Zakaria’s book is an extended brief against the fetishization of democracy, and it’s exceptionally well-argued. The author echoes the great classical liberals in arguing that democracy is a means to an end, not an end in itself. Liberty, as Lord Acton said, is our highest political end. What we’re after—in developing countries and in our own country—isn’t a system where anything goes, so long as the majority decides. On the contrary, what we want is, first, liberty and law, and then and only then, majority rule. After the rule of law is established, the political process will, and should, open up. But to imagine that “all we need is free elections” is to fundamentally misconceive the problem of democratic development.

One of the more interesting sections of the book discusses the relationship of economic growth to participatory institutions. As a country gets richer and develops a middle class independent of the state, the prospects that its political process will open up are enhanced. Zakaria cites social-science data showing that, historically, when a country has passed $6,000 in per-capita income (in today’s dollars), its chances of successfully maintaining democratic institutions are virtually certain.

Wealth matters—but not just any kind of wealth. In fact, as Zakaria shows, wealth derived from natural resources can impede liberalization and the transition to democracy. Such unearned riches can be a curse, he explains. In autocracies without an independent source of wealth in the form of natural resources, the government has an incentive to provide a framework of neutrally administered laws that facilitate wealth generation, which can in turn provide revenue for the state. The independent middle class that emerges, in turn, has an incentive to hold the state accountable. But in “trust fund states” like Nigeria or Saudi Arabia, the governments have a ready source of revenue, and less incentive to liberalize.

With all that in mind, Zakaria proposes several countries as “the most likely prospects where democracy, if tried, could over time become genuine and liberal”: Romania, Belarus, Bulgaria, Croatia, Malaysia, Turkey, Morocco, Tunisia, and Iran. (Although Iran is an oil state, Zakaria includes it because “it has always had a strong non-resource-based economy as well.”)

You’ll notice a conspicuous omission from that list—Iraq, which Zakaria in a recent speech half-jokingly called “our 51st state.” What’s surprising, then, is how sanguine Zakaria is about our current quest to transform Iraq from a bureaucratic despotism into a commercial republic. In a passage drafted before the invasion of Iraq in March 2003, Zakaria writes, “Were the United States to dislodge Saddam and—far more important—engage in a serious, long-term project of nation-building, Iraq could well become the first major Arab country to combine Arab culture with economic dynamism, religious tolerance, liberal politics, and a modern outlook on the world.”

Yet Iraq fails most of the preconditions Zakaria outlines for successful transition to a liberal, democratic regime. It’s a trust-fund state, lacking an independent middle class. It has a level of literacy (58 percent) that’s low even for the Arab world. Unlike postwar Japan and Germany, it’s really three countries rather than one—fragmented among Sunnis, Shiites, and Kurds. And even within subnational groups Iraqi society is unusually tribal. As John Tierney has reported in the New York Times, half of all marriages in Iraq are between first or second cousins, and nepotism is seen “not as a civic problem but as a moral duty.”

Throughout The Future of Freedom, Zakaria treats liberalization and democratization as an incredibly subtle, complex, and contingent evolutionary process. What’s surprising, then, is that, when it comes to Iraq, he proceeds as if liberal institutions are the product of conscious design, easily transferable from one country to another by force and fiat. The rest of the book gives readers little reason to be sanguine about the prospects for turning Iraq into a liberal democracy.

Despite Zakaria’s unreasonably optimistic take on Iraq (a view from which he seems to have backed off recently), his book is a welcome reminder of what we should really be after when we talk loosely of “democratization.” His aim is not simply a political system in which everyone has a vote and a voice. It’s a system in which the most important matters—the security of life, property, and civil rights—are not subject to a vote at all.

The soldier’s mission, as soldiers often phrase it, is “killing people and breaking things,” and they’re trained accordingly. In contrast, police officers, ideally, are trained to operate in an environment where constitutional rights apply and to use force only as a last resort. Accordingly, Americans going back at least to the Boston Massacre of 1770 have understood the importance of keeping the military out of domestic law enforcement. That understanding is reflected in the Posse Comitatus Act (PCA) of 1878, which makes it a criminal offense to use U.S. military personnel as a police force.

The phrase “posse comitatus,” Latin for “the power or force of the county,” refers to the sheriff’s common-law power to call on the male population of a county for assistance in enforcing the laws. The PCA forbids law-enforcement officials from employing the U.S. military for that purpose. Congress passed the act in response to perceived abuses associated with the practice of using U.S. Army troops to police the Reconstruction-era southern states. But the PCA has a policy rationale that transcends its particular origins; as one federal court explained: “It is the nature of their primary mission that military personnel must be trained to operate under circumstances where the protection of constitutional freedoms cannot receive the consideration needed in order to assure their preservation. The posse comitatus statute is intended to meet that danger.”

In the year since the terror attacks of September 11, however, we’ve heard a slowly building chorus of calls to amend or weaken the act and to give the U.S. military a hands-on role in domestic security. In October 2001, Senator John Warner, ranking Republican on the Senate Armed Services Committee, told Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz that the posse comitatus principle may have outlived its usefulness; Wolfowitz agreed. Though Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld had insisted that there was no plan to seek changes in the law, in July 2002 the White House released its National Strategy for Homeland Security, which called for a “thorough review of the laws permitting the military to act within the United States.” Perhaps most troubling were the comments of General Ralph E. Eberhardt, head of the newly designated Northern Command, which directs all military forces within the United States: “We should always be reviewing things like Posse Comitatus and other laws if we think it ties our hands in protecting the American people.”

Of course, where appropriate, we want constitutional and statutory constraints to “tie the hands” of the authorities in their pursuit of domestic security. Safety and security are not the only ends of government—as Lord Acton reminds us, liberty is our highest political end. The Posse Comitatus Act is, alas, a weak and porous barrier to military involvement in domestic law enforcement, but it’s designed to protect both our liberty and our safety. Changed circumstances after September 11 provide no compelling reason to weaken it further.

To understand just how implausible it is to suggest that the PCA ties the military’s hands domestically, it’s necessary to understand how the PCA works. The statute makes it a criminal offense for anyone to use U.S. armed forces to “execut[e] the laws.” But this does not bar any and all uses of armed soldiers for domestic law enforcement. First, the courts have held that “executing the laws” consists of hands-on policing: searching, arresting, and coercing citizens. Thus, the act does not prohibit the military from providing equipment, advice, and training to civilian authorities—even though such civil-military cooperation often works to inculcate a dangerous warrior ethos among domestic peace officers.

Second, the PCA applies only to federal troops: army regulars and federalized National Guardsmen. If Guard units remain under the command of state governors, the PCA is unoffended—even if injudicious use of troops leads to events like the killing of four students at Kent State in 1970.

Third, the act does not bar the use of federal troops even for hands-on policing, so long as Congress has passed a statutory exception to the PCA—and there are statutory exceptions in place that permit the military to operate domestically where an attack with weapons of mass destruction threatens imminent loss of human life. Finally, even though the act has clearly been violated any number of times since its passage, no one has ever been prosecuted for violating it.

How Would the Military Be Used?

To date, none of the prominent public figures calling for a revision of PCA have explained what sorts of operations they want the military to carry out in the domestic fight against terrorism. Putting aside fears about collateral damage to civilians from the deployment on the home front of troops trained to fight wars—where would it make sense from a security standpoint? No one—not Warner, not Wolfowitz, not Eberhardt—has come forward with a specific example of a situation in which soldiers should be given arrest authority.

Nor should that be surprising: it’s difficult to think of a domestic situation where military deployment would be useful in corralling terrorists. How can U.S. troops be effectively employed at home to prevent a shoe-bomber, a hijacker, or the release of nerve gas in a subway system? The cruel genius of asymmetric warfare is that it operates to neutralize the advantages the U.S. army enjoys against any conventional foe.

The U.S. military is the most effective in the world, but it’s nonetheless a blunt instrument—devastating in set-piece battles, but ill-suited to a home-front fight against al Qaeda saboteurs and assassins. That point was perhaps best illustrated on Thanksgiving weekend in 2001, when authorities in Florida stationed a tank outside Miami International Airport, as if the next terror attack would come in the form of an al Qaeda mechanized column.

And the very bluntness of the military instrument makes it a dangerous tool to employ on American soil. The legacy of American military involvement in domestic affairs is not a proud one. As constitutional scholar David Kopel has noted, the U.S. army has been used repeatedly to suppress unionization and break up strikes, as in 1899 at Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, when military forces imposed martial law on the area for two years. President Truman’s unconstitutional seizure of U.S. steel mills during the Korean War was carried out by the U.S. Army. More recently, in 1981, Congress passed legislation designed to increase military involvement in the war on drugs.

Misuse of this authority helped lead to the 1993 tragedy in Waco, Texas. Federal law enforcement authorities used false allegations of methamphetamine trafficking by the Branch Davidians to obtain military hardware and personnel. Indeed, it was U.S. Army Delta Force commanders who advised federal agents to launch a tank assault against the Branch Davidians’ dwellings. The result was more than 80 dead, including 27 children. And in 1997, a Marine anti-drug patrol shot and killed high-school student Esquiel Hernandez, who was shooting a .22 caliber rifle while tending goats on his own farm in Texas near the Mexican border. The Justice Department paid out $1.9 million to the Hernandez family as settlement of a wrongful death lawsuit.

Despite the dangers that inevitably accompany the use of soldiers as police forces, civil-military separation continues to erode. Because the U.S. military is so devastatingly effective in the fights it’s designed for, public officials have increasingly sought to employ it for fights it’s not. Most recently, during the month-long hunt for the Washington, D.C.-area sniper, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld approved the use of Army RC-7 surveillance aircraft to find the killer terrorizing greater Washington. The low-flying planes, crammed with $17 million worth of infrared sensors and other surveillance technologies, are typically used for tasks like monitoring troop movements around the DMZ on the Korean Peninsula. Federal officials argued that they could help pinpoint the sniper’s location.

Old-Fashioned Police Work

At the time, however, constitutional scholar and criminal-justice expert Stephen Halbrook predicted that when the sniper was caught, it would not be through use of high-tech military hardware, but through old-fashioned police work. Halbrook was right. In the end, the killers’ greed, a credit-card number, a fingerprint, ballistics work, and a witness identification of the car at a rest stop in Maryland led to the arrest of John Allen Muhammad and John Lee Malvo.

What should we make of federal officials’ readiness to use the military to solve a domestic murder spree with no solid connection to international terrorism? First, it should be noted that use of the Army planes did not violate the PCA. If the Army had employed Delta Force counter-snipers on the ground, hunting Muhammad and Malvo, that would have been a clear violation of the Act and a serious threat to civil-military separation. But as noted, the courts define “executing the laws” as arresting, shooting, searching, and laying hands on or coercing citizens; they have not held that provision of advice or equipment constitutes execution of the laws in violation of the PCA.

That does not mean that Pentagon involvement in the sniper hunt is no cause for concern, however. Federal officials’ eagerness to seek military help in this case suggests that we’ll see more military involvement in high-profile investigations in the future. As former U.S. Representative Bob Barr put it, “If you use this as a precedent, where do you then draw the line? The next time you have a sniper, do you bring the military in after two deaths?” And even where the military’s role is limited to advice, training, and provision of equipment, the erosion of the civilian-military line is troubling. After all, to the best of our knowledge, Army personnel at Waco limited themselves to provision of equipment and advice. Even that limited involvement helped lead to the greatest disaster in U.S. law-enforcement history.

Increasingly, public officials are coming to view militarization of law enforcement not as a last resort for situations in which civil order breaks down entirely, but as a panacea to be used whenever public safety is threatened. In the midst of the sniper ordeal, then-Maryland Governor Parris Glendening announced he was considering using the National Guard to provide security at polling stations on election day. Put aside concerns about effectiveness (the snipers shot one victim who was standing less than 50 yards from a Virginia state trooper) and collateral damage to innocents (what, after all, are soldiers trained to do when they come under fire by a sniper?): consider the ominous image of armed soldiers surrounding polling places. It’s an image one normally associates with a banana republic, not a free, democratic one.

It’s understandable that the under-informed general public associates states’ rights with slavery, Jim Crow, Bull Connor’s police dogs, and “segregation forever.” But classical liberals ought to take a longer view. “States’ rights” merely stands for the propositions that (1) the Constitution should be interpreted strictly with regard to the narrow set of enumerated powers granted the federal government; and (2) that the states can nullify or obstruct federal actions that violate the Constitution. As such, the doctrine has a long and honorable pedigree among advocates of limited government. States’ rights, in the view of classical liberals like Lord Acton, was no mere excuse for states to violate the rights of their citizens. Rather, the independence of the states in the period before the Civil War served as an effective check on federal aggrandizement. As Acton put it, “Centralization finds a natural barrier in the several State governments.”

Modern libertarians tend to have a different perspective, believing that strong federal oversight is indispensable to securing liberty. For example, John McLaughry, head of the libertarian Ethan Allen Institute, says the doctrine of states’ rights is little more than “a hoary legacy from the days of human slavery.” This view rests on a tendentious version of history, one quite at odds with Lord Acton’s, to the effect that in the nineteenth century, state governments were a more serious danger to individual freedom than the federal government. (That perspective is perhaps best encapsulated in Bolick’s Grassroots Tyranny [1993]. See also the Civil War history offered in “Reviving the Privileges or Immunities Clause” by Kimberly C. Shankman and Roger Pilon; Cato Policy Analysis No. 326, at http://www.cato.org.)

The true story is more complicated, and, from a libertarian perspective, far more favorable to the states than the federal government. During the nineteenth century, the people, through the agency of their respective states, repeatedly and effectively resisted federal tyranny. A brief historical survey will make that clear. It will also, I hope, suggest some reasons why modern libertarians should rethink their hostility to states’ rights.

The “Reign of Witches” and the Kentucky and Virginia Resolutions

The nation was still in its infancy, and the Bill of Rights not a decade old, when the Federalist party flagrantly violated the First Amendment with the Sedition Act. The Act criminalized uttering or publishing anything of a “false, scandalous, and malicious nature” with the intent to bring the government or its officers “into contempt and disrepute.” Anyone found guilty could be fined up to $2,000 and imprisoned for two years. The Federalists promptly put it to use in a crackdown aimed at their political enemies.

One Luther Baldwin was convicted of violating the act for little more than the rough expression of admirable libertarian sentiment. Stumbling into a Newark, New Jersey, saloon, during a parade for President John Adams, Baldwin asked what all the ruckus was. A cannon salute for President Adams, he was told. Baldwin exclaimed that it was all the same to him if the cannon was shot up Adams’s rear end. Other convictions were less amusing. David Brown of Dedham, Massachusetts, was sent to jail for 18 months for refusing Supreme Court Justice Samuel Chase’s order to name associates who shared Brown’s Jeffersonian views. Congressman Matthew Lyon of Vermont, an Irish-born republican radical, was imprisoned for criticizing President Adams’s alleged “continual grasp for power.” While in jail, Lyons was overwhelmingly re-elected to his seat.

Vice President Thomas Jefferson saw the Federalists’ tyrannical rule as a “reign of witches.” He and James Madison determined to oppose the Alien and Sedition Acts through the agency of the state governments of Virginia and Kentucky. As historians Stanley Elkins and Eric McKitrick put it in their book The Age of Federalism, “the protest was taken up in a formal way by no less a power than the constituted legislatures of two states against an act of the national government.” Acting in secret, Jefferson drafted the Kentucky Resolutions, Madison, the Virginia ones. Each articulated the “compact” theory of the Union: that the states are equal partners in the federal union, each with the power to interpret the Constitution and thwart federal abuses thereof.

The Virginia Resolutions warned that “a spirit has in sundry instances, been manifested by the Federal Government… to consolidate the States by degrees, into one sovereignty, the obvious tendency and inevitable consequence of which would be, to transform the present republican system of the United States, into an absolute, or at best a mixed monarchy.” The states, declared the Resolutions, “have the right and are in duty bound to interpose for arresting the progress of the evil.” Jefferson’s Kentucky Resolutions urged the other states to join Kentucky “in declaring [the Alien and Sedition] acts void and of no force.”

With Jefferson’s accession to the presidency, the “reign of witches” passed, as Jefferson ended prosecutions under the Acts. But the compact theory of the Union lived on, to be invoked again in the service of individual rights.

Nullifying the Tariff of Abominations

During the nullification “crisis” of 1828-33, the power of the states was again employed to counter federal abuses. In For Good and Evil.’ The Impact of Taxes on the Course of History, Charles Adams describes the disproportionate burden that the federal tariff imposed on the Southern states: “The South exported about three quarters of its goods and in turn used the money to buy European goods, which carried the high import tax.” Most of the revenue was spent on internal improvements and other federal projects in the North.

Understandably, the South chafed at the burdens imposed by the tax system. Some of her most prominent political leaders argued that the Constitution granted no power to tax for the purpose of protecting industry, as opposed to raising revenue. With the tariff of 1828, the “Tariff of Abominations,” the battle was joined. The South Carolina legislature denounced the tariff, which brought duties to their highest pre-Civil War level, as “unconstitutional, oppressive, and unjust.”

Playing Jefferson’s role of 30 years before, Vice President John C. Calhoun secretly wrote South Carolina’s Exposition and Protest, in which he outlined the doctrine of nullification. According to Calhoun, state conventions, the same bodies that had ratified the Constitution, could nullify federal legislation that they considered to be in violation of that document. The federal government thereupon could only enforce the law if it secured a new constitutional amendment through the approval of three-fourths of the states.

Calhoun intended the doctrine as a moderate middle position short of the extreme remedy of secession. But soon, a military clash seemed imminent, as President Andrew Jackson denounced nullification and privately swore to hang Calhoun. In the end, though, South Carolina’s defiance forced a partial climb-down by the feds. Senator Henry Clay of Kentucky helped usher through a bill securing a 20 percent reduction in the tariff.

Disputes over the unjust federal revenue system would play a central role in bringing about the Civil War (contrary to most contemporary accounts, which emphasize slavery to the exclusion of almost everything else). The centrality of the tariff issue is revealed in Lincoln’s First Inaugural, in which he disclaimed any intention to interfere with slavery, but was adamant about collecting federal revenue via the tariff. Republican corporate statism and Northern manufacturing depend ed on the Union and a high tariff. As a troubled editorialist in the March 18, 1861, Boston Transcript put it: “The difference is so great between the tariff of the Union and that of the Confederated States, that the entire Northwest must find it to their advantage to purchase their imported goods at New Orleans rather than at New York …. [The government] would be false to all its obligations, if this state of things were not provided against.”

Personal Liberty Laws

Ironically, the controversy over fugitive slaves would find Southerners clamoring for a strong federal role and cursing the doctrine of nullification. In his Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era, historian James M. McPherson notes a tension in Southern appeals to states’ rights before 1860: “On all issues but one, antebellum southerners stood for state’s rights and a weak federal government. The exception was the fugitive slave law of 1850, which gave the national government more power than any other law yet passed by Congress.” The South’s deviation from principle on this point stemmed in part from economic motives: the federal government’s assistance in recovering escaped slaves made the peculiar institution more secure. But those Northerners who opposed slavery fought back with a states’-rights-based resistance to the tyrannical and unjust fugitive slave laws.

The federal Fugitive Slave Law of 1793 authorized slave owners and their agents to cross state lines and recapture fugitive slaves by force, bringing them before local magistrates to prove ownership. Under the law, the deck was stacked against the purported fugitive, who lacked the protection of habeas corpus and jury trial, and had no right to testify in his own behalf. Small wonder, then, that Southern bounty hunters were less than meticulous in ensuring they’d captured the right person.

Most of the Northern states responded with “personal liberty laws,” providing the fugitive with the procedural protections denied him by the federal statute, and in several cases subjecting slave hunters to kidnapping charges. In Vermont, for example, all fugitives were declared free, and anyone who attempted to capture one could be subject to 20 years imprisonment or a fine of $10,000.

Not even the Supreme Court could deter the North from the path of resistance. When the Court overturned a kidnapping conviction under Pennsylvania’s personal liberty statute, and voided the statute itself, Pennsylvania merely enacted another. Massachusetts was equally open in its defiance of federal authority. Its legislature passed a law providing-that: “No judge of any court of record in this Commonwealth.., shall take cognizance or grant a certificate in cases that may arise under the third section” of the Fugitive Slave Law of 1793. (Northern defiance of Supreme Court decisions on the slave issue would continue when the Court issued its infamous 1857 opinion in Dred Scott. The Maine legislature, for example, was one of several Northern states to declare that Dred Scott was “not binding, in law or in conscience, upon the government or citizens of the United States.” (Shades of George Wallace!)

To appease an increasingly indignant South, Congress in 1850 passed an even harsher fugitive slave statute. Under that law, proceedings were to be held before (newly created) federal “commissioners,” who would only receive half as much for setting the captive free as they would for ruling in favor of his purported owner. All expenses associated with seizing and transporting the captive would be paid by the federal government.

Northern states found the fugitive slave law of 1850 harder to nullify, since it cut state courts out of the process. Still, abolitionists and their “vigilance committees” mounted vigorous resistance to the bounty hunters by force of arms. In 1851, the federal government felt it necessary to make a show of force in response to that resistance. To assist in the recapture of Thomas Sims, a 17-year-old escaped slave working in Boston as a waiter, the reds provided sufficient firepower to ensure that no band of abolitionist vigilantes could free him. When the federal commissioner ruled for Sims’s owner, 300 armed federal deputies and soldiers led Sims and his captor from the courthouse to the navy yard, where 250 more federal troops waited to put them on a ship heading South.

Every year, in high school history classes throughout the country, Americans learn a story intended to illustrate the beneficence of the federal government: in 1957, Arkansas governor Orval Faubus vowed to prevent the integration of Little Rock’s Central High School; President Eisenhower sent in federal troops to protect black schoolchildren from white Southern mobs. Students might get a more balanced picture of the federal role in race relations if teachers juxtaposed the story of Little Rock’s Central High with the story of Thomas Sims.

Libertarian Centralism

The above examples should not be taken to indicate that the states are natural defenders of liberty, organic extensions of the “People” that can be trusted to protect individual rights. Anyone familiar with zoning laws should know better than to embrace such a romantic notion. Instead, this historical survey suggests that the feds are unlikely to be better guardians of individual liberty than the states, and that divided sovereignty can serve as a check against federal oppression.

These examples also undermine the standard account of antebellum federalism, which amounts to public-school history: statist parables designed to make us feel grateful for the presence of our Federal Protector. If the issue were merely historical accuracy, there would be little reason to quibble. But this history is invoked, even by prominent libertarian legal analysts, to justify a particular political program. These scholars, who might be called “libertarian centralists,” view the federal government as an indispensable partner in the struggle to protect individual rights. To that end, the libertarian centralists have advanced a number of policy proposals that should give classical liberals pause—among them: Congress should be free to comprehensively redesign state and municipal codes using the enforcement powers of the Fourteenth Amendment; using the same powers, Congress can legislate directly on matters affecting liberty, with statutes such as the Church Arson Protection Act; and the Supreme Court should depart from constitutional text and engage in moral theorizing when exercising the power of judicial review. Each of these proposals represents a rather dramatic increase in federal authority over the states. The idea that such increased authority will be used to protect liberty rather than to abuse it, represents, like a second marriage, the triumph of hope over experience.

For example, Bolick, in June 7, 1995, testimony before the House Small Business Committee’s subcommittee on regulation and paperwork, said that “Congress has the power to enforce the 14th Amendment through appropriate legislation. It should use this power to enact an Economic Liberty Act. The provisions are simple: any federal or state law that restrains entry into a business or occupation must be narrowly tailored to a legitimate public health, safety, or public welfare objective.’‘ This appears unobjectionable until one contemplates what that plenary power would mean in the hands of welfare statists.

Another example comes from Roger Pilon, director of the Cato Institute’s Center for Constitutional Studies. In a June 18, 1996, Washington Post op-ed, Pilon wrote, regarding the federal Church Arson Prevention Act, “There is, however, a proper basis for Congress to act in the case at hand. It is the 14th Amendment… [I]f state measures prove inadequate and there is evidence available to Congress that federal intervention is necessary, there is ample authority under the 14th Amendment for Congress to act.”

And in a 1988 Cornell Law Review article titled “Reconceiving the Ninth Amendment,” Boston University law professor Randy Barnett wrote that “Given that the Fourteenth Amendment extends the protection of constitutional rights to acts of state governments, the Ninth Amendment stands ready to respond to a crabbed construction that limits the scope of this protection to the enumerated rights.” Again, although it sounds benign, this view is unjustifiably confident that the federal government won’t use the power to enforce unenumerated “positive welfare rights” on the states.

Patrick Henry, arguing against ratification of the Constitution, admonished Virginians to “Guard with jealous attention the public liberty. Suspect every one who approaches that jewel. Unfortunately, nothing will preserve it, but downright force: Whenever you give up that force, you are inevitably ruined.” The states did not voluntarily “give up” that force in 1861-65; it was wrested from them by federal aggression. Before the Civil War, individuals were protected from centralized coercion by multiple, divided sovereignties, competing in their interpretations of the national charter, and backing their respective interpretations with force. After that war, individuals were confronted with a powerful unitary state, one that justified its aggression—domestic and foreign with appeals to “liberty.”

Libertarian centralists assure us that we can restore true liberty by gaining influence over that state and making its institutions work for us. The history of American federalism suggests a different solution. If there is a libertarian future, it lies in dividing sovereignty in nullification and secession: opposing Power with Liberty at every turn; hammering every fault line in an attempt to crack the edifice; dividing and diminishing Power, in the hope that individuals will be better able to overcome it or, failing that, escape it. Any other route is a diversion, and a potentially dangerous one at that.

Gene Healy is a student at the University of Chicago Law School.

Historians who evaluate American presidents suffer from a bias against inaction. In the conventional view, great presidents are the nation builders and the war leaders; the failures are the ones who “never did anything.”

Nathan Miller, author of Star-Spangled Men: America’s Ten Worst Presidents, shares the conventional bias. For example, he indicts Silent Cal Coolidge with Mencken’s faint praise: “He had no ideas, and was not a nuisance.”

Those of us who favor limited government see it differently. This would have been a happier century by far if the worst that could be said of any president was, “He had no ideas, and was not a nuisance.” One (unintended) virtue of Miller’s book, then, is that it reminds us of some of the forgotten men who have held America’s most powerful office, yet somehow managed to leave well enough alone.

Miller picks his losers by asking, “How badly did they damage the nation they were supposed to serve?” What’s strange, then, is that the presidents he selects were mostly peacetime leaders who did little perceptible damage to the Republic and its institutions.

Take Coolidge, whom Miller writes off as “a reluctant refugee from the nineteenth century.” Miller fairly sneers at Coolidge’s emphasis on fiscal probity and laissez faire. Unable to find much to criticize in the uninterrupted prosperity of Coolidge’s tenure, Miller tries a cheap shot: Coolidge’s “penny-pinching refusal to cancel [the war] debts contributed to the rise of Adolf Hitler.” Well, maybe. But as long as we’re doling out responsibility for Nazi atrocities, why don’t we give some to Woodrow Wilson? Wilson’s dragging the United States into World War I allowed the Allies to impose a punitive peace on Germany in the first place. Why, then, does Miller consider Wilson a “near great” president?

Unlike Wilson, Coolidge was never awake for long enough to do much damage; as Miller recounts, he slept 11 hours a day. During his waking hours, Silent Cal’s sound instincts allowed him to hew to the presidential equivalent of the Hippocratic Oath. As Coolidge put it, “Nine-tenths of a president’s callers at the White House want something they ought not to have. If you keep dead still they will run out in three or four minutes.”

Miller’s chapter on William Howard Taft inspires reflection on the varieties of presidential obesity. Mencken saw Grover Cleveland’s great bulk as indicating a kind of implacable strength. But Taft’s girth reflected placidity and inaction, complementing his sedate view of the presidency: “the president cannot make clouds to rain, he cannot make the corn to grow, he cannot make business to be good.” Miller rates Taft as the ninth worst, but his tenure in the White House was marked by peace and prosperity.

Warren G. Harding receives the most undeservedly rough treatment of any president examined. From a classical liberal perspective, Harding was arguably the greatest president of the twentieth century. He initiated the largest spending cut in history—a 40 percent reduction from Wilson’s last peacetime budget. And Harding’s good nature and liberal instincts led him to overrule his political advisers and pardon Socialist presidential candidate Eugene Debs. Debs had been jailed during Wilson’s jihad against opponents of World War I, but Harding turned him and other dissenters loose; “I want [Debs] to eat his Christmas dinner with his wife,” he said. The scandals surrounding Harding’s administration push him near the top of Miller’s hit list. But, as Miller notes, he never took “so much as a nickel” from any of his corrupt cronies.

Despite the author’s depressingly conventional perspective on presidential greatness, Star-Spangled Men is tremendously enjoyable. Miller can turn a memorable phrase: (for example, he writes that Kissinger “looked like a Bronx Butcher and operated with the cynicism of a Renaissance Cardinal”) and has an eye for the kind of detail that makes reading history fun.

Read with the proper attitude, Star-Spangled Men inspires reflection on what we should value in a president.