G | GOVERNMENT

Watching the scale, speed, and lawless ease with which some of the most storied postwar American institutions have been attacked and dismantled in the past month makes it tempting to see this resurgent hatred against the government as an anomaly, at best a degenerate aberration even.

The truth however is that for as long as there has been the idea of government in the modern world, there has been a stubborn strain of hatred against it. For as long as there has been the question of human need, there has been the fear of the government taking over life in its name. For as long as individualism and privacy have been the stuff of politics, there has been the specter of the government depriving us of them. The distrust of government as a villainous swallower of liberty is almost as old as—if not the counterpart to—the modern faith in government as a guarantor of the common good, a guardrail against lawless power, and a shepherd of our pursuit of happiness. 

“The modern vision of politics rests on the idea that the government is more than simply an apparatus to manage the use and abuse of power, more than just a figure in our political and legal consciousness,” argues Aishwary. “In fact, the government exists in and through our moral consciousness, compressing in it our ways of relating to the world. An entire tradition and mentality of thinking about the common good—what we call the social contract—is today contained in the word government.”

“How do we discriminate between the needs of our neighbors and of those who are strangers? When do we abandon even our friends? What do we owe the world? And what parts of it will we destroy simply because we are free to do so? The government, more than a theater of checks and balances on power, is a battleground for these insoluble—and vicious—moral dilemmas.”

Not surprisingly, where earlier notions of State had at their center a juridical theory of sovereign “command,” the modern vision of Government, pace Locke’s Second Treatise, pivots to the citizen’s voluntary “obedience.” Where the State became a relic of an old, archaic system run by brute force and arbitrary taxation, the Government becomes a figure of moral reasoning, its shapes defined by the need to defend private property. So much so that in the American tradition, the word “state” is banished altogether; it formally appears only overseas where power operates without constraint: in the State Department’s handling of foreign affairs. In contrast, the government oversees the pursuit of happiness, guarding liberty at home, striving to make a perfect Union out of violently unequal parts.

The irony, of course, is that since the 18th century, those who benefited most from these unequal ideals and institutions have always been the quickest to sow distrust in it. And those who are most vulnerable to the government’s arbitrary excesses must always fight for its power to protect their common good. It is from this constitutional faith—forgiving the government’s excesses without forgetting its bloody violence—that the anti-colonial movements for self-government of the 1940s and the Civil Rights revolution of the 1960s were forged. Whatever else one might say of the fictions of popular sovereignty, the idea of government cannot survive without this political faith.

The tragedy of the neodemocratic condition is that this faith is kept alive precisely by those citizens who need the government most but who are also most brutalized by its inequalities. “Political faith,” Aishwary reminds us, “is this ability to forgive the government that rules in our name—and even fight for it—knowing well that in its moments of strength it will do us maximum harm and even seek to destroy us. And knowing even better that, after we have fought for its survival, after it has survived the lawless onslaught of the vandals, it might abandon us again.”

Yet, without this faith in government, there is no freedom. Without this faith, as Ambedkar put it in a defining postwar moment, there is only the abyss of despair and the lawlessness of a majority let loose, riding its supremacist “grammar of anarchy” and openly declaring its hatred of the whole world simply because it can afford to.

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