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Considering the potency of this anti-governmental strain in American life, it is not surprising that terrorists like Timothy McVeigh, or members of right-wing militias, not to mention the government-slashing, Gingrich-led zealots of the House class of '94, see themselves as patriots in the Jeffersonian tradition. (McVeigh had a T-shirt bearing a disturbingly gory quotation from Jefferson: "The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.")

A Necessary Evil: A History of American Distrust of Government By Garry Wills Simon & Schuster, 352 pages Nonfiction Buy A Necessary Evil: A History of American Distrust of Government by Garry Wills

For Wills, however, the "real victims of our fear [of federal authority] are not ... the 168 people killed (and many more injured) by McVeigh. The real victims are the millions of poor or shelterless or medically indigent who have been told, over the years, that they must lack care or life support in the name of their very own freedom. Better for them to starve than to be enslaved by 'big government.' That is the real cost of our anti-governmental values."

Wills meticulously and methodically knocks down the myths that support those values, starting with those concerning the Revolution. The iconic figures of the Revolution are the minutemen, who "in a spontaneous and amateur way ... fought as individuals united by love of hearth and locality, not by external discipline." While this notion is not completely without historical foundation, Wills demonstrates that it is at variance with reality. The militias were supposedly democratic and universal; but in fact, the wealthy often bought their way out. Few Americans of the day even owned a gun -- America didn't become a gun culture until after the Civil War. Worst of all for those who appeal to the militias as evidence of the power of armed citizen resistance, the militias were bad soldiers, undisciplined and disorganized; their main contribution (a painful reality check for the black-helicopter crowd) was as an internal police force, a kind of original FBI.

Wills isn't done with the militias. In a later chapter on the NRA that will probably prove the most controversial in the book, Wills argues that the "right to bear arms" language in the Second Amendment is a purely military right, intended to apply to the militias of the day. Contemporary readings of it as legitimizing private gun control, he argues convincingly, are anachronistic.

Another Revolutionary-era myth concerns term limits, which George Will and others have claimed were embraced by the Founders. In reality, Wills observes, mandated short-term governmental service proved so chaotic and inefficient during the Continental Congress period in the 1780s that it was abandoned.

The most telling chapters in the book, however, concern the Constitution. For Wills, the triumph of the ideas most of us hold about the Constitution -- that federal authority was deliberately made inefficient, through a system of checks and balances, in order to weaken itself and preserve states' sovereignty; that its branches are co-equal; and that the competition of factions is desirable -- "is one of the most successful mythologizings of a large historical sequence that can be found in all of history." In fact, Wills argues, the states are subordinate to the larger government in all essential matters and were intended to be so. Against President Reagan, who "liked to say that the states were more important than the federal government since they had preceded it and formed it," he cites President Abraham Lincoln, who wrote, "Our states have neither more nor less power than that reserved to them in the Union -- no one of them ever having been a state outof the Union."

The crucial argument concerns the allegedly self-undercutting, deliberately inefficient nature of the Constitution. For Wills, those who subscribe to this theory fail to place the Constitution in its historical context as a replacement for the Articles of Confederation, a weak, anti-federalist blueprint that was a notorious failure. Wills argues that the Constitution was created precisely to removethe inefficiencies that resulted from the Articles' federal weakness -- not to perpetuate them. The words "checks and balances" appear nowhere in the Constitution, Wills points out; the branches of government were not designed to impede each other, but to increase efficiency by assigning to each its proper sphere. (They are not "co-equal," either; the legislative function is dominant.) As for the local power celebrated by anti-governmentalists from Jefferson to Reagan, Wills shows in a virtuoso discussion of Madison's famous Federalist No. 10 that such dispersed power inevitably results in the tyranny of the local majority -- as exemplified by white denial of black rights in the pre-Civil Rights South. Only an abstract, detached, cosmopolitan power, free of "local passions," can justly rule on such matters.

In short, the anti-governmentalists, far from being true to the spirit of the Constitution, are really partisans of the flawed and derided document it superceded. But it's probably too much to expect politicians to acknowledge this: "Mom, the Bible and the Articles of Confederation" just doesn't have that good stump-speech ring.

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