If you’ve spent much time thinking about hobbits, chances are pretty good you’ve never considered them the Anti-Federalists of Middle Earth.
Yet that’s how Benjamin Wiker describes J.R.R. Tolkien’s mythical hobbits. Why the connection between small, hairy-footed, homebodies and the chief original critics of the U.S. Constitution prior to the adoption of the Bill of Rights? Wiker invokes both Tolkien and the Anti-Federalists in his latest book, 10 Books Every Conservative Must Read.
A response to his own 10 Books That Screwed Up the World, the new book offers selections from philosophy, economics, political science, and literature.
In addition to the collected writing of the Anti-Federalists, Wiker features The Federalist Papers. His chapter on that set of essays includes the following observation:
[R]ather than having an efficient, vigorous, wholly united federal government, one that could use its great energy in a united effort for good, the Federalists envisioned the three branches as three giants tied together at odd angles by tight ropes, a step forward by one causing a painful pinch and a reaction by the other two.
The Federalists were willing to sacrifice significant energy and efficiency because they realized an important conservative principle. Among mere human beings, power is ambiguous. The power to do great good is also the power to do great evil. Since human beings are inclined toward wickedness, and absolute power corrupts absolutely, we would be safer hamstringing federal power.
One of the key differences between conservatism and liberalism emerges precisely here. Despite what some conservatives might think, liberals want to do great good and they realize that great power is necessary to do it. As secularists, they have largely discarded any notion of human sin as a pervasive toxin in every human heart. Certain classes of people may be corrupt, but there is no fundamental corruption plaguing man. All that is needed to fix our problems is power, which they assume they can wield with unambiguous goodness. For this reason, liberals chafe at the federal checks and balances and incline to methods of political change that disregard them, such as using the judiciary as a legislative power to make laws, or allowing the president to have special czars and make endless use of executive agencies not accountable through elections to the people, or bypassing protective legislative procedures to ram through favored programs. …
Happily, the “dependence on the people” is still “the primary control of government,” and conservatives, at least, can see the wisdom of the further check against tyranny of the federal government in the Constitution, the election of a third of the Senators and of all the Representatives every two years.
