I have been accused of being a conservative, mostly on the grounds that I believe that the Second Amendment means what it says, and that the Founders knew what they were doing when they wrote it and ratified it.
I deny the charge.
I enter into evidence the deposition of F.A. Hayek, who witnessed the rise of socialism and its demon twin Communism over the middle of the twentieth century in Europe:
I use throughout the term “liberal” in the original, nineteenth-century sense in which it is still current in Britain. In current American usage it often means very nearly the opposite of this. It has been part of the camouflage of leftish movements in this country, helped by the muddleheadedness of many who really believe in liberty, that “liberal” has come to mean the advocacy of almost every kind of government control.
…
A conservative movement, by its very nature, is bound to be a defender of established privilege and to lean on the power of government for the protection of privilege. The essence of the liberal position, however, is the denial of all privilege, if privilege is understood in its proper and original meaning of the state granting and protecting rights to some which are not available on equal terms to others.
– Hayek, F.A., The Road to Serfdom, “Forward to the 1956 American Paperback Edition”
Reprinted in Bartley (ed.), The Collected Works of F.A. Hayek, Volume 2, University of Chicago Press, 2007, p. 46.
Moreover:
Conservatism proper is a legitimate, probably necessary, and certainly widespread attitude of opposition to drastic change. It has, since the French Revolution, for a century and a half played an important role in European politics. Until the rise of socialism its opposite was liberalism. There is nothing corresponding to this conflict in the history of the United States, because what in Europe was called “liberalism” was here the common tradition on which the American polity had been built: thus the defender of the American tradition was a liberal in the European sense.
…
Let me now state what seems to me the decisive objection to any conservatism which deserves to be called such. It is that by its very nature it cannot offer an alternative to the direction in which we are moving. It may succeed by its resistance to current tendencies in slowing down undesirable developments, but, since it does not indicate another direction, it cannot prevent their continuance. It has, for this reason, invariably been the fate of conservatism to be dragged along a path not of its own choosing.
– Hayek, F.A., The Constitution of Liberty, “Why I am Not a Conservative”, University of Chicago Press, 1960
[Emphasis mine.]
I very seriously object to being called a “conservative”, especially on account of holding a position which is all about “empowering individuals”, including individuals who belong to groups that have traditionally been oppressed by conservatives, such as blacks, women, the disabled, and gays.
I object to being called a “libertarian” on the grounds that I like having a strong central government; I simply want it to exercise its enumerated powers, and no more; and I want it to rigorously respect at least my enumerated rights.
I acknowledge that I am not current on libertarian thinking, so I may be wrong here. Nevertheless:
I kind of regard strict libertarians the way I do the Amish: they are hothouse flowers that flourish only because the rest of us provide an environment where they can do so. I strongly suspect that if everyone lived as they do, we would in general have a far lower standard of living (lower with the Amish than with libertarians, though.)
Still, while I’m not tempted to be Amish, I do admire the stance that honest libertarians take. I believe that being a libertarian requires an exceptionally high degree of self-discipline, and this is why I think libertarianism would fail: most people are simply not capable of it; I’m pretty sure I’m not.
[Braces self for comment flood by enraged libertarians. But what leaves me weak with terror is the prospect of drive-by shunnings from the Amish.]
Once again, I find I cannot resist linking to Eric S. Raymond’s essay, “Ethics From the Barrel of a Gun“. To the degree that I’m libertarian, I caught it from Raymond. The lessons he teaches here are:
- it all comes down to you. No one’s finger is on the trigger but your own.
- Never count on being able to undo your choices. If you shoot someone through the heart, dead is dead.
- The universe doesn’t care about motives. If your gun has an accidental discharge while pointed an unsafe direction, the bullet will kill just as dead as if you had been aiming the shot.
- Right choices are possible, and the ordinary judgment of ordinary (wo)men is sufficient to make them. We can, truly, embrace our power and our responsibility to make life-or-death decisions, rather than fearing both.
Raymond continues:
To believe one is incompetent to bear arms is, therefore, to live in corroding and almost always needless fear of the self — in fact, to affirm oneself a moral coward. A state further from “the dignity of a free man” would be rather hard to imagine. It is as a way of exorcising this demon, of reclaiming for ourselves the dignity and courage and ethical self-confidence of free (wo)men that the bearing of personal arms, is, ultimately, most important.
…
We can, truly, embrace our power and our responsibility to make life-or-death decisions, rather than fearing both. We can accept our ultimate responsibility for our own actions. We can know (not just intellectually, but in the sinew of experience) that we are fit to choose.
And not only can we — we must. The Founding Fathers of the United States understood why. If we fail this test, we fail not only in private virtue but consequently in our capacity to make public choices. Rudderless, lacking an earned and grounded faith in ourselves, we can only drift — increasingly helpless to summon even the will to resist predators and tyrants (let alone the capability to do so).
[I have slightly reorganized Raymond's paragraphs for my purposes. Read the whole thing; this should be a standard text in Citizenship Class, perhaps as a prerequisite for Militia Training.]