Republicanism and the Second Amendment

I started this blog at the beginning of graduate school when I was first recognizing my interest, and I dare say talent, for intellectual history. Specifically trying to grasp the thinking of people in the past and understanding the primary sources within the context of the time. Empathy is the historian's friend, one must be able to put yourself there and try to imagine facing life without the benefit of hindsight. In other words, tell the story without letting on that you already know the ending; how we also approach life in the present. Maybe that is obvious, maybe it is intuitive, but many people I know fall into the trap of automatically thinking that they are superior to people living in the past because we know what happened next. Our country has often approached problems and choices with one eye on the past and one eye to the future.

In the wake of the latest headline-grabbing school shooting in Oregon, we Americans find ourselves once again deep in debate about guns. It has mostly been two main sides talking past each other, those on the left side pleading to no one in particular that the country needs stronger regulations and background checks on who can purchase firearms, and those on the right furiously fighting any of these proposals. While when pressed, gun enthusiasts fall back on the fallacy of tradition, that the second amendment guarantees their right as individuals to own as many firearms as they want. Pressed further, their utilitarian argument is that people need to be armed in order to overthrow the government if it turns tyrannical. At its heart this is a simple appeal to authority, 'the founders said I can have guns, who are you to question them?' This does not hold any logical weight, as Australian comedian Jim Jeffries argues during his now-famous stand up routine, the only reason people have guns is that they like guns. That is the only defense that is valid, every other reason is rationalization for simply liking guns. Some rationalizations come out of fear, fear of crime in particular, but also fear that the system does not work, that you need to defend yourself because the police and justice system are unreliable. The fear that stems from insecurity is real and comes from many more areas than the simple belief that evil exists. Economic security for the vast majority of Americans is slipping away and simply gone in many cases, many people are afraid that the other people victimized by the travails of free-market capitalism are out to get them.

Robert Parry recently wrote an excellent examination of the other, darker side of gun rights activists' argument, that of overthrowing the government. That somehow the founders' imagined that the future would necessarily be one of barely-constrained anarchy with a population everready to the founders' creation were it to get out of line. Parry demonstrates that this line of thinking is the exact opposite of the founders' intent, the second amendment was designed to "ensure domestic tranquility" and maintain the rule of law and order in case of populist uprisings, slave revolts, or attacks by Native American tribes or other foreign nations. He notes that it was not until 2008 that the Supreme Court finally interpreted the second amendment as guaranteeing an individual right to own firearms.

“A well-regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed.”

There, it is one sentence. Simply liking guns does not give anyone license to ignore that the subject of that sentence is the "well-regulated militia" and that "the people" that the amendment describes is singular, not plural. But to understand why that is we need to look at the foundations of our republic through the eyes of the founders.

In his excellent book, Empires of Trust, Thomas F. Madden describes the similarities between the fledgling American republic and that of the ancient Romans. Each society had a revolution in which they threw off the rule of a foreign monarch and built a system of government centered around the people of the nation as sovereign. The people, as a singular concept, held all of the theoretical power and delegated it to various offices filled by representatives of the people. The trouble is that after the revolution was consolidated in each case, leaders did not want to make big changes. Madden points out that the Romans were a rather conservative people in the republican period, they rather liked the system they had built and did not want to change it. This is a dictionary use of the word conservative, the Romans wanted to conserve and maintain their status quo. Even when the dangerous world they lived in led to expansion, as Madden put it "to push danger over the horizon", the Romans were unable to make the changes necessary for a large empire. Instead they tweaked their republican system, adding offices like the ones that existed in the city of Rome to govern the provinces. This led to a shift of the power away from the people of Rome and into the hands of the army and the leaders who could command the respect of the legions.

One thing that did not change in ancient Rome was technology. From republic to principate, to dominate, to the fall of empire in the west people lived in the bronze age. Armies fought with sword and spear, there was no analog for the industrial and technological changes of American history. The founders of the American republic were extremely cognizant of what went wrong in Roman one, and were determined to sculpt our constitution and republic to prevent them. The "Roman" state lasted for two millennia to the fall of Constantinople in 1453 in the face of Turkish cannonfire. Not a bad run. The world is so incredibly different today from when the United States was founded just two and a half centuries ago. Are we following in the Romans' footsteps by not allowing a practical and sincere reexamination of the right to bear arms?

Bob Cesca and Chez Pazienza often remark on their show that the founders could not have imagined the state of technology in the twenty-first century, much less of weaponry. Imagine what one platoon of M1 Abrams Main Battle Tanks with ample stocks of fuel and ammunition could have done on the side of the American Patriots during the Revolutionary War. Recall the plot of The Final Countdown where the USS Nimitz somehow traveled back to the eve of Pearl Harbor, and that was only a forty year span. Futurists like H.G. Wells could imagine a world of future technology in part by living through the industrial revolution, but how could colonists? No matter how well educated and brilliant the founders were, they still lived in a rural agrarian society that moved quite slowly. The founders would find our society marvelous and shocking, so many of us packed into huge cities, so few of us actually farming the land, physicians who can treat many afflictions, information travelling at the speed of light around the globe, and the sheer scale of consumer goods available, to say nothing of bombs capable of rendering those cities into dust in the blink of an eye. Imagine their laughter at finding out that there are extremists today who insist on owning firearms capable of murdering hundreds with absolutely no accountability... and that they openly state the reason for demanding the right to these weapons is to overthrow the very government set up by our constitution.

Ideology 102: Conservatism

Conservatism is just as broad of a belief structure as liberalism, a good place to start however would be the philosophy of Edmund Burke, considered to be the father of the modern version. Whereas liberalism is concerned with individuals and loosely with the equality of humankind, Burkian conservatism is primarily interested in inequality and the organic nature of society in its many groups. The basis of this form is the division of property, the 'men of best quality' inevitably accrue the largest share of property and workers tend to squander any material gains they happen to gain. Strong leaders are neccessary to maintain order in society but the 'little platoons', as he called these groups, strive for their place within the organism. Hence, reform occurs in an orderly way but utopian visions of trancending inequality are rejected by Burkian conservatives.

In other forms, conservatism is concerned with maintaining the status quo but this also grows out of a belief that wholesale changes are inherently disruptive to order in society. Hence, the term "radical conservative" sometimes used in American media is a contradiction and the radicalism of the American right is mislabeled. True conservatives in the United States therefore, resist changes in both social policy and economics. Historically, working class Americans have often been conservatives, unwilling to take a chance at a better deal for themselves in their jobs for fear of losing what they have. In the same vein, efforts to advance equal rights for African-Americans, Hispanics, GLBT Americans and so on are resisted because more freedom or money for these other groups are percieved as being taken from working class whites. The 1960's saw a "backlash" against efforts to make American society more equal and concurrently gave politicians a platform of "law and order" to harness these attitudes.

It should be mentioned then that New Deal Democrats are essentially conservative in contemporary America because they defend the status quo of programs such as social security, labor laws and business regulation which have been institutionalized in the U.S. Republican conservatives seeking to roll these back claim to be restoring the traditional status quo of laissez faire that existed prior to the Great Depression. However, during that era our society was far less orderly or just, there was mass labor violence, snake-oil salesmen style fraud and frequent economic depressions or "panics". New Deal Liberals therefore created a society of little platoon interest groups and the capacity for orderly, gradual reform that Edmund Burke would have approved of.

Ideology 101: liberalism

Entire books have been written to define ideology, college courses from freshmen surveys all the way through the graduate level study the idea. What is it? To put this broad and complex idea into a seven second soundbite, ideology is a belief structure to organize one's thoughts and apply to events and label people's personal philosophy.


Liberal is a word that gets thrown about alot in the media and politics but it is rarely used properly. Merriam-Webster has 6 definitions and 3 sub-definitions for the word dealing with generosity, open-mindedness and freedom, as well as a working definition for liberalism: "ideals of [the] individual especially economic freedom, greater individual participation in government, and constitutional, political, and administrative reforms designed to secure these objectives." Sounds pretty good eh? So how did this word become the epitath of choice for Republicans to use against Democrats when they themselves stand for many of the same ideas?


It has a lot to do with the title of this blog. In the 1930s, as we all learned in elementary school, the United States was stuck in the Great Depression and Franklin Roosevelt steered many reforms to make government more concerned with regular people's welfare. Hence the term "welfare liberalism" was born, usually written as "Liberalism" and is concerned with "positive freedom". Classical liberals then became known as Libertarians and maintained the Jeffersonian idea of "negative freedom" and limited government. The difference between positive and negative freedoms is the former seeks to empower people with freedom to do something while the latter is concerned primarily with keeping people free from restrictions such as government interference.

So when Republicans decry "big government" they are acting as Libertarians but many other groups exist within that party as well. Democrats are often Liberal in the sense that they do want government to do more than just maintain a military and police, to various degrees they believe government is responsible for the welfare of people. Under these conditions then, both major parties in America are liberal. Hard to believe? Yeah, me too.

Statement of Purpose

Politics are really hard to understand.
I wish schools taught more of the basics of how government actually worked.
Life shouldn't have to be this difficult.
Political advertisements are too condescending but political blogs go over my head.
I spent years learning a skill, getting a job, starting a family and building a life, now I want to get involved but don't know where to start.

If you nodded your head about any of these statements, this is a blog for you. Participating in American democracy shouldn't be like emigrating to a new country where you are immersed in a foreign language and culture. Too many politicos assume they are talking to an audience that is as obsessed as they are, or deliberately want to exclude as many people from their little club as they can. It doesn't have to be this way.

To begin, nothing is truly objective, we all have biases but if we admit them and try not to deceive others of our point of view there can be a genuine discussion instead of a yelling match. I will come right out and say that I am a Liberal and a Democrat, this blog is more for open-minded people who think for themselves than for committed partisans. I know a lot more about the radical right than the radical left, if anyone knows people on the left who really act like conservative TV and radio hosts I'd like to meet them. That said, I will try to leave heavy opinion to my other blog and try to be even-handed when dealing with political topics. Since ideology is manmade, it is always a matter of opinion, you cannot scientifically study then.

This blog is primarily about intellectual honesty, I may disagree with conservatives and find many of their tactics repugnant but I do not want to demonize them. Nor is it productive to assume the other side is automatically good and deserving of praise. The opposite is also true for conservatives and Republicans. You don't try to pop wheelies and take jumps when the training wheels are still on, but even after they come off, ad hominem demogaugery is stressful and usually poisonous. My goal is just to have people who don't understand what the fuss is all about come to realize why calling Barack Obama a fascist and a socialist is laughable and unproductive, but also calling George W. Bush names isn't either.

The ugly truth is that American politics has always been this juvenile, the name-calling started during George Washington's administration and rarely subsides enough to have an honest debate. I don't know why this is so, it is almost tradition to have a bully and a victim in electoral contests (and yes, the Democratic Party was the bully for quite a long time), please join me on this journey and maybe we can figure it out.

Tallyho!