Political Philosophy

Reading the 2nd Amendment

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The meaning of words evolves over the centuries. This evolution causes confusion when contemporary readers try to understand the original meaning of old writing.

The verb “resent” for example, once meant to express emotion, good or bad, in response to the actions of others. In the 17th Century, a person might write honestly to a friend, “I deeply resent the wonderful box of chocolates you sent me.” A modern reader could easily misunderstand the meaning of “resent” in that sentence and believe that the writer felt angry at his friend.[1]

I think this same problem bedevils contemporary discussions of the 2nd Amendment. The meaning of key words and phrases in the passage evolved over the last two centuries. Applying modern definitions of these words obscures the original clear meaning of the amendment.

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“Public opinion is a lagging indicator.”

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. . . said Charles Krauthammer on TV today. He is right.

That’s one reason why weak surfers of public opinion like the Clintons should not be leaders. Effective leaders must be able to lead, which by definition means taking unpopular positions, based on nothing more than principle, some of the time, when the stakes are high. Lincoln did it. Churchill did it. FDR did it (on the war). Reagan did it. Bush Jr. did it and continues to do it.

Who among the current presidential candidates is capable of holding and defending unpopular positions for long periods when necessary? I don’t know if any of the Democrats can do it. Among the Republicans, I think Giuliani can do it. McCain: who knows. Romney and Thompson: maybe.

From the standpoint of leadership, Giuliani vs. any Democrat may be all the choice we need.

Representative Government Without Elections?

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Selection of a representative government doesn’t have to be done by voting. Given the downsides of voting with which we are all familiar, it might be worth considering alternative methods for choosing legislators.

A couple of such alternatives are presented here and here. (The first proposal is to select legislators by lottery; the second proposal suggests a variant on the lottery system that would treat selection of citizens for legislative service in the same way that we treat jury selection.)

I don’t know if the fact that these two proposals appeared as columns in Canadian newspapers is significant. I wonder why we don’t see more such proposals in the USA.

Of course the political class, whose livelihood is based on rent-seeking that would not be possible without elections, would oppose such reforms. So would many businesses, and even entire industries, that benefit from legislative largess. But that doesn’t mean the idea or replacing elections with something else shouldn’t be considered.

UPDATE: In the comments, Robert Schwartz explains why the columns I cited appeared in Canadian newspapers.

Children of Light, Children of Darkness

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The Atlantic Monthly has a sometimes thoughtful, at times irritating, article by Paul Elie on the late theologian, Reinhold Niebuhr, and the political struggle being waged by the Left, Middle and Right over his intellectual legacy. An excerpt:

“The biblical sense of history can make Niebhur seem like something other than a liberal. In the ’60’s, his religiosity made him suspect on the New Left, and in the years after his death, his work resonated with the thinkers who were turning against that era’s liberal reforms”

It wasn’t Niebuhr’s religiosity that made him suspect with the New Left but his anti-totalitarianism, something that a movement deeply afflicted with an authoritarian certitude and spasmodic nihilism could ill abide; indeed, they still seem to despise Niebuhr for his unwillingness to equivocate about Leftist tyranny. Elie is correct though, that the original Neoconservatives (the ones who actually made an intellectual journey from Left to Right) such as Norman Podhoretz had high regard for Niebuhr’s writings. I myself first heard of Niebuhr from reading David Stockman’s bitter memoir The Triumph of Politics. Stockman may have repudiated Ronald Reagan but he remained true, almost adulatory, to Niebuhr:

“The scales fell from my eyes as I turned those pages [ of Children of Light, Children of Darkness – ZP] Niebuhr was a withering critic of utopianism in every form. Man is incapable of perfection, he argued, because his estate as a free agent permits-indeed ensures -both good and evil…Through Niebuhr I dimly glimpsed the ultimate triumph of politics” ( Stockman,24).

I do not profess to be an expert on Reinhold Niebuhr or his philosophy, having read only one of his books, but the polemical war over Niebuhr that Elie critiques has, in my view, an air of ahistoricality to it. Perhaps with not the completely unhinged lunacy of the similar debate over Leo Strauss, but like Strauss, Niebuhr has been lifted by both sides out of the mid-20th century intellectual context that illuminated his ideas, in order to serve as a barricade for the political battle over Iraq and the Bush administration.

My gut reaction is that Niebuhr, were he alive today, would be writing things that would not sit well with some of his would-be reinterpreters and with more nuance and wisdom than for which his contemporary critics give him credit.

ADDENDUM:

Peter Beinart, who comes in for much criticism from Elie for the following link, on Reinhold Niebuhr.

Cross-posted at Zenpundit

What are You Going to Do About It?

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David Foster’s post got me to thinking about the ex-Mayor of Bogota. Unfortunately, my real world experiences are closer to this guy’s observations than what happened in Bogota. In general, I like the Mockus approach to re-establishing an atmosphere of intolerance for incivility. Being a libertarian, I prefer to rely on social opprobrium to discourage behavior that I think is fairly negative, but not negative enough to warrant giving the government more power to regulate.

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