senate and told them that anyone who expressed concerns about the unchecked, vast surveillance powers bestowed by the Patriot Act was aiding the Terrorists:

We need honest, reasoned debate, and not fearmongering. To those who pit Americans against immigrants and citizens against non-citizens, to those who scare peace-loving people with phantoms of lost liberty, my message is this: Your tactics only aid terrorists, for they erode our national unity and diminish our resolve. They give ammunition to America’s enemies, and pause to America’s friends. They encourage people of goodwill to remain silent in the face of evil.

Thus, the very same “small-government” right-wing leader who warned that Clinton was becoming “Big Brother,” compared him to J. Edgar Hoover, and accused him of eviscerating the Fourth Amendment transformed almost overnight into a Great American Hypocrite. With John Ashcroft and his fellow conservatives in charge of the federal government, it actually became a patriotic duty not to question their power or to oppose their domestic spying efforts, as such questioning was “fearmongering” that “aid[s] terrorists” and “give[s] ammunition to America’s enemies.”

If there was one idea that could be said to be predominant in the right-wing movement during the 1990s, it was that Real Americans should not and do not trust the federal government. The defining feature of America, they claimed relentlessly, was that Americans want strong limits on governmental power, especially powers that could be aimed at Americans on U.S. soil.

The single most influential Republican leader of that era, Newt Gingrich, actually went on
Meet the Press
in 1995 and explained how those rugged cowboys and individualist conservatives feared the federal government and insisted on limiting its intrusion into our lives
even if it meant giving up some security.
He dramatically pronounced that fear of the federal government is part of the core American character. As the May 11, 1995, issue of
Roll Call
recounted,

When asked on NBC’s “Meet the Press” about Rep. Helen Chenoweth’s (R-Idaho) outrageous proposal to force federal law enforcement agents to check with local sheriffs before making an arrest, Gingrich finally got around to opposing it, but not before cautioning that
“Easterners…and people who live in big cities ought to understand that there is, across the West, a genuine sense of fear of the federal government. This is not an extremist position in much of the West.”

As a result of the federal assault on the Branch Davidian complex in Waco, Texas, and a shoot-out at a white supremacist’s cabin in Idaho, Gingrich repeated, “There is in rural America a genuine—and particularly in the West—a genuine fear of the federal government and of Washington, DC.”

That was the glorious era of the Weekend Militias, whereby suburban and rural American dads dressed up in soldier costumes and, rather than going golfing or fishing, marched around in formation ready to defend their freedoms from the incursions of the federal government and the New World Order, in the threatening form of black U.N. helicopters, Janet Reno, and Hillary Clinton. That was when conservatives were fond of claiming that ingrained in the American spirit is a fear and distrust of federal power that the government ignored at its peril.

With George Bush occupying the Oval Office, those who express distrust over the federal government’s having unlimited powers to detain and engage in surveillance against citizens are paranoid, anti-American freaks. Back then, though, they were rugged, salt-of-the-earth patriots who represented the Real America. From the
Los Angeles Times
on May 15, 1995:

Shedding an earlier caution, many Republican politicians have been speaking out with increasing boldness to support positions taken by right-wing militia groups.

Even as President Clinton has attacked the groups’ claims to patriotism, House Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.) and a growing corps of allies from Western states have recently
expressed sympathy for some citizens’ fears of encroaching government, called for new scrutiny of federal law officers
and rejected demands for investigations of the militias themselves.

While none are defending the Oklahoma City bombing or anti-government violence, they are seeking to focus the policy debate stirred by the attack not on the militias but on the government agencies that militia members and their sympathizers consider the enemy….

Last week, Gingrich declared that
Sen. Craig Thomas (R-Wyo.) has declared his sympathy for Westerners angry at government, saying: “I don’t disagree with their arguments.” And Rep. Helen Chenoweth (R-Ida.) has said plainly that citizens “have a reason to be afraid of their government.”

The leading right-wing journals were filled to the brim with this sort of government-fearing rhetoric. Bush supporter Ramesh Ponnuru wrote in the May 8, 2000, edition of
National Review
of the dangers of federal government “storm troopers,” as illustrated by the seizure of Elian Gonzales. Ponnuru specifically protested the way in which such law-enforcement powers are justified with claims that they are exercised for our own good, for our protection:

At every step of this drama, we have been invited to ponder how administration officials feel. Network anchors said that the standoff must be “tearing Reno up,” given her deep concern for children; her deputy, Eric Holder, told us that he held her as she cried. Afterward, there was endless talk about the patient, compassionate attorney general. The INS agents who did the dirty work were also available to the press. They said they had never encountered such resistance before, citing the couch that had been placed against the door.

Let us hope this administration’s mercy is never deployed against us. If that happens, we will be reassured that we are being pummeled and jailed for our own good. Our punishers may be psychiatrists, as Elian’s are likely to be. For now, though, the style of government licensed by our carelessness does not touch us….
Like Winston Smith, we weep and realize that we love Big Brother.

Throughout his presidency, we have been bombarded with tales of George Bush’s devotion to protect us all. We should therefore be grateful to him for his spying on us and his detention policies and his use of torture as he struggles to defend us. Like Winston Smith, we weep and realize that we love Big Brother.

And then we come to Deroy Murdock, writing on April 13, 2001, in
National Review
of the grave dangers to our country from allowing political officials to act in violation of the law with no accountability and without so much as an investigation:

[The Cato Institute’s Timothy] Lynch exposes a maddening culture of impunity in which few officials face serious consequences for violating the law.
This double standard, in which federal badges become licenses for lawlessness, typified the Clinton-Reno years.
The Bush-Ashcroft team should end this intolerable situation by prosecuting those federal officials who apparently broke the law at Waco and thereby contributed to the injury and deaths of scores of innocent American citizens….

“Because numerous crimes at Waco have gone un-punished,” Lynch states, “the people serving in our federal police agencies may well have come to the conclusion that it is permissible to recklessly endanger the lives of innocent people, lie to newspapers, obstruct congressional subpoenas, and give misleading testimony in our courtrooms.”

While it is ugly but legal to lie to reporters, these other acts clearly are criminal.
Private citizens are jailed for less. Unless “equal justice under law” is a slogan as hollow as a spent bullet casing, federal prosecutors must indict and try the law enforcement officials who, as Timothy Lynch convincingly argues, set the U.S. Code ablaze eight Aprils ago.

Convicted criminal (pardoned by Bush 41) and current Bush official Elliott Abrams also spoke so very eloquently in
National Review—
specifically, the September 1997 issue—of the need in our system of government to have objective oversight and investigation, not politicized and friendly rubber-stamping from the Justice Department, when our highest government officials are accused of breaking the law. This, he insisted, was a core principle of the right-wing political ideology:

For conservatives, Waco is in large part a quis custodiet problem: Who guards the guardians? Whatever faith we may wish to place in the professionals of the FBI, who guards them from error? Who looks over their shoulder? Who punishes their abuses?

This is a problem only in practice, not in theory. In theory, the answer is easy: the professionals of the Department of Justice. Distinguished practitioners of the law who are presidentially appointed to the department work together with Justice’s career staff to provide a check on the FBI and other federal law-enforcement agencies. This is critical, because the balance between energetic law enforcement and limits on excessive government power will not be maintained if the Justice Department does not seek vigorously to maintain it.

The right-wing political movement spent all of the 1990s claiming to distrust governmental power and even printing bumper stickers like this to prove it:

These are the same people who continue to publish screeds like this one—from
National Review
in 2004—still pretending to believe in these conservative principles:

Yet in the long run, Goldwater had an extraordinary influence on the Republican Party…. He did as much as anyone to redefine Republicanism
as an anti-government philosophy: “I fear Washington and centralized government more than I do Moscow,”
he said—and this from a cold warrior who had once suggested lobbing a nuclear bomb into the men’s room at the Kremlin….

But, in philosophical terms at least,
classical conservatism does mean something.
The creed of Edmund Burke, its most eloquent proponent, might be crudely reduced to six principles:
a deep suspicion of the power of the state;
a preference for liberty over equality; patriotism; a belief in established institutions and hierarchies; skepticism about the idea of progress; and elitism….

The American Right exhibits a far deeper hostility toward the state than any other modern conservative party.
How many European conservatives would display bumper stickers saying “I love my country but I hate my government”?

How many would argue that we need to make government so small that it can be drowned in a bathtub?
The American Right is also more obsessed with personal liberty than any other conservative party….

The heroes of modern American conservatism are not paternalist squires but
rugged individualists who don’t know their place:
entrepreneurs who build mighty businesses out of nothing, settlers who move out West and, of course, the cowboy. There is a frontier spirit to the Right—unsurprisingly, since so much of its heartland is made up of new towns of one sort or another.

These “rugged individualists” of the frontier, these swaggering skeptics and despisers of government power, these Burkean defenders of individual liberty who hate “centralized government” and—above all else—are guided by “a deep suspicion of the power of the state,” now want to vest virtually unlimited secret power in the President to detain, interrogate, and spy on Americans. When George Bush was caught breaking the law by spying on Americans without warrants, they insisted that he had the right to do so, that it was for our own good, for our protection, and that we ought to be grateful. Has there ever been a political movement more antithetical to the political values they pompously espouse than the right-wing movement—those “small-government” authoritarians—epitomized by
National Review
editors?

Once securely in power, these small-government conservatives churned out brand-new theories that enabled some of the most severe expansions of federal power in our nation’s history. They insisted that congressional investigations and judicial oversight of the activities of the President are all unnecessary, that they are merely partisan obstructionism. We could and should place blind faith in the Leader to exercise power for our own Good, said the limited-government deceivers.