The non sequitur of American liberalism

The 1861-1865 War Between the States was fought for many reasons still hotly debated today. However, one point is commonly accepted: In the aftermath of the war, the United States federal government emerged as the major agent that would guide social change in our nation.

When President Lincoln declared his role was to save the union from the states that held state-wide referendums and voted to secede (not unlike the recent Scottish referendum on independence from Great Britain), he set the federal government on a course not to protect and defend the citizens of the United States but to force them to accept social standards established by the federal government. Accordingly, he directed the United States military to invade the seceded states and then orchestrated a four-year offensive war against them until they unconditionally surrendered, killing over 900,000 Americans on both sides in the process.

Slavery was undeniably a national sin that could not exist in a free nation. The complicated issue was how to destroy that peculiar institution within the constraints of the Constitution. Simply because the North had more people and resources to throw into the breech does not imply that the death and destruction of war, the horrors and corruption of Reconstruction, and the difficult assimilation of the freedmen into American society guarantee a blank check to the federal government to cure all social ills. In many ways, the process of abolishing slavery, certainly not the result, was an absolute failure; nevertheless, that is the non sequitur upon which many liberals base their massive national social programs today.

The progressives and liberals concluded mistakenly that if the federal government could abolish a major social evil like slavery, it could abolish them all. In the years since, an increasingly powerful federal government enacted controversial laws legislatively or judicially that would have never been considered by the relatively tiny antebellum bureaucracy. A national income tax, prohibition of alcohol, Social Security, legalization of abortion and federal educational standards are examples.

The irony of the expansion of the federal government is that the same people, from both sides of the political aisle, whose cure for every ill is bigger government, are often the most unhappy with the results. They fancy a state that offers everything, but they complain about outcomes such as NSA spying on their private lives, the failure of our education system, the failure of welfare and government-run medical care, or the excesses of foreign wars. Each political side blames the other, but the real problem lies in the bloated inefficiency, corruption and self-serving political agendas of big government itself. Nonetheless, the "fix" is always the same -- add another layer, like the recent Ebola czar.

If one advocates giving Washington more and more power to solve every social ill, complaints about the inevitable failed results carry little legitimacy. A bloated federal government hasn't yet produced a magical template to solve our problems. It simply made big government bigger and more intrusive. History proves over and over the adage, "The government big enough to give you everything you want is powerful enough to take everything you have."

Fortunately, our Founding Fathers didn't live in Utopia. They were ardent students of the European Age of Enlightenment when reasonable men debated, compromised, or (gasp!) even prayed for divine guidance to resolve divisive philosophical issues. Accordingly, they created a constitutional government of checks and balances, both horizontally among the three branches of federal government and vertically among the federal, state and local governments.

Our survival as a nation depends upon restoring this balance, but both parties seem hell-bent on expanding, not restraining, a federal bureaucracy that has run amok for 150 years. We must regain our freedom from the self-righteous bureaucrats in Washington. The question we must ask is how? Neither party seems interested in answering that question.

Roger Smith lives in Soddy-Daisy and is a frequent contributor to the Chattanooga Times Free Press. He is author of "American Spirit."

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