GOVERNMENT AND COUNTRY
September 19, 1997
A young neoconservative editor recently expressed his opinion that conservatives could pull the rug out from under President Clinton and build a consensus if only they could get rid of their "anti-government sentiment." How, the young man asks, can conservatives "love their nation if they hate its government?"
This confusion of government with country is the real ailment of conservatism. Germans loved Germany and hated their Nazi masters, just as Russians loved Russia and hated Communists. People always loathe their rulers for destroying their country. In the end, the Romans so hated the corrupt and abusive Roman government that they opened the doors to the barbarians by ceasing to resist.
Americans loathe their government - federal, state, and local, legislative, regulatory and judicial - for many reasons. No aspect of our lives has escaped assault by government determined to force ideological doctrines down our throats. Neighborhood schools were destroyed by judicially decreed busing to achieve racial balance. The famed melting pot that produced the American Citizen was destroyed by multicultural ideology imposed by unaccountable judges and bureaucrats and by an immigration policy that works to exclude those of Anglo-European heritage. Thanks to our government, the U.S. has become a geographical region occupied by interest groups that no longer even share a common language.
The Constitution of the United States has been reduced to a scrap of paper. In means nothing, or everything, or whatever social engineering scheme can capture the allegiance of five justices. Regulatory agencies make the law in collusion with interest groups that use the courts to clear pathways for agency rulings. Congress' statutes mean whatever a judge or a bureaucrat says. The 1964 Civil Rights Act, which forbids discrimination, has been turned into a massive system of rules that require discrimination on hte basis of race, gender and handicapped status. Equality in the law has given way to privilege in the law. Whenever Americans try to regain control over the law, as Californians recently did with Proposition 209, they are fought tooth and nail by the Federal Government.
Successful Americans are chattel of government. They are required to deliver between one-third and one-half of their annual incomes to government as the price for not being hauled off to prison. Their residual ownership rights in their own labor puts them in the category of feudal serfs and 19th century slaves. Successful Americans are among the most exploited people in world history, and the demagogy they endure is endless.
In the United States, law has ceased to be accountable to the people. We see this at every level of government. The Loudoun County board of supervisors wanted a new government office building, but the taxpayers voted down the bond issue. Like the aristocracy of old, the politicians were determined to have thir palace. They ordered it built anyway and then sued the taxpayers to make them pay for it. The utter contempt that government has for the people is good reason not to love it.
The regulatory bureaucracies have ammassed unimaginable powers, largely through assertion, and these powers are used to serve ideologies at the expense of the people, just as happened in National Socialist Germany and Communist Russia. For example, the Environmental Protection Agency recently blocked a plastics plant from locating in Convent, La. The plant meets all the environmental standards and was cleared by the state's Department of Environmental Quality. The plant was much sought after by the largely black town, desperate for jobs and school tax revenues.
In stepped Clintonista ideologue Carol Browner, chief Brownsgirt at the EPA. Puttina a plastics plant in a black community, she said, was an act of "environmental racism." It was all part fo the plot by environmental despoilers to locate factories in minority communities that are politically powerless to keep them out.
When the local black population found out, they did not regard teh EPA's tyranny over their lives as the "petty meddling of the nanny state." Indignation flowed powerfully. Jobs and opportunity were knocking on their doors, and a federal bureaucrat said, "No." Hopes in Convent were trumped by a made-up concept like "bourgeouis consciousness" and "Aryan purity."
EPS is supposed to regulate harmful emissions to the air, water and land. There is nothing in statutory law that defines "environmental racism" as a regulated emission or that gives the EPA power to use the crackpot ideological concept for regulatory purposes.
I say put the neoconservative editor's ideas to the test. Thake them to Convent. If he doesn't get strung up for preaching a "national-greatness conservatism" that "restores faith in our government" by "making it more effective," I will endorse the concept myself.