Down to the wire : confronting climate collapse / David - Index of

16 S politics and governance
misadventures of the George W. Bush administration, the constitutional
order was greatly unbalanced by 20th-century wars and
global economic forces, much to the advantage of the executive
branch. 4
A great deal of that unbalancing, however, can be explained
by our approach to politics and suspicion of democracy in particular
and government in general. Historian Garry Wills describes
the antigovernment tradition in the United States as the confl uence
of:
the lack of a symbolic center (religious or political) at our origins,
the air of compromise in our Constitution’s formation (which
made it vulnerable to the reversal of Federalist and Anti-federalist
values), the Jeffersonian suspicion of the Constitution (which
Madison abetted at one stage), a jostling of competitive states’
claims (reaching a climax in the secession of the South), a frontier
tradition, the “Lockean” individualism of our political theory, a
fervent cult of the gun. All these were added, in overlapping layers,
to the general anti-authoritarian instincts of mankind. (Wills,
1999, p. 318)
The American approach to governance, in Wills’ view, leads to the
worst outcomes: ineffi ciency and despotism. The antecedents lie
in the fact that early settlers came to the New World to escape the
overbearing hand of government and to become rich. Americans,
consequently, are said to venerate liberty more than anything else,
and for many this implies little more than freedom from government.
The fear of tyranny fueled the heated debates about the
ratifi cation of the Constitution and later about the rights of states
to act independently of federal authority, leading to the Civil
War. Even in the changing circumstances of industrialization and
world wars, many Americans remained suspicious of Washington
and centralized authority, but often without the slightest concern
about the power of corporations. Our Bill of Rights and political