US liberals are wrong: gun violence is a constitutional outcome
- Much like al-Qaeda and Isis, and their textual literalism that has been tied to a certain reading of the Koran, so gun rights and the violence that inevitably accompanies them have been the results of America’s founding constitutional documents
Large segments of the American population increasingly reject liberal democracy in the name of freedom. They are inevitably branded as the far right, right-wing extremists and such like. But one of the two dominant political parties now openly represents them. Whether you are critical or sympathetic, it’s worth making an effort to understand them, because they may well represent the future of the United States, or Disunited States, perhaps even the Disunion.
I was moved to revisit some classic political texts relating to this topic because of an editorial in The New York Times titled, “America Can Have Democracy or Political Violence. Not Both.” Or rather it was the photo that accompanied the editorial leader that caught my attention. It features a close-up of a man and a woman, both in military fatigues and armed to the teeth. On the man’s bulking forearm is tattooed “We the People”, painted in the handwritten style of the original US Constitution. The two look like they are part of a heavily armed group, perhaps a militia, one of thousands that exist across the US today.
The meaning of the picture is clear. These people are neither recreational gun owners, nor do they own guns just for personal protection. They believe they bear arms to protect their freedom, or rather Freedom itself. But here’s The New York Times, the emblem of American political liberalism, claiming such people or groups represent “political violence” and a threat to US democracy.
The Times editorial complains: “Many – far too many – Americans now consider political violence not only acceptable but perhaps necessary. In an online survey of more than 7,200 adults, nearly a third of people answered that political violence is usually or always justified.”
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I can well imagine their immediate rebuttal. If liberal democracy with its strong centralised federal government wants to deny their gun rights with gun controls, it’s tantamount to taking away their freedom, or at least the necessary tools and means to protect it. A “democracy” that is a fig leaf for tyranny must be resisted, even with violence, to protect Freedom.
On this, for all the left-wing or liberal outrage, it’s the right-wing gun “nuts” who are actually on sound constitutional grounds. For one, the republic was not meant to be a modern democracy in the contemporary sense, and the constitutional framers were more afraid of the tyranny of a highly centralised federal government as a threat to individual liberty than the threat of foreign governments, tyrannical or not.
Modern political philosophy and the modern state unequivocally ban personal weapons
It’s usually observed that the US constitutional framers were political thinkers, well-versed in modern or Enlightenment political philosophy. But when it comes to the right of the people to bear arms, a good deal that is found in the US Constitution – and the Federalist Papers written to defend it – actually run contrary to the modern theory of government.
Consider the sociologist, historian and political philosopher Max Weber. He went so far as to define the legitimate monopoly of the means of violence as an essential characteristic of the modern state. “Every state is founded on force, said Leon Trotsky at Brest-Litovsk,” Weber said in his famous lecture, “Politics as a vocation”. “Of course, force is certainly not the normal or the only means of the state – nobody says that – but force is a means specific to the state.
“Today, we have to say that a state is a human community that successfully claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory.”
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That’s why in most countries, the police can carry guns but you can’t. You are not supposed to defend yourself by unleashing violence on your own, except in the most extreme situations, and even then, you could incur heavy criminal liabilities.
Weber’s statement is the culmination of much of modern political philosophy beginning with Thomas Hobbes’ social contract theory. We are all born with the natural right to kill and defend ourselves. But that’s a recipe for anarchy. To survive and prosper, we end up as if agreeing to give up our natural right to a sovereign state in exchange for it to defend and secure our safety and property. To do that, the state must therefore have the capability to commit overwhelming forces to put down one, some or even most of its citizens, if and when the need arises, say, in an insurrection.
Tacitly or explicitly, the Times editorial board recognises the validity of this sovereign prerogative of the modern state when it wrote in the same editorial leader: “Maintaining a monopoly on force is, after all, a basic function of any government[.]” Well, not necessarily in the US; and that’s the rub!
James Madison, anti-Hobbesian
I don’t think there is any textual doubt that James Madison, and others, in the constitutional Bill of Rights and the Federalist Papers, provide powerful arguments against such stances as those of Hobbes and Weber.
“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,” the Second Amendment said.
But why? It’s the militias that protect local peoples and local or state governments from the encroachment of the federal government and its regular army.
What rules-based international order?
Madison wrote in Federalist No 46: “It may well be doubted, whether a militia thus circumstanced could ever be conquered by such a proportion of regular troops … by these governments, and attached both to them and to the militia, it may be affirmed with the greatest assurance, that the throne of every tyranny in Europe would be speedily overturned in spite of the legions which surround it.” [My italics]
To the argument that the Second Amendment originally intended to sanction only militias, not individual gun ownerships, an American can always counter: “Well, I will just join a militia then.”
Alexis de Tocqueville, it seems, also supported Madison’s arguments. Gun rights advocates like to quote the Frenchman: “[It] is by the enjoyment of a dangerous freedom that the Americans learn the art of rendering the dangers of freedom less formidable.”
The quote is taken from Chapter 5 of the second book of Volume 2 of Democracy in America, titled “Of The Use Which The Americans Make Of Public Associations In Civil Life”. Gun “nuts” may have been disingenuous with the quote. “A dangerous freedom” referred to wasn’t the right to own guns, but the right to form civic or political associations of all kinds. Such groups supposedly are the lifeblood and training grounds for self-rule and as a bulwark against any potential federal or centralised government. But aren’t militias the most political and extreme form of such civic or “voluntary” associations? Perhaps those gun nuts aren’t wrong about Tocqueville’s pro-gun stance after all.
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Interestingly, Madison’s arguments may just end up taking Americans back to the state of absolute liberty that is the state of nature, or anarchy, that is, when everyone is legally armed to the teeth – to defend themselves, in a situation whereby anyone can kill anyone else, irrespective of gender, physical strength or personal wealth. The ultimate equality!
That’s the danger in America today which inspired the cri de coeur of the Times editorial: “As the range of violence in recent years shows, the scourge of extremism in the United States is evident across the political spectrum. But the threat to the current order comes disproportionately from the right.
“Of the more than 440 extremism-related murders committed in the past decade, more than 75 per cent were committed by right-wing extremists, white supremacists or anti-government extremists.”
A hermeneutics of violence
Some Western critics have argued that the terrorism of such extremist groups as al-Qaeda and the Islamic State (Isis) group directly relates to the literalism which their ideology advocates in their interpretations of the Koran and the Islamic tradition. Literalism or perversion? I am no expert in such controversies.
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But they do seem to provide a light on the blind spot of many American liberals, especially intellectuals, who fail to see literalism in interpreting their republic’s founding documents can also provide a basis for domestic extremist ideologies and their related violence, including terrorism.
Jews, Muslims and Christians are People of the Book. That’s also why literalism and extremism have gone hand in hand in their history. Similarly, the American republic was founded on written texts, which are treated as politically sacred, if spiritually secular; and we should not deny or ignore the same deathly phenomenon that is happening in its contemporary society.
The distance between the textually faithful and the extremist may be much less than you think.
