The raid on Donald Trump’s home, reportedly to pillage some documents that the former president believes he declassified, certainly raises some serious questions about the role of government power and what kind of regime it is under which we live.
Who precisely is running this show? That’s the right question to ask. And whether we look at the COVID response, energy policy, education, or fundamental issues of criminal justice, the answer keeps coming back to us: It isn’t the people or their representatives, but the administrative state that’s in charge. Its power has become so massive and so unchecked that it believes it can and should decide who it is for whom we are allowed to vote and even what the results should be.
This was the first serious challenge to the rise of this beast in over 100 years, and threatened to do the unthinkable: take major steps toward restoring constitutional government. In the meantime, many Republicans have rallied around the idea and sworn to implement it should they retake power, first at the legislative level and finally in the office of the presidency.
That’s the backdrop to this raid.
We currently have in the United States a kind of cold war brewing between those who believe we should live in a constitutional republic and those who believe that such a thing is outmoded and should be replaced by the rule of “experts” who are completely unaccountable to elected officials, much less to the people. The Democrats in general have become the party of the administrative state, as their latest spending bonanzas prove. Republicans are increasingly defining themselves in the opposite way.
Therefore, we really are at a crossroads, and it’s happening at a time of serious economic crisis, so finding the right answer really has become a pressing concern. Otherwise, we are risking everything: not only prosperity and freedom, but also the constitutional form of government itself.
In the meantime, some 2,300 years of history have gone by, during which time the idea of universal freedom and human rights came to be discovered and eventually instituted in societies, with the United States as the shining example, first as an ideal and then in reality over time. Someone like Aristotle would have been amazed, simply because the ancient world never imagined such a thing was possible.
Another thing he couldn’t have imagined was universal prosperity through wealth creation, sufficient to support 8 billion people and growing. Ancient world philosophers assumed based on what they observed that wealth was a fixed pie to be divided up by powerful elites, mostly through war and political deal-making.
It’s the single greatest failing of all the greats of that period that they didn’t and couldn’t comprehend the emancipatory power of economic progress.
The very idea of freedom itself came to be best instantiated and codified within the framework of commercial society that granted every person the power to control his or her own life, via ownership, trade, investment, saving, and the type of cooperation made possible through money and prices. Surely, this is part of the realization of Aristotle’s ideal of living happily.
That’s why commerce occupied such a high place among America’s Founding generation. Thomas Jefferson said “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” were individual rights, not granted by government but inalienable from us by nature. The only purpose of government was to secure those rights from invasion.
“The danger for modern liberty is that we, absorbed in the enjoyment of our private independence and the pursuit of our particular interests, might surrender too easily our right to share in political power. The holders of authority encourage us to do just that. They are so ready to spare us every sort of trouble except the trouble of obeying and paying!
“They will say to us: ‘What, basically, is the aim of your efforts, the motive of your labors, the object of all your hopes? Isn’t it happiness? Well, leave this happiness to us and we’ll give it to you.’
“No, we must not leave it to them. Their tender concern to make us happy is touching, perhaps, but we should ask the authorities to stay within their limits: let them confine themselves to being just, and we’ll take care of happiness.”
Indeed! We and not the permanent bureaucracies can handle the happiness part of life just fine. It so happens that freedom, prosperity, and the pursuit of happiness all go together. We need individual rights to achieve them. When such rights are recognized widely, we can of our own volition build vibrant commercial societies with class mobility and opportunities for ennoblement available to everyone.
The larger the apparatus of the permanent government grows, and the more of our lives it invades, the less that seems possible. That’s what accounts for the widespread demoralization we see in the world today. Liberties were crushed during the COVID period, and prosperity along with it, setting in motion a series of events that have wrecked not only constitutional government, but also hope and happiness.
The raid on Trump’s home, then, serves as a kind of catalyst for action. The driving purpose of the raid, apparently, was to preserve state secrets and prevent him from revealing them in time. And to make that happen, even a former president’s home couldn’t be kept safe from invasion by the administrative state. It also happens just as the opposing party is preparing to unleash hordes of tax collectors all over the country to eat out what remains of the country’s substance, to paraphrase the Declaration of Independence.
We are a constitutional republic in name, but are we still in reality? Events of the past few years raise fundamental questions about that. Reading Aristotle on tyranny today gives rise to an uncomfortable feeling that we aren’t doing well at avoiding tyranny. And with that also comes poverty, ill-health, and ever more steps back to what Thomas Hobbes called the state of nature, in which the powerful rule the weak in a life that is nasty, brutish, and short.
We really do seem to be at the precipice. There is a choice to be made. It’s urgent that we make the right one because there might not be any going back in our lifetimes.
