After America - Mark Steyn [39]
What Judge Bolton in the Arizona immigration case and Judge Walker in the California marriage case share with Mayor Bloomberg’s observations on popular opposition to the Ground Zero mosque is a contempt for the people. Popular sovereignty may be fine in theory but not when the citizenry are so obviously in need of “re-education” by their betters. The alliance of political statists and judicial statists is moving us into a land beyond law—a land of apostasy trials. The Conformicrats have made a bet that the populace will willingly submit to subtle but pervasive forms of re-education camp. Over in England, London’s transportation department has a bureaucrat whose very title sums up our rulers’ general disposition toward us: Head of Behavior Change.
In 2008, when the Canadian Islamic Congress attempted to criminalize my writing north of the border by taking me to the “Human Rights” Commission, a number of outraged American readers wrote to me saying, “You need to start kicking up a fuss about this, Steyn, and then maybe Canadians will get mad and elect a conservative government that will end this nonsense.”
Made perfect sense. Except that Canada already had a Conservative government under a Conservative prime minister, and the very head of the “human rights” commission investigating me was herself the Conservative appointee of a Conservative minister of justice. Makes no difference. Once the state swells to a certain size, the people available to fill the ever expanding number of government jobs will be statists—sometimes hard-core Marxist statists, sometimes social-engineering multiculti statists, sometimes fluffily “compassionate” statists, sometimes patrician noblesse oblige statists, but always statists. The short history of the post-war western democracies is that you don’t need a president-for-life if you’ve got a bureaucracy-for-life: the people can elect “conservatives,” as from time to time the Germans and British have done, and the left is mostly relaxed about it because, in all but exceptional cases (Thatcher), they fulfill the same function in the system as the first-year boys at wintry English boarding schools who for tuppenceha’penny would agree to go and take the chill off the toilet seat in the unheated lavatories until the prefects were ready to stroll in and assume their rightful place. Republicans have gotten good at keeping the seat warm.
Thus, America in the twenty-first century—a supposedly “center-right” nation governed by a left-of-center political class, a lefter-of-center judiciary, a leftest-of-center bureaucracy, all of whom have been educated by a lefterooniest-of-all academy.
Liberalism, as the political scientist Theodore Lowi put it, “is hostile to law,” and has a preference for “policy without law.”79 The law itself doesn’t really matter so much as the process it sets in motion—or, as Nancy Pelosi famously told the American people regarding health care, “We have to pass the bill so you can find out what’s in it.”80 When Lowi was writing in the Seventies, he noted that both the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) and the Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) were set up by a Congress that didn’t identify a single policy goal for these agencies and “provided no standards whatsoever” for their conduct. So they made it up as they went along.
Where do you go to vote out the CPSC or OSHA?
Or any of the rest of the unaccountable acronyms drowning America in alphabet soup. For more and more Americans, law has been supplanted by “regulation”—a governing set of rules not legislated by representatives accountable to the people, but invented by an activist bureaucracy, much of which is well to the left of either political party. As the newspapers blandly reported in 2010, the bureaucrats weren’t terribly bothered about whether Congress would pass a cap-and-trade mega-bill into law because, if fainthearted Dems lose their nerve, the EPA will just “raise” “standards” all by itself.81
Where do you go to vote out the EPA?
Congress