Love Big Brother
by Donald Devine
Issue 131 - May 5, 2009

Are you “mainly antigovernment?” Have you “feared” an “economic collapse” of the U.S., have you adopted immigration as a “recruiting tool,” have you perceived “recent gun control legislation” as a “threat” to your right to bear arms, have you concerns that world governments could usurp the “sovereignty” of the U.S., have you exploited “social issues such as abortion,” or are you a “disgruntled military veteran”?

If you are any of these, the Department of Homeland Security is on the lookout for you. President Obama’s newly-issued DHS Office of Intelligence and Analysis (OIA) report “Rightwing Extremism” orders police authorities to “deter, prevent, preempt or respond to” two types of rightwing terrorism. Its official “Assessment” identifies, first, those who are “hate oriented” (such as those listed above) and second “those who are mainly antigovernment, rejecting federal authority in favor of state and local authority.” This taxonomy nicely taps into both aspects of the “progressive” paranoia that conservatives hate and are antigovernment – and, therefore, must be watched and controlled.

While this obsession against conservative “hatred” of government has reached its zenith in this government report, it is nothing new. Thomas Frank, the author of “What’s the Matter with Kansas?” and the leftist op-ed voice of the Wall Street Journal has made a living blaming conservatism for the failure of big government. Conservatives hate government so much that they are unable to manage it and this explains why government does not work, he says. On the neoconservative right, David Brooks even adds the authority of George W. Bush to the charge, when the president criticized the “destructive mind-set” of traditional conservatism’s supposed “idea that if government would get out of the way, all problems would be solved."

Progressives, of course, love government and do not hate – just as Mr. Frank loves Kansas!

The proximate source of this fixation dominating the progressive psyche is Ronald Reagan’s First Inaugural Address, where the newly-elected president declared:

In this present crisis, government is not the solution to our problem.  Government is the problem. . . It is no coincidence that our present troubles parallel and are proportionate to the intervention and intrusion in our lives that result from unnecessary and excessive growth of government.

It is too subtle for progressives to understand that seeing government as the problem is not the same as hating it. Most critics conveniently ignore the rest of what the president said:

It is time to check and reverse the growth of government, which shows signs of having grown beyond the consent of the governed. It is my intention to curb the size and influence of the Federal establishment and to demand recognition of the distinction between the powers granted to the Federal Government and those reserved to the States or to the people. . .  Now, so there will be no misunderstanding, it is not my intention to do away with government. It is rather to make it work--work with us, not over us; to stand by our side, not ride on our back.

It is clear that President Reagan was not opposed to government but to a particular kind of government, one that had gone beyond the powers granted to it by the Constitution and the people; in fact he was paraphrasing the Tenth Amendment. He was so far from hating government that the purpose of making it smaller was to make government work better, by limiting it to its proper functions, as he elaborated explicitly a few weeks later at our annual Conservative Political Action Conference. In short, Ronald Reagan and his limited government conservative friends support government when it is limited to the proper powers granted by the Constitution.

Indeed, it can be argued that it is progressives and neoconservatives who hate government because they give it more to do than it possibly could do well. For example, immediately after President Barack Obama’s Budget was announced to great fanfare about bold spending without harmful long term deficits, the government announced that it had recalculated the Social Security Trust Fund and found that the Budget could no longer count on its surpluses. Not only were the spending amounts not reduced to accommodate the new facts but the numbers were not adjusted, even though this meant $800 billion higher deficits. For big government work, apparently a trillion or so more red ink does not even deserve recognition in its major planning tool, the Budget. How can such an institution possibly work even with lots of love?

The government was already facing a few problems. Excessive lending to poor risks by its mortgage agents Fannie and Freddie and cheap money by its Fed bank have led to a deep recession that shows little sign of recovery even after trillions spent. But right on its heels is something worse, an explosion of entitlement spending. President Obama himself mentioned this but he did not offer any solutions, ignoring entitlement reform completely in the Budget. The optimistic explanation is that Democrats in Congress insist on big spending today so the president must allow them to spend trillions on health, energy and education to meet their demands. After their spending appetites are satiated, Mr. Obama can control entitlement spending. But will not increasing spending enormously in the short term make long term cuts even more difficult? What could undermine government more than to make an impending disaster even worse?

How about ignoring problems with the institution’s primary asset, its people? Yet, because big government progressives love government, they avert their attention when government employees misbehave. Even when prosecutorial abuse against a then sitting Senator was uncovered by Democratic Attorney General, Eric Holder, the reaction in Washington – as characterized by the Washington Post – was that the prosecutorial abuse took place simply because the government employees needed “more time and staff.” It was not that the government was wrong but that the citizens were too cheap to provide them the necessary resources. Of course, the problem could not have been a Department of Justice prosecutorial ethos of convictions at any cost, its bureaucratic culture that labels any oversight of career employees as political interference, or its belief that careerists are protected from correction even if they suppress evidence. So far, no one on the left has even congratulated Mr. Holder for his courage.

Defense and homeland security, like justice, are unquestionably Federal responsibilities. Surely government-lovers should want them to work well. The Department of Defense and the Department of Homeland Security – which together represent about half of Federal civilian employees – were told by Congress to develop pay for performance systems so government could respond more effectively to or prevent any future 9/11. But those who love government will not allow this to happen. Both systems have been tied up in court by federal unions supported by Democrats in Congress ever since. Indeed, Candidate Obama promised unions he would overhaul or “completely repeal” both reforms. A recent letter by eight well-placed House Democrats asked Obama’s Office of Management and Budget to de-link performance appraisal from performance rewards. This certainly should increase employee incentives to make government work better, right?

Lovers of government would surely want President Obama’s new top executives to be able to lead their organizations effectively. Under federal law, agency heads have unambiguous control over management within their agencies but it is up to them to exercise it. In 1993, Bill Clinton decided it would be a good idea for management to share executive responsibility with labor. Labor already had the right to collectively bargain with management on work procedures but henceforth, labor would also be part of management. President Clinton created Labor-Management Councils to make executive decisions regarding how and where work was to be performed, granting unions two bites of the apple – once as a labor bargainer and again as part of management, bargaining with itself.

Even the Clinton Administration feared the chaos of this system and never fully implemented it, especially after a raucous interagency meeting where the agency leaders directly told the White House they would not comply. George W. Bush formally revoked the order as one of his first acts as president. Now, union leaders are saying that the Obama Administration will revive councils in an “improved” version. Environmental Protection Agency administrator Lisa Jackson already has promised her unions she will reestablish councils at her agency. Even government lovers who must administer this bureaucratic caldron of inefficiency are amazed. Obama’s new head of the civil service confessed to Congress that he “can’t defend that [the government’s pay system] to you with a straight face;” and his new Agriculture Secretary said he just asked his careerists how many employees served under him and found out that “no one really knows.”

Lovers of big government simply assume that government, especially national government, is an objective and omnificent administrator of the public good. It is neither. President Obama’s solution is to appoint Technology and Performance czars to make it all work right. However, these czars will soon meet the Bolsheviks, with the same result. The bureaucracy has interests and exists to fight for them. Even when it is willing, a large bureaucracy cannot know about the hundreds of billions of transactions that go on under its nominal purview so it cannot solve them. Federal unions complicate matters more and are big contributors to Congressmen, especially those who nominally oversee them. Federal sector unions were one of the largest contributors to House Armed Services Chairman Ike Skelton, who previously led the initial opposition to the DOD pay for performance system and was one of the eight to write against merit pay this year.

The left loves to make big business the villain in the lobbying game. Not only does it ignore the fact that labor is the largest single contributor and that business gave more to Democrats this year but also that business normally does not waste money lobbying if government does not regulate it. The Constitution gives no right to the Feds to regulate computer software so Microsoft saw no reason to hire lobbyists in Washington and did not do so until the Department of Justice decided it had too big a share of the business. So, Microsoft then set up the largest lobbying operation in DC. Businesses start by being suspicious of government but those big enough to afford Washington representation grow to love its benefits. A recent University of Kansas study reported that a single tax change allowing repatriation of foreign earnings on a lower tax basis than before returned $100 billion to the 800 companies that lobbied– a 22,000 percent return on their lobbying investment. If the government is giving so much away and it is not illegal, why not love it enough to share in its benefits? No non-governmental investment could yield such large returns.

This is the kind of government conservatives do hate - the kind of “intervention and intrusion in our lives that result from unnecessary and excessive growth of government.” Conservatives do want “to curb the size and influence of the Federal establishment and to demand recognition of the distinction between the powers granted to the Federal Government and those reserved to the States or to the people.” That is neither love nor hate but Constitutional government. Yet, today adherents of big government see this view of the Constitution – which was that of the Founders - as a breeding ground for terrorism.

To those whose love and hope reside in government, the state cannot be denied any power necessary to “do good” or – they think – there will be no prosperity, health or welfare for the people. It is not enough for progressives that conservatives accede to power - the government must be loved. As in George Orwell’s “Nineteen Eighty-Four,” love must even have its own government agency to assure that all love it. Now we know where it resides - at DHS’ OIA bureaucracy, supported by propagandists like Mr. Frank, demanding not merely obedience but constant and passionate love for our dear Big Brother. Or else.

I guess that puts me on the OIA watch list.

Donald Devine, the editor of Conservative Battleline Online, was the director of the U.S. Office of Personnel Management from 1981 to 1985 and is the director of the Federalist Leadership Center at Bellevue University.