Poor Lisa Mascaro. In one of her latest snipes at President Trump, the veteran Associated Press reporter has let both her distaste for his approach and her lack of clarity about our country’s form of government show about as clearly as a rodeo clown’s red hankie.
It’s not entirely her fault. For decades, discussion of this country’s form of government and the advantages conferred thereby has been vanishing from our educational systems. Today, not one in four high school seniors, and not many more adults under fifty could identify the United States as a representative federal republic rather than a democracy. Even in states where old-fashioned “civics” are taught, curriculums are prone to larding-up with fashionable sentiments such as “agency,” activism and “raising money for causes” or focus on concepts like “racism is endemic in America’s justice system.” No, don’t judge Ms. Mascaro too harshly; she’s a symptom, not a cause.
Nevertheless, her thinking is fairly representative of a lot of folks on the Left, so we should have a look at her ideas. In a May 10 AP article entitled “As Trump Pulls Back from Virus, Congress Races to Fill the Void,” Ms. Mascaro mischaracterizes the president’s response to the Covid-19 threat, which is understandable: she works for the Associated Press so fibbing about Trump is doubtless written into her contract. Much more telling is her lament about the President’s “inaction” compared with his predecessors.
After the 9-11 attacks, she notes, George W. Bush created the Department of Homeland Security. Reaching further back she recalls that Franklin Delano Roosevelt “led the nation to the New Deal.” She then snarks that “Trump is not seeking a legacy-defining accomplishment” but instead “turned the life-and-death decision-making away from the federal government and onto the states…”
To which an acute observer might respond: “Exactly. And that may well be his legacy-defining accomplishment.”
Forget for a moment that Donald Trump had been warning this country about its blind trust of China far longer than he has been president. Forget that he has been working to repatriate production to America from questionable partners such as the Peoples’ Republic. Or that he suspended travel from China early on, for which he was called a racist by Democrats and others. No, the real flavor of the month among the hate-Trump crowd is that he “left it to the states” to solve the Covid-19 problem. The only rational response is, “Bravo.”
For too, too long in this country we have been hearing a strange song: that the Federal government must help in every crisis; that its leadership is irreplaceable; that without Washington’s wise guidance and resources, the nation and its people will founder. This is an attitude alien to those who founded, and after them, prospered this nation. Americans know that the strength of the country lies not in its capital or its politicians, but in its people. It was they who, by their effort, innovation and dedication made this country the envy of the Earth, and it was our divided government that enabled the whole thing to work as well as it did.
A single, centralized government seems more efficient – and it is, in some ways. It can more effectively control the population, especially if many of them are beholden to it for important services such as health care or food. But such control, the founders realized, is tyranny’s foundation. Since they wanted to protect liberties, they hedged the Federal government about with controls and created a republic in which individual states have vast powers – read amendments nine and ten of the Constitution if you don’t believe it.
The states are the actual heart of the Republic. The Federal government is empowered to do a few specific things in Constitution; all other activities are “reserved to the states, respectively, or to the people,” to quote the Tenth Amendment.
Thus, many of the actions taken to centralize authority in Washington, from the Federal Trade Commission to the Department of Education, violate the spirit, if not the letter, of the Federal Constitution. They are attempts, some well-meaning, some not, to replace our diverse republic with a centralized, unitary state – that whomever controls the apparatus of government can more easily control the country’s citizens. Such a centralized state was anathema to the founders, who agreed on its threat to liberty.
If President Trump’s legacy is that he threw the process of centralization off the rails on which it had run for the better part of a century, that is legacy enough for the ages. May freedom flourish as his monument.
