When I read Thomas Hobbes' "The Leviathan" (in college, of course), it was assigned in two parts. After reading the first part, I was delighted at how well he understood the need for government. The second part, however, scared me, for anyone who truly believed that in creating government we ceded all our freedom to it was a threat to my own freedom. By contrast, John Locke's second treatise "Of Government" was such a beacon for true lovers of freedom that even Thomas Jefferson used it as the basis for our Declaration of Independence.Unfortunately, we now have an administration, headed by George W. Bush, that believes in Hobbes and not Locke.
This administration consistently uses the fear of some unnamed and inexplicable terrorist threat to chip away at our freedom. They use the fearmongering of Stalin, parodied in George Orwell's Animal House with the phrase "Surely you don't want Jones back," to keep us from complaining as the Bill of Rights is shredded before our eyes.
The example most recently disclosed is the secret 2002 executive order ordering the National Security Agency (NSA) to spy on Americans without a warrant. George W. Bush's claims that it is necessary are transparently phony, since the NSA can already wiretap our conversations first and get a warrant later.
The so-called "U.S.A. Patriot Act", up for renewal, has many features along this same line. Scrutiny of medical records, library use, and so forth are just more examples of the Bush administration's "Big Brother" government. (Sadly, it's not coincidental how often Orwellian concepts apply here.)
The part that confuses many Americans is the longstanding Republican claim that they want smaller government, that our government is too intrusive, and that they will get government off our backs. How do all of these claims jibe with the constant Republican trend toward closer government scrutiny of our lives?
They don't.
It's time we all woke up to what the liberals have been saying for a generation - that Republicans, especially self-described conservative Republicans, are hypocrites.
They claim to want to reduce the waste in government, yet Republican pork-barrel spending is the highest in history. They claim to want balanced budgets, yet Republicans have given us the largest deficits in history. And they claim to want to get government off our backs and out of our private lives, yet they are creating the most invasive American government in history.
And so, as long as Republicans are in power, we are all in Hobbes Hell.
It could be worse - what circle of Dante's Inferno is reserved for Republican hypocrites?
Copyright 2006, Dan Jacoby
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