Lawrence Auster
Friday, Aug. 3, 2001

The difference of outlook between the delegates at the U.N. conference on small arms last month and the state legislators gathered at the Marriott Marquis hotel this week could not be more pronounced.

The ideological elites at the U.N. see the world as a collection of helpless and victimized peoples beset by an ever-widening array of "problems" ranging from civil wars to racial inequality that can be solved only by an outside, all-knowing bureaucracy — the U.N. itself. Their ultimate agenda is the disappearance of the sovereign nations they claim to represent and the advent of a uniform global government in which no one will be represented except the elites themselves.

By contrast, America's state legislators embody the very ideal and virtue of self-government. These unpretentious men and women, elected by and truly representative of their constituents, do not seek some uniform utopian answer to all the world's woes, but common-sense solutions to specific problems.

According to Bob Adams of ALEC, the message of this conference is that "federalism is alive and well. It is that the real power of our nation is at the state level."

While Adams acknowledges that the state legislatures have resembled the federal government in spending too much money in recent years, he says "it's still a great thing that we have the separation of powers. If you're taxed too much in Maryland, you can move to Virginia. But if the federal government were running everything, what would your options be then?"

Founded in the early 1970s, ALEC, which currently has 2,400 members, drafts model legislation that state senators and representatives then seek to make into law at the state level. The group's particular focus is not on the burning issues of social conservatism such as illegitimacy and abortion (though many of the members are social conservatives), but nuts-and-bolts challenges such as taxes, affordable medical care and energy supply.

A typical member of the group is Steven Sukup, speaker pro tem of the Iowa House of Representaitves, "If we want to grow in Iowa, we have to be sure we are self-sufficient in our energy supply. We prefer in-state generation. Right now our energy use equals our energy capacity, which mainly comes from coal, but we will be net importers by 2003 unless we increase our capacity, so we are building natural gas plants."

Yet, mixed with the common-sense approach voiced by many legislators, the whiff of ideology could still be heard. Techno-utopian libertarians from the Cato Institute and elsewhere seemed to play a prominent role at the conference, with one speaker telling the audience at a panel discussion: "Oil is an infinite resource. ... Energy resources are not in the ground but in our heads. The average person is replenishing resources more than consuming them because resources are in the mind." The answer is simple, he said: Remove all government controls on energy production and prices, and the world will be replete with energy forever.

Meanwhile, striking a different ideological tone, Housing and Urban Development Secretary Mel Martinez declared in a luncheon speech that HUD's mission of providing a home for every American who can't afford one on his own is a fulfillment of the Jeffersonian-Lincolnian ideal of individual self-sufficiency! People who get their homes through help from the federal government, Martinez remarked, are "living the American dream."

Thus, in the midst of the modest and practical approaches to self-government voiced by many legislators, there were cross-currents of utopian libertarianism on one side and Big Government conservatism (masquerading as Jeffersonian self-reliance) on the other. Such are the confusions of contemporary American conservatism.

Lawrence Auster can be reached at lawrence.auster@att.net.

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