Month: December 2008

Over at Brillianter, in the comments.  I’m not really buying the analogy to organized crime, since organized crime mostly only has the goal to make money, and operate black markets and rackets.  In crime, confrontation with authorities is to be avoided, because it’s bad for business.  It will inevitably happen, but it is a cost of doing business for criminal elements.  Ideological struggles are a different beast.

But I would echo many of the same problems with the ideology.  One problem our founding fathers did not have to deal with is that no one in the colonies elected the government of King George III, and we had no representation in the British Parliament.  To change their government, the only choice was revolution.  You had 1/3rd of the country, that would be 100 million people today, who actively supported a violent revolution, even if they weren’t directly fighting in it.  Do you think 100 million people today support overthrowing their elected government?  Would another 100 million be indifferent to it?

On an intellectual level I can understand the problem with popular sovereignty as the basis of governmental legitimacy, but I’ve never understood how anything else can really work in practice.  At some point, you have to come to terms with the fact that the people voted for this government.  The only way to fix that, which doesn’t involve a high degree of ugliness, is to convince them that it is not the government they actually want, and offer something better.  If they want a nanny government that takes care of them, and insulates them from ugliness in human nature, responsibility, and initiative, how is any piece of paper going saying the government can’t give it to them going to stand in the way over the long term?  I can understand not wanting to live like that, I certainly don’t, but before you even start talking about revolt, you need to deal with the problem of popular sovereignty.

Unfortunately, once bullets start flying, either one side or the other is going to be crushed.  Americans are not ones to back down, and once it crosses to violence, it’s for all the marbles.  If it comes to that, the people who elected the government will not only overwhelmingly agree with crushing the rebellion, but will acquiesce to a lot of measures to prevent such a thing from happening again.  But even if by chance the three percenters actually do win, what will they do with the people who elected the government they just overthrew?  What is the basis of your government’s legitimacy?  They say they will restore the founders constitution, but how?  Whether you like it or not, the population elected this government.  There’s no way to deal with that problem short of a purge, or a massive program of forcing people who don’t think the right way out of their homes so they can go live elsewhere.  Is that change you can believe in?

I’m not saying there are no circumstances that justify violently resisting an out of control government, but you have to be sure your means justify the ends, and that there are no other options.  I hear a lot about the means, but not much about the ends.  But whatever the ends, if you don’t get at least a sizable majority to support, or at least acquiesce to your goals, you don’t stand a chance of accomplishing anything other than bloodshed.  This isn’t the first election we’ve ever lost, and it will not be the last.  We will suffer setbacks.  Politics has to be played over the long haul.  We were successful at reversing some of the worst nonsense of the Clinton years, and it remains to be seen what Heller is going to yield.  Obama will be no picnic, but we have opposed this kind of political creature before, and we’ll oppose it again, this time with some new tools at our disposal.  I can’t say for sure that we will prevail in every battle, but in many ways we’re in better shape than we were in the early 90s.  No doubt I will be called hopelessly naive, but I also think it’s naive to believe that the situation is hopeless and can only be fixed through violence and threats of violence.  When have Americans ever backed down from a threat?