A Necessary Evil A History of American Distrust of Government [Paperback]

InA Necessary Evil,Pulitzer Prize-winning author Garry Wills shows that distrust of government is embedded deep in the American psyche. From the revolt of the colonies against king and parliament to present-day tax revolts, militia movements, and debates about term limits, Wills shows that American antigovernment sentiment is based on a fundamental misunderstanding of our history. By debunking some of our fondest myths about the Founding Fathers, the Constitution, and the taming of the frontier, Wills shows us how our tendency to hold our elected government in disdain is misguided.Chapter One: Minutemen

One of the dramatic developments of the 1990s was the emergence of self-styled militias training for guerrilla war against the federal government. Proudly patriotic, these organizations presented themselves as the true guardians of Jeffersonian values, as heirs to the Revolution's minutemen. It was hard to judge the extent or depth of the movement, but some of the literature it relied on was an apparent inspiration to Timothy McVeigh when he blew up a federal building in Oklahoma City, killing 168 people. His action echoed, in fact, an event in William Pierce's 1978 book,The Turner Diaries,which imagines a war on government beginning with a fertilizer bomb that destroys a federal building.

It may seem absurd for small bands of men to think they can defy a federal government they describe as vast in its power and ruthless in the use of it. But the militias drew on a claim that was routinely accepted in circles less extreme than their own. The Vietcong, they argue, defied the same United States government and bested it by guerrilla insurgency. This is an analogy that Wayne LaPierre, at the time the executive vice president of the National Rifle Association, used in order to argue that gun owners in general could successfully defeat tyrannical measures taken by the government.

The view that the Vietcong prevailed by guerrilla l#/