Irrational Rationales

It's always been frustrating to me to hear supporters of a U.S. Administration dismiss criticism with nothing more than a perfunctory evaluation. I've become convinced that it is very easy for a leader's supporters to consider counter-arguments as somehow attacks on the President himself and therefore a sign of disloyalty. Paul Graham discusses how identity influences a debate and I'm inclined to agree with him.

What the fan-boys, which I'm wondering whether may be an appropriate term for the most extreme devotees, of an administration should understand is there are plenty of people who need to see the administration debate an issue; when they come out with a position and defend it as if it was perfect those people feel like they are being dictated too, cut off from the idea evaluation process. Do they expect the public to praise the announced policy as in, "Yea! We don't have to think anymore, the President will save us!"? There is something to be said for public debate, the collaboration towards a better idea.

"A well-regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State..."

"A well-regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State..."

The Second Amendment to the Constitution of the United States guarantees the "right of the people to keep and bear arms," but only after it couches the right in (to modern ears) an obscure prologue that would seem to lay out the context and purpose of the right. For a hundred years or more, constitutional scholars and courts have argued back and forth over whether the Second Amendment secures an individual right to keep and bear arms, or whether this right is a collective right that secures the prerogative of the State to establish a Militia not controlled by the federal govenment. In his book America's Constitution, Akhil Reed Amir analyzes this debate and concludes that both sides miss the point of the Founders' inclusion of the right to bear arms in the Bill of Rights.

Amir writes:

Beneath the words [of the Second Amendment] lay a profound skepticism about a permanent, hierarchical standing army that might not truly look like America. Such an army might come to embody a dangerous culture within a culture, a proto-military-industrial complex threatening republican equality and civilian supremacy. The amendment's root idea was not so much guns per se, or hunting, nor target shooting. Rather the core idea concerned the necessary link between democracy and the military: We, the People, must rule and must assure ourselves that our military will do our bidding rather than its own. According to the amendment, the best way to achieve this goal would be via a military that would represent and embody us -- the people, the voters, the democratic rulers of a "free State." Rather than placing full confidence in a standing army filled with aliens, convicts, vagrants, and mercenaries -- men who would not truly represent the electorate and who might well pursue their own agenda -- a sound republic should rely on its own armed citizens, a "Militia" of "the people." Thus, no Congress should be allowed to use its Article I, section 8 authority over the militia as a pretextual means of dissolving America's general military structure -- this was the core meaning of the operative "shall not be infringed" command. (p. 323)

Amir goes on to refer to this understaning of the Second Amendment as the republican reading, distinct from the two modern readings of states'-rights and individual-rights.

States' rights anachronistically read the "Militia" to mean the government (the paid professional officialdom) rather than the people (the ordinary citizens). Equally anachronistically, individual rights read "the people" to mean atomized private persons, each hunting in it's own private Idaho, rather than the citizenry acting collectively. But when the original Constitution spoke of "the people" rather than "persons," the collective connotation was primary. (p. 324)

The principle underlying the Second Amendment was the lynchpen to guaranteeing a free Republic against tyranny and run-away Armies. For the Founders, the militia were the people and the people were the militia. The idea was the same one that instituted and pushed juries as important safeguards to liberty: the people, through non-permanent, non-beauracratic institutions, would counter the power-consolidating tendancies of the standing organizations of government and therefore act as a check and balance. Just as the House and Senate would check one another in the Congress (legislative branch), juries would check the standing courts and judges (judicial branch), and the militia would check the standing federal armies (executive branch). Each federal branch had bicameralism built into it. "Founding-era militias were closely akin to Founding-era constitutional conventions, electorates, and jurors. In each context, state law helped define precise boundaries of 'the people,' sepcifying when and how the people could properly act. Yet these webs of state law did not thereby transform any of these entities into an ordinary government agency. Rather, in each case, the law enabled 'the people' to act outside ordinary governmental channels and theteby check the professional officialdom." (pp. 324-325)

Last year in a post analyzing constitutional remedies to prevent run-away presidential war powers, I said I was not prepared to suggest ways to secure the country against presidents who would utilize the military domestically in unconstitutional, dictatorial or totalitarian ways. The militia was the Founders' answer to this threat, and for the first one hundred years of the Republic, the militias functioned as the Founders expected. So what happened to the militias? In two words, the Civil War.

 

Amir explains:

 

[T]he Civil War and Reconstruction generated a powerful constitutional counternarrative to the (romanticized) Revolutionary War vision at the heart of the Founders' Second Amendment. The very birth-logic of the Reconstruction Amendments -- the process by which they came to be proposed and ratified -- depended onthe good offices (and good officers) of the Union Army. As constitutional events of the highest import, these amendments necessarily valorized the central army and called into question the anti-army ideology driving the Founders' Second Amendment. But even as Reconstruction Republicans buried their fathers' Second Amendment, they helped unearth a new understanding of its intriguing language. Reading the amendment's words in the light of their own lived experience, they deemphasized militias and states' rights whiel accentuating an individual right of all citizens -- women as well as men, nonvoters as well as voters, civilians as well as militiamen -- to keep guns in private homes for personal self-prtection.

 

The United States today has the finest, most profressional, best trained fighting force ever assembled. It can beat any enemy in war, and it has never been used to suppress American citizens. Perhaps individual rights and liberty are so interwoven into the American story and psyche that the Army could never be used against its own people. Perhaps the fact that the military is made up of American citizens who volunteer to server their neighbors means that the Army will always be the best of us, even proitecting us from ourselves. If this is the case, then there is nothing in the world that even the best crafted constitional provision can add by way of protection.

Why Polls Matter

The Bush Administration is well known for ignoring polls, especially the ones showing low approval ratings. While I'm sure they secretly basked in the glow when the ratings were sky-high after 9-11, no one was asking if he believed in polls either; the opposite of a "sunny weather" phenomenon, only getting asked about poll numbers when they are going down.

After reading a passage in chapter 9 of Machiavelli's "The Prince" (Concerning A Civil Principality), I wondered if Bush's fate was described 500 years ago. Here, a "prince" was any sovereign leader of a State and "people" meaning the citizens of a free state as opposed to the subjects of a monarchy.

The worst that a prince may expect from a hostile people is to be abandoned by them;

My question is whether this is exactly what happened to Bush after Katrina. Through his personal inaction and acceptance of the incompetence of others. The best quote of article is,

"Brownie, you're doing a heck of a job," Bush said.

Brown resigned 10 days later.

Bush was abandoned by the people. His stubbornness continues through Obama's fateful inauguration. Could it have triggered the next step (see Machiavelli chap 19 "That One Should Avoid Being Despised And Hated")?

So, why do polls matter? Consider another quote from the L.A. Times article on Bush's former aides and their take on his presidency.

In the months after the 9/11 attacks, Dimock said, when his polling asked for a single word to describe Bush's presidency, the most frequent responses were "leadership" and "strength." After Katrina, he said, "the top word was 'incompetent.' "

Bush liked to brush off bad poll numbers by saying that making tough decisions makes you unpopular. People weren't just disagreeing with his decisions, they were changing their opinion his ability to lead. So, like the proverbial baby and bath water, Bush's rejection of polls didn't just disregard the people's opinion of him but turned a blind eye to the people's disregard and rejection of his presidency.