Not Big Government, But Bad Government

Stuart Reid writes:

The liberal Jesuit magazine America is not as bad as the words “liberal” and “Jesuit” might suggest. (No offence intended to any person living or dead.) The online edition pings into my mailbox every month for some reason – maybe I have a subscription – and I always find something there that is worth reading, and sometimes edifying, too.

In matters of tradition America is often wrong-headed, to put it mildly, and it has been too generous to Barack Obama, but its approach to social justice, especially in economic matters, is often very good, and, unlike the stuff you get from some Right-wing Catholic outlets, very Catholic.

One of America’s better contributors is Michael Sean Winters, a man who seems to raise his voice only when circumstances demand it. He raised it a few weeks ago against a “certain tendentiousness” in the New York Times story on Fr Murphy, the child-abuser from Milwaukee; and last week, in the magazine’s group blog, he raised his voice against the Tea Party demonstrators who descended on Washington on April 15. Many of them, he wrote, were “either a little bit loony or … a whole lot evil”.

You will no doubt have heard of the Tea Party movement. It is the millions-strong army of angry Middle Americans, who, with the help of saucy Sarah Palin, campaign against tax and big government. Many of these people believe that President Obama is a Communist, and maybe a Nazi too. Thirty per cent of them, furthermore, believe that he is not an American citizen, and therefore cannot be President. You might fairly describe some of them as extremists.

But what has all this got to do with our green and pleasant land? Just this: that Daniel Hannan, the Tory MEP, has founded a British Tea Party Movement, and in a letter to the Spectator last week insisted that the men who dumped the tea into Boston Harbour in 1773 did not see themselves as revolutionaries but as conservatives and were inspired by British notions of liberty. He said he aimed to repatriate our (ie, the American) revolution.

Now Dan is one of the cleverest and most fluent men I know, as well as one of the most charming, and I hesitate to take issue with him, because I realise that it would take him no more than a minute to tie me in knots and drop me down the garbage chute. But he who hesitates is lost, and I feel compelled to suggest that the last thing we need here is a Tea Party movement. There is quite enough wacky populism in this country as it is: think only of the hysteria last year over MPs’ expenses and the howling in the tabloids whenever their eyes fix on Europe/social workers/single mothers/bankers/the Holy Father. We are managing quite well as it is without Betty Crocker tea parties.

Besides, were the rebels really “conservatives”? If they were, it makes you wonder what word can be used to describe the 20 per cent or so of the colonials who were Loyalists. Quislings? Placemen? Bloodsuckers? Taken in the round, and no matter what the tea-dumpers thought, the American revolution was a rejection of what many years later Donald Rumsfeld was to dismiss as “Old Europe”, which is our home.

Now, look: the Americans are a good, kind and brave people, if sometimes rather overweight. Some of my best friends are American, my wife and youngest boy among them. But their rugged individualism – from which many of their virtues spring– is rather more Calvinist than Catholic. This is of no concern to Dan, of course, who is an Anglican, but it is to me. Thomas Jefferson, perhaps the greatest of the founding fathers, was not at all fond of the Catholic Church, and as Martin Sean Winters noted on the day of the Tea Party demo in Washington, the American revolution was accompanied by “vile anti-Catholicism”.

“In an address to the people of Great Britain,” wrote Winters, “America’s first [Continental] Congress [in 1774] referred to Catholicism as ‘a religion fraught with sanguinary and impious tenets’, and, further on, said Catholicism ‘has deluged your island in blood, and dispersed impiety, bigotry, persecution, murder, and rebellion through every part of the world.’ They warned that Catholic emigrants in Canada would ‘be fit instruments in the hands of power to reduce the ancient, free, Protestant colonies to the same state of slavery with themselves’.” You can see where the New York Times gets its inspiration from.

The unfailingly courteous (except to Gordon Brown) Dan Hannan is the acceptable face of libertarian nationalism. Nigel Farage, of UKIP, is its unacceptable face, not least because, in newspaper pictures at least, he always seems to be laughing his head off. That can’t be good for him. Consider the rule of St Benedict, Nige: “Be not ready and quick to laugh, for it is written: ‘The fool lifts up his voice in laughter’ (Eccles 21:23).”

In any case, laughter may soon have to be moderated somewhat. With the sudden rise of the slightly sinister head prefect, Nick Clegg, a hung Parliament seems increasingly likely, and that in turn might encourage populist discontent. David Cameron’s Big Society, if it is ever tried, may turn out to be pretty fragmented. Without government – sometimes big, censorial government of the sort we had in the 40s and 50s – there can be no liberty, only licence. Big government is not the problem. Bad government is the problem, and it is bad government, made worse by bureaucracy and galloping secularism, that we have now.