Nothing in democratic politics is given — or rather, the things we consider given at any moment enjoy this status for no more exalted reason than that public opinion (expressed primarily through elections) favors treating it as such. But the settlement or consensus in its favor is always temporary and contingent. The contestation of politics, the struggle over power and ideas, over the Constitution and the law and who we are as a political community, never ends. It’s always possible for a settlement or consensus at one moment of history to be rethought, overturned, or reversed. Rights granted can later be rescinded — and there’s no way to prevent that from happening beyond continuing the fight, day after day.
It’s time for me to introduce another of my personal axioms. The first was: “It is possible for two different things to be true at the same time.” The second was: “Every new president somehow lowers the bar.” The third is: There are no a priori concepts.
A priori (Latin for ‘from the prior’) is a phrase that is frequently invoked in philosophy but was popularized by Immanuel Kant in the 1781 Critique of Pure Reason. Without getting way too technical and over-involved (like Kant), the author was writing in reaction to contemporary philosophy, the one extreme being radical empiricism (example: David Hume) and the other being rationalism divorced from experience (ex: Bishop George Berkeley). While Kant asserted the reality of the material world and “experience”, philosophers ultimately count him as an idealist who distinguished knowledge gained after experience (knowledge a posteriori) from knowledge a priori, universal truths existing prior to experience of phenomena. “But although all our cognition commences with experience, yet it does not on that account all arise from experience.” Philosophers ever since have been gnawing over the merits of Kant’s work, so I don’t think people will assume that it’s easy for me to blast his thesis to bits. It seems, however, that problems can easily be deduced. For instance, in asserting “that certain cognitions even abandon the field of all possible experiences”, Kant cited as primary examples the concepts of God, Free Will and Immortality. But for these three to be truly independent and transcendent of culture and experience, they would have to be common elements in all philosophy, not just the heritage of Greco-Roman/Judeo-Christian culture. In Eastern philosophy by contrast, a Supreme Being exists in Hinduism but is not necessarily inherent in Buddhism, Free Will implies a concept of self that both Hinduism and Buddhism are opposed to, and Immortality exists only in a concept of samsara, or cyclical existence and reincarnation, in which the individual comes to see the phenomenal world as futility and ultimately seeks to end the cycle rather than preserve it.
What does this have to do with anything at all?
Because in the realm of politics, Americans, specifically liberals, are acting as though certain elements of the political debate are a priori assumptions and not to be questioned. But in the above example, Kant declared that Western philosophy pointed to theism because theism was at the basis of philosophy. But if one goes outside that philosophical perspective, it becomes clear that not everyone holds those beliefs as the given.
I bring this up due to a couple of subjects.
The Atlantic magazine recently hired National Review columnist Kevin Williamson, which is in line with other controversial decisions from center-left media (like The New York Times) hiring right-wing columnists like Bari Weiss and Bret Stephens for the sake of “perspective.” The very fact of these selections is a tacit admission that the readers of such media are only getting one side of the debate. But the ink wasn’t dry on Williamson’s first Atlantic piece before liberals brought up remarks he made on a conservative podcast where he said: “And someone challenged me on my views on abortion, saying, ‘If you really thought it was a crime, you would support things like life in prison, no parole, for treating it as a homicide.’ And I do support that. In fact, as I wrote, what I had in mind was hanging.” This was known at the time, yet Williamson got hired by The Atlantic, and Thursday April 5, Williamson got fired, editor Jeffrey Goldberg declaring: “The language he used in this podcast—and in my conversations with him in recent days—made it clear that the original tweet did, in fact, represent his carefully considered views. The tweet was not merely an impulsive, decontextualized, heat-of-the-moment post, as Kevin had explained it.” (As of the 5th, Williamson’s one column is still up on the Atlantic website, where he was still listed as a staff writer.)
It was in fact another Atlantic piece that pointed to a National Review article of March 2016 where Williamson said in regard to White Working Class Trump Voters: “There wasn’t some awful disaster. There wasn’t a war or a famine or a plague or a foreign occupation. Even the economic changes of the past few decades do very little to explain the dysfunction and negligence—and the incomprehensible malice—of poor white America. So the gypsum business in Garbutt ain’t what it used to be. There is more to life in the 21st century than wallboard and cheap sentimentality about how the Man closed the factories down. The truth about these dysfunctional, downscale communities is that they deserve to die. Economically, they are negative assets. Morally, they are indefensible. … The white American underclass is in thrall to a vicious, selfish culture whose main products are misery and used heroin needles. Donald Trump’s speeches make them feel good. So does OxyContin.” So I’m a bit surprised that anybody there is surprised at what they were getting.
As Reason Magazine’s Katherine Mangu-Ward says, “the underlying logic of Williamson’s position is a view shared by roughly half or at least 40 percent of Americans.” It is a position one can argue with, but the opposite (pro-abortion rights) position is not necessarily the accepted wisdom, unless you are a liberal. Mangu-Ward continues: “I have personally been the beneficiary of this doublethink on ideological diversity for years. When institutions recognize the need to have a nonliberal somewhere in their midst, they look across the landscape and discover that the closest thing to conservatism that they can tolerate is a relatively mild-mannered, young(ish), female, pro-choice libertarian. Which is to say, not a conservative at all.”
More broadly, this is part of why the abortion debate can’t be simply resolved by an appeal to logic or first principles, because the first principles of each side are radically different, as are their implications, depending on how far you want to go. As I grow older and the fragility of life becomes more obvious to me, I am more inclined towards the Catholic position, which is pro-life on both abortion AND the death penalty. Nevertheless, I have to define myself as pro-choice, because if we actually defined abortion as murder, Williamson’s posture would be less of a posture and more of a possibility.
See, Kant’s other famous idea was the thought experiment called the categorical imperative. Having eliminated the possibility of deriving truth from empirical data (or rather, asserting that it only applied to the ‘phenomenal realm’), Kant sought a device by which one could determine the morality of an action in a given situation. He defined this categorical imperative in action thus: “Act only according to that maxim by which you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law.” Translated, Kant is expecting the individual to take responsibility for every choice as an example of a universal principle.
When challenged on this by the Frenchman Benjamin Constant, who said that if lying goes against the categorical imperative, this would mean that there is a duty not to lie to a murderer seeking a target, Kant replied that (while one might simply withhold any statement and keep silent) it is nevertheless a greater duty to be truthful to the murderer than to protect a potential target: “Although in telling a certain lie, I do not actually do anyone a wrong, I formally but not materially violate the principle of right with respect to all unavoidably necessary utterances. And this is much worse than to do injustice to any particular person, because such a deed against an individual does not always presuppose the existence of a principle in the subject which produces such an act.”
This gets to the real issue with Kantian idealism. With the categorical imperative, and in a much broader respect with the Critique of Pure Reason and subsequent work, Kant was trying to act against the philosophy of “consequentialism”, and define a universal moral law that was not undermined by “self-love” or ulterior motives. Yet, to apply the categorical imperative, one has to apply consequences on the most abstract level, and limit one’s action on the principle that a particular action sets a universal example. To Kant, to lie in any circumstance is to justify lying in all circumstances, and thus the abstract consequence of violating philosophy is used to dismiss the practical consequence of making that maxim a universal.
Most people, of course, don’t think like this. Unless you’re in politics.
This in a roundabout way gets to the other topic I am thinking about.
One of the reasons that gun crime remains an issue is that every time a firearms massacre occurs, liberals can’t get the “common-sense gun safety” legislation they want, because even when it is common-sense and supported by the public (national background checks, for instance), it gets shot down in the Congress and state legislatures. This is mostly because of the NRA and its commercial priorities, but the NRA itself is representing a larger gun culture, and I would say that a huge reason for their success in resisting political pressure is that they are as inflexible in compromising gun rights as Planned Parenthood and liberal organizations are in resisting compromise on abortion rights. Just as pro-choice people resist conservative attempts to restrict abortion access as a transparent ploy towards ending abortion rights altogether, the gun lobby presents any gun control legislation as a slippery slope towards total gun prohibition.
At this point, liberals might object. We’ve established that there really are some conservatives who not only want to ban abortion but want to prosecute it as murder. But surely being anti-gun isn’t the same thing. The argument being proffered by liberals is that they aren’t trying to end gun rights, just establish proper security procedures. “Nobody’s saying we need to get rid of the Second Amendment.”
Except, some people are.
On March 27, retired Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens attracted headlines with a New York Times column in which he stated that the only solution to gun violence was the repeal of the Second Amendment. Stevens points out that the Second Amendment was put in the Bill of Rights because of a fear that a national standing army would threaten the security of the separate states, thus the default assumption that defense was a matter for state militia. But to Stevens, “that concern is a relic of the 18th century.” Stevens states that his concern stems from the 2008 Supreme Court decision District of Columbia v. Heller, in which he was one of four dissenters, and which he asserts “has provided the N.R.A. with a propaganda weapon of immense power.” Removing the Second Amendment, Stevens says, “would eliminate the only legal rule that protects sellers of firearms in the United States – unlike every other market in the world.” Blanking out of course, that by Stevens’ own argument, we’d had the Second since the signing of the Constitution, and the prior standard of its interpretation before Heller was more to his liking, and it would be much easier and more practical to appoint more justices who agreed with him than it would be to go through the whole process of amending the Constitution.
Keep in mind, when Antonin Scalia wrote his opinion in Heller, he specifically stated: “Like most rights, the Second Amendment right is not unlimited. It is not a right to keep and carry any weapon whatsoever in any manner whatsoever and for whatever purpose: For example, concealed weapons prohibitions have been upheld under the Amendment or state analogues. The Court’s opinion should not be taken to cast doubt on longstanding prohibitions on the possession of firearms by felons and the mentally ill, or laws forbidding the carrying of firearms in sensitive places such as schools and government buildings, or laws imposing conditions and qualifications on the commercial sale of arms. Miller’s holding that the sorts of weapons protected are those ‘in common use at the time’ finds support in the historical tradition of prohibiting the carrying of dangerous and unusual weapons.”
Not to mention, liberals have never fussed about applying the First Amendment towards a general category of individual freedom of expression that applies far beyond 18th-century artefacts like “the press.”
All Heller did was to knock away the specious rationale that the Constitution says anything about a “collective right” that is inherent in the government and not the people. Liberals wail that Scalia’s opinion arbitrarily blew away the previous consensus on what the American legal standard of gun ownership is supposed to be, eliding the point that said standard was a precedent that did not date back to the founding documents, and is most strongly based in US vs. Miller.
Nevertheless, Stevens’ piece is worthwhile in that someone is at least approaching the matter honestly. The main fact in Stevens’ opinion was that we haven’t actually needed state militia units since the Civil War, and their domestic security purpose is effectively taken over by the National Guard. But that gets to the general point that much of the government’s “rules as written” (the Constitution) have little to do with how the US government works in practice. Challenging the Second Amendment simply forces us to admit that the government hasn’t operated according to its original principles for quite some time, but it doesn’t answer the question as to whether that is really a good thing.
For example, the Third Amendment says that the government is not allowed to quarter troops in private homes. “No Soldier shall, in time of peace be quartered in any house, without the consent of the Owner, nor in time of war, but in a manner to be prescribed by law.” We haven’t even needed to consider this, because since the constitutional government was founded, the government has always provided for troops and had the money to do so, thus the option has never been necessary. That being the case, why do we still need the Third Amendment?
Because, we all know that if we didn’t have the Third Amendment, Republicans would force wealthy Democrats to quarter troops on their property so they could raid the defense budget for their personal vacations.
This is why it doesn’t help liberals to say that “the Constitution is a living document.” Because if “conservatives” press their current advantage, and get multiple justices on the Supreme Court, they could repeal Roe v. Wade, or Brown v. Board of Education. And at that point, asserting that the Constitution is a “living document” won’t sound quite so cute.
So this is what I’m getting at: First, Immanuel Kant sucks. But that’s not directly relevant. Secondly, we do not all share the same first principles, which is made clear by American political history in general and the current trend of politics in particular. Third, even beyond first principles, the real reason that liberals and conservatives can’t trust each other these days is that they both assume the worst of each other when they get into power. Which is eminently justified.