COMMENTS: AT FIRST GLANCE-How We Got Government Off Our Backs
Rule, James B.
Remember candidate Ronald Reagan's promise to "get the government off the backs of the great American people"? It was one of his most effective rhetorical thrusts in the 1980 television...
...Spokespeople for the Administration have flourished the theme from time to time since, particularly when seeking to scuttle one government program or another...
...These efforts, in which federal authorities have enlisted cooperation from state and local governments, aim at identifying and tracking persons against whom government action is contemplated...
...The president hit the same note in the 1985 State of the Union address, with his grandiose celebration of voluntary grass-roots action in place of government initiatives...
...The president himself signed the executive order authorizing for the first time covert CIA operations inside the United States...
...In the words of Rita Lavelle, that quintessential Reagan appointee now facing prison for excess of zeal, business is "the primary constituency of this Administration...
...Thus the notion of shrinking the role of government is a misleading characterization of what the Reagan administration is doing—as is, a fortiori, the claim of getting government off the people's backs...
...To encourage "voluntary" consumer protection, it has devastated the Office of Consumer Affairs...
...It has restricted access to intelligence data even for those senators and representatives charged with oversight of these activities...
...Here the key aim may have been to forestall court challenges against the massive cuts in aid to the poor orchestrated by this Administration...
...The Administration has sought to restrict access of prisoners to writs of habeas corpus...
...The intent of the Administration is clearly to leave the political field dominated by two overweening actors: the more coercive branches of the state, on a perpetual garrison footing, and the grasping forces of big capital...
...Since it is virtually impossible to live in America today without leaving such data trails, some state monitoring encompasses the lives of virtually all citizens...
...It was one of his most effective rhetorical thrusts in the 1980 television debates with Jimmy Carter...
...Consider the following: The Reagan administration has broadened the powers of intelligence agencies to spy on ordinary Americans, systematically undermining strictures set in place after the Nixon years...
...What are we to make of this potpourri of cruel and hypocritical policies, so fundamentally removed from the pretensions of their makers...
...They are applications of massive government power against adversaries who are generally weaker than the state...
...The more honorable tradition of conservatism stressed protection of a private sphere of personal autonomy: "The poor man may in his cottage bid defiance to all the forces of the Crown," said the elder Pitt...
...It has restricted publication of materials on (Continued on p. 344) 258 AT FIRST GLANCE (continued from p. 258) such topics as fuel conservation, alcoholism, poisons, and the effects of smoking...
...The coercive agencies of state power are being encouraged to grow, at the expense of civil rights and liberties...
...It has gotten government off the backs of the most powerful and well-organized interests, while bringing the full weight of the state apparatus to bear against the weak and unorganized...
...Now these are hardly policies for getting government off the people's backs...
...For some, including people who should know better, these claims have had a plausible ring, as an invocation of the conservative theme of limited government...
...But we cannot expect this Administration's political hit men (or hit women, in this case) to worry over these niceties...
...the storm may enter—but the King of England may not enter...
...And it has sought to restrict and undermine the Freedom of Information Act, one of the most effective means for ordinary citizens to obtain information on subjects the government wishes to keep secret...
...Government is enmeshed in so many previously private areas of social and economic life, and the political potency of nongovernmental actors is so vastly disparate that any posture taken by the state is bound to weigh on behalf of some and against others...
...The Reagan regime has orchestrated an extensive program of computer "matching" of data files on private individuals from a variety of sources...
...For this has been a statist Administration, consistently dedicated to attacking civil liberties and undermining grass-roots action...
...and government activities that could provide bases for action by the weaker and less organized opponents of these entrenched interests...
...What is shrinking are really two things: government activities that might hamper the freedom of action of the most entrenched forces in American political life—above all, big business...
...The virtues extolled here are authentic...
...It is difficult to imagine any policy less likely to encourage "good faith" by law officers...
...Of course, if market forces rather than entrenched political forces were really at work here, remuneration should not be unequal in the first place...
...The Reagan regime has stalled or reversed a wide variety of civil-rights and affirmative-action programs—first by curtailing resources for enforcement, then by staffing the relevant agencies with appointees hostile to their purposes...
...The FBI has been freed of restrictions against infiltrating and spying on domestic opposition groups, to the bitter opposition of civil libertarians...
...Yet of all the claims of a regime that has made itself master of genial obfuscation, this has been perhaps the most cynical...
...It has sought to promote the so-called good-faith rule governing police investigations, permitting illegally seized evidence to be entered in court proceedings if police show "reasonable good faith" that their actions were not illegal in seizing it...
...The similarities to classical conservative notions of limited government are thin indeed...
...Similar efforts are aimed at welfare cheaters and others whose "data trails" in various computer records might bring their undoing...
...Neglect by government will be benign or pernicious according to whether the target of neglect starts from a position of strength or weakness...
...Different in the prevailing technologies, political institutions, and bases for political action...
...In the name of encouraging "voluntary" selfmonitoring by businesses, the Administration has curtailed the activities of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration...
...Thus Lydia Chavez, Reagan's appointee as staff director to the Civil Rights Commission, has attacked the notion of equal pay for equal work as a "radical" idea that could "alter our existing marketplace economy...
...But this is not all...
...344...
...It has gone to great lengths to curtail communications between current and former government officials and the public—information that might stimulate criticism of the conduct of the state...
...It has waged war against the Legal Services Corporation, one of the few vehicles for voluntary, grass-roots action by and for the poor...
...It has defended, in court, government "dirty tricks" carried out against opposition figures during the COINTELPRO (counterintelligence-program) era...
...real democrats should never disparage them...
...Thus Selective Service has sought, over congressional objections, to cross-check data from Internal Revenue records and driver's-license files to apprehend young men who fail to register for the draft...
...Money, organization, and information are essential for the wellbeing of any group, and the actions of the state have everything to do with who will have access to these things...
...But the realities of public life today are vastly different from those known to Pitt...
...The military establishment grows apace, hand in hand with the unseemly domestic political and economic forces that feed on it...
...It has curtailed or eliminated reporting on occupational and product safety carried out routinely by previous administrations...
...While monopolizing the advantages of big government to act against its opponents, the Reagan administration has sought to stem the flow of information and other resources that might provide grounds for oppositional grass-roots action...
Vol. 32 • July 1985 • No. 3
