Everything in Moderation — Especially Government Power

August 4, 2024 by J.B. Shurk

One of the most important lessons in life is straightforward: everything in moderation.  If you eat too much, you’ll get fat.  If you drink too much, you’ll lose your wits.  If you play too much, no one will take you seriously.  Temperance is a remarkably sound philosophy for living well.

Living with an eye toward moderation is about more than restraining from vice.  Experience teaches that thoughtless excess undermines otherwise healthy activities.  Reading books without taking the time to consider the meaning of their words can make a person educated but unwise.  Almost everything in life is done best when done with earnest reflection and restraint.

You do not need to read through the correspondence of America’s Founding Fathers to appreciate their preference for moderate government.  Philosophically, of course, they were the radicals of their age.  They rejected the notion that an elite aristocracy should exercise power by divine right and fought a war for the revolutionary principle that “all men are created equal.”  They defended liberty, property rights, and speech as essential elements of what it means to live.  When it came time for them to design a government best equipped to protect these freedoms, however, moderation was the key!

The English Civil War of the previous century weighed heavily upon their minds.  The fall of the Roman Republic two millennia earlier guided their thoughts, too.  They understood the corrupting influences of power, but they also appreciated the carnage that corrupt governments wreak.  Mercurial monarchs and political repression guarantee war and forestall peace. 

The Founding Fathers’ spirit drove them to fight for freedom, but their temperance restrained their actions after achieving victory.  It has been said that General George Washington could easily have made himself king, but he was a man of humility who sought to follow in the footsteps of Cincinnatus — the virtuous Roman statesman who relinquished power and returned to his farm.  Similarly, had the Founding Fathers suffered from the same unchecked passions that seized Robespierre and the Jacobins during the French Revolution, America might have quickly ended in a Reign of Terror of its own.  Instead, the Founders’ commitment to moderate forms of government nurtured civic peace.

Their first attempt at a national charter — the Articles of Confederation — was so moderate, in fact, that it did not last even ten years.  So wary were the Founding Fathers of a strong central government and so concerned were they for the preservation of the states’ sovereign powers and Americans’ inherent rights that they required a second bite at the apple to get the U.S. Constitution right.  

Even then, the whole document is an exercise in slicing and dicing government power into discrete parts.  The Legislative, Executive, and Judicial Branches are coequal entities meant to keep one another in check.  The Constitution restricts Congress’s authority to a short list of enumerated responsibilities, curtails the president’s unilateral decision-making power, and grants the Supreme Court limited jurisdiction over particularized controversies.  The whole document screams, “These are the only things that the federal government is allowed to do.  All other rights and powers belong to the individual states and their citizens.”  Then, just to make sure that future ethically challenged politicians didn’t get any immoderate thoughts of their own, the Founders stamped a Bill of Rights at the end that screams even more loudly, “Future federal government functionaries, you may never, ever do any of these things!  Really, these rights are off-limits and cannot be infringed!”  If only later government stewards had listened.  

Just as moderation in life keeps us balanced, moderation in government keeps passions in check.  Constitutional republics with robust democratic norms do not require a Deep State.  If a citizen is not happy with something the government is doing, there are peaceful avenues for change.  Contacting representatives, voting for new representatives, or running for office are simple ways to alter public policy without having to alter the form of government.  When government agents operate beyond the reach of citizens, however, they damage the essential mechanisms for self-government.  When the only thing that matters is who is in charge, the contest for who controls the reins of government becomes a zero-sum game.  Excessive power leads to immoderate behavior, and immoderate behavior threatens long-term civic peace.  Government instability is the inevitable result.

If the American Republic one day falls, its cause of death could be rightly pinned on a lack of civic moderation.  Corporations posing as political parties divide Americans against each other while doing what’s most lucrative for a small cabal of financial elites.  A detached and unelected government bureaucracy furthers its own insular interests while disregarding the wishes of the public it pretends to serve.  A private central bank manipulates markets, causes unnecessary inflation, and steals from everyone with meager savings.  The Pentagon stations troops all over the country, as if it is more concerned with safeguarding the federal government from citizens than with protecting the country from foreign enemies.  The Department of Homeland Security aids and abets foreign nationals in the commission of immigration crimes that cause widespread harm to American communities.  Dozens of covert agencies spy on the American people without warrants or even the pretense of probable cause.  The Department of Justice and its sister agencies censor, intimidate, and incarcerate any American who objects to the government’s excessively unconstitutional behavior.  This thing we call the federal government is the walking, talking embodiment of immodesty.

We all got a good look at its immodesty when the Supreme Court broke rank last month and ruled that President Trump has broad immunity from criminal prosecution.  This small expression of dissent from an otherwise ideologically homogenous government blob produced paroxysms of Deep State rage.  Justice Department praetorians quickly condemned the Court for recognizing the president as the person constitutionally vested with executive power.  Senator Chuck Schumer and other legislative flamethrowers immediately set to work on a strategy for neutering both presidential immunity and the Court’s recognition of it.  So much for coequal branches of government, right?  Corporate news media erupted in such fits of schizophrenic paranoia that top-dollar “journalists” claimed presidents could now murder citizens without paying any price.  Strangely enough, none of these hyperventilating nitwits seemed to mind when Barack Obama was using drones to execute Americans without any concern for due process or civil rights.  But that was King Barack, and different standards apply!  

Although the headlines were all about Donald Trump, the Deep State’s fury was about something else.  For over a century, administrative departments and agencies have enjoyed relatively unchecked power.  Although they are either legislative creations or quasi-constitutional outgrowths of the Executive Branch, they operate remarkably independently.  This arrangement makes a mockery of the Constitution’s checks and balances.  

The DOJ’s power exists only to the extent that the president lends constitutionally vested authority to institutions under his control, but the DOJ’s argument to the Court has been that it alone decides what the president can and cannot legally do.  In this way, the DOJ and similarly powerful departments have placed themselves above the Constitution’s three branches of government in a kind of bureaucratic coup d’état.  

By holding that executive power resides in the president alone, the Court directly threatens the illegitimate powers of all those government officials who operate beyond the Constitution’s constraints.  Combined with the Court’s complementary decision to strike down Chevron deference, which gave administrative agencies broad discretion over the implementation of bureaucratic rules and regulations these last four decades, it seems as if a majority of justices are weary of the federal government’s growing intemperance.  

To no one’s surprise, the worst “extremists” all work near D.C.  For any chance at future peace, Americans must force the government back into its constitutional cage.  Without a little moderation, this Union cannot last.