Cases up, deaths down
From Issues and Insights:
It's getting rare to find reporting that focuses on hospitalizations and deaths instead of whatever they mean these days by "case counts," but it's out there if you hunt hard enough. Bloomberg started carrying daily updated charts many months ago. I check them often to compare the 7-day-average "case" trends against the "death" trends: big uptick in cases, small impact in deaths.
On the other hand, in just the last couple of months I've learned of two friends-of-friends in their 60s or 70s who died of COVID: both were unvaccinated, and neither pursued monoclonal antibody treatments. I don't get it. Texas Governor Abbott just announced this week that he was opening a number of outpatient antibody infusion clinics, but no one I talk to seems to have heard of the treatment at all, though it's FDA-approved and seems to work brilliantly. There's a nearly complete press blackout on the subject. It has to be administered fairly early; you can't wait until you're in dire straits and hospitalized.
West's Founding IX: Moral Laws
We are reaching the heart of what interested me about this book: the refutation of many scholars, whose work has influenced my own understanding, who held that the Founders had not meant for the government to morally shape individuals as a matter of respect for individual liberty. West is going after some big players here, including Gordon Wood, Alan Gibson, Harvey Mansfield, and Peter Onuf; he is also partly rejecting Thomas Pangle, Jean Yarbrough, and even Leo Strauss (to whom he is obviously philosophically aligned to some degree, but whose arguments he finds flaws with on several occasions).
West is doing it right, too: not offering a different interpretation, but offering new textual evidence that seems clear-cut on the point. It is possible that he is leaving things out; for example, at one point he offers an argument that the Founders often aimed at a generalized Christianity, but he doesn't mention Jefferson's well-known kind words about Islam. Now, those words were more foreign policy and diplomacy than anything else, and there is more to the story. Still, the fact that it goes unmentioned makes me wonder what else he has omitted that might not fit his vision.
The silence proves nothing, however; his actual inclusions are very impressive.
One of them has limits he is up-front about. He quotes John Locke on the 'four kinds of moral law,' and notes that there is no evidence he knows of that the Founders used this concept (though some of them read the book in which it is mentioned). (188-9) Rather, West says, he is bringing it up to give us a framework for considering how the Founders' actions can be interpreted. Locke is himself following Aquinas' tradition for the most part, which West doesn't mention at all.
Locke's four laws are:
1) Divine Revelation ("Eternal Law" for Aquinas)
2) Natural Law ("Natural Law" for Aquinas)
3) Civil Law ("Human Law" for Aquinas)
4) "The law of fashion and private censure" (This is not a kind of law for Aquinas, but rather the domain of honor and shame)
For the first, he has citations even from Jefferson that a foundation on the divine is the only firm foundation for the defense of liberty. (190-1). Divine law is known to us only by revelation, and reason cannot access it directly.
Natural law is derived by reason from what is observed about Creation; to know God's works is to learn something about God and God's intentions. What reason can derive about the moral structure of the world is of the second water, but it is still higher than man-made civil law. Human-made laws that violate natural law are and ought to be void; as we have seen throughout, the Founders thought a system of civil law that violated natural rights ought to be overthrown.
Civil law is the least interesting category. It should serve the natural law by spelling out consequences for violating the natural rights of others, and by offering non-violent ways of settling disputes ('torts,' for example). Here too is public education, which is supposed to shape and train the virtues in the hope of raising up citizens fit for a free society, its offices, and its duties.
The fourth category is one that I wouldn't normally think of as being a sort of law, but West makes a good case that the Founders might have done. As he points out, the Founders used this a lot to try to shape moral society through praise, condemnation, celebratory speeches, funerary speeches, honors, shames, and so and and so forth.
West is also good on the limits of Enlightenment thought in the view of the Founders. A lot of scholars view the Founding as an Enlightenment project. West shows that the Founders, though aware of the Enlightenment and interested in it, were also skeptical of how far pure reason could take you. He has good citations to Jefferson, Adams, Madison, and Washington's Farewell Address. (198-200)
So, if the ultimate metaphysical ground for natural law is the divine law, ought government to promote religion? West argues that the Founders were strongly in favor of this almost across the board; he gives an argument that Washington thought the government should promote religion even if it were thought to be a false religion rather than to leave the common people without a divine warrant to encourage their practicing of good habits. (Confer with Aristotle's arguments, well known to readers of this page, that virtue is a kind of habituation of one's character through practice until excellence becomes habitual.)
West concludes that the Founders were open to government promoting religion, and less open to government supporting a particular religion. They defended free exercise, but did not defend the idea that all religions were equally deserving of support from the government. As Tom noted in the comments below, states did in fact have state religions at and after the Founding. West argues that, at the Federal level, there were three basic approaches to what ought to be done:
1) A specific Protestant denomination;
2) "[W]hat Adams called 'the general principles of Christianity'"
3) "[T]he God of Liberty who endows all men with inalienable rights, who is identified neither as biblical nor anti-biblical." (212)
Perhaps other approaches are possible, but that is what he thinks the Founders did.
The chapter closes with some other clear-cut encouragements by the Founders in the direction of actively using government to develop citizen virtue. The strongest one is militia service, which is meant to inculcate courage but also the sense that the defense of the free state is a personal duty of every citizen. Jefferson thought we should all carry guns, and use them regularly:
"A strong body makes the mind strong. As to the species of exercise, I advise the gun. While this gives moderate exercise to the body, it gives boldness, enterprise, and independence to the mind... Let your gun therefore be the constant companion of your walks." (216) Jefferson means here taking walks in the country, and shooting small game and birds-a-wing over land. There are too many people for that today, and too many cities, but it was common practice even among proto-environmentalists like Aldo Leopold in his A Sand County Almanac.
That also brings to my mind my favorite quote from Francis Parkman, one of America's great early naturists and educators. "For the student there is, in its season, no better place than the saddle, and no better companion than the rifle or the oar."
I am convinced, with only the reservation mentioned above, that the Founders were hugely interested in shaping American moral character in salutatory directions. They could adopt this without much fear because they had an idea of the good to which 'salutatory' pointed that was rooted in natural law. The great hazard of a similar movement today -- that 'health' would become aligned with the interests of the state and its powerful corporate bedmates -- was not present because of a robust, rooted philosophical tradition.
Rogues in the House
The title of one of REH's Conan stories, and also this song by a band called Ironsword.
Aristotle On Shame
As regards a weekend discussion at AVI's, shame actually functions similarly to justice-as-lawfulness in Aristotle's ethics. Yet he is much less willing to assert that shame's encouragement of virtuous behavior is a kind of virtue than that justice-as-lawfulness is at least sort-of like virtue.
Shame should not be described as a virtue; for it is more like a feeling than a state of character. It is defined, at any rate, as a kind of fear of dishonour, and produces an effect similar to that produced by fear of danger; for people who feel disgraced blush, and those who fear death turn pale. Both, therefore, seem to be in a sense bodily conditions, which is thought to be characteristic of feeling rather than of a state of character.The feeling is not becoming to every age, but only to youth. For we think young people should be prone to the feeling of shame because they live by feeling and therefore commit many errors, but are restrained by shame; and we praise young people who are prone to this feeling, but an older person no one would praise for being prone to the sense of disgrace, since we think he should not do anything that need cause this sense. For the sense of disgrace is not even characteristic of a good man, since it is consequent on bad actions (for such actions should not be done; and if some actions are disgraceful in very truth and others only according to common opinion, this makes no difference; for neither class of actions should be done, so that no disgrace should be felt); and it is a mark of a bad man even to be such as to do any disgraceful action. To be so constituted as to feel disgraced if one does such an action, and for this reason to think oneself good, is absurd; for it is for voluntary actions that shame is felt, and the good man will never voluntarily do bad actions. But shame may be said to be conditionally a good thing; if a good man does such actions, he will feel disgraced; but the virtues are not subject to such a qualification. And if shamelessness-not to be ashamed of doing base actions-is bad, that does not make it good to be ashamed of doing such actions. Continence too is not virtue, but a mixed sort of state; this will be shown later. Now, however, let us discuss justice.
In a way this is a strange conclusion, because justice-as-lawfulness is going to end up turning on either fear or shame: the coward is pushed to the front by law, but only because he fears being put to death for disobeying the law, or because he fears being shamed as a coward by his community. The law's requirement is a rational principle, though, whereas shame is merely an emotion -- one that might be rightly or wrongly felt.
Even so, it is 'conditionally a good thing,' shame -- the condition being that it produces right action. Virtue is not good only conditionally, because it produces right action essentially.
Georgia Update
Ballots rejected by the machines were returned to election poll workers, who were allowed to alter them and then have them count. "In all, more than 5,000 of the 148,000 absentee ballots cast — or about 3% — in Georgia's largest county required some form of human intervention, according to logs obtained from Fulton County[,]"
The article notes that isn't enough to swing Georgia, which had a final margin of almost 13,000; but that's just one county, and it's just one mode of changing votes. (Recall, too, the Time Magazine 'Secret History of the 2020 Election' in which one of the things the self-described conspirators claimed to have done was to have recruited an "army" of poll workers on their side.)
West's Founding VIII: That the Founders Intended to Develop Public Morality
So we begin Part II of West's book, "The Moral Conditions of Freedom." This first chapter is devoted to simply proving, against a host of leading scholars, that the Founders took it to be part of the purpose of government to inculcate virtue among the citizens. West accomplishes this by quotations from founding documents and charters.
He begins with three documents that focus on the education of the citizenry, including the 1785 charter for the University of Georgia (quoted here). "As it is the distinguishing happiness of free governments that civil order should be the result of choice and not necessity, and that the common wishes of the people become the laws of the land, their public prosperity and even existence very much depends upon suitably forming the minds and morals of their citizens. When the minds of people in general are viciously disposed and unprincipled and their conduct disorderly, a free government will be attended with greater confusions and with evils more horrid than the wild, uncultivated state of nature." (165-6)
Scholars have wrongly thought that 'liberty' and 'republicanism' -- or 'liberty' and 'virtue' -- were opposed to one another. The concept, as West reconstructs it through quotations to these scholars, is that liberty is about doing what you want; virtue is about doing what you ought (and republicanism, requiring virtue, ends up being a kind of freedom-that-binds-you, a paradox of sorts). Some go as far as suggesting that the Founders rejected, through their embrace of freedom of conscience, any notion that the government should try to train its citizenry towards virtue.
Returning to the state constitutions and other foundational documents, West shows many clear examples that this conception is wrong. In addition to The Federalist, he gives the 1776 Virginia Declaration of Rights: "no free government, or the blessings of liberty, can be preserved to any people but by a firm adherence to justice, moderation, temperance, frugality, and virtue, and by frequent recurrence to fundamental principles." (175) He finds similar language in Pennsylvania, Vermont, Massachusetts, and New Hampshire; and similar language to the opening quote from Georgia in North Carolina and Massachusetts.
Likewise above the state level, he has quotations from the 1776 resolution of the Continental Congress that the powers they were claiming were "for the preservation of internal peace, virtue, and good order, as well as for the defense of their lives, liberties, and properties[.]" (176) That puts the defense of natural rights -- life, liberty, property -- in the last and perhaps fundamental place, but raises the preservation of 'virtue' as well as 'peace and good order' to near parity.
This should be no surprise, West suggests, given that the Founders equated moral law with the very natural law they were intending to enshrine. Jefferson is quoted on his foreign policy, which he describes as "the moral law of our nature" which is "the moral law to which man has been subjected by his creator," adding, "The moral duties which exist between individual and individual in a state of nature accompany him into a state of society[.]" (177) Hamilton also: "the established rules of morality and justice are applicable to nations as well as to individuals; that the former as well as the latter are bound to keep their promises, to fulfill their engagements, to respect the rights of property..." is natural law, and also the moral law. (178)
Private virtue is not enough, given that not all are equally capable of virtue nor inclined to it; and so, moral institutions are required. (181-3). In this, West says, they are in agreement with "philosophers both ancient and modern." (184) He quotes a scholar who mentions Aristotle by name, but cites a different section than the one that occurs to me, to whit, Aristotle on the function of law with respect to justice:
Since the lawless man was seen to be unjust and the law-abiding man just, evidently all lawful acts are in a sense just acts; for the acts laid down by the legislative art are lawful, and each of these, we say, is just. Now the laws in their enactments on all subjects aim at the common advantage either of all or of the best or of those who hold power, or something of the sort; so that in one sense we call those acts just that tend to produce and preserve happiness and its components for the political society. And the law bids us do both the acts of a brave man (e.g. not to desert our post nor take to flight nor throw away our arms), and those of a temperate man (e.g. not to commit adultery nor to gratify one's lust), and those of a good-tempered man (e.g. not to strike another nor to speak evil), and similarly with regard to the other virtues and forms of wickedness, commanding some acts and forbidding others; and the rightly-framed law does this rightly, and the hastily conceived one less well. This form of justice, then, is complete virtue, but not absolutely, but in relation to our neighbour.... What the difference is between virtue and justice in this sense is plain from what we have said; they are the same but their essence is not the same[.]
What Aristotle means here is that the law should compel everyone to act as if they were virtuous. Thus, the coward will be enjoined to act as if he were brave, and punished if he does otherwise; the temperate and the intemperate will be required to act temperately, etc. This means that justice (i.e. lawfulness) and virtue are the same in terms of the conduct they produce, but not the same in essence: the virtuous man does it because he is virtuous, without compulsion, and thus is better than the lawful.
West notes an important difference in that the Founders separated public virtue from private virtue, leaving a great deal more leeway in private life. Not complete leeway, as he points out: even religious liberty is not unlimited in these charters, which say that it cannot excuse 'licentiousness.' (175-6, 180) Yet I believe he has successfully shown that the Founders thought of encouraging the virtues necessary for citizenship as a task that government and especially its educational systems both should and must undertake.
UPDATE: West doesn’t mention him, but the want/ought discussion of liberty and virtue is also present in fellow Enlightenment thinker Immanuel Kant. For Kant, what proves that a rational being is free and not driven like an animal by base desire is his ability to choose what he ought instead of what he wants. Even metaphysically freedom is proven by doing the virtuous thing instead of the desirable thing.
Farewell, Afghanistan
U.S. State Department advises all remaining Americans to leave Afghanistan "immediately," but also that they're on their own about doing it because the American government can't help them anymore.
The Most Serious of People
Coincident to the former President's titanic birthday bash (to which climate envoy John Kerry took his private jet), the Sturgis Motorcycle Rally is taking fire from the New York Times for the second year in a row. Iowahawk reports.
Olympic Nonsense
The gold medal karate match was won by the guy who got knocked out in it, because the actual winner was disqualified for having kicked too hard.
That's not how fighting works, guys. Even in We Are The World happy globalism land, if you got knocked out you're not the one who won the fight.
DOJ to Investigate Phoenix Police
Police in Phoenix had better be very circumspect in how they deal with any protests for a while.
In a news release, the department announced the “investigation will assess all types of use of force by PhxPD officers, including deadly force.
“The investigation will also seek to determine whether PhxPD engages in retaliatory activity against people for conduct protected by the First Amendment[.]"
Just a coincidence.
Intrigue in Saudi Arabia Threatens CIA Network
Here is an interesting story that has made the Swiss papers. (If you're curious about the URL, ".ch" is the country code for Switzerland, or "Confœderatio Helvetica" as they are properly known.)
The upshot is that the relatively recent shift in the Saudi royal family displaced a number of formerly powerful guys, some of whom had CIA ties as well as ties to Saudi intelligence. Now they're abroad, the Kingdom would like them back, and they're trying to avoid being sent home by filing lawsuits. These lawsuits entail revealing a lot they know about how the Agency has been operating in the Middle East -- much to the consternation of the United States government.
You probably won't read this story in the US press, which is slavishly devoted to the intelligence community. Nevertheless I have confirmed the details with Saudi contacts, who view the guy as a fugitive and are rather incensed that our government is meddling in his hoped-for extradition.
REH Was Right: Babylonian Edition
Ancient Babylon had an advanced form of mathematics we had thought was invented by Pythagoras.
The Eviction Moratorium as a Practical Test of West
West's book, which we have been examining, laid out three tests for justified revolution.
1) The ends of government are perverted, and,
2) Public liberty manifestly endangered, and,
3) All other means of redress are ineffectual.
Now the end of government is the defense of natural rights, and property is a natural right of the first water according to the Founders. The eviction moratorium not only forbids landlords from exercising their private property rights, it creates felony Federal crimes -- without legislation -- should they dare to do so. This is clearly perverse: the natural right is being not just refused, the natural right is being criminalized.
Public liberty is manifestly endangered by this. For one thing landlords are being bankrupted, causing them to lose the property that it was their natural right to possess and use. They are threatened with prison, a very pragmatic loss of liberty.
So what about condition three? The prior CDC moratorium was challenged in court, and ruled unconstitutional by the Sixth Circuit. Supreme Court Justice Kavanaugh affirmed this judgment in his dicta. (UPDATE: see Elise in the comments of the previous post for an alternative reading of what Kavanaugh did.) The Biden administration issued another CDC moratorium anyway, in spite of the courts, and admitting that the courts will probably reject this one too.
On Tuesday, President Biden said he's conferred with constitutional scholars, and the "bulk" of them say the most recent CDC order is "not likely to pass constitutional muster.""But," he added, "there are several key scholars who think that it may and it’s worth the effort."So Biden asked the CDC "to go back and consider other options that may be available to them.”“Whether that option will pass constitutional muster...I can’t tell you,” Biden said. “ I don’t know. There are a few scholars who say it will and others who say it’s not likely to.“But, at a minimum, by the time it gets litigated, it will probably give some additional time while we’re getting that $45 billion out to people who are, in fact, behind in the rent and don’t have the money.”
So what happens when we see that the other means of redress are in fact ineffectual? West quotes the Essex Result (of 1778):
"the equivalent every man receives, as a consideration for the rights he has surrendered [in leaving the state of nature to form a social compact]... consists principally in the security of his person and property... [F]or if the equivalent is taken back, those natural rights which were parted with to purchase it return to the original proprietor." (137)
Note the specific requirement to defend person and property. Both are being taken by force: their property is effectively seized, their rights over it at least temporarily void, and their persons threatened with felony prison terms if they disobey this lawless order. They went to the courts, obtained relief, and were denied it by executive usurpation.
Prudence may caution landlords to try the courts again, in the hope that the second time around the government might agree to restore their rights and perhaps compensate them for damages. If this is a transient harm, as the Declaration suggests, it might be borne in patience.
Nevertheless please note that it is exactly the kind of offense that dissolves the social contract under our founding theory, restores the right to resume the state of nature, throw off the government, and constitute a new one. The powers that be do not seem to understand that they are playing with fire.
West's Founding VII: Natural Rights and Public Policy
This will be the last section on Part I of West's book, which is a description of the political theory of the Founders as he understands it. Part II, "The Moral Considerations of Freedom," follows after.
Both foreign and domestic policy can be derived in a few short strokes once the principle is accepted that government's sole purpose is to secure the natural rights of the citizenry. In West's formulation, the Declaration lays out foreign policy succinctly when it speaks of "one people [dissolving] the political bands which have connected them with another, and [assuming] among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them[.]" A people have a right to do that; but because it is only a 'free and equal' station to which they are entitled, their new government has no right to interfere with any other except in cases of self-defense. (141)
West does not like the term "isolationism," which he describes as pejorative. Nevertheless he approves both of Hamilton's and Jefferson's refusal to join the French Revolution's attempt to export its ideology, and their criticisms of France for shifting into an ideology-exporting mode. (145) Washington's discussion of 'entangling alliances' (especially referring to France) was repeated by Jefferson in his own day, in spite of his pro-French leanings. (ibid) West's basic idea is that the natural rights theory requires America to mind its own business, leaving other nations to do whatever they do -- be they tyrannies or principalities -- so long as they do not threaten the citizens of the United States and their natural rights.
On domestic policy, West points out that the modern conception of law enforcement that focuses on police is a great departure from the Founding approach. In early America, there were no police departments. Law enforcement was a whole of government approach, but much more limited in what exactly it tried to regulate. The legislature passed laws, the executive brought indictments, the judiciary tried the case and if guilt was proved assigned back to the executive the execution of sentences. Yet only a very few things were taken to be matters of law requiring government action (and this mostly at the state level). Murder, robbery, and the like required the government to step in and protect the natural rights of citizens to be free of such things. In more minor cases, the legislature passed laws giving citizens access to the courts to sue each other for damages related to natural rights like property or reputation. Most of life did not involve the government. (150-1)
Nevertheless, West adds, "limited government did not mean weak government. Instead, government was to be strong in its proper sphere and not involved at all anywhere else." (153)
West is sharply critical of the contemporary approach to using laws to regulate every aspect of life, to try to prevent injury in advance (as e.g. via building codes). This ends up being destructive to the natural right of liberty by constraining people's every action in the course of their employment, and requiring them to submit proofs of their obedience to the government just from day to day. The Founders rejected this approach, he says, and only allowed harms that have already occurred to be treated at law. This served as an important limit on government power. (154)
The most important aspect of the rule of law, and the one we are seeing lost today, is equality of the enforcement of the law. Just yesterday we were treated to the spectacle of a Democratic governor in the state of New York being found by the Attorney General to have violated numerous laws yet being charged with violating none of them. This is a double failure: on the one hand he is entitled to a presumption of innocence which she denied him in her press conference declaring his guilt; on the other, he will not face the hazard to liberty and property before the courts that his (alleged) violation of his victims rights entitled them to see him run. Likewise we see people who have attacked Federal buildings in Portland released without charges, night after night, while people involved in the Capitol incursion on 6 January held without bail for many months, while Congressional hearings declaring their guilt are held and new powers are granted to police to pursue such people. Likewise, too, we have seen how the DOJ handles cases against Clintons and their allies versus Trumps and theirs.
What is to confine the government here? West points out that the idea of separation of powers and federalism were meant to be functional. Natural law theory does not actually require either one, but having the powers separated was supposed to make violations of equality before the law less likely. Federalism was supposed to restrain both states and more importantly the Federal power by decreasing its sphere. Concentration of power makes abuse of power more likely. (160-1)
How about the Bill of Rights? Madison mocked what he called 'parchment protections,' and Hamilton according to West agreed. (161) However, West says, these guarantees were 'not totally ineffectual' for as long as the political theory of the Founders prevailed. (162) Only once it was lost among the elite as a guiding light did these statements of immunities and rights become things that the courts would not enforce, and that other officials would ignore at their pleasure.
Just yesterday, Joe Biden announced he was extending a program limiting the property rights of landlords in spite of the fact that the Supreme Court had said that was unconstitutional without further action from Congress; they are doing it anyway, because who cares what the Supreme Court says about the constitutional rights of people like landlords? The Court may come back and say it again, but until they get around to it power to limit the natural right to property is unconstrained; and it may just be violated again after a second ruling as easily as after a first. This shows both that the Founding political theory has been rejected by the government, but also that Madison and Hamilton were right that these 'parchment protections' do not by themselves secure any of our rights. They must be enforced by living men.
West's Founding VI: Right of Revolution
This is a section of fundamental importance that he treats very briefly. He shows through citations to the Declaration of Independence, New Hampshire's constitution and the preamble to New Jersey's 1776 constitution that the right to revolution is firmly established in the founding documents. (127-8) I'm going to quote the latter two because they are not as immediately familiar.
NH: "whenever the ends of government are perverted, and public liberty manifestly endangered, and all other means of redress are ineffectual, the people may, and of right ought, to reform the old, or establish a new government. The doctrine of nonresistance against arbitrary power and oppression is absurd, slavish, and destructive of the good and happiness of mankind." (128)
NJ: "allegiance and protection are, in the nature of things, reciprocal ties, each equally depending upon the other, and liable to be dissolved by the others being refused or withdrawn." (ibid)
West points out that this is not license for any minority to reject a government because it disapproves of the laws or loses a legitimate election (even a hotly contested and strange one like the election of 1860). The election of an opposing party does not justify revolution; but if that new government should violate its duty to protect and secure the natural rights of the people, it can.
The New Hampshire constitutional language is very nice. It establishes three conditions that all have to apply before the revolution can be justified.
1) The ends of government are perverted, and,
2) Public liberty manifestly endangered, and,
3) All other means of redress are ineffectual.
Our current case satisfies the first two of these, but we are still trying 'other means of redress,' as we ought to do. The ends of government are obviously perverted in the present case, where a government feels that public health might require mandatory vaccinations and lockdowns but also is allowing vast numbers of people with the very disease they fear to enter the United States illegally, and then is shipping them around the nation. The ends are perverted when we see (as mentioned yesterday) rioters who burn our cities let free by prosecutors, but those who tried to defend home and community persecuted and ruined under color of law. The ends are perverted when the national security state is turned into a partisan weapon, as the National Strategy to Counter Domestic Terrorism explicitly does (and in the absence of actual terrorism). The ends are perverted, too, when the executive and judicial branches collude to usurp the authority of state legislatures to determine election laws, and thus (demonstrably, and quite outside of any need to establish fraud in the election) decide elections outside of the legal and constitutional framework. The reader can easily add others.
The public liberty has been under increasing threat -- restrictions on religious free exercise; freedom of speech under constant attack by the unconstitutional union of corporate and government power to suppress rights the government is forbidden to suppress; a President who speaks of banning all semi-automatic weapons in direct violation of the Heller decision and therefore of the 2nd Amendment; a similar government/corporate conspiracy to vacate 4th Amendment privacy protections; etc. Again, the reader can easily add to this list.
We are saved from revolution in the moment by the third criterion, the pursuit of other means of redress. Audits to establish the facts about weaknesses in our election systems, state legislatures' reassertion of their right to make laws to protect both voting rights and election security, and court cases to challenge unconstitutional acts by the Federal and state governments are such means. These are peaceful and lawful, and it is right and proper to pursue them.
Note, however, that the New Hampshire language follows the Declaration in asserting that -- should all these conditions be satisfied -- revolution is not merely a right but a duty. "The people may, and of right ought," they said in New Hampshire; the Declaration, just after the discussion of prudential reasons to suffer ills as long as they may prove transient, adds that if the ills are not transient and sufferable the people have both the right and the duty.
West points out the Declaration's language on the need for caution and patience. "Prudence indeed will dictate that governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes. And accordingly all experience has shown that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed." (129) Prudence, the Aristotelian virtue, is the guide here; and West says that "[o]nly prudence can judge how far 'evils are sufferable' in the unique circumstances of a particular time and place.” (ibid)
Let us hope that Prudence guides us wisely; and that those in power find at least a shadow or reflection of that virtue, and have the wisdom not to prevent the success of our efforts to seek redress through peaceful means.
Painless
A fourth police officer who responded to the Capitol riot on 6 January has committed suicide. That's statistically unlikely, points out PJ Media.
The MPD has 3,800 officers, meaning that the force has had a suicide rate of just over 4 per 1,000 in just the last few months.
In 2019, the national suicide rate was about 0.14 per 1,000.
Even with 2020’s higher suicide rate (we couldn’t find final figures in time for today’s column), an MPD officer is about 25 times more likely to die by their own hand than a typical American.
The ratio skews even more towards the extreme when you consider that not nearly every one of the MPD’s 3,800 officers responded to the riot.
But who’s going to investigate? The same MPD that’s taken such poor care of its own officers? The FBI that may have enticed and entrapped protestors into becoming rioters?
It's easy to imagine the mafia agreeing to eliminate Jeffrey Epstein at the behest of powerful people who could provide useful favors, and also political protection from any investigation (the official finding was, of course, suicide). The cascade failure of prison security systems meant to prevent suicides also made it look much more like murder than like a suicide.
It's pretty hard to believe in a similar conspiracy to murder police officers to keep them from talking about what they saw on 6 January.
That leaves actual suicide as probable; but what then explains this extraordinary rate? Not PTSD, surely, given that there wasn't actually severe violence -- no machinegunning of the crowd, no massive death toll of any kind. It's just bad luck, I suppose; statistics only appear in broad enough segments, and for whatever set of reasons it just so happened that a statistically unlikely band of suicides occurred.
Definitely it is the sort of thing that gives additional heat to our national discourse, though. Yet we are not the main matter: we should pray for their souls and families.
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