A Necessary Evil: A History of American Distrust of Government

Christian Century, March 8, 2000 by Robert Westbrook

A Necessary Evil: A History of American Distrust of Government.

By Garry Wills. Simon & Schuster, 356 pp., $25.00.

AMERICAN INTELLECTUALS worthy of the name are thin on the ground these days--hard to find amidst swarms of academics incapable of addressing wide audiences and media pundits capable of addressing them only in cliches. Garry Wills has for years stood out among those few critics able to convey complex arguments to a broad readership. Journalist, historian, biographer, newspaper columnist and sometime college professor, he has proved equally at home with the theology of St. Augustine and the movies of John Wayne. His studies of the American founding and of such iconic presidents as Washington, Lincoln, Kennedy, Nixon and Reagan are on the short shelf of books indispensable to an understanding of American political culture. He is the closest thing we have nowadays to Walter Lippmann.

In A Necessary Evil Wills marshals his usual blend of careful scholarship and vigorous polemic to make a case against the strong streak of "antigovernmentalism" that marks the American political tradition. He offers a catalog of the various forms taken by American distrust of government since the late 18th century, ventures to debunk the historical myths that have sustained them, and argues for government as a necessary good.

Wills began this book in the wake of the Republican triumph in the congressional elections of 1994, in which conservatives apparently rode to power on a wave of antigovernment sentiment, sentiment they promised to honor by taking out a contract on the national state which they labeled a Contract with America. But as Wills observes, Newt Gingrich was only the latest in a long line of American enemies of the state, and not the first to lay claim to the authority of the Founding Fathers for his efforts.

As Wills sees it, the peculiarly strong and long-lived hostility of Americans to government is the consequence of longstanding widely held beliefs and values that have often cut across the ideological differences that otherwise divide us. Behind opposition to government throughout our history he finds the persistent conviction that government is at best a necessary evil that should be minimized, and the equally persistent and widespread belief that "legitimate social activity should be provincial, amateur, spontaneous, candid, homogenous, traditional, popular, organic, rights-oriented, religious, voluntary, participatory, and rotational." These values he contrasts with other beliefs and values with which it is readily apparent he is himself in greater accord: "a belief that government is sometimes a positive good, and that it should be cosmopolitan, expert, authoritative, efficient, confidential, articulated in its parts, progressive, elite, mechanical, duties-oriented, secular, regulatory, and delegative, with a division of labor."

Antigovernment sentiment in the U.S. has, he claims, taken on added authority by means of a carefully constructed and well-maintained story about the nation's founding which holds that the Constitution is itself an antigovernment document, designed above all to tether the power of the national state. By these lights, ours is a government intended by the Founders to be hamstrung by separated powers, checks and balances, and the inviolable reservation of individual and states' rights. "Our very liberty depends so heavily on distrust of government," Wills notes, "that the government itself, we are constantly told, was constructed to instill that distrust."

In a whirlwind tour of American history and political theory, Wills finds at least some of his constellation of antigovernment values at work in the theory of nullifiers from John Taylor of Caroline, Thomas Jefferson (or the Kentucky Resolutions) and John C. Calhoun, who argued for the constitutional right of states to reject federal law, to contemporary "academic nullifiers" such as law professor Akhil Amar, who has offered a limited defense of jury nullification.

He finds these values as well in the handiwork of "insurrectionists" from Daniel Shays to John Brown to Timothy McVeigh, and in the arguments of neo-republican legal scholars such as Amar, Sanford Levinson and David Williams, who find a mandate for revolutionary resistance to oppressive government in the Second Amendment right to bear arms.

Antigovernment sentiment takes on a different dress in the activities of vigilantes--from the Regulator movement in the backcountry of colonial South Carolina to the Ku Klux Klan to abortion clinic bombers. Unlike insurrectionists who resist government because it is repressive, vigilantes "take arms to do the government's work because the authorities are not repressive enough."

As some of these examples suggest, by "antigovernmentalism" Wills really means opposition to a powerful national state. Apart maybe from the handful of cranky intellectuals such as Henry David Thoreau featured in an odd chapter on individual "withdrawers," there are no anarchists in Wills's cast of characters. Nullifiers such as Calhoun were acting against the power of the federal government in defense of the power of the state governments (and their authority to preserve local institutions such as slavery). The academic nullifiers and insurrectionists with whom Wills seems to have the least patience are, to be sure, arguing against strictly expert, elite and wholly delegative government, but they have done so on behalf of a full measure of amateur, popular and participatory government.