A Window onto John Locke

Here is Yale professor Steven B. Smith on the opening chapters of John Locke's Second Treatise of Government.



I suspect that this was filmed in an empty auditorium for Yale's online offerings because there is no interaction at all between Prof. Smith and anyone else in the room. Also, no one laughs at his jokes (although that has happened to me before in a full classroom).

Theology, Philosophy and Policy

The full, hour-long video of my American Enterprise Institute "Values and Capitalism" luncheon event for Left, Right and Christ has been posted.



Along with it is a nice article by Elise Amyx describing the exchange between Lisa and me. She has this nice reflection on the wild leaps that Lisa Sharon Harper makes from which she finds in Scripture to the public policies she confidently advocates.

Political philosophy is where theology and policy meet; it is where the two worlds are reconciled, yet Harper jumps the gun and avoids the “high level battle of ideas.” Her argument is seemingly aligned, but not soundly intertwined. Because she approaches policy from a consequentialist view, she has failed to recognize the political philosophy implied by the policies she supports, which is not solely theological but rather one of “big government.”

Clearly, her James Madison University education has served her well.

Innes and Harper at AEI

Friday was a big day. I took the Acela down to DC to speak at a luncheon event at the American Enterprise Institute. They invited me and my co-author, Lisa Sharon Harper of Sojourners, to speak about our book, Left, Right and Christ: Evangelical Faith in Politics. We each spoke for about 15 minutes and then took questions. AEI has released five clips from our remarks. Here are my two.

In this one I talk about God's purpose in establishing government.



In this one, I state that a more fully Christian view of government is that it must secure not only individuals, but families and the fabric of cummunities in general.



Here they catch Lisa in her astonishing Robin Hood view of the Republicans and the Democrats. When she was a girl in 1976, she followed her mother around campaigning for Jimmy Carter. "Why are we Democrats, Mom?," she asked. Mom said that whereas the Republicans take money from the poor and give it to the rich, the Democrats take back from the rich and give it to the poor. "It stuck," she said.



Yup. Apparently it's that simple. Politics is the practice of plunder and counter-plunder. That view is not unique to my co-author. It is the standard, Sojourners, left-wing Evangelical view. For this reason, I think that Left, Right and Christ is a valuable book for setting side-by-side the poilitical alternatives for the Evangelical community.

Update: Here is the whole hour! Jaw dropping moments here.



Here we are the same day on Fox's Lauren Green Show.

Here is a Great Teacher

Harvey Mansfield is one of the great teachers of the last two generations. He is professor of government at Harvard University, translator of Machiavelli and de Tocqueville, and the author of books such as Taming the Prince, America's Constitutional Soul, and Manliness.

The five-part "Uncommon Knowledge" interview with him on NRO will give you a peek at why truth seeking young kind have been drawn to this politically incorrect provocateur.

In part 2, he says, he discusses Western civ and the great books, saying, "Western civilization is not one thing. In a way, it is divided against itself in a very interesting way, the most interesting perhaps between church and state, between theology and philosophy. And so Western civilization is not a civilization that has one answer--one authoritative answer--but it contains within itself problems and questions. So it's much more interesting and more powerful than other, non-western civilizations."

The Left Loves Hobbes

In "Political Jeremiads" (WORLDmag.com, July 28, 2010), I review the fire and brimstone predictions of doom and call to political and cultural repentance that American political left has employed (and no doubt sincerely believed) over the last 40 years. In the 70s it was the population explosion and limits to growth. The 80s gave us the fear of thermonuclear exchange and (at best) the nuclear winter that would result. In the 90's, they schooled us in environmentalism to "save the planet." Our children were dished up "Captain Planet" on Saturday mornings. Seriously. But saving the planet was taken to a much higher level of alarm in this past decade with the global warming scare.

It's always, "Flee from the terrible wrath to come!" Where else, but into the arms of almighty state, whether American or global…preferably global. Even unilateral surrender was, in the eyes of some, the only safe option. Better red than dead, they used to say.

But what we hear continually is an interesting combination of secularized Christian hellfire preaching and Thomas Hobbes.

Having led us in abandoning God to make our way in the world by our own wits, the secular left has come to see terrors on every side. But instead of returning to God, the rock of ages and shelter from the storm, they call us to seek refuge under the shadow of Leviathan, the almighty state, which 17th century philosopher Thomas Hobbes called “that mortal god to which we owe, under the immortal God, our peace and defence.” They reject as absurd the notion that God governs all the affairs of men with perfect goodness, yet they seek to establish a human government that will administer all the affairs of men with perfect efficiency, foresight, benevolence, and justice.

Thomas Hobbes argued in the 17th century that when faced with an intolerable threat, conditions that will make life “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short,” the only rational course is to surrender up your liberties to an all powerful government that will preserve what is most important: your life.

The only way to erect such a common power, as may be able to defend them from the invasion of foreigners, and the injuries of one another…is to confer all their power and strength upon one man, or upon one assembly of men, that may reduce all their wills, by plurality of voices, unto one will. …This is the generation of that great Leviathan, or rather, to speak more reverently, of that mortal god to which we owe, under the immortal God, our peace and defence.

In the course of preparing this column, I was charmed to notice that while during the limits to growth 70s, Frances Moore Lappé gave us Diet for a Small Planet (1971), now into the climate scare decade her daughter Anna Lappé has given us Diet for Hot Planet.

I was prompted to write on this topic by Ross Douthat's New York Times column, "The Right and the Climate," (July 25, 2010).

We are Engaged in a Great Civil War

The depth of our political divide in America constitutes a civil war, the one side preserving the regime and the other side working to overthrow it. But thankfully it's a cold war, not a shooting war. All that we need for preserving the republic against it's progressivist overthrowers is to re-school the American public in their heritage of liberty.

I have been writing recently about the movement of American government in dangerous directions toward a subtle, seductive, but very real form of despotism. Most recently I published "The Temptation to Dictatorship" at WORLDmag.com, a further reflection on what I wrote here in "The Dictatorship of Hope and Change." We hear Tom Friedman and Andrea Mitchell musing openly on Meet The Press about the public benefits that would result from allowing Barack Obama and his soul-mates in Congress to suspend the Constitution for a day and really put things right. This was not a careless thought. Friedman was just following up on what he stated in one his recent books. But only Paul Gigot expressed shock and incredulity. When he did, the political cognoscenti around him just blinked and went on.

This dangerous indifference to the institutions of liberty is not limited to a few reckless talking heads on a Sunday news show. It pervades the liberal establishment. And if it were only indifference, we would be in better shape than we are. George Will has drawn national attention to the principled hostility toward our very form of government that has characterized the Democratic Party for almost a hundred years, and which Barack Obama has raised to the level of mortal struggle.

Today, as it has been for a century, American politics is an argument between two Princetonians -- James Madison, Class of 1771, and Woodrow Wilson, Class of 1879. Madison was the most profound thinker among the Founders. Wilson, avatar of "progressivism," was the first president critical of the nation's founding. Barack Obama's Wilsonian agenda reflects its namesake's rejection of limited government.

In my WORLDmag.com column today, "Our Present Civil Cold War," I continue Will's train of thought to what I think is its implied but unstated conclusion. (Michael Lind at Salon.com responds to Will's thesis here.)

*****************

What Wilson began, the Great Depression interrupted, but Franklin Roosevelt took it up again with great energy in the New Deal. Lyndon Johnson carried it forward with the Great Society, and now Barack Obama has raised this war against limited, constitutional government to the level of mortal struggle.


Now we are engaged in a great civil cold war. It is a political war between the advocates of limited and unlimited government, between those who support the Founding and the Constitution as amended and the self-described progressives who, by definition, reject what the Founding Fathers bequeathed to us in favor of what Chief Justice Earl Warren called “evolving standards of decency that mark the progress of a maturing society.”

Will takes his prompt from a new book by William Voegeli, Never Enough: America’s Limitless Welfare State. In the progressive view of politics, there is no limiting principle for government. Writes Voegeli, “Lacking a limiting principle, progressivism cannot say how big the welfare state should be but must always say that it should be bigger than it currently is.” We can see this in President Roosevelt’s 1944 “Economic Bill of Rights” speech, in which he declared the commitment of his government to, among other things,

...the right of every family to a decent home; the right to adequate medical care and the opportunity to achieve and enjoy good health; the right to adequate protection from the economic fears of old age, sickness, accident, and unemployment; the right to a good education.

Thus rights become government entitlements that don’t limit government, but instead empower and expand it.

For progressives, the purpose of government is not to protect certain natural rights that in turn limit the government itself. This is the political theory of the Founding and the Constitution. Rather, government’s job is to discover new rights that come to light as we morally evolve, i.e., as we progress.

Our choice is between two very different forms of government. Limited government stands opposite progressive government of unlimited reach. Individual liberty stands opposite federally guaranteed personal security. Our system of checks and balances stands opposite the popularly unaccountable and trans-political bureaucracy. In the Great Civil War, we fought—as Lincoln put it—for “government of the people, by the people, and for the people.” This new struggle is a domestic cold war for that same understanding of freedom. We need to be clear that there is a fundamental difference between these politically divergent ways of life, and that the choice is now clearly before us. Otherwise we will simply slip peacefully into what Alexis de Tocqueville called “soft despotism,” the way a freezing man welcomes the embrace of death like a comforting lover.

*****************

Reading List:

Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, James Madison, The Federalist Papers.

Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy In America.

Walter McDougall, Freedom Just Around the Corner: A New American History (HarperCollins, 2004).

R.J. Pestritto. Woodrow Wilson and the Roots of Modern Liberalism (Rowman & Littlefield, 2005).

Amity Shlaes, The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression (HarperCollins, 2007).

Matthew Spalding, We Still Hold These Truths: Rediscovering Our Principles, Reclaiming Our Future (ISI, 2009).

William Voegeli, Never Enough: America’s Limitless Welfare State (Encounter, 2010).

James Caeser, Nature and History in American Political Development (Harvard UP, 2008).

Also, anything by Martin Diamond, Charles Kesler, Forrest McDonald, or Herbert Storing.

You should also explore through these websites and catalogues the considerable labors that thoughtful patriots have undertaken over that past two generations or so in the re-schooling of America in its education for liberty.

Ashbrook Center for Public Affairs
The Constitution Society
The Federalist Society
The Founders' Constitution
The Heritage Foundation
The Intercollegiate Studies Institute
The Jack Miller Center
Lehrman American Studies Center
Liberty Fund

Consent and res publica

As most of you know already, John Locke stands as something like John the Baptist to the political geniuses of the American founding, a prophet of the coming of a never-before-seen constitutional republic. His political teaching became the summary statement of early modern liberalism, in much the same way as Francis Bacon’s earlier teaching on the scientific method helped form the base from which modern science and technology was launched. But though both Locke’s and Bacon’s positions have been controverted in the last four hundred years, Locke found his nemesis in the very next generation in David Hume, a near contemporary of the American founding, who was particularly exercised to see to it that the “Whiggishness” Locke spoke for did not become entrenched in the mind of the British public.

Hume was a severe critic of the state of nature/social contract theory for the grounding of political authority and rights. Central to the contract story is the moral equality of all human individuals, and hence the necessity for consent in government—no one is born with a presumptive right to rule over his fellows. The principle is admirably stated by the Lockean acolyte Thomas Jefferson, who acutely observed that “the mass of mankind has not been born with saddles on their backs, nor a favored few booted and spurred, ready to ride them legitimately, by the grace of God.” Jefferson aimed this shot at the likes of Hume (if not Hume specifically), whom he in his typically bombastic fashion considered an enemy of mankind for the content of his wildly popular essays and magisterial six volume History of England (still very worth reading). Hume’s analysis of the matter led him to this conclusion:

My intention here is not to exclude the consent of the people from being one just foundation of government where it has place. It is surely the best and most sacred of any. I only pretend, that it has very seldom had place in any degree, and never almost to its full extent.

Hume died in 1776, just as things were getting interesting on this side of the Atlantic, and so did not witness the birth of a nation making explicit its embrace of Lockean consent as the center piece of legitimate government. And yet, contra Jefferson, Hume wrote that he considered himself “American in my principles”, while being skeptical of abstract thought, especially political, ideological abstractions. Looking to history for guidance, which is what any self respecting empiricist historian would do, Hume saw no evidence that any group of people had ever gathered, recognized their meager and dangerous prospects as individuals, and consented to cede their individual prerogative to take matters into their own hands and to place their trust in a government to protect their rights. And yet this is almost precisely what the American colonies did vis-à-vis the overbearing George III and Parliament. Declaring that the King was menacing their rights instead of protecting them, they sought to form a government that would protect their rights and be responsive to the principle of consent.

Hamilton, a noted fan of Hume (and like Hume Jefferson’s enemy), counted consent the “pure original fountain of legitimate authority” (Federalist 22), channeling the spirit of Locke as accurately as Jefferson ever did. And though the Wilsonian Progressives and their ideological descendants are wont to claim Hamilton’s patrimony of large ideas for energetic government, and a large scope for it too; they yet have little use for the consent of the governed, preferring the rule of experts to guide the hapless and sadly incapable mass of the people who need to be “nudged”, in Cass Sunstein’s phrase, in order to get to the right conclusions. None of these philosophers and statesmen—Locke, Hume, Madison, Hamilton, Jefferson—though distrustful of human frailty and moral shortcomings, were so literally dismissive of the consent of the governed as our present day elites. That the elites of our time, both inside and outside the government of our constitutional republic, eschew the role of the public in the res publica, “the affair of the people” as the ancient Latin has it, is both dangerous and remarkable. This mindset undermines not only the constitution, but the thinking that underpins it; and thus the Lockean natural rights /state of nature /social contract understanding that suffused the thinking of the Founders and yielded the unambiguously best constitution in history, gives way to a Humean theoretical skepticism regarding our own actual beginnings—a most unhistorical and un-empirical view.

But what is that to the dilettantes running the joint, immersed in rationalist abstractions like “History” and utterly oblivious and dismissive of Nature, and Nature’s God?

Political Evil This Way Comes

The so-called Tea Party continues to make the news, recently as object of the mainstream media's vilification as just so many white, upper-income racists. Others focus on the vast government spending and corresponding public debt that provoked these ordinary people into active political involvement. I argue today on WORLDmag.com ("Tyrants Among Us") that while runaway government spending is a big part of what is driving Tea Partiers to revolt, underlying that is a more fundamental fear in the face of runaway government size and power and lawless intrusion. They see tyranny hatching out of Washington like a scaly thing, bigger and more sure footed than ever seen before, and they are fighting for the survival of liberty.

Here is the little more rambling, less politically restrained version of the published article:

***  **  *  **  ***

What angers Americans in the Tea Party movement is tyranny. And well it should. It is spreading in Washington even more than usual.

Our Declaration of Independence still speaks for us where it says:

But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such government, and to provide new guards for their future security.

Lawless government is an unmistakable sign of tyranny, i.e., government that exercises power not under law or according to the authority given to it by consent of the governed, but on an authority it claims to have in itself.
The Democratic Party's health care reform legislation is an example of governing tyrannically. The law requires people to purchase health insurance who, perhaps because they are young and healthy, presently do not carry it. This is not a tax. It is the government just telling you to do something because they believe it to be good for the country. It is not conditional upon any other behavior. It says, "You will do this or we will punish you with a fine."

I have not heard a credible argument from any elected officeholder justifying this provision constitutionally. Even the president, who has taught constitutional law, made only a vague reference to the state requirement that people buy car insurance, which of course is different in that it is a condition of owning a car for use on public roads. If people take the bus or walk, they can decline the purchase. But this is government exercising authority beyond what the Constitution allows, authority the people did not entrust to it. This is power exercised tyrannically, and on a grand scale.

At a constituent meeting, Rep. Phil Hare, a Democratic congressman from Illinois, stated with unguarded candor (as though it were no big deal) his disregard for the constitutional limits of congressional power when it comes to providing for what he thinks is the public good.



When asked to locate in the Constitution where Congress gets the authority to require everyone to buy health insurance, his response was, "I don't worry about the Constitution on this...I care more about the people dying every day who don't have health care." In a half-hearted attempt to find a constitutional hook on which to hang the law after the fact, he cited the rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, thinking that he was quoting the Constitution. When someone pointed out that these words are found in the Declaration of Independence, he expressed indifference to the distinction. "Doesn't matter to me. Either one."

In other words, when it comes to doing good, constitutional restraints are irrelevant. They don't apply. The legal constraints of the Constitution are, in the eyes of Democrats like Phil Hare and, apparently, the president, only for bad people. The goodness of the obviously good things that good hearted people do with government power is the ultimate foundation of public authority, transcending even the Constitution. Another way of stating this view is that moral progress is the fundamental law of the land. It is the unwritten constitution behind the written constitution. That is to say, the politically progressive use of power is self-authorizing. Every other exercise of civil authority must be subject to constitutional limitations because that is what a constitution is for.

This lawlessly self-flattering attitude seems to draw, but unfaithfully, from Cicero's maxim in De Legibus (3.3.8) that has echoed loudly through the centuries, Salus populi suprema lex esto, "the welfare of the people is the highest law." By salus, or welfare, he meant the well-being or safety of the people. The sense of the statement is that because the individual depends on the community for the enjoyment of his private goods, and even for his very life, his individual good must yield to the public good in general when the two come into conflict. No law needs to state this. It is in the nature of the political relationship. In that sense it is the supreme law that transcends even the most fundamental written laws.

Francis Bacon reiterated the thought in #56 of the Essays, "Of Judicature." Uttered by Cicero, the words are taken in their natural law context. But Bacon's view of justice is more conventional and mundane. He explicitly cautions his readers against laws that claim divine origin, saying, "laws, except they be in order to that end, are but things captious [misleading], and oracles not well inspired." In other words, judges should pay no attention to divine law and philosophic consideration of natural law. These only distract from civil business. John Locke used it as the epigraph for his Two Treatises of Government. Both of these men used a surface piety and respect for traditional views to direct people to a radically popular foundation of political justice. But they both advocated the rule of law, even of a fundamental law in a liberal, constitutional republic. What we see in Congressman Hare's words, and in the aggressive expansion of government by his party without regard to the enumerated powers of the Constitution is something that is neither Ciceronian nor Lockean, but rather Jacobin. Yes, Jacobin.

Cicero's maxim is one for emergencies. The Democrats in Congress, along with the president, are governing as though it were the ordinary basis for legislative activity, or, to speak more cautiously, as though the fullest and immediate expansion of the welfare state were a matter of national emergency.

But in the face of such tyrannical usurpation of authority, such an obvious design to reduce us under the absolute despotism of benevolent technocracy does not justify violence. It does, however, justify vigilance. Every patriot should exercise that vigilance at the ballot box in November, asking him or herself the question, "Does this candidate govern or promise to govern under the laws, or regardless of the laws as a law himself?" Will this candidate govern as a benevolent despot, or as a public servant under law?

Let me hasten to add in conclusion that Christians are substantially to blame for this state of affairs. The constitution for the Kingdom of God is the Bible. In the late nineteenth century, Christians started debunking and dismissing its authority, and substituting enlightened progressive morality and the latest developments of scientific thinking in its place. Today, even Protestant Evangelicals, who supposedly have a high view of Scripture, treat the details of its teachings with careless disregard, following instead all too often the fashions of Evangelical subculture.

Christians can be salt and light by conforming their convictions more conscientiously to the Word of God, and voting their convictions more faithfully on election days.

Addressing the State of Liberty

As we anticipate President Obama's State of the Union address, we should also cast an eye to Freedom House's annual Freedom in the World report. Freedom House began publishing these global assessments in 1973. In 1984, five years before the collapse of the Soviet empire, Samuel P. Huntington published his essay, "Will More Countries become Democratic?" (Political Science Quarterly, 99:2), and in 1993, The Third Wave: Democritization in the Late Twentieth Century. When the Berlin Wall was finally breached in 1989, and it was clear that the West had won the Cold War, Francis Fukuyama published his provocative essay, "The End of History?," in The National Interest. Twenty years later, things do not look as hopeful for liberty around the globe.

The Economist, in "Democracy's Decline: Crying for Freedom," tells us this about the Freedom House report:

Freedom House classifies countries as “free”, “partly free” or “not free” by a range of indicators that reflect its belief that political liberty and human rights are interlinked. As well as the fairness of their electoral systems, countries are assessed for things like the integrity of judges and the independence of trade unions. Among the latest findings are that authoritarian regimes are not just more numerous; they are more confident and influential.

This map gives stark expression to the advance of tyranny (yes, that is the opposite of freedom) over the last decade.

It is good that the people who prepared this report call themselves Freedom House, not Democracy House. It is a disgrace, given all that political theorists have to teach, that there has been such enthusiasm for "democracy" and multi-party elections, in isolation of the other pre-requisites for liberty, among state department policy makers, journalists, the Bush White House, and now the Obama administration. Ronald Reagan spoke about freedom, a more substantive and less ambiguous good.

With the rise of dictators (Chavez), kleptocrats (Putin), and Islamocrats by the ballot box, democracy has been earning a justifiably bad reputation.

Semi-free countries, uncertain which direction to take, seem less convinced that the liberal path is the way of the future. And in the West, opinion-makers are quicker to acknowledge democracy’s drawbacks—and the apparent fact that contested elections do more harm than good when other preconditions for a well-functioning system are absent. It is a sign of the times that a British reporter, Humphrey Hawksley, has written a book with the title: “Democracy Kills: What’s So Good About the Vote?”.

A good start in correcting the misunderstandings that lead to these tragically false hopes for democracy would be for American college and university political science departments to clear out their Marxists and nihilists, and establish core courses that teach the religious and philosophical roots of modern liberty, as well as the founding and classic texts of American liberty, such as The Federalist Papers and de Tocqueville's Democracy in America.

Big Government and Self-Government

Patrick Henry in the Virginia House of Burgesses, 1851, 

speaking against the Stamp Act

One of my students in her final exam essay wrote, "Why should I trust my government if my government doesn't trust me?" She wrote these words in the context of reflecting on the political problem, viz., "How do you enable to government to restrain the governed while at the same time obliging it to restrain itself?"

Her question is at the heart of the liberal-conservative debate in America today, and the line of that very practical philosophical dispute is showing up in some surprising places of late. On January 19, 2010, the citizens of Massachusetts have the opportunity not only to fill the Senate seat recently vacated by Ted Kennedy, but also to pass a judgment on the political vision our present government is aggressively pursuing, often in opposition to the clear consensus of the American people. People's attention is focused on the current plans for health care reform, for combating what is supposed to be global warming, and for reviving the economy. Behind these plans, however, are fundamental questions concerning big government and self-government.


Liberals see people as fundamentally needy on the one hand and unworthy of being trusted to provide for one another and themselves on the other. Thus, privatizing Social Security would be a disaster. People would lose all their money in the stock market. Only the government can be trusted to steward people's retirement funds wisely. (Of course, they don't steward these funds at all. They spend them, and trust that they can pay us out of the contributions from our children and grandchildren, a formula for bankruptcy when the baby boomers move fully into retirement.)

And people certainly cannot be trusted to provide for their aged parents, so all the elderly must become wards of the state. This, of course, schools people in the view that their parents are, in the end, none of their concern. Liberals take the same view of children. Get them as early as possible into the public school system. If you want to homeschool your children, (a) you must be crazy and thus incompetent, and (b) the education you provide must be strictly regulated by the local public school authorities, regardless of how bad a job they themselves are doing educating children.

By contrast, conservatives trust people to manage their own affairs according to their own lights and preferences. This may not be wise for every people in the world, but it is certainly fitting for a free people such as we.

Aristotle says that a citizen in the proper sense of the word rules and is ruled in turn, as opposed to one who is a slave by nature who, by definition, requires direction from another. A true citizen, therefore, is not simply someone who enjoys a particular legal status, but is someone who by his character is capable of self-government. This is someone who has the intelligence, moral character, and practical judgment to make life decisions of sufficient wisdom for living a life of human flourishing along with others of similar character.

In short, a free citizen must be virtuous. For this reason, Aristotle identifies aristocracy (rule by the  virtuous few, i.e. the genuinely virtuous) as the best regime. The citizens under that regime rule and are ruled in turn with a view to the common good, or at least the common interest, not seeking their selfish advantage. In other words, the more self-government there is, the more good government there will be. The more virtue there is among a people, the more they will be governed by what Thomas Jefferson called the natural aristoi.

Thomas Jefferson also said, "That government governs best which governs least." He wrote those words in the context of a fairly virtuous people. He might well have added, "...having the least need to govern." The more virtue in a people, the less need for government over a people. The more virtuous a people is, the less they are in need of the restraining power of government. They are largely governed from within. As another of my students put it in her senior thesis, "Since justice by definition entails a just observance of law, law enforcers are less needed for a just people." The internal policemen of their character renders the need for outside policing to that extent unnecessary.

Thus, conservatives are concerned for public morality because they are concerned about people's capacity for liberty, i.e. self-government, both individually and corporately. Liberals, on the other hand, understand liberty as self-indulgence and post-modern autonomy, the freedom to construct one's own moral universe and live accordingly, provided that one does not "harm" anyone else (that provision being a completely groundless restriction within a post-modern frame of reference).

Conservatives are concerned to support personal virtue among the people (yes, it requires support, largely from religion, especially Christianity), so that they can live with the dignity of free people in a free republic. Liberals are happy to see people indulging themselves in any way they please while the government manages and provides for them in as many spheres of life as possible. Thus, American conservatism tends toward republican liberty, while progressive liberalism tends toward, well, benevolent totalitarianism, which in the end, because human nature is what it is, becomes simply totalitarianism.

Thus, the government of a free people can trust the people to govern their own affairs while it attends largely to what in principle they cannot do on their own. This is not to be confused with libertarianism, because it recognizes the need for virtue in the citizenry, and also that public virtue requires appropriate (not oppressive) public support and protection. The Apostle Paul wrote to Timothy that Christians should pray for their governments so that those governments would fulfill their divine calling as government--no less and no more--"that we may lead a peaceful and quiet life, godly and dignified in every way" (I Tim. 2:2). What Paul means by a peaceful and quiet life is the liberty to govern one's own affairs, and to take a hand in the affairs of one's community, including taking care of the poor. This requires godliness, and is a life of human dignity. Good government provides for this liberty.

When government does not trust the people it governs, the people they distrust are either a slavish people or a free people. If they are slavish, the government indeed should not trust them, but should nonetheless take steps to cultivate better character in them so that they can live more as free people. This is statesmanship. Government that simply continues in that distrust and uses it as an opportunity to grow itself is just a form of mastery, and, as such, is not a government at all.

If the people it distrusts is a free people, then, as my student said, that people has no reason at all to trust their government. That government views them as slavish and will attempt by a thousand measures to reduce them to servile dependence. The Declaration of Independence describes this as "a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism."

Some people are called to die for liberty. Some are called only to vote.

Rhetoric and Political Accomplishment

President Barack Obama came to office as the Golden Boy with the magic tongue capable of sending tingles up the legs of respected journalists as though they were ten year old girls at a Jonas Brothers concert. He would cry out, "We are the change we've been waiting for," and a concert stadium would go wild. Many thought, "Finally, a President who can talk! He speaks our language and speaks to our hearts."

A year into his presidency, we are in a good position to access his rhetoical ability.

This is no small matter. Rhetoric is one of the essential tools a democratic statesman needs for governing effectively. Rhetoric is the use of public speech—words that are well chosen and well spoken—to move people to agreement and to action. Francis Bacon called it the application of “reason to imagination for the better moving of the will” (Advancement of Learning II xviii 2).

The Presidents pictured above had various records of success in their ability to speak to the American people. George Bush was pretty good when he wanted to be. He was hot when he debated Michael Dukakis on television. But in office, he spoke of "the vision thing" as though it were of little importance. He lost the next election. His son, George W., was worse. In his second term, he pressed ahead with his policies, but gave almost no attention to bringing the voters along with him in understanding and commitment. As a consequence, his approval rating fell to the floor, Congress ignored him insofar as they could, and his political power diminished considerably.

Bill Clinton could talk. He was trained by actors, and carefully calculated his words, their delivery, and their emotional coloring. He connected with the people on a deep level. But, of course, this was squandered, because what agenda he had was paltry compared to his considerable abilities, and he wasted much of his opportunity defending himself against avoidable scandals.

Then there was Jimmy Carter, the man on the end who seems to be off on his own. It is no accident that he is not the leader of his party, even though he is a former President, alive, and writes books. At our time of multiple crises, he showed us a long, worried face, and scolded us for our malaise. Apparently, he did not actually use the word "malaise," but we all remember that he did, as it summarized nicely whatever he said in his public address that night, and so it stuck. Again, one term, but also lasting shame.

The Great Communicator of course is man who is not pictured: Ronald Reagan. He had a knack for going around the press, speaking directly to the American people about their concerns in familiar terms because he knew them well.

So what about Barack Obama? In office, he has come across as inappropriately cool, as, for example, when he (finally) spoke after the underwear bomber's failed attempt to bring down a plane over Detroit. He usually speaks in the dry and technical manner of a tenured university professor, i.e. one who knows more than anyone in the room, and who doesn't have to convince anyone of anything to keep his job. He seems emotionally detatched and socially aloof.

This style does not match his agenda. He and his Democratic allies in Congress have set out on an aggressive agenda of government intervention and control the likes of which we have not seen in two generations or more. Yet, he has not been able to bring the great middle along with him. Approval for his most treasured initiative, health care reform, stands today at 37%. Under Obama's government, the American people have actually become more conservative.

David Brooks, in his column "The Tea Party Teens," identifies the present governing class (as they also identify themselves) as "the educated class," and argues that the Tea Party movement is a passionate but informed rejection of everything that this governing class--that includes and is typified by President Obama--represents.

Every single idea associated with the educated class has grown more unpopular over the past year.

The educated class believes in global warming, so public skepticism about global warming is on the rise. The educated class supports abortion rights, so public opinion is shifting against them. The educated class supports gun control, so opposition to gun control is mounting.

The story is the same in foreign affairs. The educated class is internationalist, so isolationist sentiment is now at an all-time high, according to a Pew Research Center survey. The educated class believes in multilateral action, so the number of Americans who believe we should “go our own way” has risen sharply.

Commenting on Brooks, Noemie Emery emphasizes that the public recoil against the President's politics is substantive not only as to specific policies, but also as to the political theory underlying those policies.

While the liberal Left controls the White House along with both houses of Congress, the country it governs has moved to the Right. These phenomena are all interrelated: The country is moving Right in reaction to Obama's theories of governance, and Obama and the educated class are one and the same.

Michael Barone, also commenting on Brooks's column, remarks on how the 2008 Obama supporters were impressed largely with his style.

The Obama enthusiasts who dominated so much of the 2008 campaign cycle were motivated by style. The tea party protesters who dominated so much of 2009 were motivated by substance.

Remember those rapturous crowds that swooned at Barack Obama's rhetoric. "We are the change we are seeking," he proclaimed. "We will be able to look back and tell our children" that "this was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal." A lot of style there, but not very much substance. A Brookings Institution scholar who produced nothing more than that would soon be looking for a new job.

The great surprise of the Obama presidency has been the contrast between the enormity of his domestic policy ambitions in comparison with the rapid shrinkage of popular support for them on account not only of their inherent problems but also of his ineptitude in promoting them rhetorically. Obama's governing rhetoric has not matched the rhetoric of his campaign. Ill-crafted rhetoric in support of unpopular and even irksome policies will make Barack Obama an historically important one-term President.

Francis Bacon, Technology, and Modernity

If you are interested in further reflections on Francis Bacon, the problem of technology, and the crisis of modernity, go to my theological blog, Piety and Humanity. For example, there is this reflection on Perez Zagorin's account of his life in chapter two of his 1998 book, Francis Bacon, the chapter entitled, "Bacon's Two Lives."


Lytton Strachey's question, "Who has ever explained Francis Bacon?," still hangs over Bacon scholarship (Elizabeth and Essex, A Tragic History. Butler Press, 2007; p.9). Perez Zagorin identified the puzzle at the very outset of his book, a study of Bacon's life and thought entitled simply Francis Bacon (Princeton, 1998) :

Francis Bacon lived two separate but interconnected lives. One was the meditative, reserved life of a philosopher, scientific inquirer, and writer of genius, a thinker of soaring ambition and vast range whose project for the reconstruction of philosophy contained a new vision of science and its place in society. The other was the troubled insecure life of a courtier, professional lawyer, politician, royal servant, adviser, and minister to two sovereigns, Elizabeth I and James I, who from early youth to old age never ceased his quest for high position and the favor of the great (p.3).

He could have practiced law, a profession for which he trained at Gray's Inn. Indeed, many suggested that he solve his financial difficulties by pursuing that option, but he simply refused. He could have sought an academic position, but that would not have satisfied him. He desired political office. Though he combined both scientist and politician in his soul, he was fundamentally a man of politics. ...

Read on at "Francis Bacon's Very Political Life." Perhaps you have heard that Bacon was a godly example of devotion to both Christ and science? Perhaps you've heard that he was a selfless servant of enlightenment and human well-being with an inexplicable interest in practical politics? As they say in Brooklyn, "fahgettaboudit."

In addition, there will soon be a post on New York City, dung, and our dance with technology. How can you resist that? Really, it's like seeing Hans Zinsser's Rats, Lice, and History in a used book shop for 75¢ and not buying it. (You wouldn't do that, now would you?)

Progress and Its Discontents

This semester, beginning next week, I am leading six exceptional students at The King's College in a seminar on Francis Bacon's Invention of Modern Politics. We will be exploring Lord Verulam's plan to conquer nature for the relief of our estate, the benefits that have come of it, as well as the problems inherent in it. We will look closely and critically at Bacon's writings--The Great Instuaration, New Organon, New Atlantis, Essays--and then students will research the benefits and moral complications of subsequent technological developments.

Robert Faulkner, in his penetrating work on Bacon's artful and revolutionary project to reshape and redirect Western civilization, Francis Bacon and the Project of Progress, expresses this sober assessment nicely: "Now it seems that a thoughtful citizen of a modern country must be prepared to defend the benefits of progress, or at least to reconsider them while being aware of the defects as well as the advantages" (p.3).

For example, consider email. Most of us depend on it because we find it useful, and so we use it all the time. But we also sense a downside. What is that disturbing impulse we feel to be constantly checking our inboxes. That's not good. John Freeman explores the complexity of the technology in his book, The Tyranny of E-Mail: The Four-Thousand-Year Journey to Your Inbox. "E-mail might be cheaper, faster and more convenient, but its virtues also make us lazier, lonelier and less articulate."

Also have a look at "Louis c.k." claiming that Everything's Amazing and Nobody's Happy. Warning, this is very funny, and you may see yourself in one of the "spoiled idiots" he describes.



He's entertained by the fact that conservatives and Christians find his routine resonates with what they believe. What they like is clearly the call to moderation and contentment. Louis just despises them, but that's a sign that he doesn't understand either what he's saying or the conservatives and Christians. He himself is incoherent. He meant to condemn capitalism in this routine. He explains this to Opie and Anthony. (The second clip is better than the first, but blasphemous at points.) Yet capitalism is the economic system on which he depends for his lucrative career and high flying lifestyle. He also explains that he is not against technology. He just thinks we should chasten our expectations for it and have a little more peace while using it. This thought has clearly hit a nerve with people given the video's "viral" popularity. People are uncomfortably aware that while technology is good, it affects the way we see the world in ways that are morally unhealthy. And that is a subject worthy of study.

First Epistle to Tim

Dear Tim,

There are some who call you...Tim, right? Well, I can see you're a busy man, but I do want to respond to your comments on the post below, "Is It Incompetence or Sabotage?".

As the inspiration so to speak, of the post--in a personal email I directed David's attention to the Muir cartoon and the Politico piece he combined in his post--I must consider that your comments are directed at me as much as at David, since I consider his brief handling of the material very much in keeping with his usual high achievement. Hence the charge of unChristian writing and thinking--are these thought crimes in your estimation?--, and the unmannerly and unChristian error of mixing politics and faith that forms the central thrust of your plaint is pointed at me as well.

So you consider it "ironic" that the Titus 3 quote on being subject to principalities and powers hovers hard by the "very unchristian" criticism pouring forth from this blog. I notice in the same sentence the irony has turned to evil (assuming for the sake of the argument that what we are saying is evil)--someone who speaks evil of the president in the name of Christ or of Christianity is doing evil itself, or have I missed your meaning? You equate criticism with evil speaking, and evil speaking with political insurrection, and consider it antithetical to the teachings of our Lord and Savior, who called Herod--a political leader--a fox, and over turned the tables in the temple. You also implicitly equate the despotism known in antiquity with the self governance of post-Reformation, post-Enlightenment democracy, at least some of the values to which I assume you at least partly subscribe--equality before laws equally applied, the worth of individuals as individuals, natural law as the ground of natural right, the sovereignty of the people over their government servants--oh wait--that last one is the rub isn't it?

In your confusion, you have forgotten--or never knew--that in the Lockean liberal theory of politics, which Francis Fukuyama ably argued to be the basis and the high point of Western political achievement, individuals form governments for their own purposes. Governments exist for the sake of the people, not the other way around, as was the default assumption across the ancient world. The apostle Paul, from which the bulk of the political citations concerning "principalities and powers" flow, was concerned to shepherd the early churches past the suspicious and brutal idolaters of the Roman emperor and his minions. Paul's advice and teaching to the churches of the first century, under Roman dominion, makes sense to a culture based in slavery; indeed, not a few of the early adherents were slaves. What would your advice be to black slaves in say, the 1760's America; should they submit without complaint to their "masters"? In centuries in which the full implications of the intrinsic worth of every individual inherent in Christ's teachings unfolded, the understanding of the relation to the political order necessarily changed from that of those steeped in a society that accepted as matters of fact slavery and despotic rule. Would you bring back slavery, or do you long for an enlightened despotism headed by such as a Barack Hussein Obama? David and I certainly agree that despotism is the trajectory with this bunch in the White House. But respect for authority by citizens looks different in a small L liberal political culture than it does in an ancient despotism.

If you conflate Caesar and Obama in your mind--a philosophical tic you share with the One--you will miss the, for some, obvious differences between free government and despotism, and hence the range of thought, speech, and action open to free citizens of a free society. You seem to suggest that the ambit of political speech, thought, and action available to Christians in the present day should be circumscribed by that of the ancient world, as if the revelation of Christ through the writings of ancient authors also lock us into the political, social, and cultural understandings of the writers themselves. I don't think so, and neither did the writers of our Declaration and Constitution.

And thus, David and I will continue to be critical, ironic, insubordinate, and as large a pain to figures in positions of authority as we have been up to now, and we will not consider it evil-speaking or "insipient trash" (sic.), your Sojourner-inspired jeremiad to the contrary notwithstanding. I will have more to say in a further epistle. Until then Tim, take some wine for your sour stomach.

**************
David adds:

Thank you for your comments, Tim. The comments feature is there for discussion. Thank you also for identifying yourself, and please don't take Harold's bit 'o fun with the Monty Python connection the wrong way. It's healthier to join in the laughter, and carry on from there. (Here's the video for anyone who skipped the link.)



I guess it helps to put a face with a name, even if it is a randomly chosen one. Tim the Sorcerer at least is an impressive Scotsman.

I offer a partial justification for the Christian integrity of the blog and for vocal Christian opposition to the present government's policies in the post that follows above.

Harold I am eager to read these other epistles you have in mind. Let me say, friend, you're like a big jam doughnut with cream on the top. That is, I... I mean that, uh, like a doughnut your arrival gives us pleasure and your departure merely makes us hungry for more. (Oh, where have I heard that?)

Harold: LOL...is that one of yours Innes?

Our Liberal Overlords

Every so often, someone offers a flash of brilliance that illuminates the puzzling contours of the world. John Steele Gordon sheds helpful light of that sort on the way political liberals see the world. He calls that view "the liberal paradigm" ("Obama and the Liberal Paradigm," Wall Street Journal, Nov. 4, 2009), and it explains in large measure their passionate support for big government solutions to every human problem, and their hateful disdain for everyone who opposes their efforts.

The basic premise is that the population is divided into three groups. By far the largest group consists of ordinary people. They are good, God fearing and hard working. But they are also often ignorant of their true self-interest ("What's the matter with Kansas?") and thus easily misled. They are also politically weak and thus need to be protected from the second group, which is politically strong.

The second group, far smaller, are the affluent, successful businessmen, corporate executives and financiers. Capitalists in other words. They are the establishment and it is the establishment that, by definition, runs the country. They are, in the liberal paradigm, smart, ruthless and totally self-interested. They care only about personal gain.

And then there is the third group, those few, those happy few, that band of brothers, the educated and enlightened liberals, who understand what is really going on and want to help the members of the first group to live a better and more satisfying life. Unlike the establishment, which supposedly cares only for itself, liberals supposedly care for society as a whole and have no personal self-interest.

Thus the liberal paradigm divides the American body politic into sheep, wolves, and would-be shepherds. The shepherds must defeat the efforts of the wolves.

Gordon focuses on the liberal view of people as helplessly vulnerable to the wolf class. He says that through education and economic success, most people have entered the wolf class themselves, and so the majority no longer has need of progressive liberal protection. But I would like to draw attention to the way liberals understand themselves not as protectors, but as enlightened, and thus with a natural right to rule.

Liberals see themselves in the role of Plato's philosopher kings (The Republic, Book V, 473d-e; Book VII, 514a-521b). These are people who, on account of their love for the truth and their philosophic education understand justice and the nature of things in general, and so are uniquely positioned to govern public affairs. But problem is that liberals, who see themselves as the natural governing class in this way, are not philosophers. They flatter themselves. They are a mix of ideologues, technocrats, and utopians. Plato's philosopher king was none of these things.

In addition, because the philosopher king is a philosophic lover of wisdom, he is not interested in rule. The responsibilities of government are a distraction from his true love: further investigation of the good, the true, and the beautiful. His rule assumes also a public that is incapable of sober, intelligent reflection on public affairs with a view to the truth, i.e., self-government. While many populations are that way, ours is not. Aristotle said that for a people who are "similar in stock [to the rulers] and free," government that is most appropriate is "political rule" in which citizens rule and are ruled in turn (The Politics, 1277b7-16). He was describing what Lincoln called "government of the people, by the people, and for the people," where the people are free, not only by law, but also in character. The liberal preference for big government, however, is based on the view that, like the people chained to the wall in Plato's cave, people are in general incapable of taking care of themselves.

People who are incapable of self-government, people who need caretakers and overlords, who require nannys and stewards, he likens to natural slaves, people who are in themselves cannot direct their affairs for their own good. This appears to be how liberals see the American public. Hence their preference for constituitional change by Supreme Court re-interpretation instead of by popular amendment; hence, their preference for federal government power over government that is close to the people and responsive to them; hence, their resistance to the privatization of social security; hence, their preference for government controlled health insurance as opposed to a market based system.


There is still a strong, free spirit in the country. American are still unusually attached to the nobility of self-government. We can see this in the public unease over recent unprecedented levels of government spending, and in the collapsing public approval for a government run health care system. The upcoming vote on plans for that system will be the Waterloo of American liberty. Either we will keep a government for the protection of our liberties, or we will be kept by an overlord for our protection from all the dangers and pitfalls of life. But that overlord is a looming danger that overshadows all other dangers.

Justice

I teach Introduction to Politics. The topic of ultimate concern in political life is, of course, justice. The morally serious students at The King's College are eager to know what this is.

This is justice.



Now you know what justice is.

Humbling the One

Fouad Ajami has an eloquent and insightful account of Barack Obama's presidency so far. It builds on what he wrote last October in "Obama and the Politics of Crowds."

Here, in "Obama's Summer of Discontent," he repeats his point that, "His politics of charisma was reminiscent of of the Third World." The people invest all their hopes and all their authority in a charismatic leader who embodies them and who thus speaks and acts in their name without serious legal restraint. In fact it is just the sort of tyranny that grew out of the ancient democracies, and which the Founders of our republic resolved to avoid by means of the unique features of our liberal republic (federalism, representation, checks and balances, separation of powers).

But Obama and his most religiously devoted supporters have been disappointed with how difficult it has been for the President to realize all his beautiful hopes. Ajami explains that it because we are not a Third World "democracy."

American democracy has never been democracy by plebiscite, a process by which a leader is anointed, then the populace steps out of the way, and the anointed one puts his political program in place. In the American tradition, the "mandate of heaven" is gained and lost every day and people talk back to their leaders. They are not held in thrall by them. The leaders are not infallible or a breed apart. That way is the Third World way, the way it plays out in Arab and Latin American politics.

Barack Obama needs humbling, and the American people are just the ones to give it to him.

ObamaCare Means Lay Down Your Life

In the competing views of health care reform, we see the fruit of different political philosophies and different moral universes. When considering the public good, Democrats think more socially whereas Republicans are more individualistic in their approach to the question. In modern times, the social trump leads in the direction of totalitarianism, an all powerful state overseeing and directing all things for what it judges to be the good of the people (or so they say). Individual sovereignty leads increasingly to a destruction of moral community. In other words, they lead to Castro's Cuba and Capra's Potterville, respectively. The Founders of our republic envisioned neither one.

Betsy McCaughey, in "Obama's Health Rationer-in-Chief," shows how the social trump that neglects the importance of individual self-government and the inherent worth of every human being works its way out in the Obama administration's approach to managing scarce health care dollars from Washington instead of at the point of consumption.

It is horrifying, but at the same time revealing, that a man with this moral orientation would have such a prominent role in the formulation of our government's health care policy.

Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel, health adviser to President Barack Obama, is under scrutiny. As a bioethicist, he has written extensively about who should get medical care, who should decide, and whose life is worth saving. Dr. Emanuel is part of a school of thought that redefines a physician’s duty, insisting that it includes working for the greater good of society instead of focusing only on a patient’s needs. Many physicians find that view dangerous, and most Americans are likely to agree.

The health bills being pushed through Congress put important decisions in the hands of presidential appointees like Dr. Emanuel. They will decide what insurance plans cover, how much leeway your doctor will have, and what seniors get under Medicare. Dr. Emanuel, brother of White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel, has already been appointed to two key positions: health-policy adviser at the Office of Management and Budget and a member of the Federal Council on Comparative Effectiveness Research. He clearly will play a role guiding the White House's health initiative.

ObamaCare gives new meaning to the call to lay down your life for your country. It gives a perverse twist to Kennedy's noble call at the end of his 1961 inaugural address: "ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country."

Of course, I would like to re-produce the entire article, but I can only encourage you to read the whole thing in the Wall Street Journal.

Guns and Public Safety

New York City is a little safer today because an armed citizen with a steady hand blew away four armed men who were robbing his store. This account in the New York Times is moving.

They strode into the restaurant supply store in Harlem shortly after 3 p.m. on Thursday, four young men intent on robbery, one with a Glock 9-millimeter pistol, the police said. The place may have looked like an easy mark, a high-cash business with an owner in his 70s, known as a gentle, soft-spoken man.

But Charles Augusto Jr., the 72-year-old proprietor of the Kaplan Brothers Blue Flame Corporation, at 523 West 125th Street, near Amsterdam Avenue, had been robbed several times before, despite the fact that his shop is around the corner from the 26th Precinct station house on West 126th Street.

There were no customers in the store, only Mr. Augusto and two employees, a man and a woman. The police said the invaders announced a holdup, approached the two employees and tried to place plastic handcuffs on them. The male employee, a 35-year-old known in the community as J. B., struggled with the gunman, who then hit him on the head with the pistol.

Watching it happen, Mr. Augusto, whom neighborhood friends call Gus, rose from a chair 20 to 30 feet away and took out a loaded Winchester 12-gauge pump-action shotgun with a pistol-grip handle. The police said he bought it after a robbery 30 years ago.

Mr. Augusto, who has never been in trouble with the law, fired three blasts in rapid succession, the police said.

The first shot took down the gunman at the front. He died almost immediately, according to the police, who said he was 29 and had been arrested for gun possession in Queens last year.... Mr. Augusto’s other two blasts hit all three accomplices, who stumbled out the door, bleeding. One of them, a 21-year-old, staggered across 125th Street and collapsed in front of...one of the city’s biggest housing projects. ...[A]n ambulance rushed him to St. Luke’s-Roosevelt Hospital Center, where he was dead on arrival. The police said he had a record of arrests for weapons possession and robbery. Another wounded man left a blood trail that the police followed to 125th Street and Amsterdam Avenue. The fourth wounded man was picked up, on the basis of witness descriptions, at 128th Street and St. Nicholas Terrace. Both were taken to St. Luke’s.

This is a television report on the incident.



As the WPIX video above reports, Mr. Augusto's shotgun is unregistered, so he faces prosecution for violation of New York gun laws. The laws covering shotguns are more permissive than those pertaining to handguns, however. They require merely a permit, not a license. Furthermore, the New York Times reports, "Under long-established New York law, a person is allowed to use deadly physical force when he or she reasonably believes it is necessary to meet the imminent use of deadly physical force and there is no reasonable chance of retreating from the danger."

All the same, if more people were legally armed--at the very least in their homes and businesses--there would be less need for being armed. It's paradoxical, but true. The same logic applied to the Cold War standoff between the Warsaw Pact and NATO. The existence of nuclear weapons and the credible threat of their use in response to aggression preserved peace between the two alliances. As Robert Heinlein is reported to have said, "An armed society is a politie society."

John Locke, the chief theorist of our liberal democratic system of government and way of life, would view Mr. Augusto's actions as perfectly reasonable and defensible. In the Second Treatise of Government, he argues,

...it being reasonable and just, I should have a right to destroy that which threatens me with destruction: for, by the fundamental law of nature, man being to be preserved as much as possible, when all cannot be preserved, the safety of the innocent is to be preferred: and one may destroy a man who makes war upon him, or has discovered an enmity to his being, for the same reason that he may kill a wolf or a lion; because such men are not under the ties of the commonlaw of reason, have no other rule, but that of force and violence, and so may be treated as beasts of prey, those dangerous and noxious creatures, that will be sure to destroy him whenever he falls into their power.

And hence it is, that he who attempts to get another man into his absolute power, does thereby put himself into a state of war with him; it being to be understood as a declaration of a design upon his life: for I have reason to conclude, that he who would get me into his power without my consent, would use me as he pleased when he had got me there, and destroy me too when he had a fancy to it; for no body can desire to have me in his absolute power, unless it be to compel me by force to that which is against the right of my freedom, i.e. make me a slave. To be free from such force is the only security of my preservation; and reason bids me look on him, as an enemy to my preservation, who would take away that freedom which is the fence to it;...

This makes it lawful for a man to kill a thief, who has not in the least hurt him, nor declared any design upon his life, any farther than, by the use of force, so to get him in his power, as to take away his money, or what he pleases, from him; because using force, where he has no right, to get me into his power, let his pretence be what it will, I have no reason to suppose, that he, who would take away my liberty, would not, when he had me in his power, take away every thing else. And therefore it is lawful for me to treat him as one who has put himself into a state of war with me, i.e. kill him if I can; for to that hazard does he justly expose himself, whoever introduces a state of war, and is aggressor in it (sections 16-18).

In brief, anyone who would put me in his absolute power, for example at the point of a gun, should be assumed for the sake of one's self-preservation to have murderous intent. And so, being for the moment beyond the protective reach of the civil authorities, anyone in that situation has the moral right to protect himself with deadly force. Even viewing the matter from within a Christian moral framework, I am under no obligation to prefer the life of a murderous aggressor to my own or to that of my family or employees or, for that matter, any innocent person I find being threatened in that way.

This is the thinking of one local observer who was interviewed for the report: “If I were him, I would kill a dozen of them,” he said. “You have to protect your workers and your family. Case closed.”

The good sense of this statement is intuitively obvious. It follows that if people have the right to exercise that freedom, they should have the freedom to obtain the means to it, i.e., to own a gun. It follows in addition that training people in the proper use of fireams, so that in the event they should have to defend themselves they can do it responsibly and safely, is a public good. Instead of teaching children how to use condoms in order to make what some regard as inevitable teenaged sexual activity safer, the public schools (if we are to have public schools) should be training children in the use of firearms the same way they offer driver's education.

A Crash Course in Who We Are

I hope within the next few months (is that asking too much?) to take the civics test for my American citizenship. I will not study for it, of course. If I can't pass this test with a Ph.D. in political science, I don't deserve citizenship or any other kind of honor. But one cannot escape the irony that whereas people from other countries who apply for American citizenship must pass a test on American history and political institutions so that they can participate in our political process more intelligently, people who were born here and have the right to vote simply by virtue of having survived to eighteen years of age can be as abysmally ignorant of these matters as the government school system allows them to be (and that's pretty bad).

Recent developments in Washington--and I'll throw in the last 75 years as well--demonstrate that Americans in general are in need of a remedial course in our political principles. There are many institutions that are working on this national project in adult education. But most recently, David Corbin and Matthew Parks, who teach political science at The King's College and University of New Hampshire respectively, have started an effort in the blogosphere, aptly entitled republican101. Here is one of Prof. Corbin's posts that presents the gist of the blog.

Sarah Palin’s surprise announcement that she was resigning as Governor of Alaska amounted to another bad news day for Republicans. Every news day recently has seemed like a bad news day for Republicans. Which has led some to suggest that the party would do better to resemble its political adversary. This is bad advice. Republicans instead should do the following:

(1) Remember that before there were Republicans, there were republicans.

(2) Consider that the American people are a republican people, not a Republican people.

(3) Understand that this is a good thing.

(4) Begin to transform the Republican party into the republican party.

Well, what is a republican?

John Adams defined a republican as a species of man who ascribes to “an Empire of Laws, and not of men . . .in other words to that form of government which is best contrived to secure an impartial and exact execution of the laws.” Knowing that there was “an inexhaustible variety of Republics because the powers of society are capable of innumerable variations,” Adams endorsed a republican form of government held together by a regime that “introduces knowledge among the People, and inspires them with a conscious dignity, becoming Freemen.” For Adams, the most excellent form of government encourages excellence in both its leaders and its citizens.

How often has government at any level inspired dignity, excellence, and freedom in the past year?

You might be a republican if you’re still racking your brain.

And if you’re a discouraged Republican, you might think encouragingly about the prospect of the Republican party becoming republican again. If the American people are more republican than they are Republican, Republican politicians would do well to take note.