precepts at claremont.org wrote:
> The Claremont Institute--PRECEPTS | | June 14, 2001
> Visit <http://www.claremont.org> | | No. 283
>
> Claremont Institute Precepts: Anti-Government vs.
> Constitutionalism
>
> Paul Weyrich labored many years in the vineyards
> of the conservative movement, and however one
> judges the success of the harvest, he must be given
> his just portion of the credit for it. We count
> ourselves among his frequent admirers. But
> sometimes Weyrich strains the admiration of his
> friends, as he did earlier this week.
>
> In an article published in Tuesday's Los Angeles
> Times, Weyrich offers a confusing -- and confused --
> argument about the lasting damage Oklahoma City
> bomber Timothy McVeigh inflicted upon conservativism.
> If we understand Weyrich correctly, he seems to equate
> the anti-government terrorism of McVeigh with the
> limited-government conservatism of, say, Rep. Dick
> Armey, or the constitutionalism that we advocate
> here at the Claremont Institute.
>
> What other conclusion could we possibly reach?
> Weyrich writes: "Beyond the horror and carnage
> inflicted on Oklahoma City, McVeigh did great damage
> to the movement he professed to be a part of." And
> what movement would that be? Was McVeigh a member of
> Weyrich's Free Congress Foundation? Did he receive
> Heritage Foundation policy briefings? Weyrich doesn't
> say exactly, but he does go on: "The anti-government
> mood was really gaining strength in the country. The
> 1994 elections swept into office some of the most
> determined reformers ever in modern times."
>
> Let us be clear: McVeigh was a low-down murderer who
> struck at the heart of the republic. He was not a
> patriot in any sense of the word. What he did was not
> a political act. It was a crime. He did not make
> arguments to reform the government. He made bombs to
> destroy it.
>
> McVeigh was not part of any movement of which the
> Claremont Institute is a part. If we stand for
> anything, it is the right of every human being to
> "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness," all
> of which the terrorist McVeigh took from 168 innocent
> people in Oklahoma City.
>
> Says Weyrich: "That bombing completely tore the heart
> out of the anti-government movement in the country
> . . It put the forces of less government completely
> on the defensive, lest somehow they be linked to
> Oklahoma City." Certainly we did not go on the
> defensive. We continued saying the day after the
> bombing exactly what we had been saying the day
> before: that the federal government has burst the
> constituional bonds placed upon it by our Founding
> Fathers and is over-taxing its citizens, over-spending
> their money, and over-regulating their lives.
>
> By linking McVeigh to any political movement that
> seeks to reduce the size of government by constitutional
> means, Weyrich is guilty of employing the same rhetoric
> used by Bill Clinton. Remember that Clinton used the
> bombing to discredit the agenda of the newly elected
> Republican Congress. The liberal media eagerly parroted
> this line on the evening news and in print.
>
> No doubt Weyrich would deny that his argument is no
> different in principle from the demagoguery deployed by
> the ex-president. Yet he uses the terms "anti-government"
> and "less government" interchangeably. They are clearly
> not the same thing. But does Weyrich know it?
>
> After the "Gingrich Revolution" of 1994, conservatives
> failed to achieve clear and permanent victories. But
> this could be expected in any case. The enormous power
> and reach of the federal bureaucracies was not going
> to be reined in overnight. Nevertheless, it led Weyrich
> to effectively withdraw from the cause.
>
> Recall his famous 1999 open letter to conservatives,
> written in the wake of impeachment, which urged true
> believers to give up the "culture war" as lost and to
> quarantine themselves from American society and its
> "alien ideology" of moral relativism.
>
> After Weyrich published the letter, we wrote to
> Precepts readers that his idea was "based upon a bad
> premise [and] even if the premise were true, the
> strategy would fail."
>
> What Weyrich failed to understand, we argued, was that
> "to a wide extent, the deterioration in the culture
> turns out to be a political phenomenon. To abandon
> politics is to abandon one's fellow citizens -- and of
> course ultimately oneself and ones own family -- to the
> ravages of bad law."
>
> That certainly remains true today, even with a
> Republican president in the White House and a
> nominally Republican-controlled House of
> Representatives. Anti-government rhetoric is no more
> principled than the blindly pro-government rhetoric
> of welfare-state liberalism and its successors.
>
> The problem with many conservatives -- and Beltway
> conservatives in particular -- is that they do not
> properly understand the meaning of constitutionalism.
> Government is necessary. We must have it. The reason is
> because we are human beings. After all, James Madison
> wrote, "what is governmentt itself but the profoundest
> reflection on human nature? If men were angels, no
> government would be necessary."
>
> We cannot live among ourselves without any rules because
> we have faults. We get to choose what the rules are,
> but they must apply to everyone equally. Of course,
> all of our faults are possessed by the people who run
> the government. Madison goes on to tell us that,
> "If Angels were to govern men, neither internal nor
> external controls upon the government would be
> necessary."
>
> When we give someone the force of law, we give that
> person power. That someone is human, so there must be
> checks on that power. Those checks are provided by
> the Constitution. One such check is the election. In
> the words of Lincoln, "ballots, not bullets."
>
> Weyrich writes that "the anti-government forces have
> never regained the momentum they had before the
> bombing occurred. Only God knows how far things might
> have gone had this man-made act of vengeance not
> interfered with the political forces that had been
> building for years." The only anti-government forces
> that lost momentum in the aftermath of the Oklahoma
> City bombing were such groups as the Michigan Militia
> -- groups that set themselves outside of politics and,
> to the extent they had any influence at all, were
> part of the problem.
>
> Evidently, Weyrich cannot make simple distinctions
> between those who wish to defend the Republic
> and those who would destroy it. Perhaps it is time for
> him to give it up, and let the rest of us continue to
> do the work necessary to save America from all her
> enemies, foreign and domestic.
>
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------
> Copyright (c) 2001 The Claremont Institute
>
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