Published: Oct. 4, 2013 Updated: 11:55 a.m.
Mark Steyn: Manning the Barrycades of punitive liberalism
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Way back in January, when it emerged that BeyoncĂ© had treated us to the first-ever lip-synched national anthem at a presidential inauguration, I suggested in this space that this strange pseudo-performance embodied the decay of America’s political institutions from the real thing into mere simulacrum. But that applies to government “crises,” too – such as the Obamacare “rollout,” the debt “ceiling,” and the federal “shutdown,” to name only the three current railroad tracks to which the virtuous damsel of Big Government has been simultaneously tied by evil mustache-twirling Republicans.
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This week’s “shutdown” of government, for example, suffers (at least for those of us curious to see it reduced to Somali levels) from the awkward fact that the overwhelming majority of the government is not shut down at all. Indeed, much of it cannot be shut down. Which is the real problem facing America. “Mandatory spending” (Social Security, Medicare, et al) is authorized in perpetuity – or, at any rate, until total societal collapse. If you throw in the interest payments on the debt, that means two-thirds of the federal budget is beyond the control of Congress’s so-called federal budget process. That’s why you’re reading government “shutdown” stories about the Panda Cam at the Washington Zoo and the first lady’s ghost-Tweeters being furloughed.
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Nevertheless, just because it’s a phony crisis doesn’t mean it can’t
be made even phonier. The perfect symbol of the shutdown-simulacrum so
far has been the World War II Memorial. This is an open-air facility on
the National Mall – that’s to say, an area of grass with a monument at
the center. By comparison with, say, the IRS, the National Parks Service
is not usually one of the more controversial government agencies. But,
come “shutdown,” they’re reborn as the shock troops of the punitive
bureaucracy. Thus, they decided to close down an unfenced open-air site –
which, oddly enough, requires more personnel to shut than it would to
keep it open.
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So the Parks Service dispatched their own vast army
to the World War II Memorial to ring it with barricades and yellow
“Police Line – Do Not Cross” tape strung out like the world’s longest
“We Support Our Troops” ribbon. For good measure, they issued a warning
that anybody crossing the yellow line would be liable to arrest – or
presumably, in extreme circumstances, the same multibullet ventilation
that that mentally ill woman from Connecticut wound up getting from the
coppers. In a heartening sign that the American spirit is not entirely
dead, at least among a small percentage of nonagenarians, a visiting
party of veterans pushed through the barricades and went to honor their
fallen comrades, mordantly noting for reporters that, after all, when
they’d shown up on the beach at Normandy, it, too, had not been
officially open.
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One would not be altogether surprised to find the
feds stringing yellow police tape along the Rio Grande, the 49th
Parallel and the Atlantic and Pacific coasts, if only to keep Americans
in, rather than anybody else out. Still, I would like to have been privy
to the high-level discussions at which the government took the decision
to install its Barrycades on open parkland. For anyone with a modicum
of self-respect, it’s difficult to imagine how even the twerpiest of
twerp bureaucrats would consent to stand at a crowd barrier and tell a
group of elderly soldiers who’ve flown in from across the country that
they’re forbidden to walk across a piece of grass and pay their
respects. Yet, if any National Parks Service employee retained enough
sense of his own humanity to balk at these instructions or other
spiteful, petty closures of semiwilderness fishing holes and the like,
we’ve yet to hear about it.
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The World War II Memorial exists
thanks to some $200 million in private donations – plus $15 million or
so from Washington: In other words, the feds paid for the grass. But the
thug usurpers of the bureaucracy want to send a message: In today’s
America, everything is the gift of the government, and exists only at
the government’s pleasure, whether it’s your health insurance, your
religious liberty, or the monument to your fallen comrades. The
Barrycades are such a perfect embodiment of what James Piereson calls
“punitive liberalism” they should be tied round Obama’s neck forever, in
the way that “ketchup is a vegetable” got hung around Reagan-era
Republicans. Alas, the court eunuchs of the Obama media cannot rouse
themselves even on behalf of the nation’s elderly warriors.
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Meanwhile,
Republicans offered a bill to prevent the shutdown affecting
experimental cancer trials for children. The Democrats rejected it. “But
if you can help one child who has cancer,” CNN’s Dana Bash asked Harry
Reid, “why wouldn’t you do it?”
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“Why would we want to do that?”
replied the Senate Majority Leader, denouncing Miss Bash’s question as
“irresponsible.” For Democrats, the budget is all or nothing. Republican
bills to fund this or that individual program have to be rejected out
of hand as an affront to the apparent constitutional inviolability of
the “continuing resolution.” In fact, government by “continuing
resolution” is a sleazy racket: The legislative branch is supposed to
legislate. Instead, they’re presented with a yea-or-nay vote on a single
all-or-nothing multitrillion-dollar band-aid stitched together behind
closed doors to hold the federal leviathan together while it belches its
way through to the next budget cycle. As Professor Angelo Codevilla of
Boston University put it, “This turns democracy into a choice between
tyranny and anarchy.” It’s certainly a perversion of responsible
government: Congress has less say over specific federal expenditures
than the citizens of my New Hampshire backwater do at Town Meeting over
the budget for a new fence at the town dump. Pace Sen. Reid, Republican
proposals to allocate spending through targeted, mere
multibillion-dollar appropriations is not only not “irresponsible” but,
in fact, a vast improvement over the “continuing resolution”: To modify
Lord Acton, power corrupts, but continuing power corrupts continually.
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America
has no budget process. That’s why it’s the brokest nation in history.
So a budgeting process that can’t control the budget in a legislature
that can’t legislate leads to a government shutdown that shuts down open
areas of grassland and the unmanned boat launch on the Bighorn River in
Montana. Up next: the debt ceiling showdown, in which we argue over
everything except the debt. The conventional wisdom of the U.S. media is
that Republicans are being grossly irresponsible not just to wave
through another couple trillion or so on Washington’s overdraft
facility. Really? Other countries are actually reducing debt: New
Zealand, for example, has a real budget that diminishes net debt from 26
percent of GDP to 17 percent by 2020. By comparison, America’s net debt
is currently about 88 percent of GDP, and we’re debating only whether
to increase it automatically or with a few ineffectual strings attached.
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My
favorite book of the moment is “The Liberty Amendments,” the new
bestseller by Mark Levin – not because I agree with all his proposed
constitutional amendments, and certainly not because I think they
represent the views of a majority of Americans, but because he’s
fighting on the right battleground. A century of remorseless expansion
by the “federal” government has tortured the constitutional order beyond
meaning. America was never intended to be a homogenized
one-size-fits-all nation of 300 million people run by a government as
centralized as France’s. It’s no surprise that, when it tries to be one,
it doesn’t work terribly well.
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