In his brilliant classic, A
Disquisition on Government, John C. Calhoun warned that a written
constitution would never be sufficient to restrain the governmental
leviathan. The net tax consumers (those who received more in government
benefits than they paid in taxes), especially government employees, would
relentlessly argue away the effectiveness of constitutional restrictions on
government, he predicted. The net tax payers would inevitably be
overwhelmed and defeated. There was never a truer political prediction.
In his new book, 9
Presidents Who Screwed Up America – And Four Who Tried to Save Her,
Brion McClanahan presents a masterful and superbly-scholarly discussion of
how nine presidents, beginning with George Washington himself, effectively
destroyed constitutional government. On the brighter side, he also
explains how four presidents – Jefferson, Tyler, Cleveland, and Coolidge –
did their best to preserve the Jeffersonian vision of limited constitutional
government.
In a sense, the book demonstrates the futility of “limited
constitutional government” for precisely the reasons given by Calhoun.
For example, even George Washington acted in ways that were destructive of
constitutional government. McClanahan describes how slick political
manipulators like Alexander Hamilton were able to talk Washington into things
that were either of dubious constitutionality or plainly
unconstitutional. Washington wanted America to stay out of foreign
wars, so he issued a “Proclamation of Neutrality.” That sounds fine,
but there was no constitutional authority for the president to intervene in
foreign policy in that way. Nor did Washington have the constitutional
authority to call up the state militia (only Congress does) to invade Pennsylvania
during the Whiskey rebellion – another one of Hamilton’s heavy-handed,
tyrannical adventures.
What this shows is that even with the best intentions on the part of the
most selfless president in American history, the poison of politics will
inevitably prevail to chip away at constitutional liberty.
Every chapter is a mini-book on the various presidents that McClanahan
examines. Andrew Jackson is praised for some things that he did, such
as defunding the Bank of the United States, but is rightfully condemned for
some of his more tyrannical acts, such as threatening force during the
nullification crisis of the late 1820s, following passage of the 1828 “Tariff
of Abominations.”
Lincoln is accurately portrayed as the most tyrannical of all
presidents. He had a “careless disregard for executive restraint” and
achieved “the wholesale transformation of the American political system from
a federal republic to a consolidated nation.” “Every [subsequent]
president who screwed things up could use Lincoln’s example to justify his
actions,” writes McClanahan.
Teddy Roosevelt continued the assault on the Constitution, which was
despised by all “progressives” like himself, by bastardizing the Commerce
Clause to justify myriad economic policy interventions; passing a Food and
Drug Act based on the “fabricated lies of a socialist” (Upton Sinclair,
author of The
Jungle); confiscating “public” land; and foreign interventionism
without congressional authorization. Then there is Woodrow Wilson, the
“twentieth-century pioneer in unconstitutional executive authority” who
nationalized industries, destroyed capitalism in America by adopting “war
socialism”; attacked civil liberties with his alien and sedition acts; was a
sworn enemy of the
Constitution; and plunged the country into a senseless war that killed more
than 100,000 Americans for no good reason. Naturally, he is always
ranked near the top of every American historian’s list of “great presidents.”
McClanahan offers an excellent summary of FDR’s unconstitutional New Deal
interventions, with the entire First New Deal being ruled unconstitutional by
the Supreme Court, followed by FDR’s famous “court packing” scheme. He
was a Lincolnian dictator gone wild, adopting war socialism, placing
Japanese-Americans in concentration camps, confiscating privately-held gold,
adopting an American version of Soviet central planning, and scheming to get
Americans into the European War to save his own political hide after eight
years of the “New Deal” had proven to be not only failures, but made things
worse.
Truman “perfected the art of the demagogue” with even more “Fair Deal”
economic intervention, the senseless Korean War, the initiation of the Cold
War, “emergency” seizure of private businesses, and worse. Then there is
Lyndon Johnson, the only man to rival FDR during the twentieth century in
terms of constitutional destruction. McClanahan’s summary of the
Johnson administration’s policies is infinitely superior to – and hundreds of
pages shorter than — the hagiography of Johnson written by regime
propagandist and court historian Doris Kearns-Goodwin.
McClanahan’s discussion of Jefferson, the first good president, is
masterful. He details his anti-tax, pro-civil liberties policies and
his strict constructionism. He does not portray Jefferson as a perfect
libertarian specimen, but as a real, live human being who was involved in
politics. He was not perfect in every way, but he was better than all
the rest in demonstrating his belief that that government is best which governs
least.
The nineteenth-century Jeffersonian John Tyler is described as “arguably
the best president in American history,” which is why most Americans have
never even heard of him. He was a hardcore Jeffersonian who, as
president, vetoed the entire “American System” of Henry Clay and the Whig
Party (protectionist tariffs, a national bank, and corporate welfare), after
which the Whigs kicked him out of his own party.
I have called Grover Cleveland “The Last Good Democrat”; McClanahan correctly
labels him as the last Jeffersonian president. He vetoed more
legislation than all of his predecessors combined, which of course is why
most Americans know almost nothing about him. He opposed foreign policy
imperialism, including the annexation of Hawaii; was a free trader; and
opposed the beginnings of a welfare state, arguing that “though the people
support the government, the government should not support the people.”
He vetoed numerous schemes to turn veterans’ pensions into welfare
handouts. For this he has been pilloried by the history profession for
the past 120 years.
Another object of leftist hatred is Calvin Coolidge, a somewhat sad figure
in that he was, as McClanahan describes him, “a Jeffersonian whose vision had
given way [by 1933, the year of his death] to the socialism of Franklin
Roosevelt.” His tax-cutting policies and his foreign policy
non-interventionism earned him eternal ridicule at the hands of the American
history profession.
McClanahan’s final chapter proposes several constitutional amendments that
would curtail executive power, decentralize government, and begin to breathe
life back into American federalism. This is all fine and good, but in
my humble opinion, American history – including the history as so brilliantly
told by Brion McClanahan – amply proves that any and all constitutional
limitations on governmental power will always be easily and cleverly evaded
by our ruling class of master politicians, once defined with perfect
precision by Murray Rothbard as masterful liars, connivers, and manipulators.
The Best of
Thomas DiLorenzo
