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Taking Back the Government

January 18, 2017
Todd Huizinga

Todd Huizinga

Calvin College

In deciding to leave the European Union last year, a majority of people in Great Britain voted to regain control of their government, said Todd Huizinga, a Calvin College researcher and former U.S. diplomat at the college’s 2017 January Series.

Referred to as Brexit, the move showed the mood not only of many Britons but also of many people in the United States — people who are troubled by the movement away from democratic principles, he said.

“Many observers were dumbstruck by Brexit, but this was a tremendously courageous decision. We need to recognize that,” said Huizenga, a U.S. diplomat from 1992-2012 who served as deputy chief of mission at the U.S. embassy in Luxembourg and political counselor at the U.S. mission to the European Union in Brussels. He has served in several other diplomatic positions as well and is now a senior research fellow at the Henry Institute of Calvin College.

“After Brexit, people warned of the impact that it would have globally and that it would increase inflation,” said Huizinga. “But so far it has had no measurable effect. The feared economic decline hasn’t occurred, although signs of real turbulence could come.”

Huizinga said Brexit, and to an extent the election of Donald Trump in the U.S., are signs of people turning against global and national institutions that don’t always have their best interests, but rather their own bureaucratic intentions and agendas, in mind.

Whether it is in the European Union, which is a “government that is not a government,” or in the U.S., which is increasingly “in the hands of career civil servants,” said Huizinga, people are being left out of the democratic process.

In the U.S., he said, civil servants are making laws and policies that lawmakers should be making. “Administrators make 30 times more regulations than Congress makes laws,” he said.

When this happens, you are leaving government power in the hands of people who are not elected by voters, which is “the very definition of tyranny,” he said.

There is a growing perception, said Huizinga, that countries are being run by “an unaccountable group of elites.”

The EU may have an ideal of creating a more peaceful world order through the unification of countries and the economy, but it is instead eroding democracy and destabilizing countries, he said.

“In the EU, there are no majority or minority parties. . . . Everyone gathers together in a hybrid system of universal governance,” said Huizinga. “The actual government, as most of us know it, is everywhere and nowhere.”

In Europe and in the U.S. there has been an erosion of fundamental truth and values; there is no solid basis of truth on which to make decisions, said Huizinga.

The U.S. Constitution, he said, is rooted in the belief, the unchanging truth, of a good and yet “flawed, sinful” human nature.

“But today truth is in the eyes of the beholder. Truth is seen to be the tool of the political and economically powerful,” said Huizinga. “The heart of today’s political correctness is nothing more than the code by which the elites force” people to accept as truth things that are by many accounts subjective.

“Today, every tradition is up for grabs. . . . Human rights are those held by those who hold political power,” said Huizinga, author of  The New Totalitarian Temptation: Clobal Governance and the Crisis of Democracy in Europe.

“Everywhere around us there is a radically secular vision,” he said. “We are engaged in a battle [based on the hunger for self-governance] that goes deep.”