Unqualified Offerings

Or, Why I Am Not a Liberal.

Many years ago I spent an evening chatting up the night clerk at the desk of a motel on the edge of Harper’s Ferry, West Virginia. She was a married, born-again Christian mother, we neither of us had anything else to do that evening and it was pleasant to talk. It was she who brought up abortion, almost as if merely mentioning the subject did not risk comity. I take pro-lifers seriously even though I am not one. If you accept that a fetus has the status of a person, and there are reasons of both faith and prudence to do so, then opposing abortion becomes a necessity. That I don’t come down on that side myself does not make it absurd that others do.

But this item isn’t about abortion, it’s about guns. Really, all political arguments are about guns, which is why Harper’s Ferry is a good place to have one. For five years it was our Beirut, changing hands dozens of times between Fort Sumter and Appomattox. The town proper occupies a spit of lowland and a hillside in the fork that the Potomac makes with the Shenandoah – a spit and a hillside lower than the ridge across the river, which is a bad thing during years when people are cannon-oriented. Whenever the Confederates took the town, the Union pounded it from the Maryland hill; when the Union took the town, the Confederates pounded it from the West Virginia hill, though you can bet they didn’t think of it as “West Virginia.”

Nor did the locals lack rooting interests of their own. The townsfolk and country people thereabouts bitterly – and lethally – divided between pro-Union and pro-Confederate sympathies. There were spies, saboteurs, partisans, guerrillas. Terrorists, to come down to it. Let your gaze wander from the carefully focused historical spotlight, beyond the Army of Northern Virginia and the Army of the Potomac, the almost-nobility of Chickamauga and brutal-but-straightforward Vicksburg, and you notice places – Missouri, Kentucky, the Shenandoah – where our civil war looks a lot like everyone else’s: terror, fire, reprisal, hanging, burning, bushwhacking and the discarding of those sentimental categories, bystander and prisoner.

But I was talking about abortion. (I know, I said I was talking about guns. Trust me, I am still talking about guns.) That evening in Harper’s Ferry, I explained to the night clerk that, Yes, I could see why someone would be against abortion. But didn’t she hear what Dan Quayle had said in response to the ambush question about his daughter during the recent debate? I wasn’t wild about abortion either; but I wouldn’t agree that my sister should go to jail for trying to have one, nor with jailing the doctor who performed the abortion my sister chose. And if I wasn’t willing to subject my own sister to that, why should I be able to subject other people’s sisters to that?

There are all kinds of libertarians, which sort of sucks, since maybe if there were fewer we’d amount to something politically. There are anarcho-capitalists, who believe that the market can and should provide all goods including defense; Constitutionalists, who believe that the federal government must contract to fit the enumerated powers as understood before FDR browbeat the Supreme Court into agreeing that Sure, it was up to the federal government whether a man could grow his own wheat to feed his own livestock; minarchists, who support the so-called Night Watchman State, that provides for the common defense and protects against violent crime and fraud and is otherwise nowhere to be found; “pragmatic libertarians” who, when not winning oxymoron contests, argue for maximizing liberty on the grounds that experience shows that freedom makes people happier, more efficient and less quarrelsome; “principled libertarians” who argue for maximizing liberty because rights come from Our Creator or are deducible from elementary postulates of self-ownership. I am a “my sister” libertarian.

Nobody worth performing the Heimlich Maneuver on is going to tell the police they saw their sister smoking pot. Am I okay with my sister going to jail if she sells some pills or her favors? Do I think my sister or brother should be dragged into court if she drains her field or he hires too many people of the wrong color? No. So I have no business supporting a regime that subjects other people’s siblings to those things. Would I have to agree that if my sister drowned my niece, or my brother defrauded credit card companies or my mother burned down her building for the insurance, that they should be subject to arrest and imprisonment. Yes, I’m afraid. And a note to you smartypants readers: Not all of the examples in this item have been hypotheticals. So I really do mean it.

Which brings us back to guns – not the guns that citizens might or might not own, but the ones the State most definitely does. Behind every law is a weapon. That goes for all the nice regulatory laws too. Sure, it’s only “civil proceedings,” but try telling them to tie a tail and a string to their civil proceedings and run into a headwind and its the sherrifs and marshalls who come round to uphold “the majesty of the law.” Which ends up in the same place the criminal law does – jail or, if you take the armed fugitive route, death. “Contempt of Court” – dissing da judge – is the thing that judges will lock you up for indefinitely, and on their own say-so, and try checking and balancing that if you don’t like it. They don’t ask you to go politely, either. It’s sherrifs and marshalls time again. For the system to survive, resistance must prove futile. Even the most “innocuous” law has, potentially, the entire weight of the State and the State’s monopoly on the legitimate use of violence behind it. I can bitch about the Ravens’ stadium deal, but watch what happens if I keep my share in protest and get stubborn.

Frost wrote, “…Before I’d build a wall / I’d ask who I was walling in or out.” Before I’d pass a law, I’d ask who might get shot. My purpose is not to argue that “we” can afford an optional system of laws or courts that one can opt out of if one chooses. After all, Frost would and did build walls if he got the right answer to those questions, and I would pass laws if I got the right answer to mine. My purpose is to note the stakes.

Brian Linse kindly observed that he wished I would address some issues I originally left aside when I waded into the Interblog Gun Wars. That is sort of what I am doing in this item. The liberals in the colloquy, Ginger Stampley, Charles Dodgson and Brian, were all good about noting the sorts of police abuses that the libertarians in the argument imagined an armed citizenry could successfully defend against. Charles has made a minor specialty of pointing out police and FBI abuses. The big story in Dallas, Virginia Postrel notes, is “cases involved alleged drug buys during which narcotics officers could not see or hear their paid informant conducting the transactions” and the drugs seized turned out to be crushed wallboard. The police power is a necessary power, but boy is it dangerous.

This is the core problem with contemporary liberalism: liberals can be very good at noting the dangers of police power (though they used, present company excepted, to be a lot better at it); but the liberal program of strengthening the regulatory state amounts to turning more and more of life into police business. Here in Montgomery County, Maryland, we have a County Executive, Doug Duncan, whose enthusiasm for undercover operations seems boundless. Teen smoking? Undercover operations to catch insufficiently zealous store owners. Minority Hiring? Undercover operations to “catch” local businesses not hiring…undercover officers. When there was a brouhaha recently about dog barking I fully expected Doug Duncan to dress cops up in cat suits and troll for trouble. Waco started as a tax case. Show me a law and I’ll show you a district attorney who wants to be governor.

“I never saw any of them again,” Philip Marlowe says at the end of The Long Goodbye. “Except the police. No way has yet been found to say goodbye to them.”

But ways must be found to say, “Some other time.” Because that’s my sister you’re talking about.

UPDATE 2005: Strange, the afterlife of blog items. Since there was never a comment thread on this item, feel free to offer any reactions to a new item posted for that purpose.