Keeping perspective
President Woodrow Wilson declared in 1919: “In the last analysis, my fellow countrymen, as we in America would be the first to claim, a people are responsible for the acts of their government.” Wilson had campaigned for reelection three years earlier bragging that he had kept the country out of World War I; then, shortly after he started his second term, he submitted to Congress a declaration of war against Germany. Were the people responsible for President Wilson’s 1916 peace promises or his 1917 declaration of war?
by James Bovard
Democracy is a system of government under which the people are automatically liable for whatever the government does to them. Many of the most deadly errors of contemporary political thinking stem from the notion that in a democracy the government is the people, so there is scant reason to worry about protecting citizens from the government.Freedom consists of more than a mere choice of political masters.
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Throughout western history, tyrants and would-be tyrants have sought to browbeat the citizens into obedience by telling them that they are only obeying themselves — regardless of how much the citizens disagree with the government’s edicts. Thomas Hobbes explained in 1652:
Because every subject is by this institution the author of all the actions, and judgments of the sovereign instituted; it follows, that whatsoever he doth, it can be no injury to any of his subjects; nor ought he to be by any of them accused of injustice. But by this Institution of a commonwealth, every particular man is author of all the sovereign doth; and consequently he that complaineth of injury from his sovereign, complained of that whereof he himself is author.
Hobbes sought civil peace by imposing an almost unlimited duty of submission via the sham that people are responsible for whatever government does to them: thus, government can never do the people wrong: thus, people never have a right to resist the government. Unfortunately, Hobbes’s canard has become standard equipment in the rhetorical armory of many rulers of democratic states.
A long history of abuses
In 1798, President John Adams pushed through Congress the Alien and Sedition Acts, which empowered Adams to suppress free speech and imprison without trial any critic of the federal government. When the citizens of Westmoreland County, Virginia, petitioned Adams in 1798 complaining of the acts, President Adams responded by denouncing the citizens: “The declaration that Our People are hostile to a government made by themselves, for themselves, and conducted by themselves, is an insult.” Adams’s response to the people of Westmoreland County — few of whom had voted for Adams — was the classic trick of a would-be democratic tyrant. Virginia had been unwilling to ratify the Constitution until a Bill of Rights had been added to safeguard free speech, among other rights.
Yet even though Adams openly suppressed free speech, he still claimed a right to not only the citizen’s abject obedience but also a right to be above criticism for suppressing their freedom. Kentucky and Virginia enacted resolutions declaring the sedition act null and void; the Kentucky resolution observed that the doctrine “that the general government is the exclusive judge of the extent of the powers delegated to it [is] nothing short of despotism; since the discretion of those who administer the government, and not the Constitution, would be the measure of their powers.”
President Theodore Roosevelt, speaking in Asheville, North Carolina, on September 9, 1902, proclaimed: “The government is us; we are the government, you and I.” Yet, at the time, Roosevelt was using the American military to brutally crush a rebellion in the Philippines, which had been conquered by the United States and declared an American territory a few years before. Roosevelt explained that the “constitution does not follow the flag” — the American army therefore had no duty to respect the rights of the Filipino people.
President Woodrow Wilson declared in 1919: “In the last analysis, my fellow countrymen, as we in America would be the first to claim, a people are responsible for the acts of their government.” Wilson had campaigned for reelection three years earlier bragging that he had kept the country out of World War I; then, shortly after he started his second term, he submitted to Congress a declaration of war against Germany. Were the people responsible for President Wilson’s 1916 peace promises or his 1917 declaration of war? How can they be responsible for both? Wilson campaigned for the presidency in 1912 as a progressive. Shortly after he took office, mass firings of black federal employees occurred. The chief federal revenue collector in Georgia announced: “There are no Government positions for Negroes in the South. A Negro’s place is in the cornfield.” How were voters who opposed Jim Crow laws responsible for Wilson’s unexpected racist purge? And how could people have been responsible for Wilson’s pervasive suppression of civil liberties — as well as his pious promises to respect the Constitution? As Harvard professor Irving Babbitt observed in 1924, “Wilson, in the pursuit of his scheme for world service, was led to make light of the constitutional checks on his authority and to reach out almost automatically for unlimited power.”
President Franklin Roosevelt declared in 1938, “Let us never forget that government is ourselves and not an alien power over us. The ultimate rulers of our democracy are not a President and senators and congressmen and government officials, but the voters of this country.” When Roosevelt first ran for the presidency in 1932, he promised to balance the federal budget — and then later touted his endless deficit spending as a panacea for all the nation’s economic woes. When Roosevelt ran for reelection in 1936, he never mentioned his plan (revealed in early 1937) to pack the nation’s highest court with new appointees to rubber-stamp his decrees. Yet, because he won in 1936, he effectively implied that the citizens were somehow bound to accept all of his power grabs as if they themselves had willed them. Likewise, were citizens responsible for FDR’s 1940 reelection campaign boasts about keeping America out of World War Two — or were they to blame of his secret machinations to drag the United States into that war the following year?
President Lyndon Johnson declared on October 28, 1964: “Government is not an enemy of the people. Government is the people themselves.” Yet it wasn’t “the people” of Arkansas or Oklahoma who had lied about the Gulf of Tonkin incident to create a pretext to commence bombing a foreign nation.
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