By Joseph Sobran
Ludwig von Mises Institue
July 1994


American government, we are told, is notable for its stability. And
so it seems, at least on the surface. But stability over a long
period, as the Russian tsars could tell us, is no gurantee of
permanence. And the tsars fell very suddenly after ruling far longer
than the U.S. government's two centuries.

Bear in mind that the United States has already been divided by a
terrifically violent civil war, after which its structure was
greatly altered, in favor of the North over the South and the
federal government over the state governments. Bear in mind too that
surface stability may mask radical changes in the structure of the
regime, as I believe happened to the United States earlier in this
century, when the federal government quietly ceased to be federal
and became centralized or (as the Framers would have put it) "consolidated."

The latter change is still going on. And though there is more
grumbling about the government than ever before, most Americans
still regard their government as legitimate, if not fully competent
and perhaps not altogether benign.

Still, something is changing in Americans' attitudes. It can be
sensed by anyone who listens to call-in radio shows, or reads the
burgeoning literature of dissent, or notices the workings of the
"underground economy." It is a growing feeling that the U.S.
government is the enemy of the average American.

Since the Declation of Independence, American have been concerned
with a philosophical question, to which they had an optimistic
answer. The question is, how can the government claim the right to
exercise power over its subjects? And the answer was, the right is
given by the people, when they deem the government to be just
(because it respects and secures their rights) and consent to its
exercising power. This consent is thought to be conferred through
elections. The very fact that the U.S. government holds elections is
thought to certify its legitimacy.

For two centuries, except for the Civil War period, this has been
thought to be unproblematic. The simple old answer to the
philosophical question has been simplified further, to the formula
"This is a democracy." It is an answer that flattens out all the
refined reasoning of the founding generation of Washington,
Jefferson, Hamilton, and Madison, but it suffices for most people and pundits.

But this answer no longer satisfies is the way it used to. We have
discovered that the mechanisms of democracy can co-exist with
tyranny, just as political philosophers since Plato and Aristotle
have warned. Moreover, the current discontents of Americans run
deeper than any since the Civil War.

The Shocking 1993 siege at Waco, at which the U.S. government
effectively destroyed a religion, by violent means, on behalf of
claims that were never clearly defined, dramatically showed how far
the government is prepared to go in asserting its limitless power
over formerly private and local areas of American life. Many
Americans could hardly believe their eyes; others found their
darkest suspicions confirmed.

At one time nearly all Americans would have assumed that the Branch
Davidian "cult" was evil and must have deserved whatever it got from
a government that was fundamentally trusted. And this was the line
most of the news media tried to sustain. But this time it didn't
work. For the first time, millions of Americans found themselves
feeling and sometimes saying that the government was the enemy.

This is a perfectly natural thing to feel about any government.
After all, a government, whatever else it is, is a legal monopoly of
force. The real mystery is why Americans generally haven't hated
their government. People usually hate those who force them to do
anything. In order to enjoy moral legitimacy, a government for the
most part must use force only in ways most people can accept--as
against violent criminals, or (more cynically) against individuals
or groups whose rights aren't taken seriously.

Americans have recognized their government as legitimate for so long
that they and their rulers may have forgotten what an exceptional
and precarious condition this is. And as a result, the government
has committed a vast sin of presumption, exercising far more
coercion than its population will tolerate indefinitely.

We can formulate some general laws of ruling. The more force you
use, the more enemies you will make. The more laws you enact, the
more criminals you will create. And when you coerce and criminalize
too many peiople who think of themselves as law-abiding, you destroy
your legitimacy in their eyes.

Here a certain principle of public opinion comes into play. Public
opinion can be defined as what everyone thinks everyone else thinks.

It decides whether people feel alone, isolated, and helpless in
their opinions. Solzhenitsyn tells us that everyone in the Gulag
camps felt estranged from everyone else, because each man knew he
was innocent but assumed that all the others were guilty. The
rebellions in the camps occured when each realized that all were
innocent, that the whole system was monstrous and tyrannous.
In the same way, many Americans have felt oppressed by confiscatory
tax rates, gun control, business regulations, labor impositions, and
countless other interventions. But, until recently, most of these
people have felt isolated.

That, in my view, is what is changing radically now. Americans
victimized or outraged by government are speaking to each other,
have established lines of communication that didn't exist before,
and know that they aren't alone. The personal computer can take some
credit for this. So can talk radio. But however it has happened, it
has happened. Large and diverse segments of the population--gun
owners, small businessmen, religious believers, ordinary taxpayers,
crime victims, smokers, whites who have been victimized by race, and
men who have been victimized by sex quotas--feel acute political
discontents, to the point where they are ready to reject the central
government as illegitimate.

Another large factor is that the U.S. government has, in a sense,
succeeded too well. It has outlived its foreign enemies, anc can no
longer count of feeling needed to protect us from evil abroad. Many
Americans, including conservatives, put up woh the ravenous welfare
state only because they thought the government was protecting them
from an even worse socialist power. Now they don't feel they have to
tolerate bad government at home anymore.

When these Americans speak of "crime," they aren't worrying about
the myriad of former rights the government has recently
criminalized. They mean precisely the ancient forms of violent crime
the government doesn't manage to control. And they know that the
government's favorite targets for harassment and prosecution are
precisely those who are law-abiding, and who pose the least danger to others.

Put simply, very few Americans now think of the government as
identifiable with "We, the People." The alienation opnce confined to
the radical fringes has now reached Middle America. It is no longer
"mainstream" to support the central government.

It doesn't help the government's prestige that something like a
majority of Americans now feel the profoundest moral contempt for
the incumbent president, a contempt surpassing even their low regard
for Congress. This mixture of fear and contempt toward government is
something new under the American sun. It promises to bring political
convulsion before the turn of the century.