« Duck of Doom! | Main | A New Sovereignty and Lebanon »
July 17, 2006
The Right and Duty to Revolt
Dave Shuler commented at QandO, and later posted an expansion of his point on The Glittering Eye, as follows:
In a liberal democracy like ours civil disobedience and revolution are almost never moral or justified.In a country like ours civil disobedience is only justified when the electoral system has itself been subverted. This was the case with respect to African Americans particularly in the South prior to the passage of the Civil Rights Act and, particularly, the Voting Rights Act. Their civil disobedience during that period was justified.
Revolution is never justified as long as the country remains a liberal democracy.
I strongly disagreed in Dave's comments, and wanted to post my disagreement here, also, for those who read Caerdroia and not Dave's excellent blog.
Dave, with all respect, I believe that you are confused about a very fundamental point. Before I get to that, and hopefully without taking up too much space/time, I want to talk about governmental forms. The reason for the digression is that "liberal democracy" is a vague term, and I could be misreading your meaning of the term.
In general, there are only three types of governance (plus anarchy, the absence of governance, which so far as I can tell inevitably leads to tyranny in a short time): tyranny, democracy and republic.
A tyranny is government by a small group of people not selected by nor answerable to public will. A tyranny is not necessarily malignant, but in practice virtually always eventually becomes so due to man's power-seeking and inherently corruptible nature. Variant forms of tyranny include monarchies (rule by one person and advisors or courtiers he selects, with the ruler selected by familial relationship to prior ruler) in both absolute and some constitutional forms (those in which the monarch can dissolve the parliament at will, for instance, or where the parliament has no actual power); oligarchies (rule by a very small group of people not subject to popular election or recall) including theocracies (rule by priests) and juntas (rule by a military council); and dictatorships (rule by one person and his selected advisors and courtiers, with the ruler being whoever grabs and holds on to power).
A democracy is rule with the explicit consent of citizens as a body. Variants include pure democracies (the citizens actually vote on all or most decisions, with the rule of the majority (or sometimes a supermajority) generally being absolute); representative democracies (the citizens periodically choose representatives to decide issues for them in elections of the whole body of the polis, and generally can recall those representatives by the same method); constitutional monarchies (or for that matter dictatorships) in which the parliament is not generally subject to the will of the monarch, particularly for its existence and selection; and participatory democracies (which are generally representative democracies, but in which the polis can directly impose its will by a referendum that overrides laws passed by the representatives).
A republic is rule by representatives, where each type of representative is chosen by a different segment of the citizenry (or sometimes of the whole population), and where the actions and decisions of the representatives are constrained by charter. The ruler or rulers are not generally subject to the polis to approve or reject their decisions, nor do they necessarily serve at the pleasure of the polis once selected (though they generally do, at least indirectly). There are many variant forms, based on how powers are divided and how the different types of representatives are chosen, but I'm not aware of any commonly-used terms for the variants.
(Before you say "federal republic", consider that a democracy could also be federal — "federal" is merely a descriptor indicating a government organization split into multiple levels, with any given sub-government's powers being based on which type it is.)
The United States began its life as a republic, in which the body of citizens as a whole selected their Representatives, the legislature of each State selected its Senators, and the people selected Electors who would in turn select the President and Vice President (good idea; bad execution). However, three key governmental changes over the past hundred-and-a-few years have changed our governmental structure to a representative democracy. Direct election of Senators made both Senators and Representatives selected by the polis as a whole (though the geographic differentiation differs between the two offices' electors); changing selection of electors from direct vote for electors to votes for a candidate who would pick electors for himself did the same for the President and Vice President; and the doctrine of the "living Constitution" removed the governing charter's brake on the representatives' powers.
You use the term "liberal democracy". In that context, you seem to mean a liberal form of representative democracy — at least, that's the common meaning of the term. The term "liberal" essentially means "based on Enlightenment principles", and in the US (and Japan, Korea, Taiwan and Australia), that generally means the principles of the English Enlightenment: life, liberty, and property. (In Canada and Europe, even oddly enough in Britain, the term generally applies to the principles of the French Enlightenment: liberty, equality, and brotherhood.) The English Enlightenment is very fundamentally concerned with individual Natural Law rights, and in particular the effective sovereignty of the individual except where he has, by consent to the republic's charter, explicitly agreed to cede elements of sovereignty to the government.
The point of a representative government is that it is much harder for such a government to tyrannize its people than it is for non-representative governments. In an explicitly liberal government, infringing on explicitly acknowledged rights (or in the case of the US, those rights deriving from Natural Law regardless of their explicit acknowledgment [see Amendment IX]) certainly constitutes a tyrannical act.
Where you go wrong is to assume that a mechanism for preventing tyranny against individuals (liberal democracy) inherently, always and unconditionally does prevent tyranny against individuals. I assert that that assumption is incorrect: there are many instances where liberal democracies have tyrannized their people in ways both large (as in Britain effectively banning gun ownership or the US allowing the government to confiscate one person's property for the use of another person) and small (such as the various restrictions on commercial speech in the US). That assumption leads, I think, to your comment that "civil disobedience and revolution are almost never moral or justified" because there are ways to change the system to resolve injustices.
I believe that there is an inherent, inalienable and self-evident right — indeed, a duty — to change the government if that government becomes destructive of the ends of securing individual natural law rights. This could be by revolution, if necessary; though I agree with you that that should be rare, because less drastic methods will generally suffice to remedy even large injustices. (Well, at least for now; we seem to be becoming anesthetized by the Chinese water torture of small but growing infringements, such that most people seem quite happy to be subjects rather than citizens.)
I believe that there is an inherent right — indeed, a duty — to resist clearly unconstitutional laws and regulations. This could be anything from refusing to comply (I don't care what law is passed, I will endorse whatever candidates I want whenever I please) through symbolic protest (if a law (not an Amendment) banning flag desecration is passed and held constitutional, I will burn the Constitution) to large-scale civil disobedience (I would be willing to attempt to block the government from taking private property for other private people's gain, and to get arrested in the process).
Perhaps you would agree, and I have misinterpreted you. Certainly, I think that both courses of action are too frequently called for (and in the case of civil disobedience, too frequently attempted), and perhaps that is all you are really saying.
As for me, the three bright lines I draw, the crossing of which would almost certainly lead me to kill government agents, are government agents trying to take my kids away from me, government agents bursting into my house in the middle of the night without first serving a warrant (how do I know they're really government agents?), or the various infringements of my liberties cumulatively becoming so intolerable that death is preferable to continued existence under such a regime.
Trackback Pings
TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://www.caerdroia.org/MT/mt-tb.cgi/1055