Within the U.S. political system, the ideological spectrum is not all that broad, and mainly swings between the two poles of classical liberalism (conservatism) and progressive or modern liberalism (social democracy). Ezra Taft Benson explained the former in his 1968 essay “The Role of Government”, which was to enforce the law, protect the natural rights of individuals, provide for the national defense and generally refrain from redistributing wealth or creating social welfare programs. These ideas free market capitalism and limited government were also held by Ronald Reagan, Calvin Coolidge, Margaret Thatcher and economists like Milton Friedman. Jeffrey Sachs expressed the contrasting view “The Case for Bigger Government” that the state had a duty to reduce poverty, provide for healthcare, education and environmental protection, and invest in technology and infrastructure. It would not be a socialist system, though, since the means of production would remain in private hands, but it would be a far more active and expansive government than that of the classical liberals. In U.S. history, this view of the federal government was held by Theodore and Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman, Lyndon Johnson and (presently) Barack Obama. Of course, these have not been the only possible ideologies about the role of government, since there have also been totalitarian systems like fascism, communism and Nazism, similar to the Big Brother state described by George Orwell in 1984. There have been some tendencies like this in U.S. history, such as in the treatment of blacks and other minorities going back to the time of slavery or more recently with the ‘military-industrial complex’, but for the most part the U.S. has not had a totalitarian or authoritarian system, but one that upheld democratic norms and individual rights.
Within the mainstream of American politics, the two major parties are based on the views of Ezra Taft Benson for the Republicans and Jeffrey Sachs for the Democrats and in the most recent election Mitt Romney and Barack Obama had almost identical views. Sachs believed in capitalism as much as Benson, but argued that the state could carry out certain functions that the private sector could not. It had a duty to bail out industry and banks during the recession, for example, and follow Keynesian policies of deficit spending to stimulate the economy. There were 50 million people without healthcare and the federal government had to assist them, just as it should take steps to protect the environment and improve the public education system. To do all this it had to raise taxes, no matter that it was politically unpopular (Sachs 2009). All of this was anathema to a conservative like Ezra Taft Benson, and like most conservatives he cited John Locke, Adam Smith, and Thomas Jefferson as classical liberals and believers in the natural rights of life, liberty and property. For Benson, these were God-given rights with which the state could not interfere, and therefore it should be confined to certain minimal functions like enforcing the law, paying for the military, courts and police, and then simply leaving individuals alone (laissez faire) to pursue their private interests. Socialists and Marxists were wrong in their idea that the state could create wealth, while its attempts to assist the poor or redistribute wealth were disasters and should be phased out (Benson 1968). For Benson, even moving slightly in the direction of socialism risked a slide into authoritarian or totalitarian rule or a regression to feudalism or the absolutist state.
In U.S. history, the power of the federal government has expanded greatly over the last 100 years in both domestic and foreign affairs, and both the welfare state and the warfare state have appeared to be deviations from the original idea of limited government in the 18th and 19th Centuries. Liberals and social democrats have strongly supported the growth of the welfare state that conservatives oppose, while remaining more suspicious and critical of the warfare state and expanded foreign policy that conservatives favor. This has been especially true because of the wars in Vietnam and Korea. Certainly the U.S. has never become the totalitarian nightmare that George Orwell described in 1984, where the state owns everything, treats the masses like slaves, and uses the Ministry of Love to torture and kill anyone suspected of disloyalty and the Ministry of Truth to issue a constant stream of propaganda, lies and rewritten history. It watches it citizens constantly through telescreens for any sign of dissent and infiltrates the population with spies and informers, so that they have no rights of privacy or freedom of speech. Even thinking in ways opposed by the Party and Big Brother is treated as a crime—Thought Crime (Orwell 1989).
Orwell based his totalitarian system on the contemporary examples of Nazi Germany and Stalin’s Soviet Union, which were militaristic police states in which the state was all-powerful and the common people had no rights at all. In the Third Reich, for example, Hitler’s ideology was “based on struggle as a way of life, the right of the strong leader to dominate, and the missionary need to create the Aryan racial state” (Spielvogel and Redles 294). He allowed the capitalists to continue to exist in Germany, as long as they were ‘Aryans’ and obeyed the orders of the Nazi Party, while in the Soviet Union capitalism had been abolished and the Communist Party leaders controlled the government and economy (Trotsky 2004). Both states were very militarily aggressive and believed they were beset by enemies from within and without. These ideologies like fascism and communism are certainly not within the mainstream of the American political condition, which has maintained a fairly high degree of respect for democracy and individual rights, at least compared to most governments in history. It does have authoritarian or totalitarian tendencies, particularly in the treatment of blacks and other minority groups during the era of slavery and segregation, or in its wars of extermination against the Native Americans in the 18th and 19th Centuries. One of the worst examples of the violation of civil liberties and human rights occurred during World War II, when 150,000 Japanese-Americans were interned in concentration camps. There have been other examples of harsh and repressive measures against organized labor or against dissenters in World War I and the Vietnam War. Rightly or wrongly, all of these events are considered aberrations and deviations from the democratic norm, however, rather than integral to the system as in an authoritarian or totalitarian state.
WORKS CITED
Benson, Ezra Taft. “The Proper Role of Government” (1968).
Orwell, George, Nineteen Eighty-Four. NY: Houghton Mifflin, 1949, 1989.
Sachs, Jeffrey. “The Case for Bigger Government”. Time, January 8, 2009.
Spielvogel, Jackson T. and David Redles.Hitler and Nazi Germany: A History, 6th Edition. Prentice Hall, 2009.
