Ordered Liberty and the right to armsIncompatible or Inseparable?

Drawing its seminal inspiration from the William F. Buckley, Jr., of the 18th century, Edmund Burke, the conservative movement might be thought to have all but foresworn revolutionary intent. Although known for his stinging critique of the French Revolution’s abandonment of civil protections for life and property, Burke was, nonetheless, a philosophical supporter of the American Revolution. The colonists’ demand for representation epitomized the Whig tradition of opposing tyrannical governance and favoring a constitutional monarchy restrained by republican institutions.

But can one gerrymander Burke’s observations on the excesses of the French Revolution into a conservative case for gun control? That is just the case that Roger Williams University law professor Carl Bogus makes in his recent commentary (”Do we place our faith in law or guns,” The Providence Journal, Dec. 4) on the impending U.S. Supreme Court case, DC v. Heller. He argues that conservative justices should see gun control as a tool for the preservation of ordered liberty and recognize the preamble of the 2nd amendment as limiting the right to bear arms to those serving in a militia.

It is a uniquely positive development when academics mine the wealth of conservative thought in search of foundational principles for contemporary society. There is a plausible, if widely debated, thesis that ubiquitous firearms ownership is a destabilizing factor in society. Thus conservatives might favor a narrow reading of the 2nd amendment, allowing the police power to be more readily exerted over this perceived threat to public order. But this is an exceedingly simplistic view of the panoply of conservative prerogatives at stake.

Bogus’ claims represent an opportunistic reading of Burke teamed with a cribbed recitation of the history of the American founding and intervening world history. French peasants did not own firearms, which is why they stormed the Bastille - largely an armory and barely a prison in 1789. Burke’s quintessential chronicle of the descent into anarchy and tyranny of the First Republic clearly lays the blame upon the morally untethered abstractions of its philosophers, not on the armed precondition of its followers.

Bogus does distinguish between the American Revolution, which did not “seek to radically alter…society,” and destructive revolutions, such as the French Revolution as catalogued by Burke (and its Russian and Chinese “stepchildren”). But here we leave intellectual terra firma with Bogus’ attempt to tar the 2nd amendment with Mao’s observation that “political power grows out of the barrel of a gun.” The absurdity of aligning liberty interests in firearms with communist revolutions that helped secure tyranny in their wake by banning guns, turns Bogus’ serious argument about paramount conservative values into a farce.

In fact, it is the trajectory of gun ownership in the Soviet Union and China that give stellar contemporary example to the Founders’ belief that an armed populace, rather than threatening liberty, was the last best defense of the republic. Far more consonant with the founding vision than Mao’s truism would have been Lenin’s strategic understanding: “One man with a gun can control 100 without one.”

Misusing Mao, as a conservative literary crime, pales by comparison to misusing Madison. Bogus cites Madison’s opposition to Shays’ Rebellion as evidence that the Founders foreswore the “insurrectionist” premise, but apparently he imagines that American History stopped in 1786, before the Constitution had even been adopted.

Madison is a complex figure whose desire for a more strongly organized federal government during the post-revolutionary confederacy outweighed any sympathies he might have had for Shays’ grievances. But this provides no evidence that Madison thought widespread firearms ownership posed a threat of constant petty insurrection in early America; the facts are to the contrary.

Thus, resort to arms as a defense against any future tyrannical habit in the new national government was an explicit part of the case Madison made in defense of the proposed Constitution, writing only a year after Shays’ Rebellion in Federalist 46:

“Besides the advantage of being armed, which the Americans possess over the people of almost every other nation, the existence of subordinate governments, to which the people are attached, and by which the militia officers are appointed, forms a barrier against the enterprises of ambition, more insurmountable than any which a simple government of any form can admit of. Notwithstanding the military establishments in the several kingdoms of Europe, which are carried as far as the public resources will bear, the governments are afraid to trust the people with arms.”

If anything, with the memory of anti-tax insurgencies fresh in his mind, Madison must have believed the insurrectionist check on governmental ambition valid or, at very least, a necessary compromise. That is not to say that every legitimate gripe inspiring a call to arms represents a propitious occasion for anarchy. Nor, as Burke’s inheritors well know, is the defense of civil order to be simply laid aside at the invocation of liberty.

But respect for tradition is not a hidebound resistance to change, even revolutionary change. Burke saw the status quo social architecture as evolving over time from the nature of civil man - a literal inheritance not to be lightly discarded or frivolously spent but subject to gradual revision. He describes this process in his Reflections on the Revolution in France: “[B]y preserving the method of nature in the conduct of the state, in what we improve we are never wholly new; in what we retain are never wholly obsolete.”

While the stable social environment of “ordered liberty” is certainly a conservative value, reform can be a necessary incident to this desired state. At root, it is the likelihood that civil institutions protecting liberty and property may weather the change that informs conservative revolution.

These are cornerstone principles of the conservative understanding of liberty, which place conservatives and libertarians in close coalition. Those on the Left have long sought to find common ground on social issues with libertarians, but more fundamental libertarian beliefs in economic liberty and limited government have largely frustrated this effort - even if imperfect political accomplishment on the Right has left the Goldwater coalition discouraged. It is a creative twist for Professor Bogus instead to appeal to conservatives to defect leftward while leaving libertarians on the right flank. I am all ears to those who would join the conservative revolution, but, I have heard nothing from Professor Bogus to suggest that is what he really desires.

Brian Bishop is on the Board of Advisors of the Foundation for Intellectual Diversity and directs the Foundings Project for the Ocean State Policy Research Institute. The Foundings Project uses the organic lens of the United States and Rhode Island Constitutions, their text, structure, and history, to inform debate over contemporary public policy.