-Caveat Lector-
> Three Statists
>
> by DON MATHEWS
>
> [Posted August 11, 1999]
>
> No doubt the typical proponent of freedom and free enterprise,
> being of good manners and peaceful disposition, would sooner put
> his head in a bucket of rats than read All Too Human by George
> Stephanopoulos, Locked in the Cabinet by Robert Reich and Behind
> the Oval Office by Dick Morris. These books are chronicles by
> three government men of their years with the Clinton presidency,
> American democracys celebration of the abject. Why would a
> friend of liberty want to get more of this sorry episode by
> reading these books?
>
> One good reason: Know Your Enemy.
>
> Stephanopoulos, Reich, and Morris are statists. But each is a
> statist of a different type. Their chronicles offer an
> opportunity to plumb three classic varieties of the statist mind.
>
> George Stephanopoulos was a top aide to Bill Clinton between 1992
> and 1996. The Stephanopoulos-type statist has a history and a
> tradition that is as old as the state itself. In todays America
> he has the esteemed title of senior advisor to the president. He
> is a celebrity, envied and fawned over by the political class. A
> political operative and round-the-clock propagandist, this brand
> of statist makes his living by doing what it takes to enrich the
> power of his monarch, his dictator or his president. He is an
> elite stooge.
>
> Stephanopoulos tells us in All Too Human that the pistons of
> [his] character are restrained idealism and raw ambition. What
> he has raw ambition for is government power. He loves being near
> it, being part of it and wielding it, for its own sake and for
> the celebrity that it brings. He rationalizes his ambition for
> power with this restrained idealism: Because I believe in
> original sin, because I know that Im capable of craving a cold
> beer in a village of starving kids, because I understand that
> selfishness vies for space in our hearts with compassion, I
> believe we need government -- a government that forces us to care
> for the common good even when we dont feel like it, a government
> that helps channel our better instincts and check our bad ones.
>
> People who have a lust for the power to impose their will on
> others are rare in society. Invariably, they wind up in prison or
> in government. Stephanopoulos chose the government route. Without
> a doubt, Stephanopoulos has a desire to serve the common good,
> and he believes in the power of politics to help people. But
> All Too Human reveals that Stephanopoulos hooked up with
> government not from a desire to help people but from a desire for
> power, the kind of power that only politics and government can
> offer. It is egoism, not altruism, that drives the political
> stooge.
>
> Power corrupts, and the people most corrupted by power are the
> people who want it most. As the stooge ascends in the ranks and
> gets closer to power, his character changes. He grows even more
> infatuated with himself. The stooge who makes it to the ranks of
> the ruling elite takes on a different character altogether.
> Assisting the head of state govern over the masses, he sees
> himself as inherently different from them. He sees himself as
> genuinely elite, and he sees the masses as instruments of his
> will. Exercising power in the name of the state, he sees the
> state as an extension of himself. He works to expand the power of
> the state because in doing so he expands his own power and
> affirms his vision of himself, and he is burdened by no scruples
> in attacking any opposition that threatens his power.
>
> All Too Human is the story Stephanopoulos tells about an elite
> stooge corrupted by power. It is a story not about Bill Clinton,
> but about himself.
>
> Robert B. Reich, the Secretary of Labor during Clintons first
> term, is a familiar type of statist. He is the social engineer,
> ever ready with government intrusions to heal our hurting nation.
> And, Reich tells us in Locked in the Cabinet, our nation is
> hurting bad. We are fast becoming two cultures--one of affluence
> and contentment, the other of insecurity and cynicism. Most
> Americans are worried about their jobs, their wages, their
> futures, their kids futures--worried that the American Dream of
> upward mobility may be just a dream. The middle class has
> become an anxious class. (His italics.) Sweatshops are back in
> America. Thats a daunting heap of crisis and woe for even the
> most determined social engineer. And Reich is one determined
> social engineer. Theres so goddamn much to be done, he writes.
> (Again, his italics; I guess statists have a thing for italics).
>
> Academic-bureaucrat Reich is a determined social engineer because
> he cares about the economically anxious and overwrought--the
> pawns of capitalism, the proletariat and the army of the
> unemployed. We know he cares about these people because he tells
> us so on every other page of his book. Sometimes he tells us
> several times on the same page. And if one cares--truly
> cares--there is no option but to be a statist. To give up on
> government is to cede it to those who are in it for the wrong
> reasons, or who care nothing for the underdogs in society, he
> writes. I care; therefore, I am a statist is the self-righteous
> logic of the social engineer.
>
> The social engineer also has the arrogance of an Ivy League
> academic. This is not surprising, since so many social engineers
> are Ivy League academics. Ivy League academic arrogance is not
> Im-a professor-at-Harvard arrogance; its
> Society-would-be-much-better-off-
> if-the-government-policies-that-I-have-proposed-and-discussed-at-
> length-in-my-many-books-
> and-articles-were-put-in-place-immediately arrogance.
>
> Dont be fooled by the April 15, 1993 entry in Reichs chronicle,
> in which he reminisces about warning his Harvard students that a
> social engineer who has the arrogance to believe he knows what is
> best for society is dangerous. Reich is full of the very
> arrogance he warns his students about. He believes government is
> the engine of social progress. He believes governments mission
> is to create genuine opportunity for all (his italics)--not the
> phony kind that liberty offers. He believes he knows just what is
> best for society and feels justified in using government coercion
> to engineer it.
>
> The social engineer is by nature arrogant and self-righteous.
> What else but arrogance and self-righteousness would lead him to
> think that he is fighting the good fight by using government
> coercion to engineer society as he sees fit? But the social
> engineer is more than just arrogant and self-righteous. He is
> also a con artist.
>
> It is tempting to compare the social engineer to the snake oil
> salesman, but the snake oil salesman would take offense at that.
> Rightly so. The social engineer is more depraved. The snake oil
> salesman serves up phony medicine for real ailments. The social
> engineer serves up phony medicine for phony ailments. His patient
> is the body politic. He gets the body politic to take the phony
> medicine by tormenting the body politic into thinking its sick.
> Where the body politic notices a blemish, a stretch mark or an
> ingrown hair; the social engineer sees illness, sickness and
> disease--which he calls Crisis, Social Injustice and National
> Tragedy. He berates the body politic with warnings that its
> riddled with Crisis, Social Injustice and National Tragedy; and
> when the worn down body politic finally yields, the social
> engineer crams his medicine down its throat. His medicine is
> always intrusive, and very expensive.
>
> Dick Morris is our final exhibit in this reading tour of
> statists. Morriss book, Behind the Oval Office, is by far the
> best of the three books reviewed here. It is just as self-serving
> as the other books, but theres more to learn about politics,
> government and the mind of Bill Clinton in the first fifteen
> pages of Behind the Oval Office than in all the pages of All Too
> Human and Locked in the Cabinet combined.
>
> Morris was the presidents key political consultant from December
> 1994 to August 1996. He was one of the first of the modern day
> political consultants and one of the first of the political
> pollsters. He has been giving politicians advice based on polling
> results since 1977, when he took on his first real client, a
> thirty-one year old attorney general from Arkansas named Bill
> Clinton.
>
> The political class despises Morris. Party statists demand
> allegiance, but Morris has worked for both Democrats and
> Republicans. For that, the political class views him as a cynic,
> a cutthroat. Or worse. According to the March 21, 1995 entry in
> Reichs Locked in the Cabinet, Stephanopoulos said of Morris:
> Hes a slime bag. Utterly without principle. Devoid of
> integrity. The guys been working with Trent Lott [the Senate
> majority whip]. Still is. Nothings beneath him. Hell do
> anything. (Again, the italics are the statists.)
>
> There is a larger reason why the political class despises Morris.
> Morris advises politicians to take positions that his polls show
> are popular with voters. The political class denounces this as
> governing by polls; it is, in Reichs words, the antithesis of
> leadership. Governing by polls circumvents the ruling elite. It
> transfers power from the ruling elite to the median voter. Reich
> says: There used to be a policy-making process in the White
> House. Now we have Morris and his polls. Nothing is more
> loathsome to a member of the ruling elite than the loss of power.
>
> Morris is not a political stooge or a social engineer. He is a
> statist of a different sort. Morris is a political animal. He
> loves the game of politics. For him, politics is an end in
> itself.
>
> But to play the game of politics is to play games with peoples
> lives. The median voter can be a tyrant, too, and the political
> animal urges him to be one. If power corrupts--and we know it
> does--the political animal is likely to be successful.
>
> Morris tells us in Behind the Oval Office that his ego lead to
> his demise. He writes: Ego is the occupational disease of
> politics. It infects idealism and turns it into self-
> righteousness. It distorts a desire to make positive change into
> a search for power. Morris understates the problem. People like
> Morris, Reich and Stephanopoulos dont become flush with ego,
> self-righteous and hungry for power once they enter politics and
> government. They are that way before they enter politics and
> government. Thats why they enter politics and government.
>
> The lesson of the elite stooge, the social engineer and the
> political animal is that government power does not, as
> Stephanopoulos would have it, channel our better instincts and
> check our bad ones. Government power attracts the worst among us
> and brings out the worst in us. It attracts people who must
> impose their will on others to affirm themselves. It attracts
> people who believe in using force to mold society to their
> liking. And it attracts people who believe that politics is and
> ought to be the driving force of society. Once such people taste
> power, their desire for it grows even stronger.
>
> Power corrupts. But it does more than that. Power attracts the
> corrupt, then corrupts them further.
>
> * * * * *
>
> Don Mahews teaches economics at Coastal Georgia College.
>
> ^ Top of Page
>
>
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