If liberals want to contribute to a civil political debate, here’s a modest suggestion: Stop claiming their opponents believe “government is the enemy.”
This falsehood infiltrates so many tributes to government programs that it has graduated to the rank of cliche. It made a predictable appearance even during the mostly non-partisan inaugural of Gov. John Hickenlooper, in a speech by Lt. Gov. Joe Garcia.
And in the hands of a raging polemicist such as The New York Times’ Paul Krugman, the claim that voters who resist the Democratic agenda hate government assumes an especially ugly cast. Krugman professes to believe that conservatives seek to sweep away the entire social safety net erected during the past 80 years because, in their view, “taxing them to support others, no matter how needy, amounts to theft” (my emphasis).
You could see shades of this slander last year when Sen. Michael Bennet described Tea Party activists as “trafficking in a kind of nihilistic vision of the United States that says that somehow we don’t have a responsibility to the next generation.”
Neither polling data nor everyday experience supports these lurid claims. Some libertarians may consider government the all- around enemy, and a few breathless broadcasters peddle such rhetoric, but the vast majority of voters and even activists upset by the direction of the past two years simply do not subscribe to such views.
They obviously consider specific policies a threat to overall liberty — what thinking person doesn’t? — but they most certainly do not, for example, believe all taxation is theft. As a New York Times poll last year discovered, even most Tea Party supporters consider the amount of taxes they paid the previous year to be “fair.”
In today’s progressive imagination, it seems, a “nihilist” is someone who merely favors trimming spending at a time of trillion-dollar deficits and who resists the idea that an already huge federal government should become even larger, with even wider powers.
We nihilists are not ashamed to admit it: We do not greatly admire the European social-democratic model, where taxes are higher and government bureaucrats enjoy more power to curtail individual liberty in the name of state goals.
“Other things being equal,” explains British politician Daniel Hannan in his book “The New Road to Serfdom, a Letter of Warning to America,” “big and centralized states are likelier than small and devolved states to: be sclerotic; have more bureaucrats and higher taxes; have soulless and inefficient welfare systems; crowd out non-state actors, from churches to families; and have fatalistic and cynical electorates.”
Hannan, a member of the European parliament, notes that between 1945 and 1974, Europe more than held its own with the U.S. in terms of economic growth. Since then, however, the story is not so happy.
“Here is Europe’s economic tragedy,” he writes. “It suffers no worse than the United States during recessions. But it fails to recover to the same extent during the intervening upswings.”
As a result, in comparative terms, “Europe is dwindling.”
Within the European Union, almost every sphere of activity — transportation, agriculture, the Internet, power generation, telecommunications, you name it — is subject to more constraints than here. As is the exercise of free speech.
Forgive us nihilists if we’d rather not trace that path — and would even like to slow the growth of our own regulatory behemoth. Maybe it’s not government we hate so much as national self-destruction.
E-mail Vincent Carroll at vcarroll@denverpost.com.
