Ameritopia_ The Unmaking of America - Mark R. Levin [77]
Wilson’s objective was to centralize and consolidate power in the federal government and redefine the relationship between it and the individual. His assignation of human characteristics to the federal government was an argument for maximalist federal power where the central government has unrestrained flexibility and freedom to operate, and where the rights of actual human beings are diminished and their pursuits restricted. The individual lives to serve the body politic and, in turn, the politicians who oversee it. Wilson wrote, “The trouble with the theory [of limited, divided government] is that government is not a machine, but a living thing.… It is modified by its environment, necessitated by its tasks, shaped to its functions by the sheer pressure of life. No living thing can have its organs offset against each other as checks, and live. On the contrary, its life is dependent upon their quick cooperation, their ready response to the commands of instinct or intelligence, their amicable community of purpose. Government is not a body of blind forces; it is a body of men, with highly differentiated functions, no doubt, in our modern day of specialization, but with a common task and purpose. Their cooperation is indispensable, their warfare fatal. There can be no successful government without leadership or without the intimate, almost instinctive, coordination of the organs of life and action. This is not theory, but fact, and displays its force as fact, whatever theories may be thrown across its track. Living political constitutions must be Darwinian in structure and in practice.”8 Wilson’s reference to Darwinism highlights his notion of the federal government in a constant state of motion and evolution, where the Constitution and the government it establishes are no longer fixed or predictable. The individual and society generally are to serve the nutritional demands for eternal governmental growth, in the form of power, demanded by Wilson’s utopian dogma.
Wilson would substitute Locke’s civil society and Montesquieu’s limits on government with a form of Thomas Hobbes’s social compact. In describing his “great Leviathan,” Hobbes argued, “Every man should say to every man I authorize and give up my right of governing myself to this man, or to this assembly of men, on this condition, that thou give up thy right to him, and authorize all his actions in a like manner.” “That Mortal God to which we owe, under the Immortal God, our peace and defence.” And in this Sovereign “consisteth the essence of the commonwealth, which is one person, of whose acts a great multitude, by mutual covenants one with another, have made themselves every one the author, to the end he may use the strength and means of them all, as he shall think expedient, for their peace and common defence” (Leviathan, 109). For Wilson, the federal government, and particularly the president, takes on the qualities of Hobbes’s Sovereign. Indeed, Wilson proclaimed, “the President is at liberty, both in law and conscience, to be as big a man as he can. His capacity will set the limit; and if Congress be overborne by him, it will be no fault of the makers of the Constitution,—it will be from no lack of constitutional powers on its part, but only because the President has the nation behind him, and Congress has not.”9 There are few demagogues and tyrants who would disagree with such a prescription.
Wilson argued further, as he had to, that the federal courts are not bound to the Constitution. “The weightiest import of the matter is seen only when it is remembered that the courts are the instruments of the nation’s growth, and that the way in which they serve that use will have much to do with the integrity of every national process. If they