This Letters from an Ohio Farmer blog post hits the nail on the head, “Constitutional Lines.”
…James Q. Wilson, one of the preeminent American political scientists of the last half century, helps us understand this. The ultimate meaning of the triumph of the New Deal, according to him, is the collapse of the “legitimacy barrier.” Since its fall, he argued, “political conflict [has taken] a very different form. New programs need not await the advent of a crisis or an extraordinary majority, because no program is any longer ‘new’—it is seen, rather, as an extension, a modification, or an enlargement of something the government is already doing. Since there is virtually nothing the government has not tried to do, there is little it cannot be asked to do.”
The correct label for the alternative to limited government is not big government, but unlimited government. The destruction of all legitimacy barriers creates a new constitutional logic in which government grows, not just very big, but limitlessly big. All the forces – political, economic, and judicial – that might constrain it are rendered ineffectual.
This deformation of our republic has gone on so long, and acquired so much inertial strength, that the Tea Party movement’s mission is politically as well as intellectually audacious…. (Emphasis added)
…The ultimate goal of constitutional conservatism is to mold public sentiment into a broad, durable consensus in favor of rebuilding legitimacy barriers in American government. This is not a task that will be accomplished by one legislative fight over the debt ceiling, or in one or two election cycles….
This is the message that Dr. Troy Kickler and I drive home in our Constitutional Workshops. The next two workshops are scheduled for Saturday, September 10 in Sanford and Saturday,October 29th in New Bern. Watch www.johnlocke.org/events for announcements of more workshops around the state this fall.
