The [del]rant[/del]thread about “Taxes are theft” highlighted two things that I feel are at the root of the populist/conservative backlash against government today. One is that our government is at least in form representative: the people get the laws they want or at least assent to, and this is the rebuttal to any claim that our government is tyrannical.
The other is that despite this, many people (a majority perhaps?) seem to believe that our government is effectively a bureaucracy, run by technocrats, policy experts and other assorted Mandarins who impose whatever policies they see fit. That the ability of, say, the people of one particular county to choose the laws and values they wish to live by is effectively nill.
So why do so many people have no faith in what’s supposedly their own government? And do they have reason to think so?
As an individual who is, on some issues (fiscal, for the most part, although not close to all) conservative, and on others libertarian (social issues, and I identify socially neither with the D’s or R’s) I think I can shed some light at least on my opinion.
First, I don’t think taxes are theft. They’re part of the social contract of living on our society. Second, I don’t think the government is tyrannical. Although just because the majority are represented doesn’t mean that a government is without tyranny – this is why the expression “tyranny of the majority” exists. It’s one of the things that the constitution exists to prevent.
I do think, and this is often where the ideas of mine and others get confused, that federal governance is in general bad. Not because they enact bad policies (though they sometimes do), but because those policies shouldn’t necessarily be applied to everyone in the country. Drug laws are a perfect example of this.
You have far more voice in your state government than your federal one. And you have ever more in your local one, and it’s my opinion that whenever possible laws abd governance should be done on as small of a scale as possible, in order to best tailor those laws to the reality of the area their in.
Mostly, because they’ve been told that government is innately evil over and over again by the right wing media machine. Partly, because that makes the right wing cannon fodder easy to manipulate. And partly because that makes people helpless; a democratic government is the only real protection normal people have from powerful individuals and organizations that wish to oppress and exploit them, and their only real source of power. Teach people to rely on guns and “rugged individualism” instead, and they are weak; easy prey.
The great historical victories for freedom, for equality and civil rights weren’t won by people who just thought that Government Is Bad and believed in guns and individualism at any cost. They were won by people who organized, and who tried to change government rather than just scream about how government and taxes are evil.
People don’t understand things that are larger than them. Taking part in the process is too much of a hassle to keep up with and getting involved in. Hence these voter turnout numbers. Presidential election years, even at their best haven’t topped 60% since 1968, and probably because that’s easy to follow and the info is stuffed down your throat. Non-presidential election years have hovered at about 37% since the 70’s. This tells me that only 50-60% of eligible people come out for the national elections at best, and damn the local ones. I consider myself fairly knowledgeable about the political situation in general(hard not to living in the DC area), but frankly I have no clue who my local councilman is, or even who the current county executive is.
Locally, things are run by real estate developers; nationally, the financial sector, big pharma, and the MIC. And most of us accept this social contract. It’s how things have been operating our entire lives, and it works OK for us.
From time to time, even the most despotic regimes will attempt to increase the domestic comfort.
I agree. If only our founding fathers could have added an amendment to the constitution limiting the power of the federal government and reserving the vast remainder to the states or people, then maybe we could have avoided this federal largesse…
I’m liberal, but it isn’t just the “right wing media machine” - or perhaps, they historically have not always been the loudest voice chanting “tyranny.” Anarchists at the turn of the century, labor in the 1930s, the peace movement of the 1960s (and yes, Bricker, the dumb impeach Bush movement of more recent history) all used similar chants.
I think the “I don’t agree with everything” is probably closer to the truth. We are such rugged individualists - for both the good and the bad - that its easy to forget that “by the people, for the people” does not mean “by ME and for ME.”
So… the argument shifts from “It’s absurd to think the government is being tyrannical,” to “It’s absurd to think the Obama administration is being tyrannical like the Bush administration was.”
“Impeach Bush” isn’t remotely the same as condemning government, period. As for the other examples, I was talking about how things are now, not the 60s much less the 30s and earlier. 50 years is a long time.
I thought the protests during the Bush administration were against the usurping of the government by private special interest groups, and the attempted dismantling and sabotaging of government programs in a desperate attempt to show that they were bad.
“Government doesn’t work, and we will continue to throw sand in its gears until you agree with us.”
We’re shifting away from the bullshit false equivalence you presented, yes. It’s certainly true that governments can become tyrranical, or trend in that direction; tyrranies do exist, after all. Hoever I think it’s clear that the OP is presuming that the people he’s talking about are genuinely overreacting based on nothing.
Unless you were about to present evidence that Obama is wiping his tush on the constitution, and answer the OP with “the paranoid people are right”?
Big difference, there: The people calling for Bush to be impeached may have thought that Bush was tyrannical, but not the system as a whole. A call to impeach the President is a call to work within the system, whereas a call to assassinate the President (or other government officials) is a rejection of the system.