Donald Trump claims to be concerned about anarchists; someone needs to warn him that the call is coming from inside the house.
Recently we have been hearing a term that has fallen out of favor over the past forty years or so – “anarchists.” The term has been so loosely applied that is often little more than an insult to be hurled at people the speaker doesn’t like, joining such old favorites as “right-wing” and “socialist”. But anarchism actually means something; it comes from a Greek word meaning “without government.” Real anarchists are people who don’t believe in government. They think we would all be better off if there were little or no government, and we were all free to do what we like.
So who are the anarchists in the US today? Not Antifa members, for starters. While they profess to be against fascist or authoritarian governments, as their name indicates, I have not heard that many Antifa protestors want to abolish government altogether. In fact, while there are some anarchists on the left fringe, the standard attack on the left is that they want too much government, not too little.
How about looters? Once again, while they are branded as anarchists, I have not heard that looters espouse any particular political philosophy. So far as I can tell, their dominant philosophy is “I really like free stuff, and I can get it while the police are busy with arsonists, and tear-gassing protestors.”
As for the arsonists, if they were mostly burning government buildings, you might wonder about political motivation. But the arson fires seem mostly directed at businesses and cars. They seem to be crimes of opportunity rather than an attempt to advance a philosophy that government should be abolished.
So where should be looking for people we can accurately call “anarchists.” There are a few clues to help us locate those who want to get rid of government. Ronald Reagan, in his inaugural address, said: “Government is not the solution to our problem, government is the problem.” Now we seem to be getting warmer, and it isn’t from an arson fire. Grover Norquist famously said: “I‘m not in favor of abolishing the government. I just want to shrink it down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub.”
Rick Perry, while campaigning for president, said that there were three entire departments of the federal government that should be abolished, including (Ooops!) the Department of Energy. Is it just a coincidence that he was picked to head a department he thinks should be abolished? Or that Betsy DeVos, chosen to head the Department of Education, advocates policies that weaken public schools? If a vandal removes a mailbox, he faces a penalty of five years in federal prison; when Louis DeJoy removes hundreds of mailboxes under orders from the White House, he gets a pat on the back.
We hear a lot about the need to protect private property, but no one talks about the need to protect public property. Yet public property is the core of what our government, and our constitution, are about. The word “republic” comes from the Latin “res publica” – public property. It means the same as “commonwealth” – the wealth we hold in common. We have been brainwashed into thinking of government as “them” rather than “us”, when the Constitution makes clear that it is “We the people” who are establishing the government. As Teddy Roosevelt said: “The government is us; we are the government, you and I.” When we stop thinking of ourselves as the government, we abdicate our solemn duty as citizens, and allow ourselves to become mere observers, victims of those who assume control of our common wealth for their own purposes.
Over the past forty years, we have witnessed a movement to weaken government by repeated attacks on public property. The attacks have taken the form of allowing private drilling on public lands, privatizing social security, overturning Obamacare and other forms of public programs that provide a safety net for everyone, among many others. All in the name of decreasing public property and increasing private property, while in the process shifting enormous amounts of wealth from the many to the few, and making our economy and our politics less inclusive and more extractive, as those terms are used in Why Nations Fail.
But it has gotten worse recently. Under Donald Trump, we have repeatedly been told that we can’t trust our public institutions – our intelligence agencies, our health experts, our military (“babies!” “losers” and “suckers”), our government employees (“the deep state”) and that we can only trust one person, a person who somehow remains outside the government while running the government. Remarkably, a significant but shrinking minority of the population continues to trust him.
Why would we ever trust our government to people who don’t believe in government? When they get control they will inevitably destroy, or at least weaken, our government and will allow hand-picked vandals to loot our public property. We need to call them what they are – saboteurs and anarchists.
