A NECESSARY EVIL: A History of American Distrust of Government.

• Author: Lemann, Nicholas
• Position: Review

A NECESSARY EVIL: A History of American Distrust of Government By Garry Wills Simon & Schuster, $25

GARRY WILLS TELLS US THAT he undertook this project in the wake of the 1994 midterm elections--the "Contract With America" elections that brought about the apotheosis of Newt Gingrich, Dick Armey, and Tom DeLay. That was only five years ago, but already the moment is beginning to seem impossibly distant. It's worth recalling: Predictions that the Democratic Party was about to suffer the fate of the nineteenth-century Whigs were almost the conventional wisdom. Books like E.J. Dionne's They Only Look Dead and James Carville's We're Right, They're Wrong were daringly titled. President Clinton seemed to have been struck dumb. And strangest of all, the word "government"--denoting, literally, something every one of the world's hundreds of societies has--was so negatively valenced that it could no longer be uttered openly in American politics. The mood was all-powerful--it swept everything before it.

The list of specific events that triggered the change since then would have to include Gingrich's disastrously unpopular shutdown of the government at the end of 1995, the Oklahoma City bombing, and Clinton's hiring of Dick Morris to reposition him. But the public also seems to have made a more general shift, from finding the idea of government profoundly scary to finding the idea of no government profoundly scary. In 1996, Clinton won going away. In 1998, Republican candidates all over the country found themselves having to assure voters that they didn't want to dismantle the public school system. In 1999 the almost certain Republican presidential nominee, George W. Bush, is running on the central promise of starting new government social programs for the poor. Things are startlingly different.

Wills' new book is titled, or subtitled, a little misleadingly: Rather than being a full-dress history of the idea of government in this country from the beginning to the present, it is a series of inspired, essay-length riffs, somewhat recalling his great early book Nixon Agonistes. The bulk of the material concerns colonial times--Wills makes no attempt to tell the story of the rise of the anti-government tide of the 1980s and '90s. He wants to refute not the idea that government is bad or nonfunctional in the present, but the idea that suspicion of government was a founding principle of the United States, deeply woven into the fabric of the country.

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