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The BIRCH BARK BBS / 414-242-5070
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* The Future of Freedom Foundation * Jan/94 *


Book Review
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by Richard M. Ebeling

Grassroots Tyranny: The Limits of Federalism 
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by Clint Bolick (Washington, D.C.: The Cato Institute, 1993); 195
pages; $21.95 (cloth); $12.95 (paper).

In his book The Vanishing Rights of the States (1926), former
Solicitor General of the United States, James M. Beck, pointed out
that "unhappily a written form of government is not a Gibraltar
that can resist the waves, but a sandy beach, which, while it seems
to beat back the devouring waters, is always losing in the
struggle. Each decade sees some principle of the Constitution
either weakened or nullified, and the difficulty is that the people
are only sensible of their peril after the principle is destroyed,
and when it is too late to restore it."

One such eroded principle is the federal nature of the American
republic. More and more over the decades, the state governments
have lost their sovereign quality and become administrative units
subservient to and increasingly dominated by the national
government in Washington. The trend can be seen, for example, in
the subtle change in the grammatical usage when referring to the
country. Throughout most of the 19th century, the phrasing would
be, "The United States are. . . ." In our own century, the proper
phrasing has become, "The United States is. . . ."

Thus, in our language we have come to think of the United States of
America, not as a compact among the peoples of a plurality of
sovereign states who have delegated certain enumerated and limited
functions to a national government for the common welfare of those
people, but as a unitary state possessing paramount authority in
setting the parameters in which the state legislatures and their
citizens may decide and act in various ways.

Yet, in realizing that Washington has increasingly encroached upon
the traditional rights and autonomy of the states and local
governments within those states, it would be a mistake to assume
that a respect for states' rights and local government "close to
the people" necessarily means the absence of political abuse or
denials of personal freedom. And it is the danger of such local
infringements upon individual liberty that is the theme of Clint
Bolick's recent book, Grassroots Tyranny: The Limits of Federalism.
Indeed, Mr. Bolick despairs that "the most notable aspect of the
contemporary debate over federalism, on both ends of the political
spectrum, is the almost total absence of serious discussion about
individual liberty." Through most of this century, modern liberals
have viewed states' rights as a barrier to their desire to impose
their own social engineering designs upon the entire nation from
the halls of power in Washington. They have wanted to weaken or
eliminate the notion of state sovereignty when it has stood in the
way of their grand plans for remaking social and economic
relationships in their own collectivist image.

On the other hand, conservatives have frequently defended the
autonomy of the individual states and local governments in
opposition to this trend towards national socialism and welfare
statism. Nevertheless, conservatives have been quite willing to
permit legislative discretion and majoritarian rule at the state
and local levels for the enforcement of their own preferred agendas
for social and cultural collectivism, in violation of the liberties
of the individuals at these levels of government. As Mr. Bolick
expresses it, "The difference between the conservative view . . .
and the liberal view . . . lies not in one or the other's
consistent support for individual liberty, but in their respective
preferences for which level of government may with impunity
compromise that liberty. . . . Either way, liberty stands
unprotected in all but passing rhetoric."

For this reason, Mr. Bolick believes that the views of both
conservatives and modern liberals are inconsistent with the spirit
of the Founding Fathers who framed the American system of
government. They were suspicious of all violations of human
liberty, regardless of the level of government at which they
occurred, and wished no level of political power, national, state
or local, to have the ability to threaten the freedom of those in
whose name they were supposed to rule.

And continuing a theme developed in his earlier book, Unfinished
Business: A Civil Rights Strategy for America's Third Century, he
argues that the post-Civil War Fourteenth Amendment to the
Constitution was designed precisely to balance the powers of the
national and state governments in such a way that the latter could
not deny individuals their right to life, liberty and property,
while at the same time assuring that the national government was
still constrained in not having the power to threaten the liberty
of the people from Washington.

In a series of chapters, Mr. Bolick discusses the manner in which
state and local political authorities have often violated and
sometimes completely denied individual liberty in the areas of
private property, free exchange and contract, freedom of speech and
cultural autonomy. And he argues that these local denials of
personal freedom and economic liberty are often far more pervasive
than the myriad of controls from Washington, and, indeed, in many
ways are more of a daily threat to the spirit of individualism in
America than those dangers that emanate from the District of
Columbia.

It is to the original premises of the Founding Fathers to which we
must move if freedom is to be recaptured in these United States.
"State governments are neither constitutionally irrelevant, as some
would argue," Mr. Bolick states, "nor are they constitutionally
glorified as if they were ends in themselves. Adherence to the core
values of federalism means a preference for decentralized
government, primarily as a means of protecting individual liberty."
The tragedy and the danger we face in America today is that
collectivism on the installment plan, the incremental manner by
which statism has grown in our country, has not only slowly worn
away the constitutional restraints on governmental power, but has
also eaten away at the memory of what freedom is supposed to mean. 

Rare is the individual who can conceive of what a really free
society should look like and why it is a desirable social order.
Can it be recaptured, or is it too late, as James Beck feared it
might become?