Extreme Politiphobia

Here's a sample of the current hysteria from a local paper's letters column. The author is Frank James Davis of Troy NY:

From civilized man's very beginning, there has been nothing more despicable than government; nothing which more consistently attracts the power-mad, the morally depraved. It has been -- and always will be -- a magnet to every true tyrant. Except for a relatively brief time, when our great Republic was instituted by the inspiration of brave, God-fearing men -- and the temporary solace of a few good public servants along the way -- brazen bureaucratic predators have dogged the people. These collectivists live only to extend their own power in an ever-expanding government moving inexorably to enslave us.

Not war, not slavery, not human sacrifice, but government is the most despicable thing in human history, according to Mr. Davis. His is the despite of apathy, since government, in his mind, is something that happens to him, or someone else does to him. What he envisions in the absence of government is unclear, though his praise for allegedly "God-fearing men" is an unhappy hint that it wouldn't necessarily be an absence of government at all. But his vision of the world as a whole is dangerously unclear, since he seems to think that the only predators among us are bureaucrats, or that the only enslavers among us are "collectivist" politicians. But history is ample with examples of slaveholders and slavedrivers, literal and metaphorical alike, who have nothing to do with the state, and against whom a state governed by and for the people may be the best or only defense. But Davis, I suspect, sees self-government only as a matter of looking out on his own for himself. He is unfit to live in a democratic republic on this evidence, and while letters like these have appeared in papers for most of the last century, I worry lately that this viewpoint is becoming more common. But if he thinks he's emulating the Founders in his distrust of "government," he has another think coming. If the Founders could walk the land today, they might not like what the government or the opposition is doing, but they would certainly look on Frank James Davis with the contempt he deserves.