After Multiculturalism by Welsh John F.;

Author:Welsh, John F.;
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 1331607
Publisher: Lexington Books
Published: 2013-07-11T00:00:00+00:00

JAMES BOVARD: DEMOCRACY AGAINST LIBERTY

James Bovard is a Libertarian writer who developed an impressive body of knowledge that challenges the structure and outcomes of the power and authority of the government in the United States. Since 1989, Bovard published nine books on politics in America. Six of these are directly focused on how the power and policies of the government in America are eroding or eradicating the rights of individuals and the expression of freedom. In Lost Rights: The Destruction of American Liberty, Freedom in Chains: The Rise of the State and the Demise of the Citizen, and Feeling Your Pain: The Explosion and Abuse of Government Power in the Clinton-Gore Years, Bovard has a field day identifying and savaging the impacts of federal domestic policies on the individual liberties and property rights of citizens in the United States.18 Although Bovard includes one chapter on Clinton’s war in Kosovo in Feeling Your Pain, his primary animus in these three books is directed toward the “Principle of Government Supremacy” over individual rights, which Clinton, in particular, succeeded in institutionalizing during his presidency. Bovard’s next three books, Terrorism and Tyranny: Trampling Freedom, Justice, and Peace to Rid the World of Evil, The Bush Betrayal, and Attention Deficit Democracy, continue to develop some of the ideas and analyses developed in his books about the Clinton administration, but are more focused on the predations and foibles of the Bush presidency.19 In addition to his continued interest in illuminating the exercise of state power through domestic policy and programs, the last three books demonstrate how foreign policy, especially in the aftermath of 9/11 and the resulting War on Terror, have helped to reinforce and strengthen the Principle of Government Supremacy.

Bovard argues that the essence of the state in any society is control and coercion. It makes little sense to think about government as something grander than the “threats, bribes, and legislative cattle prods by which some people are made to submit to other people.”20 Differentiating himself from the anarchists, Bovard says that the fundamental problem of politics is not whether the state can and should be abolished, but how the use of force by the state should be minimized.

Bovard’s compendia of governmental abuse and destructive incompetence can be categorized into three themes that help illustrate the Principle of Government Supremacy and its impact on race relations. First, the powers of the federal government expanded rapidly during the Clinton and Bush eras, as did the ability of the state to regulate the everyday affairs of American citizens. The growth of state power and its regulatory functions since the 1990s are found in the increase of the government’s assertion of “eminent domain,” “property seizure,” and “asset forfeiture.” These processes basically entail the confiscation of the private property of individuals by the state. Bovard contends, and documents, that the volume of the state’s appropriation of private property during the Clinton and Bush years constitutes a veritable “war on property rights” perpetrated by a confluence of local, state, and

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