America dodged a bullet on Super Tuesday. G. W. Bush, governor of Texas and candidate for the Republican presidential nomination, swept seven of the eleven primaries held on March 7, winning such delegate-rich states as California, New York, Ohio, and Georgia. In one bold stroke, Bush derailed the campaign of his principal challenger for the nomination, Senator John McCain of Arizona.
Bush’s nomination as the Republican candidate had been considered inevitable until McCain defeated him in the New Hampshire primary on February 1. Although Bush won the South Carolina primary, McCain rebounded quickly with victories in Michigan and Arizona. Had McCain succeeded on Super Tuesday and secured the Republican nomination, his coalition of Republicans, independents, and conservative Democrats would have proven sufficient to trounce the Democratic nominee, Vice-President Al Gore, in the general election.
In short, a McCain victory on March 7 would have opened his path to the White House, and election with a popular mandate would have empowered McCain to implement his statist vision for America.
Statism, the political ideology of unlimited government, is grounded on the moral principle, as novelist-philosopher Ayn Rand put it, that “man’s life belongs to the state.” (Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal, p. 192) Over the course of the twentieth century, statism — in its fascist, communist, socialist, and welfare-statist permutations — has sapped the vitality of national economies, consigned millions to selfless drudgery, inspired unprecedented mass murder, and instigated two world wars and countless smaller conflicts.
Statism as a moral ideal has been in gradual decline since the Second World War. The 1990s saw the collapse of the purest realization of that ideal, Soviet Russia, and the beginning of a worldwide trend toward limited government and economic freedom, with its material concomitant, a continually rising standard of living for larger and larger numbers of men and women. The close of the twentieth century marks the end of the Era of “Big” Government and, hopefully, the beginning of a new century in which the state will be strictly limited in its powers to the protection of individual rights. Flying in the face of global progress toward individualism and capitalism, John McCain’s campaign for the Republican presidential nomination threatened to revive statism as a moral ideal and a political vision for America and the world.
The guiding principle of the McCain campaign has been the sacrifice of the life, liberty, property, and happiness of the individual to the state. On February 19, the Arizona Senator gave a statist sermon which made President Kennedy sound like Patrick Henry. In South Carolina, he told a large audience of raucously enthusiastic college students, “There is nothing more noble than to sacrifice and serve our country’s cause, causes greater than our self-interest.”
What sort of causes? McCain went on to be specific in conveying his moral ideal: “This nation now sits astride the world as the most powerful nation, militarily and economically, in the history of the world. And this nation therefore is the greatest force for good [i.e. sacrifice]. And when some young people come to me and say, ‘There are no great causes any more’, I say to you what you know: every place there’s a hungry child, there’s a great cause; every place there’s a senior citizen without a shelter, there’s a great cause; everywhere someone is killing each other [sic] for ethnic or tribal disputes or age-old hatreds, there’s a great cause. And the wonderful thing about America is we’re the people who were willing to go out and serve those great causes. And that’s what this campaign is all about.”
McCain has relentlessly reinterated this theme throughout his campaign. On March 1, he told a California audience, “Service and sacrifice are what America is all about.”
In a defiant address following his defeat on Super Tuesday, McCain solemnly intoned, “There is no greater satisfaction, nor one that gives our lives greater meaning, than to sacrifice in causes greater than our self-interest, causes that encompass us, but one[s] not defined by our personal ambitions alone.”
Statism is the political system which follows necessarily from the moral principle of self-sacrifice which McCain so passionately espouses. And that fact renders him the most dangerous man in American politics today. As Ayn Rand wrote in The Fountainhead, p. 638,
“It stands to reason that where there’s sacrifice, there’s someone collecting sacrificial offerings. Where’s there’s service, there’s someone being served. The man who speaks to you of sacrifice, speaks of slaves and masters. And intends to be the master.”
One cannot claim that Senator McCain is merely an “idealist” who articulates the theory of statism while innocently unaware of its pernicious consequences in political practice. Over the last few years, his legislative agenda in the Senate consistently subordinated the rights and interests of the individual to the power of the state, from his opposition to abortion rights and his persecution of the tobacco industry, to his public support of President Clinton’s selfless war against Serbia and his co-sponsorship of the McCain-Feingold bill, which would violate the constitutional rights of free speech and petition by criminalizing donations by private citizens to their political representatives.
The Senator’s specific campaign proposals have also been consistent with his statist rhetoric and legislative record.
While his challenger G. W. Bush opposes “campaign finance reform,” McCain made it the centerpiece of his campaign, and there would be no stopping the McCain-Feingold bill were he elected president.
While Bush calls for a political environment favorable to business and economic growth, McCain takes the trustbusting Theodore Roosevelt as his model of a “reform Republican” and accordingly denounces business as the source of our national woes rather than the fountainhead of our unprecedented prosperity.
Although one of the infamous “Keating Five,” he shamelessly blames the corruption of the political process, not on the politicians who offer pull in return for money, but on corporate “fat cats,” the businessmen victimized by the pullpedlars’ racket.
While Bush favors giving all Americans a substantial tax cut on the premise that “the surplus is the people’s money,” McCain will concede only a modest tax cut for lower- and middle-class Americans, “not for Bill Gates,” and promises to close “corporate loopholes” in the tax code.
Moreover, while Governor Bush insists that American military power be applied only in the national interest, Senator McCain subordinates the national interest to the needs of “humanity” by advocating military intervention to quell ethnic violence anywhere in the world. This recipe for endless bloodletting by young American troops is all the more inexcusable coming from a man who so keenly suffered from the folly of a selfless foreign adventure while held captive by the North Vietnamese.
Clearly, a McCain administration would initiate statist policies with disastrous consequences and set the cause of individualism and capitalism back at least a decade. In an altruistic culture which still equates sacrifice, servitude, and suffering with morality, idealism, and heroism, a hypothetical President McCain would be able to silence all opposition to his demands upon the life, liberty, property, and happiness of individual citizens by citing his own ordeal as a prisoner of war.
Who in American politics would have the moral self-confidence to oppose him?
Between John McCain and G. W. Bush, Bush is unquestionably the lesser of the two evils. The Texas governor’s agenda as a presidential candidate has been inconsistently pro-freedom, and there is no reason for confidence that a President Bush will keep the pro-freedom promises he has made. Bush has shown himself to be a consummate opportunist, lacking core principles or clear goals. But better an awkward, dull-witted, mush-mouthed pragmatist with no vision for America than an articulate, intelligent, politically astute statist with a consistently evil vision for America.
At this point Bush has effectively secured the presidential nomination of the Republican party and averted the chilling prospect of a McCain presidency. One can imagine Gore cutting Bush to ribbons in the presidential debates, and the Governor’s capacity to generate gaffes and malapropisms exceeds even his father’s. So it is entirely possible that Bush will lose to Gore in the general election where McCain would have won. But even Gore’s victory in November would be less damaging to the long-term future of freedom in America than a McCain presidency.
Gore has proven himself much more pragmatic than he once appeared to be. And a pragmatist like Bush or Gore is always preferable to a committed statist like McCain. Although Gore wants to preserve (and, in some respects, expand) the welfare state, he has made no overtly anti-capitalist remarks during his campaign for the Democratic nomination which can be compared with McCain’s strident statism. Clinton, Gore, and their fellow “New Democrats” want to have business and eat it too. McCain just wants to chew it up and spit it out.
It now appears that the general election of 2000 will be just what we expected it to be last January: a match-up between two moderate pragmatists, G. W. Bush and Al Gore. Although McCain’s bid for the presidency is over, the threat posed by his statist campaign lingers still, like a fog of poison gas over the scarred political battlefield.
In response to the McCain campaign, Bush made some efforts to steal independent voters by aping his challenger’s rhetoric. McCain has inspired a substantial following among independents and Democrats, and the pragmatic Bush and Gore are both trying to assume McCain’s mantle as the “reform” candidate. One could well imagine Bush adopting elements of McCain’s statist agenda and perhaps offering the Arizona Senator an influential cabinet post in return for his support.
Lovers of liberty must remain vigilant against the persistence of “the McCain phenomenon,” lest it still divert this country from its progress toward greater respect for the person and property of the most oppressed minority that exists: the individual.
