A friend of mine believes that at this point, there’s no way for America to avoid eventually becoming a totalitarian state. He isn’t some loony guy who only comes down from his cabin to barter animal hides for beef jerky. This is a serious thinker whose intelligence and foresight I deeply respect. Like me he’s a professional investor, so he gets paid to think of what will happen in the future. His knowledge of both history and economics are immense and like everyone in our business, the success of his predictive ability can be correlated to his financial success. By that measure, he certainly knows what he’s talking about.
We are on largely the same page with regard to the coming collapse of the current government. We both agree that it will be caused by the economic excesses of our free spending government, and the only issue we’re unsure of is the date. But I disagreed with him about impending totalitarianism because I didn’t think the American character could swallow something like that.
We talked about it at some length and when he offered it as an argument; I gave what’s probably considered the ‘standard’ American response to statements like that: “It’s damned difficult to impose tyrannical rule over a people who have 90 million firearms”. He appreciated this perspective; after all, he’s a ‘gun guy’ too. But in the end he said that he felt it was unpersuasive. “A stroke of a pen will fix that”. He said. “All they need is an economic riot and they will impose martial law and disarm the populace.”
I should tell you that while my friend appreciates the things that make America great better than many Americans, he’s not actually American. He’s an immigrant, who’s fled here from Europe while their economy and civilization slowly collapse and their culture becomes Muslim. He has a better knowledge of early American history than most Americans, and values the liberty it offers as highly as anyone. Still he’s not an American. So there are aspects of the American experience which I think his knowledge is more academic than empirical. This I think is the reason he believes what he does about our future.
When EJ Dionne misunderstands ‘gun culture’ it’s because of his insecurity about himself. He’s being self deluding and engaging in emotional projection. He looks at people carrying guns at an Obama rally and assumes that their political motives come from the same place that his motives do. It would never occur to him to have political principles that go beyond ‘self congratulation’. To him, all politics is about believing “I’m a good person because I believe in X.” So to him those people must be carrying guns for reasons that ultimately rest on that kind of flawed logic too.
For someone like him, every motive is based one’s own fragile ego and centered on the idea of making others think better of them. And when you believe that, consensus becomes the only truth, and popularity is the only moral law. So when EJ Dionne tries to back out the motives of the gun carriers, the only things which make any sense to him are ugly sentiments based on fear, intimidation and racism. That fear and racism exists only in the heart of EJ Dionne, but he doesn’t realize that. Instead he simply projects it onto others as their ‘obvious’ motive.
But none of that is true of my friend. The sort of thinking that EJ Dionne is engaging in is only sustainable when the consequences of failure are very low. Places like journalism or the academy allow it, but the world that my friend and I inhabit does not. If we’re wrong more often than we’re right we end up unemployed, so there is no room for the kind of intellectual sloppiness and childishness that’s become the standard fare of the political left.
On the contrary, my friend is a clear headed empiricist. He’s a scientist as much as any of us in the social sciences ever can be. His view is formed from an intimate understanding of history, a careful examination of incentives, and their thoughtful application to present events. And since that’s so, I believe he misunderstands the members of American Gun Culture, not because he’s projecting his emotional problems on them like EJ Dionne, but only because he lacks experience with them.
“I don’t think you appreciate just how many American’s feel about their firearms.” I said to him. “After hurricane Katrina, 28 states passed laws preventing private firearm confiscation during an emergency, so if the federal government wants to disarm those people, they’ll have to get past the National Guard first. If they were to try anyway, Texas will almost certainly secede from the union. And the borders of Texas will probably be quickly expanded east to Georgia, north to Indiana, and west to California as well. You might end up with a civil war over it, but that’s a long way from a totalitarian regime.”
At this point one of the spectators to our conversation chimed in:
“Well a few civilian gun owners will never be able to stand up to the US Army.” he said.
“I don’t think they’ll have to. The US Army will very likely be on the side of the gun owners. They’re overwhelmingly pro-gun…because they understand that it’s pro-liberty. It’s only the politicians who aren’t. Besides, I think you misunderstand the nature of the problem here. No one is talking about suburban duck hunters squaring off against the 1st Cavalry. They don’t have to defeat the Army; they just have to not give up their guns. Even if the vast majority of them surrender their arms and only the ‘fanatics’ keep them, there is no way you can maintain martial law when your troops are being sniped at by 3 million people with deer rifles. They mayhem would be uncontrollable.
Also, even if the Army doesn’t secede along with Texas, I think it’s pretty unlikely that you’ll be able to get them to do what you want them too in a situation like that. They don’t have to obey illegal commands and it’s hard to see how disarming the populace isn’t directly illegal. Certainly in those states that have a law preventing it, it would be. US officers swear an oath to defend the constitution, not to be a useful tool to a tyrant who wants to use them to shred it.”
Besides” I said, “You can’t make a people ‘un-free’ when the idea of freedom is the only thing making them a people. This is central to the idea of being an American. And the idea of being American is really all we have holding us together. In Europe one belongs to a tribe by birth, it can’t be taken away from you. But our only tribe in America is based around an idea. The members of American gun culture are completely unwilling to compromise on that idea. They know the only way you can keep your liberty is if you’re prepared to prevent people from taking it from you by force. Sometimes just being prepared to fight is enough, and the actual fight isn’t necessary. But make no mistake; they’ll fight if they have to.
That’s why the people like EJ Dionne all fear them like they do. Those people want to be able to use talk to separate the general population from their liberty. That’s why they keep insisting that the guns be removed from the debate. It’s why they use ridicule and hyperbole and elitist sneering to try and talk them into it. But even in the face of being maligned by the elite media, American gun culture still refuses to disarm. ‘You can have my gun when you pry it from my cold dead hands’ isn’t just a sound bite to these people. They would really rather be dead than live as slaves. Most leftists are really cowards, so hopefully that commitment is enough to make the actual battle unnecessary.”
My friend agreed that it was a persuasive point, and said that he hopes I’m right. But his natural cynicism prevents him from agreeing that it will play out that way. I appreciated that; nothing wrong with taking a cynical view in my book. What I didn’t tell him was in the end I’m a cynic too. And although I really believe all the things I said to him, I’ll still keep extra ammo around just in case.
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