By Charles C. W. Cooke
Saturday, July 25, 2015
By the time that Charles Murray sat down to write By the
People: Rebuilding Liberty Without Permission, he had decided that he’d had
enough. During the process, he confides in the acknowledgments, his wife had
been a touch worried about him: “‘No more mister nice guy,’ I would say
ominously, and then disappear back into my lair.” Once she read the finished
manuscript, though, she concluded that she’d been overly concerned.
It is quite the trick to call for substantial civil
disobedience but to do so without ever worrying the reader, but Murray has
pulled it off. In By the People, he appears as a mild-mannered Howard Beale,
sticking his head out the window of the social-sciences train and announcing,
with frustrated resignation, “I’m not going to take this anymore!” In so doing
he joins a long line of American rebels who have contrived to take up literary
arms against the established order, and to reclaim their birthrights from
Leviathan. If you want a book that will crisply outline what has happened to
Madisonian America since the Great Depression, without scaring the neighbors,
it’s your lucky day.
That Murray is a restrained warrior should not be taken
as an indication that his diagnosis is half-hearted or that his indignation is
faint. His intention, he explains candidly on the first page, is no less than
to convince his readers that “America’s political system has been transmuted
into something bearing only a structural resemblance to the one that the
founders created.” How bad have things become? Bad enough at least that Part I
begins with a host of serious epithets — America is “lawless”; “systemically
corrupt”; in a state of “advanced sclerosis”; saddled with a “broken
constitution” — and that, by the time their use has been assiduously justified,
the reader does not consider them hyperbolic.
Once upon a time, Murray contends darkly, the United States
enjoyed a political order that was uniquely effective at limiting the influence
of government. Alas, since the New Deal that order has been slowly perverted:
in part by faithless courts that have failed to police the state and to uphold
the Constitution as written; in part by the abandonment of crucial common-law
principles such as mens rea and limited negligence standards; in part by the
metastasization of the administrative state, which has taken power away from
Congress and become a law unto itself; in part because democracies inevitably
eat themselves; and in part because the very political system that could in
theory push back against these excesses has itself become corrupted. By
Murray’s lights, there is no realistic chance that, simply by electing the
right people to Washington or by appointing Scalia-esque justices to the
Supreme Court, the voters can reverse the decline. “It is not,” he submits,
“unlikely” that the United States will be restored at the ballot box — it is
“impossible.” And so, it is time to raise some hell.
Clearly anticipating the obvious charge — that he is
merely bitter that his own team has not been winning of late — Murray goes to
great pains to rest his case upon the legal strictures contained within the
original Constitution and upon the universal precepts of the Declaration of
Independence. In most polities, to claim that the government is on “the wrong
path” makes little logical sense. The inevitable question in, say, Italy, is
“By what yardstick?” But “American government,” as Murray contends
convincingly, “does not command our blind allegiance to the law.” Indeed, “it
is part of our national catechism that government is instituted to protect our
unalienable rights, and that when it becomes destructive of those rights, the
reason for our allegiance is gone.”
These are potentially seditious words, and because there
is such a thin line between legitimate rebellion and unwarranted law-breaking,
a good number of Americans will presumably recoil at them. But, ultimately,
they need not worry. Murray insists that he is “not proposing revolution” so much
as suggesting that the government has “lost elements of its legitimacy” and
needs therefore to be selectively challenged from the outside. To underscore
this claim, he reports polling data illustrating a concerning fact: Voters of
all stripes have lost faith in their institutions as those institutions have
grown beyond recognition. Suspect that it’s just tea-party types who are
disgruntled with the way Washington works? Think again. Jefferson’s “consent of
the governed” has been lost.
Those who are hoping to recruit Murray to their side in a
broader fight against the state will be disappointed. Certainly he has of late
adopted “an adversarial stance toward the federal government.” But his ideal
insurgency is a limited one. In Murray’s view, there are no victories to be won
by encouraging Americans to cheat on their taxes or to chip away at the
nation’s civil-rights laws or to put people in physical danger — or, for that
matter, to pick any public fight during which the state can trot out a
sympathetic victim. Nor does he believe that conservatives can win their battle
against extensive transfer payments, restore the federal government to its
pre-1932 role, or overturn the more damaging of the Supreme Court’s acts of
constitutional vandalism. Rather, he aspires to give a voice to the voiceless,
and accord to the put-upon a realistic chance of fighting back against a
bureaucratic machine that routinely crushes anything that finds itself in its
path.
The “repeated injuries and usurpations” against which
Murray hopes to wage war are regulatory and administrative in nature. He is on
the side of the dentist whose business is destroyed by an overly literal
hygiene inspector; of the restaurant whose owners are fined for keeping cheese
a single degree above the temperature established in the rules; of the
family-run storage-drum-reconditioning plant that is threatened with a $9.3
million fine for no discernible reason whatsoever.
Murray’s troops are lawyers — representatives of a
proposed pro bono group that he has termed “the Madison Fund” — and their role
in the mutiny is to “pour sugar into the government’s gas tank.” Murray
envisions that, by tying up in court the most capricious and petty among the
regulators, his liberty-friendly attorneys would achieve two salutary victories
against Goliath. First, they would bring much-needed legal relief to a host of
tormented Davids: No sooner would the government threaten to end a career or
put a company out of business than a counselor with a legal briefcase would
show up and announce his intention to take it from there. This, in turn, would
force the nation’s mandarins to rethink their approach, enjoining the
out-of-control bureaucratic state to contemplate whether it is really worth
issuing a citation for that minor infraction. Just as the federal government
lives in constant fear of restricting speech lest the ACLU show up at its door,
and just as the states tend to shy away from limiting the right to keep and
bear arms for fear that the NRA will jump on their case, so too would America’s
many Departments of Frivolous Interference think twice before sending out a crack
squad to smash a peanut with sledgehammers.
Which is to say that, despite the high-flown appeals to
the liberty of man and the bleak assessment of the scale of the “abuses and
usurpations” to which modern Americans are daily subjected, the Charles Murray
of By the People is not Sam Adams, and his weapon of choice is not the musket;
he is Atticus Finch with a Gadsden Flag.
All revolutions rely for their success on timing,
tactical prowess, and the identification of their enemy’s key weaknesses.
Murray’s would be no different. We are, he proposes in his final chapter,
coming out of an era of peculiar homogeneity and entering an era of
technological change and genuine intellectual and political diversity. The
one-size-fits-all government that grew up during the culturally uniform
post-war period is no longer suitable in the age of the “liberation technology”
that we now take for granted. In consequence, he argues, we might be on the
verge of a broad rejection of prior regulatory norms, and of a moment in which
the rest of the country stands up and insists loudly that we refrain from
treating the United States as if it were merely an extension of New York City.
Should this happen, and should the government choose to react by persevering in
the manner to which it has become accustomed, it will more than likely expose
itself to be a paper tiger, unable to enforce its will without inviting the ire
of the disaffected. “What looks like Goliath to any one of us,” Murray submits,
“is actually the Wizard of Oz.” If we want to restore our liberty, we have only
to pull off the mask — whether we are permitted to do so or not.
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