Liberalism and Legalism

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As our various governments become increasingly liberal, a horrifying—a word chosen with care—paradox becomes more apparent: A more liberal America is becoming less free. The conventional wisdom is that conservatism is restrictive while liberalism is liberating, but in practice, the opposite is true. While conservatives generally uphold standards to a higher degree than liberals do, they are in the main legal minimalists. Liberals, on the other hand, while they disdain moral standards—and do their best to tear them down at every opportunity—are legal maximalists. Because of this liberal trait, we find ourselves buried under an avalanche of laws, regulations, orders, procedures, and bureaucratic oversight and interference.

Many people fail to understand this aspect of the liberal mind, so it may take some explanation. The misunderstanding arises from linguistic and historical misconceptions about what "liberalism" is. Liberal is—or was—a good word. It derives from the Latin word liber, which means "free," and thus has the same root and underlying sense as "liberty." Classically, a liberal person was free in bestowing upon others; he was generous, in other words. Sometimes, his generosity extended beyond economics into more ethical areas to include freedom from prejudice on racial, ethnic, sexual, social, religious, or even national grounds. An individual could also be liberal in more aesthetic areas, depending on his attitude toward the arts, sports and entertainments, or fashion—for instance, whether he liked and promoted avant-garde artists in music, painting, acting, or poetry.

Historically, a political or philosophic liberal advocated expanding personal freedoms. For instance, the religious reformers of fifteenth-century Europe were liberals in the eyes of the Catholic Church, for they advocated stripping the Pope and his hierarchy of priests of their power and control over Christians. In a similar way, the men at the forefront of the ensuing Enlightenment campaigned for political and philosophical freedom, that is, for more democratic forms of government (as opposed to autocratic, centralized rule) and more reliance on human reason and science (as opposed to divine revelation via Scripture and church, which they considered "superstition"). Many of America's Founding Fathers, today considered quite conservative, were the "flaming liberals" of their time. They took Enlightenment ideas of liberty and put them into practice on a grand scale.

However, as political systems and cultures evolved, "liberal" slowly changed meanings. While nations have always been composed of people with a wide range of views, Western democratic nations soon developed the modern political spectrum by dividing into factions, known as political parties. Usually, the spectrum fell into two primary parts, which we call "the Right" and "the Left." Rightists desired things to remain as they were, or even to return to a standard of the past. Being advocates of the status quo, they became known as "conservatives"—they wanted to conserve or preserve the nation as it was.

Leftists, though, were not satisfied with the current state of affairs in one area or another. They desired to improve society: to better working conditions, to increase wages, to open access to wealth and privilege to more people, to raise the status of various minorities, etc. They did not want the country to stagnate, as they saw it, but to make progress in many areas of life. Leftists became known as "progressives."

So far, so good. Yet, despite being humanitarians and succeeding in many areas that needed to be addressed, the progressive spirit became poisoned through excess and evolutionary thinking. Progressives began to reach beyond merely improving society to remaking it along the lines of the then-new ideas of Darwin, Marx, and Freud. Soon, progressive parties around the world were controlled by atheists and communists who used their crude understanding of human psychology to persuade and control huge populations. The world has progressive thinking to thank for such historic movements as the Russian and Chinese communism, German National Socialism, most Third-World dictatorships, Liberation Theology, and even institutions that many people today consider more-or-less benign, like the United Nations, the World Bank, the AFL-CIO, and Greenpeace.

In the United States, with the defeat of Nazism in World War II and the advent of the Cold War, first "communist" and then "socialist" took on pejorative meanings. To be considered a communist was to be blackballed, making one's life almost unbearable and unsustainable. After a time, it was almost just as ruinous to be called a socialist, as most informed people understood that socialism is communism with a yellow happy face for a mask. Thus, in America, Leftists needed a new label, and "liberal" would work just fine—its benevolent meaning would hide a multitude of progressive ideas and programs.

Today's liberals repudiate the term because more people have caught on to their linguistic joke. But liberals they are, as their progressive ideas and voting records expose. Since their predecessors' failures to remake the world through revolution, they have decided to do the job through legal means, one law or regulation at a time. They are willing to let the nation evolve, as they believe man evolves, by increments, if need be—though they would love to see it make a progressive leap every now and then.

Thus, they have taken over the governments of this land—not the visible leadership in many cases, but the invisible bureaucracy supporting the elected leaders. There, hidden from view and in many cases shielded from responsibility, they tinker with our freedoms, slowly changing "the land of the free" into a nation in a legal straitjacket. The legal code of the U.S. is mammoth, so massive that no one can keep abreast of it any longer. Why else has the legal profession in this country exploded except that 1) there are so many laws, people are breaking them right and left, consciously or unconsciously; and 2) teams of lawyers are necessary to handle the intricacies of the law? Liberalism is killing this nation. Legalism is its weapon.

Many people think that the church of God is legalistic—or that God Himself is legalistic. That is the furthest thing from the truth! God commands His creation, humanity, to follow only ten principles of living, the Ten Commandments (Exodus 20; Deuteronomy 5). While this may be an oversimplification, He does not overwhelm us with laws or change them every few years. All of His laws fit in one, easily accessible, unchanging Book. Compared to life under human liberalism, living under God's revealed way of life is liberating!

A Nation of Laws?

A primary concept that separates the United States of America from other nations, particularly those governed by strong men or oligarchies, is the principle of the primacy of law. No person's whims or cadre's machinations are to hold any weight in "the land of the free" unless and until they are duly processed through checks and balances into enacted law. We tout our country as "a nation of laws," in which no individual, not even the Chief Executive, stands above the law. The rights, privileges, and obligations enshrined in our founding documents are to apply equally to all citizens, and the subsequent statutes built upon that foundation are to follow this code of equality before the law also.

America has taken this obsession with law to extremes. Any law passed in Congress seems to run to hundreds or thousands of pages of picayune regulations to cover any and every situation. Added to this are various amendments and supplementary statutes, appropriations, and other rigmarole of lawmaking. Every activity must be covered by laws and regulations, so our law libraries run to thousands of volumes, which no one can possibly comprehend fully. There are so many laws in so many jurisdictions that any person at any time could be considered in violation of one or more of them.

Our near-worship of law has produced a huge number of lawyers—the U.S. has the highest number of lawyers per capita of any country in the world—and with that has come a powerful lobby that wields sometimes overwhelming influence in Washington and the state capitals. We even make law central in our entertainment; we seem to be fascinated by crime, forensic, and courtroom dramas, all of which revolve around the laws—used and abused—which govern our lives. And when elections roll around every two years or so, everything else takes a backseat to debates about who our lawmakers should be.

Yet, does it not seem ironic—understanding what we do about Americans' soft spot for law—that so many of them are quite willing to break the law when it comes to the question of illegal immigrants? Should a company fudge some numbers on their reporting to the government—prosecute them to the fullest extent of the law! Should a person drive drunk and get in an accident—take away his keys, seize his vehicle, throw him in the slammer, and let him rot! Should a politician take money under the table—smear him, fine him, imprison him, and run him out of town on a rail! However, should the government try to deport an illegal immigrant—somebody's housekeeper, gardener, or driver—why, that is inhumane!

A young lady recently called a Charlotte talk show, complaining how long and hard it was for an immigrant, legal or illegal, to get into this country through the proper channels. She proceeded to relate her sob-story about conditions in her former country—the lack of jobs, no opportunity, the repression, etc.—and it wound up with her telling the host that her mother just had to take matters into her own hands and cross the border illegally. Her justification was that, since the process was so involved and difficult, going around the law made perfect sense, and the American public should just accept it. What she was really saying was, "Would you not have done the same thing?"

The next day, on another show, a wealthy businessman called in to say that the host's views on this topic were all wet. The caller owned a company involved in agriculture, and he admitted that his firm hired illegal aliens routinely. Why? Normal Americans, he declared, would not work in the fields. Why not? The wage is too low. Well, then, why not follow the law by hiring citizens at a wage they will work for? How naïve! If he did that, he could not compete in the marketplace, and he would go out of business! According to him, the law was impractical, so he took his chances and ignored it. He would support wholeheartedly any amnesty measure that Congress passed.

And let us not forget the bureaucrats. Their line is that 11-12 million illegal immigrants live in this country already (a number that at best can be called a "guesstimate"), and rounding up, processing, and deporting that many people is both physically impossible and prohibitively expensive. Thus, they have ignored the laws already on the books for years, and should Congress pass more immigration laws, they will most likely ignore them too.

What can one conclude except that Americans love law in principle, but when the law begins to squeeze them and their accustomed lifestyles, why, it becomes perfectly acceptable to ignore, bend, or break the offending law. As Romans 8:7 says about people's attitude toward God's law—and we find that it applies equally well to man's laws—"the carnal mind is enmity against God; for it is not subject to the law of God, nor indeed can be." When millions of people display this self-centered attitude toward law, taking matters into their own hands, anarchy is the result (see Judges 21:25).

True, man's laws are too often poorly written and weakly enforced by those sworn to do so. However, despite America being a free country, this deficiency in the nation's, state's, county's, or city's laws does not give us the right to become scoff-laws. Americans are at heart a rebellious people (see Ezekiel 2:3-4), having given birth to this republic in civil war and fighting among ourselves at every turn, and the Founders, knowing this, wrote into our basic covenants processes for correcting bad law and bad government. Unfortunately, these measures are rarely used, as either we cannot agree on what should be done or we lack the will to carry them through. So these problems continue, and the country slides further toward chaos.

Nevertheless, we can test ourselves (II Corinthians 13:5) in regard to law. What is our attitude toward it, especially toward God's law? Is it, "Oh, how I love Your law?" Or is it, "Those laws don't apply to me?" Be honest.

Toward Anarchy

Here in Charlotte, the local school system has descended into another crisis—only the latest one on a very long string of such problems—and this time the turmoil concerns what is being called deconsolidation. Briefly, the wealthy and relatively placid suburban areas wish to secede from Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools (CMS) and form their own, separate system. In fact, they have suggested that CMS should be broken up into at least three—and perhaps more—smaller, more local, more accountable districts. The backers of this idea believe that local autonomy and a smaller, more efficient administration are the keys to reforming a horribly inept, corrupt, unfair, and ineffective governmental agency.

The public school system is probably the most visible and tangible form of government to most Americans, certainly to those who have children in the system. It is here that the shortcomings of big government are most quickly observed and have their greatest impact on the average citizen. Despite the fact that voters have the "power" to elect school boards, the unified school districts around the nation are not run by these elected officials but by the entrenched bureaucracy created to support the ever-expanding—and soon-bloated—system. With power over billions of dollars and motivated by an agenda to impose their often-liberal values (in CMS's case, it is forced integration through busing and mandated racial "equality" through disproportionate allocation of funds to the inner city—in effect, a kind of reparations package), these relatively unaccountable managers implement their ideas through successive administrations without missing a beat. In Charlotte, it took thirty years for the frustration with the system to build into outright rebellion.

On the national level, the rumblings against big government are also being heard. For starters, democrats are widely seen as advocates of higher taxes, expanded services, and increased governmental involvement in every area of life, and their candidates—at least nationally—have done poorly in the last three elections. In addition, fiscal and social conservatives are quite concerned about President Bush's profligate spending. Granted, much of it has gone to military matters, but perhaps even more is being funneled to fund No Child Left Behind, prescription drugs, and other social benefits. Many claim his proposal to "save" Social Security will be another financial boondoggle for the American taxpayer. Whatever the case, more spending means higher taxes means increased government means less freedom for Joe and Jane Citizen—whether the administration is Republican or Democrat.

Even on the radical Left, some are crying for decentralization and local autonomy. Ward Churchill, the embattled Ethnic Studies professor at the University of Colorado at Boulder, has called for "the United States out of North America," meaning that he advocates the breakup of the American government into hundreds or even thousands of local, self-determining districts. Whatever his reasoning, he believes that there can be peace, freedom, and equality only on the "tribal" level—that is, only among those who band together around a set of common beliefs and aims. To him, the larger the entity, the less cohesive and fair it is, so it makes sense to him to strip all large governments of power. He and many who think like him are reacting to the obvious abuses and inequalities engendered by huge, powerful, impersonal, and inevitably corrupt human government.

Since the Second World War, the world has been advancing and building global structures: the United Nations, the World Trade Organization, the International Criminal Court, etc. Only now are many seeing the problems associated with such transnational organizations. For instance, the UN has recently found itself mired in scandals ranging from the Oil-for-Food Program to sex-trafficking on UN missions. Observers are realizing that the self-interests of often very diverse peoples keep clashing, causing horrible disparities, abuses, and offenses around the world. For this very reason, the U.S. will not become a signatory to the Kyoto Protocol on Climate Change, to name just one example.

The human solution is to move in the opposite direction, toward tribalism. Deconsolidation, decentralization, downsizing, local autonomy, and similar words or phrases are all catchphrases for this movement toward tribalism. At its extreme, tribalism becomes each man for himself—anarchy, literally "without a ruler," an absence of government, resulting in lawlessness.

The Bible describes such conditions: "In those days, there was no king in Israel; everyone did what was right in his own eyes" (Judges 17:6; 21:25; see also Deuteronomy 12:8). The book of Judges has been called "the bloodiest book of the Bible," as the text shows Israel cycling through the process of freedom, decline, oppression, and revolt time after time. The author pares the cause of the Israelites' instability down to this one statement: There was no government, so it was every man for himself.

Do we really want to go there? On the other hand, do we really want to continue under the present system?

The real problem in all of this swinging back and forth between globalism and tribalism is self-interest—or to put it bluntly, selfishness. No human government, big or small, powerful or weak, centralized or local, will work unless the governed are willing to put aside their self-interests for the good of all. Certainly, this is altruism, but it is a basic message of the Bible: "It is more blessed to give than to receive" (Acts 20:35). There will be no universal stability, peace, and prosperity until humanity realizes this and chooses to live by it.