A Necessary Evil: A History of American Distrust of Government
by Garry Wills
Simon & Schuster. 365 pp. $25.00

It is hard not to be impressed by the range and sheer volume of Garry Wills’s work. A prolific commentator on events of the day—he is presently engaged as a syndicated columnist and as a regular contributor to the New York Review of Books—Wills has also managed to write some twenty rather serious books, covering everything from the theology of St. Augustine to the big-screen image of John Wayne. But he also has a specialty. In volumes devoted to the role of religion in American politics; to leaders like George Washington, Richard Nixon, and Ronald Reagan; and to such foundational documents as the Declaration of Independence, The Federalist, and the Gettysburg Address, Wills has applied himself to a single grand task: exposing the seemingly countless myths and misconceptions in how Americans understand themselves, their history, and their political tradition.

Through all the permutations of this revisionist project, Wills has returned again and again to what he considers the fundamental problem of our national psyche. As he sees it, Americans have a grossly exaggerated view of the power and moral significance of the individual. We are too quick to celebrate self-sufficiency and self-interest, too oblivious of our profound dependence on one another. Worse, Wills insists, this attitude has led Americans to cast a suspicious eye on every form of collective endeavor, however beneficial or benign. And that brings us to the subject of his latest book.

A Necessary Evil is a loosely organized and somewhat idiosyncratic history of American attitudes toward government. Since the very birth of the nation, Wills contends, public authority in the United States has been judged in terms of two distinct and opposing “clusters” of values. On the one hand are such “pro-government” values as cosmopolitanism, efficiency, deference to elites, trust in expertise, and faith in the possibility of progress. When these ideas are foremost in the minds of Americans, government thrives and can best serve public ends. On the other hand, and of far greater interest to Wills, are the “anti-government” values that recur, he argues, every time Americans take a stand against public authority, especially centralized public authority. These include the values of authenticity, tradition, voluntarism, religiosity, and respect for popular wisdom.

What is most striking to Wills—and what his book aims to demonstrate—is that these anti-government values defy our usual political categories and have a coherent life of their own: “They can show up on the Left or on the Right; but wherever they show up, they bring along all or most of their fellows.” To back up this assertion, Wills sets out a vast assemblage of persons and events, organizing them into a roughly chronological “typology” of American anti-governmentalism.

He begins with “nullifiers” like Thomas Jefferson and John C. Calhoun, who believed that federal law should be subject to some kind of local veto. These are followed by a brief interlude on “seceders”—which is to say, the Confederacy. Next comes an assortment of “insurrectionists,” the violent (and often deluded) men behind events like Shays’s Rebellion, John Brown’s raid on Harpers Ferry, and the recent bombing of the federal building in Oklahoma City. Finally, and rounding out Wills’s gallery of anti-government types, we meet “vigilantes,” a rubric that covers the Ku Klux Klan, gunmen of the wild West, grassroots anti-Communists during the cold war, the National Rifle Association, and terrorists who attack abortion clinics; “withdrawers” like Henry David Thoreau, Henry Adams, H.L. Mencken, and the hippie communes of the 1960’s; and such “disobeyers” as Martin Luther King, Jr. and protesters against the Vietnam war.

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As one might expect, Wills has sharply critical things to say about most of these brands of anti-governmentalism. Of nullification and secession, for instance, he observes that both share the mistaken—and historically fateful—premise that the parties to our national union are the states rather than the American people. As for more recent times, Wills finds a good deal of reckless naiveté in the enthusiasms of the 1960’s: hippie communes invariably ended in “chaos” or “charismatic leadership,” while the “increasingly clamorous and undisciplined crowd of protesters” against the Vietnam war repelled potential sympathizers and “helped to prolong” the conflict.

Still, for all the judgments that Wills is ready to pronounce on these sundry episodes in our history, his rather exhaustive typology remains something of an academic exercise, most of its branches being occupied by long-dead creeds or marginal causes. The brunt of Wills’s debunking firepower is reserved instead for a more contemporary instance of the anti-government ethos: the “myths” about the American founding that are invoked in our own politics, especially by the Republicans who swept to power on Capitol Hill in 1994.

Most of the arguments that Wills is concerned to refute in this connection have to do with the basic architecture of the Constitution. To the advocates of term limits, who praise a supposed 18th-century ideal of the citizen-politician, Wills points out that the Federal Convention was of a decidedly different view, its members recalling all too well the crippling lack of continuity and professionalism in the Continental Congress. In a similar vein, he deploys the words of James Madison against the suggestion that such Madisonian priorities as social diversity, checks and balances, and the separation of powers were meant to foster “inefficiency” in how we conduct our public business. In all of this, Wills laments, one finds the stubborn belief that we “have a government which is itself against government.”

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One can always learn something from the books of Garry Wills, and A Necessary Evil is no exception. It is filled with interesting bits of historical trivia—who knew that the quick-draw gunfights made famous by Hollywood Westerns were virtually impossible with the six-shooters of the day?—and well-informed summaries of major ideas and events. But where the book falls radically short is in its central aim: to make a case for the existence in America of some stable set of “anti-government” values.

Even at the highest level of abstraction, and with all the qualifications that Wills duly enters, it is absurd to throw into a single camp figures so disparate as John C. Calhoun, “Wild Bill” Hickok, H.L. Mencken, and Timothy McVeigh, much less to assign a common impulse to such ideological opposites as hippie communes and the NRA, or the Ku Klux Klan and Martin Luther King, Jr. To say that all of these cases represent some sort of negative attitude toward government is simply to beg the truly decisive questions that must be answered about each of them.

One theme that does unite the clutter of Wills’s myriad examples is his own disdain for anyone and anything associated with the modern conservative movement. In his scheme of things, anti-Communists and gun-rights advocates emerge as “vigilantes”; Republican opposition to Roe v. Wade amounts to tacit approval of abortion-clinic bombings; and an 1868 lynching by the Ku Klux Klan is satisfactorily summed up in the acid remark, “As President Reagan liked to say, people know best how to handle their own affairs.”

Such efforts at guilt by association are typical of A Necessary Evil, and they demonstrate the poverty of Wills’s catchall term “anti-governmentalism” as a tool for understanding either the motives or the purposes behind most of the specific cases he adduces. It may well be, as Wills argues at tedious length, that some conservatives are not particularly discriminating readers of The Federalist, but whether this adds up to a reflexive anti-governmentalism is very much open to question. In any case, the real issue—of concern, one might think, even to a writer of Wills’s liberal-communitarian bent—is the role of the federal government, and the advantages and disadvantages of its active superintendence of so many different aspects of American life.

To this important discussion, however, Wills’s elaborate scheme of opposing “clusters” of values contributes very little light and a great deal of smoke. A less polemical thinker might have hesitated before branding as “anti-government” such values as a strong attachment to tradition, religious faith, and voluntary activity, recognizing them instead as basic attributes of private and social life, a realm that a limited constitutional government like our own is supposed to respect (if not always defer to). But Garry Wills has little use for such distinctions.

For him, as we learn from his own list of “pro-government” values, American public life is at its best when left to the ministrations of a cosmopolitan, expert, and progressive elite. That this attitude has given us, among other things, a vast bureaucratic welfare state—though one recently reformed somewhat by the forces of “anti-governmentalism”—and a candidly activist federal judiciary does not win even a passing mention in A Necessary Evil. For a book ostensibly concerned with the sources of American distrust of government, that is an especially telling oversight.

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