Ameritopia_ The Unmaking of America - Mark R. Levin [76]
Wilson asserted, “No doubt a great deal of nonsense has been talked about the inalienable rights of the individual, and a great deal that was mere vague sentiment and pleasing speculation has been put forward as fundamental principle.”4 Clearly, Wilson dismissed not only the Declaration of Independence and the Founders’ announced purpose for American independence, but the Lockean exposition on natural law, the nature of man, the social compact establishing the civil society, and the essential ingredients of constitutional republicanism (shared broadly by most of the best thinkers of the European Enlightenment). In short, for Wilson, rights are awarded or denied the individual as determined by the government.
Underscoring this point, Wilson argued, “Government is a part of life, and, with life, it must change, alike in its objects and in its practices; only this principle must remain unaltered,—this principle of liberty, that there must be the freest right and opportunity of adjustment. Political liberty consists in the best practicable adjustment between the power of the government and the privilege of the individual; and the freedom to alter the adjustment is as important as the adjustment itself for the ease and progress of affairs and the contentment of the citizen.”5 Notice Wilson’s use of the word privilege in lieu of inalienable rights when discussing the status of the individual in his utopia, underscoring the malleability of rights at the hands of masterminds.
For Wilson, government is to be treated as a living being; indeed, it is the most important of beings. Identifying man with the state and the state with man is typical of utopians. In the Republic, Plato wrote that “a just man won’t differ at all from a just city in respect to the form of justice; rather he’ll be like the city” (435b). Thus man ought not fear government but surrender to it, embrace it, and be at one with it. The Framers’ efforts to restrict federal power with checks and balances, etc., would, in Wilson’s view, deprive oxygen to the body of government just as assuredly as would restricting the various organs of man.
In furtherance of this analogy, Wilson wrote, “It is difficult to describe any single part of a great governmental system without describing the whole of it. Governments are living things and operate as organic wholes. Moreover, governments have their natural evolution and are one thing in one age, another in another. The makers of the Constitution constructed the federal government upon a theory of checks and balances which was meant to limit the operation of each part and allow to no single part or organ of it a dominating force; but no government can be successfully conducted upon so mechanical a theory. Leadership and control must be lodged somewhere; the whole art of statesmanship is the art of bringing the several parts of government into effective cooperation for the accomplishment of particular common objects, and party objects at that. Our study of each part of our federal system, if we are to discover our real government as it lives, must be made to disclose to us its operative coordination as a whole: its places of leadership, its method of action, how it operates, what checks it, what gives it energy and effect. Governments are what politicians make them, and it is easier to write of the President than of the presidency.”6
Wilson took direct aim at Montesquieu as the source of the Framers’ single-minded and supposedly misplaced reliance on divided government. “The makers of our federal Constitution followed the scheme as they found it expounded in Montesquieu, followed it with genuine scientific enthusiasm. The admirable expositions of the Federalist read like thoughtful applications of Montesquieu to the political needs and circumstances of America. They are full of the theory of checks and