What Wendell Berry's Brush Teaches Us About Capitalism, Community, and "Inevitability"

[Cross-posted to Front Porch Republic]

The Art of Loading Brush: New Agrarian Writings, the latest collection of writings by Wendell Berry, isn't a perfect book, nor the perfect expression of his powerful vision of what constitutes a good life or a good community. In particular the final, essentially autobiographical stories in the book don't really work, I think, as persuasive pieces of writing. But a man of such enormous accomplishments, and of such influence on behalf of localist truths, doesn't need to hit it out of the park every time, especially not at age 83. And in any case, each of the three lengthy critical essays which form the first part of this collection are worth the price of the book alone, so you should pick it up, right now.

In particular, when you read the book, pay close attention to the first essay, "Thoughts of Limits in a Prodigal Age." There is a principle taught therein which may be, I think, crucial to anyone engaged in any kind of effort on behalf of localism today--as well as a lesson echoed in unexpected ways all around us. Consider two examples:

First, a response from the Republican majority in the Kansas state legislature to the recent arguments about gun violence and America's schools. Their proposal: encourage teachers to carry guns to defend themselves and their students from mass shooters (and make sure that the identity of armed teachers is kept secret). Problem: the last time the Kansas legislature attempted this, in 2013, the insurance companies which underwrite the security of Kansas's public schools said they would not be able to justify renewing policies at existing rates if such a bill became law. The proposed solution, in 2018: simply make it illegal for those companies which insure Kansas schools from adjusting their policies as a consequence of gun ownership.

Second, the demands of striking school teachers in West Virginia. In response to legitimate complaints about abysmally low pay and poor teaching conditions, and facing the prospect of a teacher walkout, the legislature offered to use state budget surpluses (when they existed) to better fund public education. The teachers, recognizing the unreliability of such funding promises, engaged in a wildcat strike--defying their own union leaders--that shut down all the public schools in the state for nearly two weeks. The state government caved, agreeing to all the teachers' demands. Initially, some in the legislature warned darkly that paying for teachers' raises would jeopardize other state programs like Medicaid; the governor, however, looking at the polls, said "there’s not a chance on this planet that’s going to be the case."

What do these two ostensibly very different cases--the usually conservative cause of gun rights in the first, the usually liberal cause of public education in the second--have in common? Both present, though probably not on first glance, a challenge to what Berry calls in this essay the reigning doctrine of "inevitability," which is "an economic and technological determinism, as heartless as it is ignorant" (p. 51). It is the assumption that, of course, in the insurance marketplace, in the budgeting process--in anything related to the presumably inevitable logic of the capitalist economy, really--there is always a (presumably) "natural" way that things are going to have to work, and no amount of political grandstanding can ever make a difference. Except, of course, for those times when, as a people's awarenesses expand and their preferences become refined, it does.

Do not think for a moment that Berry is advocating either an ignorance of nor an obliviousness to the laws of nature. On the contrary, tending to the fundamental limits and characteristics of one's land has been central to his work over the decades; he mentions it in his introduction to this collection (agrarianism, he writes, must be characterized by "an informed and conscientious submission to nature, or to Nature, and her laws of conservation, frugality, fullness or completeness, and diversity"--p. 8), and reiterates it in this essay (responsible thinking "has to confront everywhere the limits of both nature and human nature, limits imposed by the ecosphere and ecosystems, limits of human intelligence, human cultures, and the capacities of human persons," all of which must be positively contrasted to "fantasies of limitlessness"--p. 53). All of that may sound like a recognition of inevitability...and it is, in a sense. But Berry's main intention in this essay to show that in our "prodigal age" we have submitted, not to the limits of nature and place, but to artificial limits, constructed limits, limits of process and economic possibility, rather than authentic limits of place. It has been an act of collective (though admittedly, on an individual level, often empowering) ignorance. His name for this ignorance? "Industrialism," which is expressed in the form of a logical determinism which overrules "any need for actual knowledge and actual thought" (p. 51). More:

From its beginnings, industrialism has depended on a general willingness to ignore everything that does not serve the cheapest possible production of merchandise and , therefore, the highest possible profit....[Yet] we must acknowledge real needs that have continued through the years to be real, though unacknowledged: the need to see and respect and inescapable dependence even of our present economy, as of our lives, upon nature and the natural world, and upon the need, just as important, to see and respect our inescapable dependence upon the economies--of farming, ranching, forestry, fishing, and mining--by which the goods of nature are made serviceable to human good (p. 36).

Berry's decision to hang this act of grand intellectual substitution on industrialism is of a piece with the strongly reactionary tone which these essays occasionally take. (In the collection's second essay, "Leaving the Future Behind: A Letter to a Scientific Friends," a grouchy complaint about all those who would use invoke "science" superficially to support their preferred causes, he casually wonders if the possibility of achieving "a reasonably coherent, reasonably self-sufficient and self-determining local economy" for the long term wasn't gravely harmed by the advent of "oceanic navigation" by which humans "traveled the globe"--pp. 83-84). But such contrariness aside, he has a point. For Berry, the industrial process is essentially about turning the productivity of places and persons into economic units--"We have...been turning our country into an economy as fast as possible, and we have been doing so by an unaccounted squandering of its actual, its natural and cultural, wealth" (p. 23)--and is the complete opposite of the localist and agrarian sensibility, which he presents as understanding wealth in association with "the freedom and independence that come with dependence on a parcel of land, however small, that one owns and is owned by or has at least the use of" (p. 47).

That kind of wealth is not measured primarily by profit, but by "provision," a concept Berry turns to repeatedly in this essay. He writes of the "need to provide: to be living a responsible life, which is to say a responsible economic life" (p. 35). All of this comes together, when one looks at the essay as a whole: the work of farming, ranching, mining, lumbering, artisnal manufacturing, etc., are all 1) intimately dependent upon an appreciation of the natural environments within which they are conducted, as well as 2) directly related to the provisioning of human beings. Engaging in such work thus allows for a sense of fulfillment and wealth in the way an industrial economic mindset does not, since the latter turns upon price and productivity, and not upon the--in Berry's view--moral priority of responsibly providing for, or collectively participating in providing for, oneself and one's place (places being defined both naturally and in terms of human community), by patiently bringing needed goods out of the bounteous, demanding, natural world.

When the industrial world--and the expanded reach, access to resources, and opportunities for monetary wealth and excess consumption which it undeniably brought to far more human beings than had ever previously ever been the case in human history--caused many to subject agriculture (as well as many other of the fundamental tasks Berry associates with the agrarian mindset) to the model of economic profit rather than community provision, the moral achievement of the agrarian economic conception was put in jeopardy. The real heart of the essay, then, comes when Berry gives us an analysis of, and mourns the loss of, one form this conception took: namely, the Burley Tobacco Growers Co-operative Association, an arrangement among tobacco growers in Berry's home state which began in 1921, took new life--and, in Berry's view, best performed its careful balancing act--under the New Deal's Federal Tobacco Program beginning in 1941, and was strongly associated with the Berry family through its entire existence until the end of the Program--and thus the end, in Berry's view, of the Association's essential role--in 2004. For a time, Berry writes, the Association "did preserve a sort of balance between industrialism and agrarianism," one which "prevented their inherent difference and opposition from becoming absolute" (p. 47).

How does Berry think the Association managed this feat? You might say they did it by recognizing one inevitability, and democratically working out a way to incorporate it into a system of provision, rather than allowing it to be co-opted by another, more harmful inevitability.

The first inevitability is endemic to commercial agriculture: overproduction. Specifically, since "farmers individually and collectively do not know, and cannot learn ahead of time, the extent either of public need or market demand....[t]hey tend logically, and almost by nature, towards overproduction." Why? Because either "the market is good and they are encouraged," or "the market is bad and they are desperate" (p. 40). Continual surplus production is, of course, bankrupting to any commercial enterprise, farming--and other forms of work characteristic of the agrarian worldview as well--in particular. Before industrialism, with all its benefits and harms, things were different:

The traditional home economies of subsistence, while they lasted, gave farmers...hope of surviving hard times. This was true especially when the chief energy source was the sun, and the dependence on purchased supplies was minimal. As farming became less and less subsistent and more and more commercial, it was exposed ever more nakedly to the vagaries and predation of an economy fundamentally alien to it. When farming is large in scale, is highly specialized, and all needs and supplies are purchased, the farmer's exposure to "the economy" is total (pp. 40-41).

But industrial capitalism, for good and for ill, had by the early decades of the 20th century utterly transformed the responsible agrarian economies of America's past, making markets abstract and global. So how to deal with already constant, and now technologically-increased and market-intensified, push towards overproduction? Not through simply subsidizing farmers in their overproducing practices (according to Berry, his father referred to "direct subsidy payments" as an "abominable form of regimentation"--p. 45). On the contrary, rather than "allowing" farmers to lock themselves into a rat-race of subsidized overproductivity, the independence of the farmer would be achieved through carefully calculated, democratically ratified, and strictly imposed limits.

As Berry thoughtfully, and movingly, describes the Association's careful work, each year every participating farm was allotted, on the basis of their past history of production, a certain acreage they would be allowed to farm. On that limited acreage, tobacco would be produced that would be sold at agreed upon price--"fair prices, fairly determined...with minimal help from the government." The point was not to subsidize farmers without concern for the consequences of their work, but rather to make use of their work in a controlled way, so as to achieve real "parity," which Berry describes as the overall goal of the program. With all (or nearly all) tobacco farmers participating, the Association could obliged buyers to "bid a penny a pound above the support price"; when such buyers, or enough such buyers, could not be found, government assistance would take the form of a loan to the farmer, to cover their losses on that particular crop, which the Federal Tobacco Program would take, and which would be bought and stored by the Association, to be resold later and which, in the meantime, would affect the calculations for allotted acreage for the coming year. And so the program continued for decades--it made no one rich, but it maintained a way of life, even enabled that life to flourish. In 1940, over a third for the farmers in the Association were tenant farmers; by 1970, so many had become farm owners, thus solidifying their place in their communities, that tenant farming described less than 10 percent of participants (pp. 44-46).

So what happened? Well, many things, not the least of which was the growing social and medical consensus against tobacco use in the America (which Berry himself agrees with; while he defends the benefits which the controlled management of the crop brought to the world he grew up and developed his agrarian convictions within, he makes no defense of the crop itself). But perhaps more important was the individualizing temptation of industrialism. When "industrializing members" pushed the Association in 1971 to permit "the lease and transfer of production quotas away from the farms to which they had been assigned," this allowed for the "accumulation of allotments...into very large acreages dependent more upon extensive technology and migrant labor," and thus ultimately a "reduced agrariansim" (pp. 47-48). In other words, the siren song of growth--of profit!

And why shouldn't people be free to seek profits, to choose to maximize their holdings, minimize their costs, and grow their position, both economically and otherwise? Who is to say that some of these farmers might have tired, as the years went by, of the rewarding but limited and labor-intensive world of work that they'd been guaranteed a place in, and wanted to buy their way out? Or perhaps, more simply, they had a large family, or children with diverse interests, and they believed they needed greater incomes--rather than mere "parity" with their neighbors--to satisfy their needs and hopes? That's all part of the American dream of freedom, isn't it?

Berry, predictably, is unconvinced. "To limit production as a way of assuring an equitable return to producers is assuredly and abridgement of freedom. But freedom for what?" (p. 41).

The tobacco farmers of Kentucky and elsewhere, close to a century ago, realized (as did many thousands of other late 19th-century and early 20th-century populists, socialists, and radical reformers) that their agrarian way of life required resisting the supposed "inevitability" of the industrial economy, and developing a plan which stipulated different rules, different priorities, and different ends. Those ends may have been based on a deeper, more natural "inevitability"--but still, in so articulating them, and enforcing them, they presumed some real independence on the part of those farmers, sufficient to choose to support a way of life that they agreed among themselves to be valuable and virtuous. No, they couldn't guarantee themselves that they could maintain that way of life and at the same time enjoy the profitable "freedom" promised by the industrial economy (though such results would only come to those farmers which survived long enough to buy out all their fellows, of course). But they could choose to value their community, their culture, and accept the costs of doing so--and even, as human creativity demonstrates, distribute those costs fairly, and allow for some genuine flourishing along the way.

There is much in this essay I haven't touched upon. (The way Berry connects all of the above to a contempt for rural people, and the combined decision of American business and America's government to get rid of as many farmers as possible, in the name of efficiency, is worth pondering--and his anger at politicians both Republican and Democratic is pleasantly splenetic.) But it's warning about the false, paralyzing inevitability of industrialism and the global economy is, I think, vital. Because, you know, you can actually fully fund public education without cutting social programs, if the community democratically decides to so--it just has to accept that it will require that new taxes be levied. And you can find a way to allow guns in the public schools if the community really prefers that--it just has to accept that additional insurance costs, to avoid unfairness, be borne by the people as a whole (which, again, will probably mean more taxes). As Berry documents at length, it simply isn't true what President Bill Clinton claimed, that "the increasing productivity of agriculture" made inevitable "the shrinking of the farm sector" (pp. 49-50). The success--for several decades, anyway--of the Burley Tobacco Growers Co-operative Association proves that. No, that was a choice--one that followed the assumptions made by thousands of individuals, to be sure, but also assumptions which were enabled by powerful interests, interests which found the agrarian ideal useless and irrelevant in an industrial age.

In the end, Berry's mournful story teaches us that it is not utopian, not ridiculous, to insist upon a different economy than a profit-driven capitalism, a different community than one separated by an industrially determined notion of individual freedom from a sustainable and local engagement with the land. It will take time to do,  it will be complicated, it will probably not last forever, it will not satisfy everyone, and in the meantime it will have costs. But to take those caveats as proof that a thing cannot be done, that the economic and technological logic of growth is simply and always inevitable is to blind oneself a deeper set of possibilities: the possibility of taking collective responsibility for one's place, emphasizing provision over profit, prioritizing public goods and public safety over corporate balance-sheets, and working out, one bit at a time, in Berry's words, "a harmonious balance among a diversity of interests." When it is done right, he concludes, for however long it lasts, "it is a grand masterpiece to behold" (p. 56).

Just a Quick Note About "Local Solutions" and Guns

Of course there's a "national conversation" taking place over guns; is there ever not in America, no matter what the most recent mass shooting atrocity, no matter how many were killed, no matter how those numbers compare with any other atrocities in American life? I've partaken in that conversation before, and I'm reluctant to do so again; the last time I wrote at length about my relationship with guns was nearly 10 years ago, and my thoughts have changed quite a bit since then. Maybe sometime I'll sit down and think through where I stand now on the appeal and the idolatry of guns in America today; for now, though, just a quick, local note.

Yesterday, Kansas's new governor, Jeff "Brownback" Colyer, spoke with an NPR reporter about the meeting of governors which President Trump called together for the purpose of talking about gun violence. You can read the transcript here. What really stands out is how frequently in this brief, 4-minute interview, Colyer refers to the need for "local" solutions. Not only does he explicitly refer to trusting in localism a half-dozen times, he very pointedly talks about how what's appropriate in "western Kansas," or in Garden City or Topeka or Kansas City, might not be appropriate elsewhere. And, as if people hadn't gotten the message, he baldly states that, in regards to guns, "I don't see a specific, statewide thing to do." In a follow-up to that interview, he went even further--insofar as Trump's idea that maybe teachers ought to be paid extra to arm themselves in preparation of the next school shooting, Colyer said he was intrigued, but that "local school districts should make that call."

Now, you might consider all this wise and responsible, or you might consider it foolish and dangerous. What you can't call it, though, is consistent--because it was Colyer's administration, while he was lieutenant governor, that forbade Kansas municipal governments and other local bodies, including our state universities, from interpreting state laws regarding the concealed carry and open carry of firearms in accordance with their own local needs and preferences. So, yes, the governor supports local decisions...but apparently, unless he's suddenly changing his tune (and he's not; when the NPR reporter asked explicitly about revisiting "statewide laws saying that cities and counties cannot pass gun restrictions that go beyond state law," Colyer gave an unambiguous "no"), then it appears the only local decisions that really count are those which the National Rifle Association supports.

This isn't surprising, of course. Kansas is a pretty conservative state, and Republican politicians around here likely see only positives coming their way when they curry the favor of the NRA. (Though it's worth noting that Carl Brewer, former mayor of Wichita, Kansas's largest city, and a Democratic candidate for governor, is specifically targeting in his campaign this unfunded mandate, in the form of millions of dollars in increased insurance costs, which Brownback and Colyer forced upon Kansas's cities by robbing them of their "local" judgments about guns.) More importantly, as with so many things, when many self-identified conservative Americans speak of "local solutions," what they frequently mean is "states' rights," and specifically the rights of states that tend to support conservative causes and elect Republicans. Of course, employing constitutional language in an incoherent and essentially partisan way is hardly unique to the Republican party--but when it comes to guns, at least here in Kansas, such confusion has a long history, and probably will long continue.

Two Comments on Last Night In Ferguson, Missouri

Last night my wife's Twitter feed went nuts, and we ended up--like thousands of other Americans, I'm sure--opening up the laptop and watching, stunned, the images of violence coming out of Ferguson, MO. Tear gas and rubber bullets tearing into protesters, journalists arrested, vicious words. Scary, scary stuff.

So this morning I've been reading the news--about the death at the hands of police of Michael Brown, an unarmed black teen-ager, about the stunning overflow of intimidating force shown by the local police department, about the thinking of the protesters and where this all might be leading. I'm no expert on any of these matters, and I'm certainly without any local knowledge--but it doesn't seem hard to me to put two and two together. Or more specifically, to put together 1) the heavy-duty military equipment readily available to local police departments, thanks to federal government give-aways (better to cheaply off-load army surplus to those involved in law enforcement than destroy it or sell it on the international market, right?), and 2) the genuine paranoia that predominantly African-American populations and communities feel when confronted with yet another ambiguous incident which ends with the police closing ranks, the law privileging the shooter, and an unarmed teen-ager dead. The result is a script which almost writes itself, isn't it? Still, my main reaction is simply, again, feeling stunned.

But there are people putting together thoughtful observations nonetheless, trying to tease out how fear, the militarization of the police, racial division, a culture of violence and distrust, and the electronic enablers of all of the above, come together. So as I did over two years ago, when Trayvon Martin was killed, here are two thoughts, from a couple of smart people. First, Alan Jacobs, focusing on how there is a frighteningly easy unreality to what many police officers apparently think is obvious when faced with civil unrest:

Because [first-shooter] computer games are so popular and are so utterly central to the experience of above all males under forty, we should probably spend more time than we do thinking about how immersion in those visual worlds shapes people’s everyday phenomenology. We do talk about this, but in limited ways, primarily in order to ask whether playing violent games makes people more violent. That’s a key question, but it needs to be broadened. Ian Bogost wants us to ask what it’s like to be a thing, but maybe we need also to ask: What is it like to be a shooter? What is it like to have your spatial, visual orientation to the world shaped by thousands of hours in shooter mode?
I want to suggest that there may be a strong connection between the visual style of video games and the visual style of American police forces--the "warrior cops” that Radley Balko has written (chillingly) about. Note how in Ferguson, Missouri, cops’ dress, equipment, and behavior are often totally inappropriate to their circumstances--but visually a close match for many of the Call of Duty games. Consider all the forest-colored camouflage, for instance....It’s a color scheme that is completely useless on city streets--and indeed in any other environment in which any of these cops will ever work. This isn’t self-protection; it’s cosplay. It’s as close as they can come to Modern Warfare 3.

The whole display would be ludicrous--boys with toys--except the ammunition is real. The guns are loaded, even if some of them have only rubber bullets, and the tear gas truly burns. And so play-acted immersion in a dystopian future gradually yields a dystopian present. 

What is is like to be a first-person shooter? It’s awesome, dude. 

I will add at this point that a friend of mine, who works for the Navy, relates this anecdote: "The military recently had a scandal where each of the services was paying independently for research into camouflage patterns. Even the Navy got into the act; we developed a blue camouflage pattern, which is not only completely pointless but actually counterproductive, because the very last thing a sailor who has fallen into the water wants to be is invisible. The reason for all of this was termed the 'CDI factor': Chicks Dig It."

Second, Timothy Burke, who actually strongly disagrees with the way Alan chooses to focus on computer games and our violent social imaginary in contrast to the whole tangled web of feedback loops (most of which ultimately revolve around race) which have brought up to our present moment. Picking up on a recent incident where a mall cop, responding to a disturbance involving a shirtless, raving white man, targeted and maced a by-standing and entirely innocent black man who was standing nearby, he writes:

So this is just pepper spray in the face compared to being shot dead and left to lie in the street. But if we're going to get anywhere as a society with this, we have to see that the same infrastructure of violence, injustice and inequality is in play in both cases and many more. It's a mistake to focus on the individuals who shot or sprayed, to make them out to be unusual, "bad apples". Or to say, "Oh, that's inadequate training", to turn to a technocratic solution: oh, just change the training methods! This is something deeper, harder, worse.

The mall cop was facing a tense, tricky situation, but he had people all around him guiding him, telling him where the problem was coming from, telling him what peace he'd been summoned to keep. He got a call that told him what the problem was. But he couldn't--not wouldn't, really couldn't--see it. Because the problem was a shirtless white guy who'd been causing trouble for a while, and there he was next to an African-American man. So he saw what he is predetermined to see: a black threat.

We've militarized police (private and public), we've protected them from oversight, and we've built a society that for thirty years has been fed on ever-escalating fear: fear of crime (even as it drops precipitously), fear of difference (even as we become more richly diverse in our real sociologies), fear of a world that we can't control. FDR was right, but we lost that fight: fear itself is our national anthem now. So what happens when you create an army that is both fed by and shielded by fear and tell them they can do as they will, so long as they do it just to people whom history has named as scapegoats and victims, so long as they are guided by a racial unconscious?

Americans--white Americans in particular--shouldn't have to be brought so unwillingly to the understanding of what's happening now. The country's deep political DNA is fundamentally suspicious of unaccountable power, power that doesn't answer to the same law that the people have to answer to, power over citizens rather than power from citizens. But down there in the depths is another principle: that race, and blackness most of all, is the exception. Nothing of anything in all of those principles means a damn thing until that stops, until it's liberty and justice for all.

Well said, indeed.

Brownback's Intriguing (and Possibly Incoherent) Gun Rights Crusade

Last week our governor, Sam Brownback, signed into a law a bill titled "The Second Amendment Protection Act," which the bill's proponents trumpeted as "the strictest Second Amendment protection law in the nation." Others suggested that it was a pointless law, really just political chest-thumping and nothing more. You can read the whole thing here (it's not that long) and make up your own mind; for my part, I think it's kind of a fascinating document--and likely a deeply confused one as well. Let's run through the possibilities:

1) The law is designed to substantially expand the rights of gun owners in Kansas.

The problem here, though, is that the law never really talks about what any of those rights are. It does spend a great deal of time--all of sections 6, 7, and 8 of the law--claiming how, under this Kansas law, "any act, law, treaty, order, rule or regulation of the government of the United States regarding a firearm" will be "null, void and unenforceable in the state of Kansas," but all of that is simply a negative, stating that such and such people or agencies won't be allowed to enforce gun laws; it never actually explains what Kansas gun owners themselves actually have a legal right to do. The closest it comes to actually spelling out anything substantive is when it references the 2nd Amendment of the U.S. Constitution and section 4 of the Bill of Rights attached to the Kansas Constitution as guaranteeing "the right to keep and bear arms"--but as it does not assert anything beyond those statements (and indeed, it goes out of its way to emphasize a kind of simplistic literalism in reading those words, stating that this right to keep and bear arms exists "as it was understood at the time" in 1861 when Kansas officially became part of the United States), it doesn't provide any way for Kansas gun owners today, in 2013, to know what their legal rights (regarding gun licensing, or or gun usage, or anything else) positively are. They just know that--according to the state of Kansas, anyway--the federal government can't do anything to their guns, pursuant to the 2nd Amendment and the Kansas Bill of Rights. As one commentator put it, all you really get out of this law when it comes to substantive gun rights is that "federal measures that violate the Second Amendment will be ignored in Kansas." Or, in other words, that unconstitutional gun laws will be considered to be unconstitutional gun laws. Not a whole lot of new substantive defenses there.

2) The law aims to deny the authority of the national government when it comes to guns, and possibly much else.

Perhaps this law isn't really about the defending the rights of gun owners at all, but rather is all about attacking the legitimacy--or at least the reach--of the national government, and maybe the U.S. Constitution itself. The sounds extreme, but still, it's hard to come away from reading the lengthy section 2 of this law, with its rather ornate and very literal references to the 9th and 10th Amendments to the Constitution (both of which, according to the law, reserve rights and powers as "a matter of contract between the state and people of Kansas and the United States...as they were understood at the time that the compact with the United States was agreed upon") and not imagine that the authors perhaps wished we were still governed by the Articles of Confederation. Or, if not the Articles, then at least a reading of the Constitution--one that grants to the states the right to nullify and ignore national laws, given that they are only part of the American "compact" by choice--which has regularly been invoked but has never had much lasting political or legal acceptance in all our post-ratification history. (The one arguable exception to that judgment, of course, was the Civil War, when nullification led to its logical conclusion of secession, and that did enjoy a fair amount of support across the American south, until four years of war and over a half-million deaths led to the idea being basically buried for close to a century.) Personally, I'm rather dubious that Brownback himself actually wants the argument over gun rights to become another Nullification Crisis, or for this law to become another Virginia Resolution, or for him to go down in recent American history as a half-baked John Randolph of Roanoke. I would actually have greater respect for him if any of those possibilities were true, but the fact is his overall policy positions don't seem much at all like those which a supposedly committed states-rights localist or classical republican would hold to. There are, I'm sure, old-school conservatives around him who really are committed to challenging over two centuries of fairly consistent constitutional law (I hear you, Caleb!), but I doubt he's one of them.

3) The law is just trying to attract gun jobs to Kansas.

Some of the proponents of this law are convinced that manufacturers of guns and gun components will want to relocate from Colorado or Maryland or wherever else to operate in a "pro-Second Amendment state." The evidence in support of this assertion is weak at best, especially given the fact that this law itself requires some extensive (and possibly expensive) documentation and labeling of any guns or gun components manufactured in Kansas in order to satisfying the requirement that the items in question be "declared by the legislature...[to] have not traveled in interstate commerce." Whether such contortions could prevent the guns in question from being subject to any hypothetical laws justified under the national government's commerce power is unlikely and at this point impossible to know. More curiously though, it's worth noting that this aim conflicts with the previous one. After all, if you're really trying to draw gun jobs from across the national marketplace to your own state, then presumably you can't really at the same time believe in challenging (or even just getting around) the national government's authority, since it is that authority which makes possible a national marketplace in the first place. A country of state-by-state nullification is also a country which would likely have diverse, state-by-state banking and currency systems, taxation and investment regulations, and quite possibly even internal tariffs. (Many of which characterized life in American under the Articles of Confederation.) I suspect that there is an unreflected-upon intellectual tension here inside the Kansas Republican party. On the one hand, there are a handful of Tea Party quasi-populists who truly embrace the idea of "small government," understanding that to mean leaving government power in local and state hands so as to protect economic sovereignty from overarching national agendas; on the other hand, there are a handful of committed libertarians who also truly desire "small government," but in their case understand that to mean a low-tax, minimal-regulation national government that will enable the marketplace to flourish free from any obstacles...including the priorities of local developers and industries. You can't really satisfy both these groups at the same time, though it may be that some of the superficial thinkers behind The Second Amendment Protection Act somehow think they can.

4) The law simply signals an allegiance to conservative voters, rallying them to Brownback's cause.

So this brings us back to this rather cynical, but also likely, explanation for the law. Obviously, the politics of anything which allows a Republican legislator in Kansas to label themselves as more pro-gun than their hypothetical opponent is easy to understand. Probably Brownback & Co. don't actually have any new and brilliant legal arguments to expand the protections to individual gun owners already provided by the 2nd Amendment and by the Kansas Constitution; probably Governor Brownback (perhaps unlike some true believers around him) isn't really all that enamored of the idea of a radical, Constitution-challenging, states rights/nullification crusade; and probably it's a given that, realistically, gun manufacturers are going to make their decision on the basis of economic conditions and workforce availability, not on the basis of how much the state government claims to be able to legally defend their products. If so, that leaves us with the plain truth that uninformed defenders of gun rights--and reflexive Republican opponents of anything the President Obama has spoken in favor of (including a few fairly reasonable gun control measures)--will probably love this law, no matter how lacking in substance or motivationally incoherent it may be. This law essentially comes from the same place as those posters put up at gun shows and shooting ranges thanking Obama for the great work he's done as a gun salesman. Brownback and his allies may not have any real alternative in mind to our current constitutional order, and most of them almost surely don't want one anyway, but they surely politically benefit from making as though they believe (as some no doubt genuinely do) there is a constitutional crisis at hand regarding gun rights. What more explanation do you need for this strange document than that?

"This is for Trayvon"

So said the Boss has he tore into this new classic of his (now a dozen years old, and as angry and as despairing as ever) a week ago at a show in Florida. The man's albums may have gone on autopilot, but live, Springsteen has still got it.

Two Comments on the Killing of Trayvon Martin

Both of them from blogs, and both of them better than anything I could come up about this absurd, horrible tragedy. First, Ethan Gach from The League of Ordinary Gentleman, on the obvious--but all too often ignored--fact that our (perhaps justified) paranoia about crime and our (certainly unjustified) fetishizing of personal liberty runs into problems when it is extended to include a rather simply piece of deadly technology: that is, essentially allowing anyone who feels threatened to use a gun:

The reality of the matter is that in Florida the law will protect you if you gun someone down because you felt “reasonably” afraid for your life. Referred to as the “Stand Your Ground” laws, 16 other states have them....Reading through the news stories, I haven’t found anything that says Trayvon was armed with a gun or even a knife. Or anything that says he was threatening Zimmerman with either of these weapons. Which makes it appear as though Zimmerman got a bloodied nose and decided to slaughter a 17-year old teenager because of it....

People have a right to carry around hunks of intricately designed metal that can shoot tinier hunks of metal with the ease of contracting a single muscle group. These tinier hunks of metal, upon making contact with human flesh, will continue on, either burrowing deep within one’s body, or blasting out the other side. In order for someone carrying one of these tools around to use it on me, and be justified in doing so, they need only feel afraid.

Of course, self-defense is only a legal and moral abstraction. And has no bearing on actual circumstances, the reality of which is that Trayvon, will still be dead, because another person killed him, no matter what the police, FBI, or Justice Department find out later on. And for no reason other than that someone had the effortless means to do so, and a system of justice that would condone it.

Second, my old friend Michael Austin, who is just getting better and better at this pundit thing, reasoning how the situation in Florida essentially suggests an abandonment one of the most fundamental basics of the liberal order: namely, a social contract which assures us that the use of force is going to be subject to the rule of law:

For Thomas Hobbes, civil society was pretty much a no-brainer. However bad it might get (and Hobbes lived through some pretty bad times), it was better than the alternative, which was a worldwide and eternal version of The Hunger Games called the state of nature, also known as the state of war. In this latter state, the only law that applies is brute force. Whoever can take stuff gets to keep stuff, until someone else takes it again. Killing people while taking their stuff is optional, but not discouraged. In the state of nature, Hobbes famously opined, the life of man (and woman) is “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short”....

Fast forward from the English Revolution to February, 2012, when Trayvon Martin, a young African-American man, was shot and killed by George Zimmerman, a self-appointed neighborhood watch captain with a long history of harassing people on the street. He (Zimmerman) was told by police operators not to pursue Martin, yet he did so anyway, shooting him in cold blood while the young man begged for his life. Three weeks later, Zimmerman remains free, even though he admits to killing an unarmed seventeen-year-old boy, because, police say, they cannot dispute his narrative of self-defense.

Not getting arrested because of a “Stand-Your-Ground” law is a very different thing than claiming self-defense at a trial. Anybody accused of murder has a fundamental right to make the case that he or she was acting because of a perceived threat, and juries have been known to be very sympathetic to such claims. If George Zimmerman were acquitted by a jury on the grounds that he was defending himself against a perceived threat, I would be very disappointed, but I would ultimately accept it as a verdict reached through the rule of law. Trayvon’s family would, in such a case, at least have their day in court....

[In the absence of any attempt to introduce law into this terrible event, so say that if] only Trayvon had been armed, he would have been able to stand up for himself....This reasoning leads us directly back to the Hobbesian state of nature. If everybody has to walk around carrying their own weapon, and shooting before being shot, than there is ultimately no point in having a government, for we do not live under the rule of law. If Florida cannot find a way to at least bring Mr. Zimmerman to trial...then they do not deserve to be a state, having failed in the most fundamental responsibility of the social contract.

Would You Shoot (a Computer Image of a Zombie) Sarah Palin?

Back in January, when Representative Gabrielle Giffords was shot, and six people were murdered, during a rampage by your stereotypical gun-toting, conspiracy-believing, drug-addled, psychologically-imbalanced, maladjusted lunatic, I--like a lot of people--kind of lost it. I got mad, I searched for blame, and I found it, in an advertisement put out by Sarah Palin during the 2010 midterm elections. As part of her campaign to defeat Democratic politicians that had won election in previously Republican districts, and had gone on to support the president in the passage of the Affordable Care Act, Palin used gun sights, and spoke in speeches about the need to "take out" those who were part of what she considered to be an atrocious, presumably socialist, presumably unconstitutional bit of legislation. Over-the-top, violent political rhetoric, combined with armed and impressionable crazies, equals murder. QED.

So I wrote a post making that claim...and was pilloried for it. And rightly so--and not just because as more information emerged about the man who attempted to assassinate Giffords, the more and more obvious it was that there was almost no chance his murderous intentions were inspired by or even connected to Palin's vicious (but, let us be frank, pretty standard) rhetoric. No, I was pilloried because I was taking a tragic, actual event, and quickly, emotionally, and irresponsibly targeting one person as responsible. As I put it in my apology, "in writing what I did, I became part of exactly what I was truly responding to: not the horrible news out of Tuscon (to which there was only one decent reaction, namely one of mourning and sorrow), but more largely the environment within which this shooting happened to occur." Rather than responding carefully to a terrible event, I piled fuel on the rhetoric fire. That was wrong.

I was thinking about all this yesterday, when a local television station called me up, and asked if they could talk to me for a bit about the latest appalling bit of "entertainment" coughed up by an internet economy which naturally sees such rhetoric as a commercial opportunity: a video game where you get to kill as many "Tea Party Zombies" as possible, including such luminaries as Palin and the Koch brothers, before they "teabag" you.



My comments in that news piece were brief and innocuous, I suppose. There were just a tiny segment of a 15-minute conversation, mostly dealing with the difficult balance that any society which respects free speech (which, frankly, I think we respect a little too much) has to strike between actively discouraging speech which is grossly inflammatory, on the one hand, and not going overboard--as I have before and as we all usually will at one point or another--over some whatever new and appalling bit of language or imagery shows up which offends our sense of propriety or decency or security. I told the reporter a joke which I can remember going around on Facebook months ago, one which made my wife livid: its punch line involves President Obama being thrown off an airplane. He laughed. And why shouldn't he? It's just a joke, right? And Charles Koch shouldn't be concerned that some anonymous twerp looking to have some fun--or some liberal with a rather ugly sense of humor, or both--has created a game in which players get to shoot a two-headed zombie-version of him. It's just a game, right?

The best thing I said to the reporter--which, of course, also didn't make it into the piece--was a few thoughts drawing on things which Cass Sunstein and Jay Rosen have both argued at length: that the internet has mostly resulted in our ways of sharing and receiving information being broken apart, atomized, sealed off into separate bubbles. We live, too many of us anyway, in various blog-anchored echo chambers, chatting endlessly on Facebook with our selectively chosen friends. Of course everyone has always created in-groups and out-groups; that's nothing new. But the internet has really ramped it up...and if you combine that with all the stresses and breakdowns our democracy is currently experiencing (an almost wholly dysfunction Senate, major parties that no longer share much of any kind of incentive to actually govern responsibly, etc.), then it's not hard to suspect that there has been an increasing in violent rhetoric in American politics, because it's just so easy for everyone in all their little bubbles to continually egg each other on, say the same jokes ever more loudly and ever more fervently, develop a shorthand of humor and rhetoric that is perhaps completely innocent but nonetheless, in retrospect, perhaps is also thorough dehumanizing, angry, and contemptible. Step out of your bubble, if only for a moment, and ask yourself: would you really proudly display your liberal hunting license or your President Obama urinal target, or whatever else the endless free-flowing invective of the internet encourages folks with sick minds to appeal to, if you weren't just displaying it where only your ideological comrades-in-arms will see it? Would you really enjoy hacking a video image of Sarah Palin to pieces on your home computer, if it was anything for you except a private joke between friends? Perhaps not. Now ask yourself this question--is anything on the internet capable of remaining private for long? Also a negative answer, except in that case I don't think there's any "perhaps" to it.

Some liberals, at least, are trying to get ahead of the usual cycle of blame (which, I confess again, I've been part of before!), and calling for boycotts of the game. Good for them, though I wonder what difference it will make. The genie--a genie of anger and contempt, fed by a technology that simultaneously encourages people to act out within their little boundaries as well as makes certain no boundaries truly last--is out of the bottle, and fear that, absent a profound political change which leads people to accept that our democracy can function, that government can listen, and that the rules and procedures and methods of elections and parties can be taken seriously, there's nothing that will get it back in. I'm as much at fault as anyone, I suppose. But I can at least refuse to play the game. We could all do that much, at least.

On Pretexts and Apologies

Yesterday, in reaction to the breaking news about the murderous rampage aimed at Congresswoman Giffords in Arizona, I was in an angry, reactive mode. That led me to make connections--even accusations, or something close to such--that were not, I would insist, necessarily unreasonable...but which were also irresponsibly quick, direct, and harsh. In doing that, I was wrong. In writing what I did, I became part of exactly what I was truly responding to: not the horrible news out of Tuscon (to which there was only one decent reaction, namely one of mourning and sorrow), but more largely the environment within which this shooting happened to occur. I am torn and frustrated by what I see as the viciousness and foolishness which I hear on the airwaves and read over the internet; I want to dismiss it, but when I hear people calling for "revolution," I start to wonder if they aren't serious, and it makes me wonder if it isn't irresponsible not to get angry and respond in kind. And unless I'm equally serious in what I claim to know, then I should be a lot less quick to come to that conclusion.

Anyway, the fact is I used a tragic event as a pretext to let a lot of my fears and worries run wild. Those fears and worries, I maintain, may not be unjustified; however, using the attempted murder of a congresswoman--an attempt which resulted in the death of six other people--as an excuse to get hysterical about them is. All of which, I suppose, just goes to show why I'm a lowly blogger, while James Fallows gets paid the big bucks:

Shootings of political figures are by definition "political." That's how the target came to public notice; it is why we say "assassination" rather than plain murder. But it is striking how rarely the "politics" of an assassination (or attempt) match up cleanly with the main issues for which a public figure has stood....

[T]he train of logic is:
1) anything that can be called an "assassination" is inherently political;
2) very often the "politics" are obscure, personal, or reflecting mental disorders rather than "normal" political disagreements. But now a further step,
3) the political tone of an era can have some bearing on violent events....[T]he anti-JFK hate-rhetoric in Dallas before his visit was so intense that for decades people debated whether the city was somehow "responsible" for the killing. (Even given that Lee Harvey Oswald was an outlier in all ways.)....

We don't know why the Tucson killer did what he did....But we know that it has been a time of extreme, implicitly violent political rhetoric and imagery....It is legitimate to discuss whether there is a connection between that tone and actual outbursts of violence, whatever the motivations of this killer turn out to be. At a minimum, it will be harder for anyone to talk -- on rallies, on cable TV, in ads -- about "eliminating" opponents, or to bring rifles to political meetings, or to say "don't retreat, reload."

If it really is the case that one of the consequences of this ugly, evil incident is that people calm down a little bit, that political vitriol may moderate some, then I suppose that would count as a silver lining. There may be some evidence that this will in fact be a consequence; yesterday, a leader of one Arizona Tea Party commented that "When we talk about Barack Obama, we've got to be clear, it's not personal. When we say he's destroying this country we are not saying he's doing it out malicious intent and a desire to cripple us. He has good intentions and he's wrong. I worry when that gets lost."

I wasn't part of that possible moderation yesterday, and I apologize for that. I don't apologize for my worries and fears--I'm pretty sure I can defend them in an argument--but neither would I would expect anyone worried and fearful about the things I consider valuable and worth fighting for to apologize for their views. I know people--good, devout, smart people, some of whom I consider to be real friends--who probably felt themselves caught up in my pretexts and accusations yesterday, and that makes my words all the more in the wrong.

Let me finish by quoting something that another friend, Matt Stannard, who is frankly a lot better at this public communications stuff than I, put on Facebook yesterday:

All ad homs aside: 1. Today was a sad, tragic day. 2. This type of violence happens all the time in many parts of the world; we should oppose it no matter where it occurs. 3. I appreciate that so many friends on all sides have been hanging out here arguing with/against me. To me, a good argument is like a good hug. I really love all of you. Let's all work on making the world more just and peaceful any way we can.

Indeed.

Great Work, You Over-Hyped Violence-Infatuated Morons

This graph reflects the message which came out from Sarah Palin's PAC last year. Democrats that won in basically Republican districts who voted for the Affordable Care Act: what shall we do with them? Why, murder them, obviously.

No, of course, she didn't mean that. Of course, using gun sites to target the congressional districts of those she wanted to raise money for the fight against wasn't mean to be taken literally. Of course, her use of the language of "aiming" and "fighting" and firing "salvos" was just harmless rhetoric. Of course.

And Henry II, when the interference of his former friend Thomas Becket over Henry's plans to consolidate the authority of the crown of the church reportedly shouted out "What miserable drones and traitors have I nourished and brought up in my household, who let their lord be treated with such shameful contempt by a low-born cleric?"--or, as some more prosaically reported it, "Will no one rid me of this meddlesome priest?"--no doubt, he didn't really mean it either. Of course.

And well, now it so happens that one of Palin's "targets"--Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords, conservative Democrat, first elected in 2006, husband of an astronaut, mother of two--has been shot. Early reports said she'd been killed at the scene; later, we learned she was in critical condition and under surgery at a Tuscon hospital. A man managed to get close to her at one of her ordinary constituent events ("Congress on Your Corner"), and fired a weapon at point blank range at the Congresswoman and several others. Whether any died or may die is not yet know.

Sarah Palin, of course, Facebooked her condolences ("we all pray for the victims and their families, and for peace and justice"). And the new Speaker of the House quite honorably spoke out on behalf of one of the congresspeople he's responsible for: "An attack on one who serves is an attack on all who serve....This is a sad day for our country." And, of course--of course--no one is really to blame save the murderer, or murderer wanna-be, who evilly or sickly or both ran at the Congresswoman with death on his mind.

Except. Except. Except that all around there are spooky signs. Signs of things slipping away. Something about this president, and something about the health care reform act, seems to have tripped a wire, sent some people over the edge. Death panels. Socialism. Birther nonsense. People calling for capital punishment against illegal immigrants. State legislators in Wyoming trying to make it a crime to enforce the Affordable Care Act, which is the law. What's going on here?
I don't know, but it scares me, a little. I wonder if I want to earnest engage it and fight back, or if I just want to ironically dismiss, waiting for it to go away. I put on my political scientist hat, I remind myself that this country has gone through ideological upheavals and whipped-up hysteria before, I tell myself that, in the long run, stability will always win out. And I believe myself. Mostly.