What’s So Great About Government?

Obama’s Chicago history — Wright, Rezko, Ayers — is starting to make him look just like every other Joe “I’ll Do It If It Gets Me Power” Politician. I shouldn’t be surprised: Might may not make right, but the promise of power can make a lot of problematic things palatable. And we all must do what we must if we want to do what we want.

But Obama was supposed to be special. None of us had illusions about Clinton. But Obama too?

So it’s getting tougher to tell the Two Dems apart. And where you can’t see a difference — like on a long straight road through a flat landscape — things start to get boring.

(What was that Green Day song? “Wake me up when September ends”?)

What is interesting, however, is the fact that even those of us with libertarian tendencies still care. Thinking over the basic libertarian approach to politics, I start to wonder why we don’t simply declare the whole show unappealing — and go play golf instead. (The sitcoms tell me that golf is always the alternative to doing something you don’t want to do.)

After all, we don’t agree with the Scholastics’ Aristotelianism, Mussolini’s fascism, [Insert Almost Any Politician’s Name Here]’s socialism, or the Marxists’ communism. We simply don’t think that politics in general, or government in particular, embodies the end (telos) of humanity.

If you’re like us, you’re convinced you don’t need government to be human, to have meaning. You scoff when Plato(bamania) says you won’t be happy till the right leader comes along.

So I sometimes find myself asking why we care about government. Why do we spend so much of our time talking about something which we’d really rather there be much less of? There’s so much more to life than the idiocy of politics.

And now that even the Democratic race is getting boring (they’re still arguing about Michigan and Florida? about whether superdelegates should matter? about who’s endorsing whom? about whose associates are more disturbing? about whose “red-phone moment” is most concocted?) the question of why we value something we think has been blown vastly out of proportion becomes even more pressing.

Is our attachment to politics a merely negative one? Are we just the political version of fire-and-brimstone preachers: consumed with condemning evil, defined by what we despise? Why aren’t we off playing golf, like our fellow (“I’m Not Really Political,” non-voting) citizens?

The answer, I think, is as paradoxical as the problem. We care because the politicians have the biggest guns. If you’re looking for the greatest concentration of power, you turn to government.

But fear isn’t the issue. We care simply because might matters.

And despite the fact that a thing matters when it’s “important,” and we equate importance with value — and value with worth and goodness — we don’t care about government because we think “might is right.”

It’s neither that government is evil, nor that government is good, which leads us to privilege it in our conversing and thinking. It’s that government “has weight,” is “weighty.” When politicians act, we say that “something is happening.” The very fact that they are the most powerful people in a given locale makes them worthy of attention.

The problem is to differentiate this kind of greatness from the greatness that comes from goodness. We must even differentiate it from the importance which evil gains by being a threat to goodness.

It is not that government, by having the most power, is something good or bad. The importance of government is more neutral (we might say, “beyond good and evil”).

I think the best way to put it is that government, as the embodiment of concentrated power, is important because it can lead to either great good or great evil. In itself it is mere potential (from the Latin, potentia, power); the question is how it will be used, how it will be “reduced from potency to act.”

It is the fact that great power can produce either great good or great evil — that it is, in a sense, before both — that makes it worthy of even the libertarian’s focus: The proper response to the greatness of good is reverence, adulation, valuation. The proper response to the greatness of evil is opposition, resistance, condemnation. But the proper response to the greatness of power — to the greatness of government — is attention, preparation, anticipation.

And that, I believe, is why we still care, even though we find our politicians’ self-importance revolting. That’s why we care, even when we seem to be stuck with the same-old-same-old.

We can’t help it. The greatness of government demands it, even though the greatest goods are non-political. That is the paradox with which we live.

Micah Tillman is a lecturer in the School of Philosophy at The Catholic University of America. His blog can be found here.