Water Hates Hydrogen and Oxygen
So, okay: a Washington Post columnist goes to a Tea Party protest to meet the violent and racist extremists, mostly doesn't meet them, finds that he's talking to people with rational grievances that they can articulate without melting down into a puddle of rage. Whatever. But then Postie Robert McCartney lays this spectacular historical egg:
"The tea party has been called an heir of Alabama's segregationist governor George Wallace. It certainly shares his anti-government worldview, if not his aggressive racism."
Governor George Wallace was anti-government. The chief executive of a state opposed state power. His worldview compelled him to reject the authority of the thing that he was.
In a smart 1995 book on Wallace, Dan Carter describes the Alabama governor's unrelenting use of state instruments in the service of his social and political agenda. By the time Wallace took over the governor's seat, the state had a well-established tradition of police repression in the field of radical politics; in particular, the Birmingham Police Department's sizable red squad had long been active against labor organizers in a steel-producing town. But Wallace went farther, in a place where"the line between surveillance and harassment was often nonexistent." He wanted to centralize the political aggression.
"Local police, as well as the state Department of Public Safety, had conducted such surveillance haphazardly," Carter writes."George Wallace set out to institutionalize and dramatically increase the role of the state police," simultaneously turning their attention from communists and labor unions to civil rights activists.
A broad agenda of spying and harassment had very distinct personal effects. For example: Bob Zellner, a young white activist who worked as a SNCC coordinator, was arrested by state police on untenable subversion accusations, but brought to trial on a felony charge of financial crimes after a careful investigation proved that he had written a check before he had enough money in the bank to cover it. The check hadn't bounced -- there was just a brief moment when the check was written, but the money wasn't deposited. (Remarkably, the state couldn't get a jury to bite; as the saying goes, Zellner beat the rap, but he couldn't beat the ride.)
Meanwhile, Wallace's allies in the legislature worked to develop investigative committees that would serve some of the same purposes, smearing and intimidating civil rights activists while working to jail them through perjury traps and legislative contempt charges.
In short, a governor, his subordinates in the state police, and his allies in the legislature and local government all worked to use the power of government against people who they hated and feared.
This is what government is for. Power exists to be used. People govern to advance their agendas, and to push back the agendas of people whose beliefs they oppose.
So how does a newspaper columnist look at a chief executive -- a man who sat at the head of a state government and worked to grow its coercive power for use against social enemies -- and see an"anti-government worldview," militating against the use of state power?
Because of an ideological assumption in which government is necessarily progressive. This is the water in which academic historians and D.C. journalists swim, along with the political class that they flatter and enable: government fixes, builds, protects, serves. See Bill Clinton's morally insane rantsagainst political speech this weekend, which were premised on the aggressively stupid argument that government can only protect freedom and serve the interests of the governed.
To an observer sitting in the imperial city, Governor George Wallace was anti-government because he used government power in a way that we find distasteful. It's easier to live with the wrenching cognitive dissonance that comes with a narrative about state actors who oppose the state than it is to acknowledge that government isn't what you want to pretend it is.
(Cross-posted at Inflection Point Diary.)