Amidst economic collapse, Thomas Woods challenged
readers in his 2009 book
Meltdown, as TAS associate editor W. James
Antle, III
aptly put it, “to embrace fairly radical notions about the
New Deal, the Federal Reserve and the government’s role in the
economy.” Now, with a gonzo federal government nudging —
someone send Cass Sunstein a quarter — ever-increasing
numbers of Americans towards a serious apprehension of
centralized power, Woods returns with
Nullification, a provocative and enlivening new tome
spelling out the historical, constitutional, and moral arguments
for states simply rejecting unconstitutional laws the federal
government attempts to impose. “I wanted to write a book
explaining what nullification is and justifying what it does,”
Woods explained to TAS during an interview at the
Mises Institute booth shortly
before he gave a rousing
FreedomFest lecture on the topic, “and also to create a ready
resource for people to combat the inevitable smears from the
drones and zombies.”
TAS: How did Nullification
come about?
Thomas Woods: I’m interested
in political decentralization as a way of bridging ideological
divides, even if I realize that for most on the left federal
supremacy is like their bread and butter.… Still, the Kirkpatrick
Sales of the left do exist — people who favor farmers
markets and say things like ‘Small is Beautiful’ — and there is
a growing number on the right who also feel the political scale
has gotten too big. That is what needs to be cultivated on both
sides. It can be done. You know, I bet I could find some
Vermonters who basically want to let Vermont be Vermont.
TAS: There is a pretty healthy, or at
least brash and noisy, home-rule/secessionist movement
in Vermont.
TW: Yeah, they’re an example
of it. And obviously in Vermont those ideas have nothing to do
with racism or slavery.
TAS: It has to do mostly with big box
stores and SUVs, far as I can tell.
TW: Right. So they have their
priorities, I have my priorities. Why shouldn’t we each pursue
our own priorities rather than clawing at each other every four
years to see who gets to impose a single view on the whole
country? That’s the idea behind nullification. It’s fascinating
to me how easily demonized this position is. There’s nothing in
the apportionment of powers that has any necessary connection
with racism or oppression… but when you challenge federal power a
lot of people who support that power want to shout at you about
lunch counters and have that be the end of it. These aren’t
left/right issues, though. It should be a structural question: Do
you want to live in an imperial society or a self-governing
one?
That’s not to say states can’t use power badly. Of course
they can! But at least you have some recourse when they do.
Nobody can control Washington, D.C. This is obvious. Everybody
who voted for Obama thinking anything would change — it’s the
same damn thing! State legislatures are not a huge improvement,
but they’re some improvement.
TAS: Nullification, as you explain in
detail, is not radical in a historical context, but would you
agree it might seem radical to a lot of people in a contemporary
context?
TW: Yeah, it does, because it
is the excluded possibility. The possibilities we usually get
are, ‘Should the federal government do this or should it
do that?’ The question is never, ‘Should the federal
government have a policy on this?’ or ‘Why can’t states
set their own education polices?’ Everything in America is now
immediately referred to people we have zero control over, civics
text platitudes to the contrary notwithstanding.
TAS: At the same time, we have a
bipartisan problem in this country whereby people are generally
only interested in abuse of power and civil liberties when their
party is out of power. Those who spent the eight years of the
Bush administration praising dissent and obstruction did a pretty
quick about-face once Obama was elected, and we could obviously
have used some of this tea party skepticism much earlier in
Bush’s term. In light of that, how likely really is a long-term,
trans-partisan movement to decentralize federal power?
TW: It’s hard to say because
there is some kind of psychological hold party affiliation seems
to possess on the human mind. People want to be part of
something. They don’t want to be on the outside or be viewed as
outliers. There are people who are going to favor
decentralization because Bush is in power or because Obama is in
power, but not as a general way of living. Perhaps as a sense of
political helplessness grows — the more people realize no matter
how much they oppose some crazy thing the federal government
wants to do the federal government does it anyway — they might
come to the default position that living on a scale smaller than
a single 309 million person unit might at least give them a
prayer of influence.
TAS: There’s obviously some concern
about this catching on when ‘tenther’ — i.e. someone who
believes in the Tenth Amendment to the Constitution — becomes an
increasingly
popular liberal slur.
TW: That’s so stupid. The
historical record is 1000 percent on the side of people who
support the Tenth Amendment. It just shows how out to lunch these
people are. Thomas Jefferson was the original tenther. Is that
really the argument they want to have? If you hate Thomas
Jefferson, please, please, please come out and tell the
country that. None of them have the guts.
TAS: Is the scope of what the federal
government attempted under both Bush and Obama since this
economic crisis began, often against mainstream public opinion,
made people more open to concepts like nullification?
TW: Well, sure. The crazier
the federal government gets, the easier it is to propose
alternatives and be listened to. Whether you ultimately agree
with the thesis of my book or not, I don’t think anyone will
finish it and say, ‘Well, that was just insane.’
Unfortunately, for a long time in our current political
environment if you didn’t fall somewhere within this little
three-inch area between Mitch McConnell and Hillary Clinton, then
you were, by definition, crazy. It becomes easier to turn that
argument around on people when you can say, ‘Wait, you’re calling
me crazy? They’re the ones who are proposing the following twelve
insane things. But I’m crazy because I say, “Maybe we should have
a chance to opt out”’?
TAS: One last question: Regarding
your previous book, Meltdown, I’m curious, are things
now better, worse, or as bad as you thought they’d be when you
finished writing that book?
TW: It could have been worse.
I’m not sure how. [Smiles.] I’m thinking of Young
Frankenstein — ‘It could be worse,
could be raining!’ I didn’t realize the Obama deficits would
be quite so bad as they are, but the rest of it — I can’t say
I’m shocked. They have managed to hold on to and continue the
narrative of ‘We, the government, are just innocent bystanders in
all of this, except for the failure to regulate enough under the
last guy.’ Even that Obama has abandoned a little bit since the
campaign trail where he just kept saying, ‘Deregulation,
deregulation, deregulation.’ Probably because people started to
ask, ‘What specific deregulation?’ They tried
Gramm-Leach-Bliely for awhile, but it wasn’t really
completely applicable, and if you dig too deep people find out
Clinton and Biden supported it. Now it’s more like, ‘It was a
failure to be proactive.’ Of course! After the fact anyone can
say, ‘If we hadn’t let this happen, it wouldn’t have happened.’
So what does that mean for the future? At least there is, thanks
to the Internet, a competing version of events people can access.
In 1975 we wouldn’t have had that. People don’t have to just pick
between the narratives of the New York Times and the
Washington Post anymore.
TAS: Has the growing skepticism of
the public toward government during a time of economic crisis
surprised you at all?
TW: I’m surprised, frankly,
more people didn’t swallow the line — ‘This is regrettable, but
we have to do this to save the system from collapse.’ People were
against those bailouts from the beginning. And that was amazing
because that line was being pushed on the public so vigorously,
by so many sources, and anyone who disagreed was denounced as a
total ignorant hick. Yet people defiantly held to that
skepticism. And that truly does give me hope that maybe people
are tuning those voices out and things will get better.
