Christine O’Donnell: “Where people fear government, there is tyranny. Where government fears the people, there is liberty.”

Okay. If we reverse the clauses, you might have a true statement: where there is tyranny, it is likely that people fear the government. But it just doesn’t work logically the way you’ve stated it any more than saying “where people speak English, there is America” or “where there are oranges, there is a grocery store.” But it doesn’t really work factually, either: how can you possibly look at the emotional response of a group and determine from the response its cause? How can you think there is even a “cause,” singular? You could finish that sentence so many ways, but you can’t walk it backward and still have it hold true. Where people fear government, they fear the government. And that’s about as far as you can take it in eight words and still have a statement that remains whole and valid.

And then there’s the second part of your statement. You can reverse the clauses and it’s not true either way. Where government fears the people (and by this, I’ll assume you mean the people in government, not, say, the actual government, since it couldn’t possibly experience thought or emotion, not having an amygdala of its very own), the government fears the people. It’s that not being able to determine causation thing again. You could finish the clause with things that are situationally correlative: “where government fears the people, there is a weak government (a restive populace, civic instability).” But to say that liberty is necessarily found where the government fears the people? It’s demonstrably untrue. Liberty is found in places where the governors do not fear the governed. And some places with fearful governments have the opposite of liberty (North Korea, anyone?).

And I wouldn’t wordsmith your pithy quote if not for the fact that it’s exactly the kind of rhetoric that’s catchy and quotable and provocative. It’s clearly an applause line and it worked for you: your audience hooted and hollered and would have grabbed pitchforks and tossed babies had you asked them to. And that’s what’s so frightening. Your line is based in poor logic, misattribution, false premises, and simplistic dichotomies. You tried to build an aphorism out of things that are conditionally true at best and untrue at worst and logically flawed throughout. Bad enough if the target were a person, but the crowd is already stoked to “take down the government.” Hyping up more misdirected blame at the government seems to me a really socially irresponsible thing to do.