The Sorta-Good, the Very Bad, and the Extremely Ugly

In his brilliant classic, A Disquisition on Government, John C. Calhoun warned that a written constitution would never be sufficient to restrain the governmental leviathan.  The net tax consumers (those who received more in government benefits than they paid in taxes), especially government employees, would relentlessly argue away the effectiveness of constitutional restrictions on government, he predicted.  The net tax payers would inevitably be overwhelmed and defeated.  There was never a truer political prediction.

In his new book, 9 Presidents Who Screwed Up America – And Four Who Tried to Save Her, Brion McClanahan presents a masterful and superbly-scholarly discussion of how nine presidents, beginning with George Washington himself, effectively destroyed constitutional government.  On the brighter side, he also explains how four presidents – Jefferson, Tyler, Cleveland, and Coolidge – did their best to preserve the Jeffersonian vision of limited constitutional government.

I have called Grover Cleveland “The Last Good Democrat”; McClanahan correctly labels him as the last Jeffersonian president.  He vetoed more legislation than all of his predecessors combined, which of course is why most Americans know almost nothing about him.  He opposed foreign policy imperialism, including the annexation of Hawaii; was a free trader; and opposed the beginnings of a welfare state, arguing that “though the people support the government, the government should not support the people.”  He vetoed numerous schemes to turn veterans’ pensions into welfare handouts.  For this he has been pilloried by the history profession for the past 120 years.

Another object of leftist hatred is Calvin Coolidge, a somewhat sad figure in that he was, as McClanahan describes him, “a Jeffersonian whose vision had given way [by 1933, the year of his death] to the socialism of Franklin Roosevelt.”  His tax-cutting policies and his foreign policy non-interventionism earned him eternal ridicule at the hands of the American history profession.

McClanahan’s final chapter proposes several constitutional amendments that would curtail executive power, decentralize government, and begin to breathe life back into American federalism.  This is all fine and good, but in my humble opinion, American history – including the history as so brilliantly told by Brion McClanahan – amply proves that any and all constitutional limitations on governmental power will always be easily and cleverly evaded by our ruling class of master politicians, once defined with perfect precision by Murray Rothbard as masterful liars, connivers, and manipulators.

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