Déjà vu

Well that didn’t take long. But as we have learned in the past, statists and aspiring tyrants like to feed on the bodies while they are still warm. And so, as predictable as the springtime return of short skirts to the Tuileries, as ubiquitous as the jambon buerre, as inevitable as an SNCF strike, Paris now brings us calls for restrictions (is it t0o soon to say “containment”?) of free peoples’ civil liberties as the only possible means to avert even more attacks. 

Everyone, it seems, wants a bloody mouthful. French President Hollande wants his 12-day "extraordinary powers"  – which include warrantless searches and detentions, and prohibitions of certain gatherings – extended for three months now and then written into the French constitution in a way that eliminates that onerous consultation with Parliament.

Here in the US, we probably shouldn’t be surprised that the FBI director wants private use of encryption restricted. But you have to admire the bureaucratic ambitions of the chairman of the Federal Communication Commission – last I checked, not a law enforcement agency – calling for more wire taps. Fortunately for them, these members of the Executive Branch needn't worry overmuch about pesky checks and balances by the Legislative Branch. They'll have enthusiastic support from lawmakers like Diane Feinstein, who never met an exercise of state control she didn’t want to take home and take to bed -- including state control over the cooperative playing of Mario Cart.

But then, we are talking about a government – at least here in the United States – that seems more than a little fuzzy on notions like the free exchange of ideas. How else to understand Secretary of State John Kerry’s facile and frightening distinction between last week’s Paris attacks – which he considers thoroughly unjustified – and the January murders of journalists at the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, which murders he described as “legitimate, er, rational, um, particularized.”*

We’ve talked about this before, this tendency for hard facts to make bad – usually grandiosely named -- law. But the danger is that you might want understand this impulse only as the sort of paroxysm of desperate, ex post facto panic that leads even a liberal Montessori mom to spank her toddler after he’s run into the street. But this is not an emotional overreaction by an otherwise liberty-minded set of leaders. This is no aberration.**

Rather it is inherent in the nature of the state always to expand its power and always to seek to expand. At its core is an understanding that, to ever expand, rulers must “never let a crisis go to waste.”*** As soon as, and every time that, events make the people a little less vigilant of the state, the state will take advantage.**** So while you're keeping an eye out for Daesh, spare one for Washington.

* OK.  I admit it. That paraphrase isn’t precisely perfect. But the link will take you to what he actually said, which was, frankly, worse.

** For this, I like to quote Robespierre: "The principle of the republican government is virtue, and the means required to establish virtue is terror."

*** Rahm Emanuel said it recently, perhaps revealing more than he meant to about his particular team strategy. But the concept by no means belongs to progressives alone. The quote is originally attributed to Winston Churchill (aren't they all), no progressive he, but quite the fellow for expanding state power, as many a dead Irish patriot could tell you from his grave.

**** And here we mean "take advantage" in the precisely same way a father means it when he warns his daughter before prom "not to let that boy take advantage."

Be afraid. Be very afraid.

United States Senator Chris Murphy (Team D. - Connecticut) is afraid. What, you ask, in a world wracked by terrorist attacks, unbalanced by a resurgent Russia, alternately frozen by polar vortices and simmered by global warming frightens Sen. Murphy? Of whom, you wonder, in a world populated with the likes of Donald Sterling, Abu Bakr al-Bahgdadi, and  Kanye West is Sen. Murphy afraid?

Well you might ask. Because the answer, if you happen to own a full-sized pistol manufactured in the past 80 years* or so, turns out to be . . . you.

I know this because The Hill reports that, after what we must assume was careful and objective analysis (i.e., asking a couple of anti-gun lobbyists what they thought), Sen. Murphy is throwing his support behind the push for a new federal law banning magazines that hold more than 10 rounds because, he says

. . . he has not met “a single hunter or a single person who hunts for sport” who needs more than 10 rounds [and] those who wanted high-capacity magazines were more interested in “arming against the government.”

Now, I'm not going to engage in a political assessment of the bill's chances for passage. (Which are, in the words of Dean Wormer, zero-point-zero.) Rather, let's address this notion that the reason folks want to own modern firearms is to take arms against the government.

Because, now that you mention it, Sen. Murphy . . .  um . . . yeah. Sorta. If you insist.

I've pointed out before that when it comes to the founding philosophy of this nation, there are some absolutely essential bits that get all too conveniently forgotten -- or intentionally ignored -- by the fellows who consider themselves to be in charge nowadays. Because a belief that men have God-given rights that other men cannot take is a fine and a true and a worthwhile thing. But what it isn't, in and of itself, is any sort of justification for even a punch in the nose, let alone bloody revolution against one's duly emplaced leaders. Not by a long shot. If you want to wage war against your own government -- precisely what the Founders did for eight and a half deadly years -- you're going to need something more. You're going to need to to keep reading:

That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.

That was the justification upon which Americans committed what most viewed as a grave sin and abolished their until-then-lawful government. And if it ever becomes necessary to do so again, the justification for such an awful event will be precisely the same.

The Founders knew that to be true. And, having just thrown off one tyrant, they did not imagine for a moment that there were no tyrants left.  Indeed, they recognized in themselves and in each other the human inclination to tyranny -- what Frederic Bastiat calls "A Fatal Tendency of Mankind" -- and they were determined to guard against it. That's why the Constitution creates three co-equal branches of government. And that is at least one reason why, when they set out the Bill of Rights, they put the Second Amendment second.




* I make a distinction here between revolvers and pistols, and I arbitrarily picked 80 years because that is the year John Moses Browning's second most-famous pistol made its appearance, seven years after his death, but incorporating important improvements he wanted to make to his more famous 1911. The Browning Hi Power -- or P35 for its first year of manufacture -- had a magazine capacity of 13 rounds in 9mm and set the trend, still followed today, for pistols to carry as many rounds as conveniently fit, given the grip size and caliber.

Obstructing justice

Democracy makes for a fearsome tyrant. This should come as no surprise, since we each of us bear a tyrant inside ourselves and democracy – colloquially known as mob rule – is nothing more or less than the imposition of the will of a group of collective selves over a slightly smaller group. From schoolyard to sorority house to workplace to the Place de la Révolution, we see the human impulse to rule other humans played out in every petty and terrible way. 

Happily for us, even before they had witnessed French monarchical tyranny deposed by French democratic tyranny in a bloody paroxysm of retributive horror, our Founders knew that democracy was a dangerous and unreliable guardian of liberty. This was precisely why they rejected any such regime for their new nation, and settled instead on a Constitutional Republic, a system not only different from a democracy but, blessedly, antithetical to it.*

Of course, the blessings of liberty which the Founders sought to secure for themselves andtheir posterity were never meant to include the unfettered right to do anything one pleased, at any time, in any place, to any effect. Liberty does not equal lawlessness. If your college buddy turns out to be an amateur terrorist, and you decide after the fact to give him a hand by getting rid of some of that pesky incriminating evidence, then -- even in the freest society on Earth -- you ought to expect to be arrested for obstruction of justice.

But in truth it’s not the lawbreakers nor the bombers – nor even the terrorists  – whom we ought really to fear. Their potential for tyranny is limited to the blast radius of whatever device they can assemble once Williams and Sonoma lifts the pressure cooker ban. Instead, the existential threat to liberty comes from those unreconstructed statist thugs who never learned to “work and play well others” in kindergarten, those “great men” whom Bastiat says desire to rule over others.**

By way of sterling example, New York Mayor and anti-Mountain Dew® activist Michael Bloomberg recently suggested that while:

. . .the people who are worried about privacy have a legitimate worry,   . . .  we live in a complex world where you’re going to have to have a level of security greater than you did back in the olden days, if you will. And our laws and our interpretation of the Constitution, I think, have to change.

Bloomberg’s chief enforcer, police commissioner Ray Kelly, on the other hand, is not about to follow his Bloomberg's lead and go all squishy in the middle where terrorists are concerned. Officer Stop and Frisk, without actually invoking the Latin legal aphorism of privacy schmivacy, Kelley made it clear that he thinks his boss needs to stiffen his spine:

The privacy issue has really been taken off the table. I don’t think people are concerned about it. I think people accept it in a post-9/11 world.  . . . The people who complain about it, I would say, are a relatively small number of folks, because the genie is out of the bottle.

Give that a moment to sink in. The contention is that the bombs detonated in Boston were so powerful as to shake the very foundations upon which the Republic has rested lo these two and a third centuries. Usually it takes a civil war*** or a world war**** for statists so comfortably and brazenly to reveal themselves. Now all that's needed to drag them into the light and before a bank of microphones is weaponized kitchen utensils.

Most of the time, most of what these sorts of villains do to advance their tyranny is done as subtlety and deceptively as they are able, and as quietly as they can. Every now and then, though, we get the chance to hear what’s really on their minds. When that happens, we really do need to pay attention. Thomas Jefferson, when he observed that “eternal vigilance is the price of liberty,” had in mind an entirely different sort of vigilance than do Bloomberg and Kelly and their ilk.

Jefferson understood, as we should, that men like these are not meant to be the practitioners of that vigilance, but its objects. *****

* Because I hold my few and gentle readers in such high esteem, I can only presume that the broad distinctions between the two systems are known full well to you. If, however, you are called on to explain the concepts to others, less-well-informed than you – as anyone must be if not among my few and gentle readers – I recommend this essay, “An Important Distinction: Democracy versus Republic,” which thoroughly and succinctly explains the issue.

** 

This must be said: There are too many "great" men in the world — legislators, organizers, do-gooders, leaders of the people, fathers of nations, and so on, and so on. Too many persons place themselves above mankind; they make a career of organizing it, patronizing it, and ruling it. . . .My attitude toward [such] persons is well illustrated by this story from a celebrated traveler: He arrived one day in the midst of a tribe of savages, where a child had just been born. A crowd of soothsayers, magicians, and quacks — armed with rings, hooks, and cords — surrounded it. One said: "This child will never smell the perfume of a peace-pipe unless I stretch his nostrils." Another said: "He will never be able to hear unless I draw his ear-lobes down to his shoulders." A third said: "He will never see the sunshine unless I slant his eyes." Another said: "He will never stand upright unless I bend his legs." A fifth said: "He will never learn to think unless I flatten his skull.""Stop," cried the traveler. "What God does is well done. Do not claim to know more than He. God has given organs to this frail creature; let them develop and grow strong by exercise, use, experience, and liberty."

Frédéric Bastiat, The Law

*** President Lincoln’s suspension of habeus corpus and wholesale sedition arrests mean he is hardly regarded in unalloyed reverence.

 **** Executive action to intern Japanese-American citizens evidently being insufficiently shameful, the Supreme Court got in on the act in Korematsu.

***** The provenance of this quote is well-documented and fascinating and some of it can be found here. So when I suggest what Jefferson meant by it, and what he’d mean if had the chance to say it today, I do so with good reason.

Great Expectations.

Perhaps it’s unwise for a new blogger to point this out, but there’s a lot of dangerous idiocy on the Internet.

Not long ago, within the space of an hour, I was engaged in two exchanges that served as stark reminders of this. The first was an online disagreement with a fellow who claimed to be a lawyer, who thus necessarily took an oath to support and defend the Constitution, and who, one supposes, must have had occasion actually to read the damned thing at some point. Yet his fundamental position was that the Constitution (originally) and the courts (thereafter) grant us our rights, rather than merely enumerating and protecting them.  Lest you fall into similar folly,  the drafters of the Constitution provided a handy clue rigth there in the Preamble: “ . . . the blessings of Liberty. . . ” And the Declaration of Independence, in which some of the same fellows had a hand, is helpful as well: “ . . . endowed by their creator. . .”*

Next, a Facebook thread dealt with an association by a our new Attorney General that any rational middle-schooler would recognize as a conflict of interest, but which she has denied was any conflict at all. When I suggested that such political and moral tone-deafness were problematic, I was asked, “Well, what do you expect?”

Fair question. And one which, depending upon which word receives emphasis, covers a lot of territory, from the merely categorical to the particularly personal to the wildly aspirational.  I choose – for the moment – to abandon categorizations and aspirations and deal only with prognostications.

So here’s what I expect in these matters:

I expect a never-ending, ever-expanding assault on my personal liberty. I expect, every week, for events to demonstrate that Frédéric Bastiat knew exactly whereof he spoke.** In this I am rarely disappointed.

I expect members of the party in power -- whichever it may be -- to be so hungry to expand their ideology and influence right now that they throw notions of equity, fair play and good governance overboard with both hands, blind to the simple reality that they will come to decry these same "reforms" when -- as will surely come to pass -- they find their particular orthodoxy to be out of favor. For a current example, consider the Florida Legislature's multi-front attack on an entire branch of government.

I expect that efforts to improve government will be either costly and futile, or costly and disastrous.  I expect it is exceedingly rare – and increasingly rare in direct proportion to the amount of power wielded – that anyone in government has even passing concern for those they govern. Indeed, I expect that most in government think of themselves not as the governors of citizens, but as rulers of subjects. (In England this is explicitly so.)

I expect that Stalin was exactly right when he said those who cast votes decide nothing, while those who count votes decide everything.

I expect no benevolence from any government, because I expect power at every level to serve itself not just first, but only. I expect to take care of myself and my own without useful intervention of the government. At the same time, I expect to receive the help of my friends, colleagues and church family  – and I expect them to expect the same of me.  

I expect to do my best to keep my head down and stay off the radar of the tyrants who everywhere abound, but I also expect to fail at that from time to time. When I do so fail, and I come under the direct attention of those who want to harm me or – far worse – those who think they know what is best for me, I expect to come out the worse for wear.

Sadly, I expect that there will come a day when just striving to be let alone will no longer suffice.

But listen, that's just what I expect. Whatever I expect, I try always to keep Cromwell's admonition in mind.*** After all, there was a fellow who, despite the fact  that he was endearingly regicidal, knew a thing or two about tyranny.  



*  Those who still need convincing are referred to Messrs. Seneca, Luther, Hegel, Rousseau, Locke . . . .

** "If the natural tendencies of mankind are so bad that it is not safe to permit people to be free, how is it that the tendencies of these organizers are always good? Do not the legislators and their appointed agents also belong to the human race? Or do they believe that they themselves are made of a finer clay than the rest of mankind?"

"It seems to me that this is theoretically right, for whatever the question under discussion—whether religious, philosophical, political, or economic; whether it concerns prosperity, morality, equality, right, justice, progress, responsibility, cooperation, property, labor, trade, capital, wages, taxes, population, finance, or government—at whatever point on the scientific horizon I begin my researches, I invariably reach this one conclusion: The solution to the problems of human relationships is to be found in liberty."


*** "I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible that you may be mistaken." This was Cromwell's plea to the synod of the Church or Scotland in August 1650, when the church leaders aligned themselves with Charles II's claim to the throne from which Cromwell had removed his father, not long before likewise removing Charles I's head from his shoulders. Charles II  reclaimed the throne ten years later following Cromwell's death and -- you have to love the British sense of propriety -- posthumous "execution."

"Cromwell's Rule," as logicians refer to it, advises that in searching for the truth, unshakable certainty is poor place to start.