No one wants to be thought of as a \u201cstatist,\u201d a proponent of \u201cstatism,\u201d for the \u201cstatist,\u201d it is widely held, is an ardent lover of an omnipresent, omnipotent government.\u00a0 Conversely, he despises individuality or liberty.<\/p>\n
Despite the regularity with which \u201cstatism\u201d and the like are bandied about, they are deeply problematic.<\/p>\n
Admittedly, over the span of roughly 500 years or so, the concept of a state has lent itself to multiple readings.\u00a0 Yet initially, the term referred to a political entity, an association organized by a centralizing authority\u2014a government.\u00a0 Note, government, though essential to a state, was never thought to be synonymous with it.\u00a0 Rather, a state was the sum total of all activities transpiring within its territorial jurisdiction.\u00a0 Its government, in contrast, was but one activity among these others.<\/p>\n
This understanding of a state may be old, but it is not dead\u2014not by a long shot.\u00a0 In fact, even those who accept \u201cstatism\u201d as a term of opprobrium regularly concede its legitimacy.\u00a0 Take, for example, America.\u00a0 When the colonists achieved their independence from England, they saw themselves as forming a union of, not just governments, but something more <\/i>than this, a union of states.\u00a0 <\/i><\/p>\n
Neither the Founders nor their posterity ever regarded \u201cthese United States\u201d interchangeably with \u201cthese United Governments.<\/i>\u201d\u00a0 In fact, up until the War Between the States, Americans, particularly Southerners like Robert E. Lee, for instance, thought of their country first and foremost in terms of their home states.\u00a0 For Lee, his \u201ccountry,\u201d his homeland, was the state of Virginia.\u00a0 The latter\u2019s government was just one ingredient in this mix.<\/p>\n
Sometimes even the most avid \u201canti-statists\u201d are the first to acknowledge that \u201cstate\u201d and \u201cgovernment\u201d are not one and the same.\u00a0 Even as I write this, Edward Snowden, the government employee who just recently revealed the scope and nature of the National Security Administration\u2019s surveillance program, is front and center in the news.\u00a0 The most avowed \u201canti-statists\u201d not only defend him against the charge that he is a traitor.\u00a0 They go so far as to deem him a hero, for while Snowden may very well have betrayed the confidence that his government<\/i> placed in him, he did so for the sake of preserving the integrity of his country. <\/i>But his country is a state (in name, anyhow, a union of states<\/i>).<\/p>\n
When Ron Paul (and others) said of 9\/11 that it was \u201cblowback\u201d from America\u2019s interventionist foreign policy in the Middle East, his (mostly) Republican detractors accused him of \u201cblaming America.\u201d\u00a0 His most vocal defenders\u2014\u201canti-statists\u201d all of them\u2014observed that criticisms of the American government, <\/i>however harsh and sweeping, <\/i>are not one and the same as criticisms of the country.<\/p>\n
I propose that we jettison \u201cstatism\u201d and \u201cstatist\u201d from our vocabulary and replace them with \u201cgovernmentalism<\/i>\u201d and \u201cgovernmentalist.<\/i>\u201d<\/p>\n
As we have seen, state and government are not mutually equivalent. A state is made possible by its government, certainly, but it transcends it.<\/p>\n
Secondly, the term \u201cgovernment\u201d has none of the ambiguity with which \u201cstate\u201d has been saddled over time.<\/p>\n
Thirdly, and most importantly, it is <\/i>the love for massive government <\/i>that \u201cstatism\u201d is supposed to be all about.<\/p>\n
Governmentalism will probably never catch on; too many syllables (though not as many syllables as \u201cenvironmentalism,\u201d and that\u2019s now part of our political vernacular).\u00a0 In any event, it is more accurate a term than \u201cstatism.\u201d\u00a0 This consideration alone should count decisively in its favor.\u00a0 However, there is another.<\/p>\n
The word \u201cgovernmentalism\u201d is an uglier word than \u201cstatism.\u201d\u00a0 And no term can be too ugly that aims to characterize an ideology devoted to an all encompassing government.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
No one wants to be thought of as a \u201cstatist,\u201d a proponent of \u201cstatism,\u201d for the \u201cstatist,\u201d it is widely held, is an ardent lover of an omnipresent, omnipotent government.\u00a0 Conversely, he despises individuality or liberty. Despite the regularity with which \u201cstatism\u201d and the like are bandied about, they are deeply problematic. Admittedly, over the…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":399,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-882","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\n