How Guns Made the Civil Rights Movement Possible

Two men keeping a "fire-bomb watch" at a Freedom School's community library in Holmes County, Mississippi, during the 1964 Freedom Summer.  (Photograph by Matt Herron)

A young man guarding a Black Panther billboard in Lowndes County, Alabama (a place so violent that it was known as "Bloody Lowndes").  This photograph was taken during the 1966 election for county offices.  The year before, only one black person was registered to vote in this majority-black county.  Now black registered voters outnumbered white registered voters and had formed the Lowndes County Freedom Organization, a political party whose symbol was a black panther.

 
A video on the Deacons for Defense and Justice, formed in Jonesboro, Louisiana, in the summer of 1964.


This summer is the 50th anniversary of a critical period in the history of the American civil rights movement.  The passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 provoked many white Southerners into angry resistance, which included renewed violence from the Ku Klux Klan and the white Citizen's Councils.  The major civil rights organizations formed a coalition to support "Freedom Summer" in Mississippi.  Organizers moved throughout Mississippi to register black voters, in a state with the lowest percentage of registered black voters.  Organizers also set up "Freedom Schools" to provide blacks some of the education that they were not receiving in their segregated schools--including reading, mathematics, science, and American history with an emphasis on black history.  The violence against the "Freedom Summer" organizers included the Klan killing of James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner, whose bodies were found on August 4th.

During this same summer of 1964, some black leaders in Jonesboro, Louisiana, formed the Deacons for Defense and Justice, which was an organization of men trained to provide armed protection for civil rights workers in the South.  As was true for much of the civil rights movement in the South, the leaders were black military veterans who had served in World War II and the Korean War.  Chapters of the Deacons for Defense spread throughout the South over the next few years.

This armed self-defense might seem to be oddly contradictory to the widely professed nonviolence of the civil rights movement.  The Southern Christian Leadership Council (SCLC), the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), and the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) all had formally adopted the policy of nonviolence.  Although it had no formal policy on it, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) was understood also as committed to nonviolence.  And, of course, Martin Luther King used his prominent position in the movement to preach Christian nonviolence.

Within the movement, however, there was debate over King's message of nonviolence.  In 1964, Hartman Turnbow, a black Mississippi farmer and community leader, warned King:  "This nonviolent stuff ain't no good.  It'll get ya killed."  Hartman was known for driving away Klan night riders attacking his home by returning their gunfire, until the Klan retreated.  The morning after one exchange of gunfire, Turnbow told some civil rights organizers, "I wasn't being non-nonviolent.  I was just protecting my family."

Actually, King himself was known to have been well-armed for self-defense.  After an attack on his home in 1956, his friends noticed that guns were scattered all around his house.  Even when he was not carrying a gun himself, he was surrounded by people who were armed.  In 1966, when he and Stokely Carmichael led a march through Mississippi, they disagreed about the policy of nonviolence; but King allowed the Deacons for Defense to provide armed protection for the marchers.

The importance of armed self-defense for the civil rights movement has been largely ignored, because it contradicts the popular image of civil rights workers as Christ-like martyrs ready to be killed without defending themselves.  Charles Cobb Jr. has set the record straight in his new book--This Nonviolent Stuff'll Get You Killed: How Guns Made the Civil Rights Movement Possible (Basic Books, 2014).  Cobb is a journalist, and he was a field secretary for SNCC in Mississippi, so some of his writing is based on his experience.

As the title of his book indicates, Cobb's claim is that despite the commitment to nonviolent resistance as a tactic for the civil rights movement, the movement would have failed if participants had not been able to defend themselves with arms.  Another way of putting this is that when American blacks demanded their "civil rights," one of the most important right was the Second Amendment right to keep and bear arms.  Cobb quotes one civil rights leader--John R. "Hunter Bear" Salter--as saying in 1994: "I'm alive today because of the Second Amendment and the natural right to keep and bear arms." 

Moreover, as this remark suggests, this right was understood as not just a constitutional right but also a natural or human right rooted in the natural human desire to protect one's life, one's family, and one's property from violent attack.  This is not necessarily contradictory to nonviolence if one understands that this is a right to exercise defensive violence rather than offensive violence as a deterrent to aggressive violence.  Richard Haley, CORE's southern regional director, defended the arrangement by which the Deacons for Defense provided armed escorts for CORE organizers as a way of supporting the policy of nonviolence.  "Protected nonviolence," he observed, "is apt to be more popular with the participants than unprotected."

One can also see here the natural ground of all human rights in what John Locke called "the executive power of the law of nature" as rooted in the naturally evolved animal inclination to ward off attacks and the resentment against unjust aggression.

Here is one of many good stories in Cobb's book illustrating the need for "protected nonviolence":

"[Margaret Block] stayed with eighty-six-year-old Janie Brewer, the matriarch of a large black family who lived with some of her children and grandchildren on the family farm. . . . 'Mrs. Brewer asked me what did SNCC mean,' Block would later recall, 'and I told her the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee.  And she stopped me.  [She said] 'You said nonviolent.  If somebody come at you, you ain't gonna do nothing.' . . . She pulled up a big ole rifle. . . . She kept a big rifle behind the chair. . . . [Mrs. Brewer said,] 'Shit, we ain't nonviolent.'  Ideas like this shaped Block's own feelings about nonviolence.  'Since I was living with [the Brewers],' she later explained, 'I had to be what the family was.'"

". . . One night in August 1964, after four of Mrs. Brewer's sons and another local resident tried to register to vote at the county courthouse in Sumner, Mississippi, whites in cars began circling the family's farmhouse.  This was not the first time such harassment had occurred; when SNCC staff took local people to attempt to register to vote, whites often followed the groups back home.  On this night, Janie Brewer had already been warned by her local sources of a possible attack, and she instructed her children, grandchildren, and SNCC guests to arm themselves and hide in the cotton fields.  Meanwhile she and Margaret Block began making Molotov cocktails in the kitchen, 'spilling gas everywhere,' Block remembered.  'And I'm like 'Damn if we get burned up in here, everyone was going to swear the Klan did it, and it's going to be Mrs. Brewer blowing us up.'  As the sheriff and a truckload of Klansmen approached the farmhouse, Brewer family members and some of the SNCC workers were still in the fields with rifles and shotguns.  Before the raiders reached the house, someone shone a floodlight on them.  Others fired into the air.  Brewer stood on the front porch ready to hurl a Molotov cocktail.  Everyone, including the sheriff, fled.  Night riders never returned to the Brewer farm."

Of course, armed self-defense cannot prevent people from being killed by hidden assassins.  King was assassinated in 1968 by a shooter hiding in a room across a street from King's motel.  Medgar Evers was assassinated in 1963 by a hidden killer who shot him as he stepped out of his car in the driveway of his home, and so he had no chance to get to the guns that he kept in his car and in his home.

                                                  Charlie Cobb Speaks About His Book

Some other posts on these themes can be found  here, here, here, and here.

The American Black Tradition of Armed Self-Defense as a Natural Right: A Response to Jefferson Cowie

The 13th chapter of Jefferson Cowie's Freedom's Dominion has a provocative title: "Lynching as an Act of Freedom."  Cowie explains: "A person did not have to see a dead and mutilated body to know that white people relished a uniquely sinister form of liberty: the freedom to take a life with impunity" (233).  White people lynching black people expressed the freedom of white people to dominate others.

Cowie observes: "The only cure, short of changing the hearts of white people or the armed resistance of Black people, was the power of the federal government" (241).  But while the federal government had restrained the freedom of the dominant white class to inflict violence on the blacks during Reconstruction, once Reconstruction was over, the federal government never made lynching illegal until the "Second Reconstruction," in the 1960s, when major civil rights legislation was passed.

But notice how Cowie quickly passes over "the armed resistance of Black people" as a possible restraint on lynching, which suggests that black people never saw this as a serious option.  Cowie thus ignores the black tradition of armed self-defense.  For example, while Cowie makes one brief reference to Ida B. Wells, who was a famous black journalist known for her national campaign to expose the brutal injustices of lynching, he says nothing about her argument that armed self-defense was the best way to prevent lynchings.  In one case, after telling the stories of blacks using firearms to stop lynchings in Jacksonville, Florida, and Paducah, Kentucky, she declared:  "The lesson this teaches us and which every Afro-American should ponder well, is that the Winchester rifle should have a place of honor in every black home.  The more the Afro-American yields and cringes and begs, the more he is insulted, outraged, and lynched" (Johnson 2014: 109-110).  We should remember that the Winchester was the best lever-action repeating rifle of that time.  It could be considered the assault rifle of its day.  One full fifteen-shot magazine could be fired in 11 seconds. 

The white fear of armed blacks was manifested in the "Black Codes" enacted in the Southern States after the Civil War, which prohibited blacks from having guns.  The law in Alabama, for example, prohibited "any freedman, mulatto or free person of color in this state, to own fire-arms, or carry about this person a pistol or other deadly weapon" (Johnson 2014: 79).  Cowie is silent about this.

Similarly, although Cowie has an entire chapter on the "convict lease system" as a disguised form of black enslavement, he is silent about the fact that one of the most common charges against these black convicts was the crime of carrying a concealed weapon (191-209).  Thus, Cowie does not allow his readers to see this as evidence for a widespread culture of black gun ownership that threatened white dominance.

Cowie also gives his readers a brief account of the race riots after World War One that is silent about how blacks fought back with guns (242-43).  One example is the Tulsa riot of 1921, in which as many as 100 people were killed, and over one thousand black homes were destroyed.  John Hope Franklin, who became a prominent black historian, moved to Tulsa in 1925 at age ten.  Franklin reported that "many more whites were killed during the riot than many whites were willing to admit," because they didn't want to admit that armed blacks had fought back heroically.  Franklin observed:

"The self-confidence of Tulsa's Negroes soared, their businesses prospered, their institutions flourished, and they simply had no fear of whites.  After 1921, an altercation in Tusa between a white person and a black person was not a racial incident, even if there was a loss of life.  It was just an incident.  Such an attitude had a great deal to do with eradicating the fear that a Negro boy growing up in Tulsa might have felt in the years following the riot" (Johnson 2014: 189).

Cowie says nothing about this.

He is also silent about black armed self-defense in Alabama during the modern civil rights movement.  For instance, he writes about Rosa Parks and the Montgomery boycott of the bus system and about Autherine Lucy's attempt to enroll at the University of Alabama.  But he says nothing about Rosa Parks' account of how important armed defense was for the black community, and he says nothing about how a group of armed black men protected Autherine Lucy from a violent mob (Johnson 2014:220-222).

Similarly, Cowie says nothing about Condoleezza Rice's testimony about the importance of black armed self-defense for her family when she was growing up in Birmingham, Alabama.  She has said: "Because of this experience, I'm a fierce defender of the Second Amendment and the right to bear arms.  Had my father and his neighbors registered their weapons, Bull Connor surely would have confiscated them or even worse" (Johnson 2014: 223).  Cowie does not even mention the Second Amendment.

Cowie does not recognize armed self-defense as a natural or constitutional right, and that points to the fundamental flaw in his understanding of American freedom.  He agrees with Orlando Patterson that there are three kinds of freedom.  The first is the freedom to enjoy individual liberty as long as one does not infringe on the equal liberty of others.  The second is the civic freedom to participate in political life--freedom as democracy.  The third is the most ominous--the freedom of some people to dominate or even enslave others (6, 415-416). 

The problem is how to defend the first two forms of freedom against the third.  In America, the only way to do that, Cowie suggests, is to have the federal government protect individual freedom and democratic freedom at the local and state levels of government, which means overriding "states' rights."  The flaw in Cowie's reasoning here is that he does not allow people to defend their natural rights from attack when government fails to defend them.   

This governmental failure can either be malevolent or structural.  A malevolent governmental failure is when government becomes the tool of an oppressive ruling class in dominating an inferior class, as when local and state governments enforced white supremacy in the South.  

A structural governmental failure is when government either cannot or will not protect the equal liberty of all people.  When the federal government refused to protect equal liberty in the American South, that was a structural governmental failure.  But even when a government strives to protect the rights of all of its people, it often fails because the governmental agents of law enforcement are often not present when there is some imminent threat to someone's life or liberty.  In either case, where people cannot rely on government to protect them, they have a natural right to armed self-defense, which is also made a constitutional right by the Second Amendment.

Although this right to self-defense is important for all people, it has been especially important for black people in America because they have so often not been able to depend on government to defend them from violent attack.  Previously, I have written about how guns made the civil rights movement possible.  But in my next post, I will extend the story of the black tradition of armed self-defense that stretches over 200 years of American history, from the Founding to the present.  The most comprehensive account of that story is Nicholas Johnson's Negroes and the Gun (Prometheus Books, 2014).  It is remarkable that Cowie has no place for that story in his history.

The Crisis of the House Divided in 2024: Trump and the Antiliberal Tradition in America

Some Americans shocked by Donald Trump's MAGA movement have insisted: "This is not who we are."  President Biden has adopted that as the main theme of his campaign against Trump--that Trump and his MAGA movement are trying to overturn those moral and political principles that have always defined the American people. 

But now some historians are saying that Trump's political movement has deep roots in an American antiliberal tradition that has always been set against the liberal tradition that originated in the American Revolution and the liberal principles of the Declaration of Independence: since 1776 America has been split in two--a liberal America that embraces the ideal of equal liberty for all in the Declaration of Independence and an antiliberal America that rejects it.  

Two new books make this argument:  Robert Kagan's Rebellion: How Antiliberalism Is Tearing America Apart--Again and Steven Hahn's Illiberal America: A History.  In this post, I will respond to Kagan's book.

Kagan elaborates an argument that he first set forth in some articles in the Washington Post.  He makes two claims.  The first is that the American presidential election of 2024 will be like the election of 1860 in manifesting what Abraham Lincoln called the Crisis of the House Divided, which will provoke a rebellion against America's liberal democracy comparable to the South's rebellion in the Civil War.  The second claim is that this crisis in 2024 is only the most recent expression of a struggle between liberalism and antiliberalism that has been woven into American history ever since the American Revolution and most dramatically displayed in the American Civil War.

Kagan predicts that if Trump wins, he will become a dictator in punishing his enemies and exercising unlimited power in violation of the Constitution; and his supporters will allow him to do this.  If Trump loses, he will say the election was stolen, his supporters will deny the legitimacy of the federal government, and those state governments under Republican control will refuse to accept Biden's presidency, and perhaps secede from the Union and form a pro-Trump confederacy.  Either way, American liberal democracy will be dissolved.

This is possible, Kagan argues, only because the many Americans who support Trump reject the liberal principles of the American Revolution, and consequently they will justify Trump's illiberal behavior.  Trump's supporters show that they belong to an American tradition of illiberalism that stretches back to the origins of American politics.

Kagan sees the Declaration of Independence as the statement of the radical liberalism of the American Revolution--that all men are created equal and equally endowed with unalienable natural rights, such as life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, that governments are instituted by consent of the people to secure these rights, and that when any government fails to secure these rights, it is the right of the people to alter or abolish that government and to institute a new government that seems to them most likely to secure their safety and happiness.  

Throughout American history, the most fundamental political debates have been about how best to extend that equality of rights to all Americans.  Kagan agrees, therefore, with Lincoln's belief that this equality of rights in the Declaration was meant to be the "standard maxim for free society" that would be "constantly looked to--constantly labored for--and even though never perfectly attained, constantly approximated and therefore constantly spreading and deepening its influence, and augmenting the happiness and value of life to all people of all colors everywhere" (Speech on the Dred Scott Decision, June 26, 1857).

But from the beginning in 1776, according to Kagan, these principles have been rejected by many Americans who have embraced a racial, religious, and ethnic antiliberalism, in which America is defined not by its commitment to human equality of rights but by its identity as a white Protestant Anglo-Saxon nation.  The American antiliberal groups have included the slaveholding South, the post-Reconstruction Jim Crow South, the Ku Klux Clan in the 1920s, the anti-immigration movement that led to the Immigration Act of 1924, the Dixiecrats of the 1940s and 1950s, the John Birch Society conservatives, the antiliberal conservatives associated with William Buckley, the supporters of George Wallace, the movement for Pat Buchanan, the New Right around Ronald Reagan, and now the antiliberal populists who have taken control of the Republican Party under the leadership of Trump.

Kagan believes that Trump's MAGA populism shows all the elements of American antiliberalism.  The racial element is white nationalism: all white groups have voted in greater numbers for Trump than for his opponents.  The religious element is Christian nationalism:  many of Trump's most fervent supporters want to restore America's identity as a Christian nation.  The ethnic element is Anglo-Saxon and European nationalism:  Trump's anti-immigration stance is predominantly opposition to immigrants of Hispanic, African, Middle-Eastern, and Asian ethnicities.  America is for Americans, and those Americans who do not support Trump's ethnic, religious, and racial vision of America are not true Americans.

Although I agree with much of what Kagan says, I disagree with him on three points.  First, he fails to make a good intellectual argument for the Lockean and Lincolnian interpretation of the Declaration of Independence.  Second, he fails to see that over the past 250 years of American history, the liberal tradition has ultimately prevailed over the antiliberal tradition--even among American conservatives. Finally, he fails to see that as a consequence of that triumph of the liberal tradition in America, Trump and his supporters have neither the guts nor the guns for fighting a civil war to overthrow that liberal tradition.

THE LOCKEAN AND LINCOLNIAN DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE

Kagan identifies the liberal principles of the Declaration of Independence (particularly in the first two paragraphs) as a concise and elegant statement of John Locke's political philosophy, and so the liberal tradition in America as based on the Declaration is a Lockean tradition of thought (13, 17, 30-31, 34, 41, 151).  Kagan says nothing, however, about Claire Rydell Arcenas's argument that the Declaration does not show Locke's influence at all.  He should have responded to her by showing the many clear echoes of Locke's language in the Declaration, as I did a few years ago.

Kagan should also have responded to Pauline Maier's claim that Lincoln's elevation of the Declaration to being America's statement of the "standard maxim for free society" was Lincoln's mythic invention.  Lincoln saw the highest moral standard for American politics stated in the first two paragraphs of the Declaration of Independence--particularly, the assertion that "all men are created equal." But Maier argued that from 1776 to 1790, almost no one thought that opening section of the Declaration was important.  It was only later, after the Jeffersonian Republicans had transformed the interpretation of the Declaration, that the "self-evident truths" of the second paragraph became the most important part of the Declaration.  

In my previous post, I answered Maier by arguing that the political philosophy of the Declaration was widely recognized beginning in 1776 as necessary for the moral justification of the Revolution, although George Mason's language in the Virginia Declaration of Rights was quoted more often than Jefferson's revision of that language, and as Maier admits, Jefferson's language had the "same content" as Mason's.  Then, beginning in the 1790s, the Jeffersonian Republicans began the tradition of quoting Jefferson's language as the most concise and eloquent statement of the founding principles of the American Revolution.  So, when Lincoln appealed to Jefferson's principles in the Declaration, he was not creating a myth but extending a tradition that had emerged early in the American founding period. 

But while Locke, Jefferson, and Lincoln all agreed that we can justify the human equality of rights as "inherent in the nature of being human"--as originally expressed in the state of nature--Kagan insists that they were wrong because liberalism is "a choice, and, at root, a faith" for which there is no rational proof or justification.  "Either one believes in its principles or one does not" (13-14).

This is not much of an argument for liberalism.  Indeed, it's not an argument at all, but rather a groundless "faith" or "choice."

Kagan simply assumes without proof that there is no empirical argument for natural rights as "inherent in the nature of being human."  He thus ignores the evolutionary historical evidence that Locke was right about the state of nature as the original condition of our human ancestors and that the American Revolutionaries were right about their being in a state of nature.  I have written about this in some previous posts.

Kagan asserts: "Since the dawn of humankind, people have been ruled by tyrannies of one form or another.  That is the norm" (10).  He offers no proof for this assertion.  And he does not respond to the evidence that I and others have presented to show that democracy is natural for human societies, because it arose in our earliest evolutionary history in Paleolithic hunter-gatherer bands, so that it is part of our genetically evolved human nature.

Contrary to Kagan, liberalism does not depend on a blind "faith."  Locke, Jefferson, and Lincoln were right in seeing that it can be supported with reasons and evidence that show how our natural rights arise from our evolved human nature.

THE TRIUMPH OF THE LIBERAL TRADITION IN AMERICA

Even if there is a good case to be made for liberalism, we have to wonder how successful it has been in persuading the American people.  If American history since 1776 has been a perpetual struggle between a liberal tradition and an antiliberal tradition, has one side emerged as stronger than the other?

Kagan's answer is unclear.  Sometimes he says that "large numbers of Americans" or "millions of Americans" are on the side of antiliberalism, and at other times he says that "half the country" is antiliberal.  But then he also says that at the founding "the great majority of Americans" were antiliberal.  And yet in the 1950s, antiliberalism "had fallen into minority status in both parties."  He also says that in recent history "the core antiliberal constituencies were declining in absolute numbers in the country at large, but as a percentage of Republicans, they were growing in both numbers and influence."  He quotes Glenn Ellmers (a scholar at the Claremont Institute) as saying that "most people living in the United States today--certainly more than half--are not Americans in any meaningful sense of the term," because only "the 75 million people who voted" for Trump in 2020 are true Americans.  (Previously, I have written about how Trump has split the Claremont Institute, with people like Ellmers taking the side of Trump against Jaffa's legacy of Lincolnian liberal conservatism.)  But then Kagan says that no more than "tens of millions of Americans will follow Trump wherever he leads."  (See pages 3, 5, 8, 77, 89, 94, 124, 135, 141, 161, 182, 196.)

In the final paragraph of his book, Kagan concludes that the future of American liberalism looks good--if it can survive the 2024 election:

"Meanwhile, the overall long-term prospects for American liberalism are actually bright, if only because the demographic shift is a reality that can't be blinked away.  White supremacy is another Lost Cause.  As America becomes increasingly multiracial, multiethnic, and multicultural, and as it becomes impossible for any single ethnoreligious group to dominate American politics and society, the appeal of liberalism as the only means of holding such a society together should grow.  Many white people may not change their attitudes toward other racial and ethnic groups--after all, they haven't changed in two hundred years--but their ability to fight to preserve their hierarchies will diminish because they will be too badly outnumbered.  That is why 2024 is the year when the antiliberals hope to overthrow the system.  It may be their last chance" (217-18).

I agree that the "demographic shift" towards a "multiracial, multiethnic, and multicultural" America favors liberalism.  But I also believe that there has been an intellectual shift in the moral and political culture of America that favors liberalism.  If we don't see that intellectual shift, that's because most of what Kagan identifies as antiliberal conservatism is only a pretense of antiliberalism that disguises an underlying liberal conservatism.

For example, Kagan speaks of Patrick Deneen as one of the leading antiliberals in America today (176, 185).  But as I have argued, if you study Deneen's writing carefully, you will see that he is actually a liberal!  As an illustration, you will notice that while Deneen praises John Winthrop's Massachusetts Bay Colony as the antiliberal founding of America--in contrast to the Lockean founding in 1776--Deneen refuses to defend the theocratic code of laws in Massachusetts--such as capital punishment for adulterers, homosexuals, witches, blasphemers, and those who refuse to worship God in the right way--because Deneen believes in the liberal principle of religious liberty, and so he's on the side of Roger Williams rather than Winthrop.

If you wanted to see a true model of antiliberalism, you would have to look beyond American history to Joseph de Maistre. In reaction against the French Revolution, Maistre initiated a Counter-Enlightenment tradition of thought based on a theocratic authoritarianism--the idea that all government comes from some unquestioned coercive authority that is divinely infallible and that all such authority is derived from the Pope as God's representative on Earth.  He proposed a restoration of the Bourbon monarchy to the throne of France, ruling under the supreme authority of the Pope in both temporal and spiritual matters.  Atheists, Jews, and heretical Christians (such as the Protestants) should be suppressed.  He claimed that the rationalist rejection of Catholic Christianity and theocratic monarchy was responsible for the disorder that followed the French Revolution of 1789.  Even the most extreme right-wing Catholic Integralists in France today who profess to be in de Maistre's tradition can't endorse his theocratic authoritarianism.

As compared with de Maistre, almost all American conservatives today--even those who pretend to be antiliberal or post-liberal--are really liberal conservatives.  You can see that in the debate that has recently emerged between the "National Conservatives" and the "Freedom Conservatives."  If you compare the "statement of principles" for National Conservatism with that for Freedom Conservatism, you can see that they agree in affirming the liberal principles of individual equality and liberty, and thus reject any ethnoreligious antiliberalism.  

For example, in the National Conservatism Statement, the section on "God and Public Religion" includes this: "Where a Christian majority exists, public life should be rooted in Christianity and its moral vision, which should be honored by the state and other institutions both public and private.  At the same time, Jews and other religious minorities are to be protected in the observance of their own traditions, in the free governance of their communal institutions, and in all matters pertaining to the rearing and education of their children.  Adult individuals should be protected from religious or ideological coercion in their private lives and in their homes."  

That's a long way from the theocratic coercion of Winthrop or de Maistre.

Here's the section on "Race" in the National Conservatism Statement:  "We believe that all men are created in the image of God and that public policy should reflect that fact.  No person's worth or loyalties can be judged by the shape of his features, the color of his skin, or the results of a lab test.  The history of racialist ideology and oppression and its ongoing consequences require us to emphasize this truth.  We condemn the use of state and private institutions to discriminate and divide us against one another on the basis of race.  The cultural sympathies encouraged by a decent nationalism offer a sound basis for conciliation and unity among diverse communities.  The nationalism we espouse respects, and indeed combines, the unique needs of particular minority communities and the common good of the nation as a whole."

This "decent nationalism" is a liberal multiracial and multiethnic nationalism.

What we see here is the ultimate triumph of the liberal tradition in American history.  The critical turning point in that history was the Civil War.  That war was a test of whether a nation dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal could endure in a war with a nation dedicated to the proposition that all men are not created equal.  The victory of the Union over the Confederacy was, as George Fitzhugh sadly conceded, the victory of John Locke over Robert Filmer.

Moreover, there is a good argument for saying that the military superiority of the Union over the Confederacy really was in some ways a product of the Lockean liberal culture of the North.  Consider, for instance, how the greater population of the Northern states over the Southern states arose from differences in migration.  Before the Civil War, the migration of white Southerners to the North was three times greater than the migration from the North to the South.  At the same time, seven-eighths of the immigrants from overseas settled in the North.  (This later became important for the Union army: 24 percent of all Union soldiers were born abroad [McPherson 1997: ix].)  In the 1840s alone, the population growth in the North was 20 percent higher than in the South (Kagan, 70).  Proslavery Southern leaders saw this population growth in the North as the single greatest threat to the South, which is why they fought so hard to expand slavery into the western territories, and thus increase the number of slave states.

What we see here is what evolutionary scientists call cultural group selection through migration and assimilation, in which countries with cultural traditions of freedom have higher fitness than countries that are less free.  John Locke understood this, which is why he argued that free societies benefited from having open borders, so that they could attract migrants from less free societies.  The freer societies with a growing population of productive and inventive people become the more prosperous and powerful societies.  In this way, people "vote with their feet" in favor of freedom.

And of course, not only did many white Southerners migrate to the North, many slaves ran away to the free states, forcing Southern slaveholders to demand that people in the North capture these fugitive slaves and return them to slavery.  That's why the debate over the fugitive slave laws was so intense.

Because of its larger population, the Union had a larger pool of men from whom soldiers could be recruited.  Consequently, the Confederate soldiers were badly outnumbered by their opponents: of the 3 million Civil war soldiers, over 2.1 million (70 percent) were Union soldiers.

Now, of course, once Reconstruction was ended, the Jim Crow South did preserve some of the Southern antiliberal tradition for almost a hundred years.  But even that was eventually defeated by the liberal tradition of the Civil Rights Movement, signaled in 1965 by an American President from the South, speaking before a joint session of Congress, declaring: "We shall overcome."

TRUMP HAS NEITHER THE GUTS NOR THE GUNS FOR A CIVIL WAR

But then is it likely, as Kagan predicts, that after the election of 2024 Trump will lead his MAGA movement in a new rebellion against the American liberal tradition that will provoke another civil war?  After all, if the people do have the right to overthrow an unjust government, as the Declaration of Independence says, and if Trump and his supporters believe that the American liberal regime is unjustly oppressing them, then they should be willing and able to launch an antiliberal rebellion.

I don't think so.  As I said three years ago, the response of Trump and his supporters to his defeat in the 2020 election shows that they do not have the guts or the guns to rebel against the American liberal political order.

He did not have the guns because military leaders such as General Mark Milley (Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff) made it clear that they would not allow the military to support a presidential dictatorship.  And he did not have the guts because he lacked the courage to assert his dictatorial will in violation of the Constitution.  He displayed his unmanly weakness on January 6 when he failed to lead the march on the Capitol as he had promised earlier in the day, and instead he watched the attack on TV at the White House, as if it were an entertaining TV drama.  Later, he meekly condemned the insurrectionary violence that he had inspired, and he told the insurrectionists to "go home with love and in peace." As Nicholas Fuentes of the white nationalist "America First" internet broadcasts said, Trump on that day proved to be "very weak and flaccid."

Kagan writes:

"What we are witnessing, however, is not a political battle but a rebellion.  The events of January 6, 2021, proved that Trump and his most die-hard supporters are prepared to defy constitutional and democratic norms, just as revolutionary movements have in the past.  Though it may have been shocking to see normal, decent Americans condoning a violent assault on the Capitol, that event demonstrated that Americans as a people are not as exceptional as their founding principles and institutions" (215).

But as shocking as the January 6th insurrection was, it could have been much more shocking.  Trump could have ordered the military to support the insurrectionists and to take control of the Capitol.  And he could have ordered his MAGA supporters to rise up and follow his leadership as the American Caesar.  He didn't do that because he didn't believe that Americans would support an antiliberal revolution to overthrow the American constitutional order.

By contrast, in 1861, Southern political leaders could count on there being a sufficiently strong antiliberal tradition in the South to support a Confederacy of states in rebellion against the national government.  

I am not convinced by Kagan's suggestion that when Trump wins or loses the presidential election of 2024, there will be such a strongly antiliberal MAGA movement that it will support Trump in becoming an antiliberal dictator. 

The Black Tradition of Armed Self-Defense and Rebellion in America: The Answer to the Christian Uncle Tom Problem

Discovery of Nat Turner, an 1884 Wood Engraving Illustrating Benjamin Phillps's Capture of Nat Turner--Turner with a Sword, Phillps with a Rifle

First published in 1852, Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin sold millions of copies in the United States and around the world and became perhaps the single most influential expression of abolitionist rhetoric.  And yet, as I have indicated in previous posts, some black abolitionists criticized her for depicting Uncle Tom as a submissive Christian slave who followed the Bible's admonition "Slaves, obey your masters."  In the 1950s, black author James Baldwin renewed this criticism and made "Uncle Tom" a term of scorn for blacks who passively submitted to their own exploitation and thus confirmed the racist depiction of blacks as unmanly in their servility.

Perhaps in response to this kind of criticism, Stowe seemed to change her mind in 1856 with the publication of her second novel Dred, A Tale of the Great Dismal Swamp.  Her hero in this novel--Dred--is a leader of violent slave insurrections who sneers at the meek passivity of Christian slaves.  Speaking to a slave, he declares:

"When a man licks his master's foot, his wife scorns him--serves him right. Take it meekly my boy! 'Servants, obey your masters.' (Ephesians 6:5) Take your master's old coats--take your wife when he's done with her--and bless God that brought you under the light of the Gospel! Go! You are a slave! But, as for me, . . . I am a free man! Free by this," holding out his rifle. "Free by the Lord of hosts, that numbereth the stars, and calleth them forth by their names. Go home--that's all I say to you! You sleep in a curtained bed.--I sleep on the ground, in the swamps! You eat the fat of the land. I have what the ravens bring me! But no man whips me! --no man touches my wife--no man says to me, 'Why do ye so?' Go! you are a slave!--I am free!" (199-200)

To those of us who think of the history of the modern civil rights movement as dominated by the Christian nonviolence taught by Martin Luther King and others, it might seem strange to think of American blacks as made free by their rifles.  But, in fact, there is a long American black tradition of armed self-defense and rebellion from the seventeenth century to the present.  The best single history of that tradition is Nicholas Johnson's Negroes and the Gun: The Black Tradition of Arms (Prometheus Books, 2014).  

What I see in this history is the black assertion of the Lockean natural right to keep and bear arms in defense of one's life and liberty--a natural right that has been made a civil right in Anglo-American law such as the Second Amendment to the Constitution.  Whenever people find themselves in circumstances where they cannot rely on governmental authorities to protect their life and liberty, they are thrown into a state of nature with what Locke called "the executive power of the law of nature"--the power and the right to punish those who aggressively attack them.

Johnson shows that there have been four periods in American black armed violence.  In the first, from the earliest colonial settlements with slavery in the 17th century to the end of Reconstruction in 1877, blacks used armed violence both in personal self-defense and in rebellion against slavery.  In the second period, from the end of Reconstruction to the early 1960s, blacks employed armed violence for individual self-defense, but they usually avoided political violence.  Then, in the early 1960s, a few black radical leaders recommended political violence to achieve "black power," which provoked a backlash from both black and white leaders who said that while violence in self-defense could be justified, political violence was foolish and unjustified.  Finally, beginning in the late 1970s, the high rate of black-on-black gun violence led many black leaders to recommend a complete ban on the private ownership of all guns as the only way to reduce gun crime in black neighborhoods.

ARMED VIOLENCE FOR SELF-DEFENSE AND REBELLION, 1712-1877

In colonial America, there is evidence that slaves often fought back in self-defense against their masters.  For example, some studies of the legal records shows that violence against masters was the most common form of slave crime (Johnson 2014: 32, 36).

There is also plenty of evidence of armed violence in slave rebellions.  Historian Herbert Aptheker identified over 250 slave uprisings involving 10 or more slaves (Aptheker 1943).  Consider three examples.

In the early 1700s, about 20 percent of the population of New York City were enslaved black people.  On the early morning of April 6, 1712, a group of over 20 black slaves set fire to a building, which served to distract the white colonists who tried to put out the fire.  The slaves were armed with guns, swords, and hatchets; and they killed 8 whites and wounded 7.  The slaves were captured almost immediately.  As many as 70 blacks were arrested.  21 were convicted and executed.  After the revolt, the city and colony passed restrictive laws for black slaves, including prohibiting blacks from carrying firearms (Hughes 2021).

On September 9, 1739, a Sunday, 20 slaves led by Jemmy Cato assembled near the Stono River southwest of Charlestown, South Carolina, with the hope of fleeing to Spanish Florida, where they would become free under a 1733 proclamation by the Spanish King.  Cato could read and write, which made it easier for him to learn about the King's proclamation. They did this on a Sunday because most of the planter families would be in church, and because by tradition slaves were left unsupervised on Sundays to work for themselves.  The slaves first attacked a warehouse belonging to a Mr. Hutchenson.  They killed some white people there, and they seized many small arms and ammunition stored there.  They plundered and burned other houses and killed other white families.  They began marching south towards Florida, carrying a banner that said "Liberty."  Other slaves joined while they marched until there were as many 100 in the march.  Colonel Bull, Lieutenant Governor of South Carolina, happened to be riding in the area.  Bull rode off to spread the alarm and to raise a militia to pursue the slaves.  When the militia attacked, many of the slaves ran away, but as many as 40 fought to the death.  It was all over by the end of the day.  Overall, about 40 blacks and 20 whites were killed (Hoffer 2011).  

The story of this rebellion shocked white people in South Carolina and elsewhere.  It was especially disturbing in South Carolina, where slaves outnumbered whites, and thus whites feared a general slave uprising.  New laws were passed restricting slavery such as prohibiting slaves from being taught to read and write and from carrying firearms.

On August 21, 1831, Nat Turner led a slave rebellion in Southhampton, County, Virginia.  Turner was a deeply religious preacher who believed that God had told him to lead a slave insurrection.  He planned the rebellion carefully over many months telling only a few trusted slaves.  Starting with a few, the rebellion expanded to over 70 slaves and freedmen.  They were armed with knives, hatchets, and clubs.  They had not been able to collect any firearms.  Turner ordered his men to "kill all the white people."  They moved across the countryside freeing slaves and killing whites.  

The rebels killed as many as 65 white people before the rebellion was suppressed by the state militia on the morning of August 23.  The militia greatly outnumbered the rebels.  The militia was also well armed with guns and even artillery.  Turner, however, escaped; and he survived in hiding for over two months.  On October 30, Turner was discovered by a farmer--Benjamin Phipps--who turned him over to the authorities.  Turner was tried and convicted.  He was hanged on November 11, and his body was mutilated.  During this time false rumors about a spreading slave rebellion led militias and mobs to kill over a hundred blacks who were falsely assumed to be rebels (Oates 1975).

These three slave rebellions illustrate a general pattern for such rebellions.  The number of rebels is small--usually no more than a few dozen, sometimes up to a hundred.  Remarkably, even in places like South Carolina, where the slave population was the majority, the rebels could not spark a general insurrection, which could have overwhelmed the white population.  The rebellion is quickly suppressed within one or two days.  The rebels fail because they are outnumbered and outgunned by their white opponents.  Notice in the picture of Nat Turner being captured by the farmer that Turner has only a sword, while the farmer has a rifle.

And most significantly, none of these rebellions led to the abolition of slavery.  Turner's rebellion in 1831 did provoke the Virginia Legislature in 1832 into a debate over the possibility of abolishing slavery.  Thomas Jefferson's grandson, Thomas Jefferson Randolph, warned that if slavery were not soon abolished peacefully by the legislators, it would someday be abolished violently by the rebellion of slaves.  He proposed a version of his grandfather's plan for the gradual emancipation of slaves and then sending the freemen to colonies in Africa.  Although the proposal was defeated, it had strong support.  The principal objections had to do with the impracticability of the plan.  Notably, no one in this long debate spoke of slavery as a good that should be preserved forever (Root 2008).  But within a few years, some Southern thinkers began for the first time to defend slavery as naturally good for slaves because of their biological inferiority to white people and the need of black people for paternal care by whites.  By 1837, John C. Calhoun defended slavery on the floor of the United States Senate as a "positive good" (Calhoun 1992: 474).

Some historians have argued that black slave rebellions show that blacks were not dependent on white abolitionists for their emancipation, because the slaves emancipated themselves by their aggressive resistance to slavery.  But, as I have noted in a previous post, historians like Joao Pedro Marques have pointed out that while slaves for thousands of years resisted their enslavement, slaves never sought the abolition of the system of slavery.  In fact, many emancipated slaves have become slaveholders themselves.  The abolition of slavery in the 19th century depended on the Enlightenment idea of the Declaration of Independence that all men are created equal and endowed with equal liberty, and therefore slavery is inherently unjust.  Slavery was abolished not by slave rebellions, but by the ideology of abolitionism.

Through most of our evolutionary history as hunter-gatherers, in which our human nature was shaped, slavery did not exist, and human adults lived as free and equal individuals.  But then with the establishment of agrarian societies and formal bureaucratic governments, slavery arose and became so deeply established that a "slaveless world" seemed so unimaginable that even while slaves sought every opportunity to liberate themselves, they could not conceive of a world without some being enslaved to others.  It was not until the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries that the Liberal Enlightenment--from John Locke to Adam Smith--introduced the rhetoric of bourgeois equality and liberty that was expressed in the Declaration of Independence, which gradually, in the nineteenth century, led to the abolition of slavery, which was a return to the equality and liberty of the evolutionary state of nature. 

Marques is correct in saying that slaves did not abolish slavery through their slave rebellions alone.  But slave rebellions contributed to the abolition of slavery once those armed slave rebellions became part of the moral and political movement to secure the natural rights to equal liberty promised by the Declaration of Independence.  One can see that in the resistance to the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, in the Civil War, and in Reconstruction.  In each case, black armed rebellion was in the service of the principle of equal liberty as demanding the abolition of slavery.

To be continued . . .

Donald Trump Was Too Weak to Become a Military Dictator

In some previous posts (here, here, and here), I have wondered why Donald Trump failed to declare martial law so that he could rule as a military dictator.  Why didn't Trump do something like what General Min Aung Hiaing, the commander in chief of the Burmese military, did on February 1, when he declared that since the parliamentary elections in November had been fraudulent, the new Parliament would be disbanded, and the military would rule over Burma through martial law?  Why didn't Trump say that since the Democrats had stolen the presidential election through a fraudulent vote count, he was justified in declaring himself the true president for a second term and ordering the military to support this?  Or, alternatively, why didn't he declare martial law in response to the Black Lives Matter protests last summer, so that he could have established his rule over the country as Commander in Chief?

In reading the new book by Carol Leonnig and Philip Rucker--I Alone Can Fix It: Donald J. Trump's Catastrophic Final Year--I hoped to find the answers to these questions.  Although Leonnig and Rucker do not say this explicitly themselves, my conclusion from their history of Trump's last year is that he did not have the guns or the guts for becoming a military dictator.  He did not have the guns because military leaders such as General Mark Milley (Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff) made it clear that they would not allow the military to support a presidential dictatorship.  And he did not have the guts because he lacked the courage to assert his dictatorial will in violation of the Constitution.  

He displayed his unmanly weakness on January 6 when he failed to lead the march on the Capitol as he had promised earlier in the day, and instead he watched the attack on TV at the White House, as if it were an entertaining TV drama.  Later, he meekly condemned the insurrectionary violence that he had inspired, and he told the insurrectionists to "go home with love and in peace." As Nicholas Fuentes of the white nationalist "America First" internet broadcasts has said, Trump on that day proved to be "very weak and flacid."

The most revealing part of this book is its account of General Milley's central role in upholding the constitutional limits on presidential power by asserting that the military take an oath to support the Constitution, which means that they would have to disobey any presidential order that violates the Constitution.  In recent days, Milley has been asked to say whether this book's stories about him are accurate.  He has answered by saying that he will not comment on the book.  But he did say: "The U.S. military is an apolitical institution.  We were then, we are now.  The military did not and will not and should not, ever, get involved in domestic politics.  We do not arbitrate elections.  That's the job of the judiciary, the legislature, and the American people."  This actually confirms what Leonnig and Rucker say about Milley's insisting that the military must not serve the political interests of the President or any other politician, and that once an election has been decided, the military cannot overturn the outcome.

Milley told his staff that he feared that Trump was looking for an excuse to invoke the Insurrection Act, so that he could call out the regular military to fight against his political opponents and to support him as a military dictator.  "This is a Reichstag moment," he explained.  "The gospel of the Fuhrer" (437).

The Insurrection Act of 1807, as amended a few times over the past 200 years, is a federal law authorizing the President to deploy National Guard troops and regular military troops within the United States to suppress civil disorder or insurrection.  This establishes a statutory exception to the general principle that the federal military must not be used for law enforcement purposes within the United States.  This creates a contradiction between the protecting the rights of citizens under civil law and the apparent need during some times of emergency to subject citizens to martial law.  There is also a contradiction between requiring that the President's proclamation of martial law in a State be requested by the State authorities and the need of the President to act whenever the State authorities are "unable, fail, or refuse" to execute the laws protecting their citizens from violence.

A "Reichstag moment" refers to the Reichstag fire, an arson attack in 1933 against the German parliament building in Berlin.  Adolf Hitler had recently become the Chancellor of Germany.  He led the Nazis in charging that the fire was part of a communist conspiracy against Germany.  He used this as an excuse to have President Paul von Hindenburg declare a state of emergency suspending civil liberties and then to have Parliament pass the Enabling Act that allowed Hitler to rule by decree, which made him dictator of Germany.

There were two Reichstag moments during Trump's last year in office when he threatened to invoke the Insurrection Act, but then failed to do so.  The first was in June of 2020 in response to the Black Lives Matter protests.  The second was in the two and a half months after the presidential election when he considered declaring martial law so that he could overturn Biden's election.

On May 25, 2020, George Floyd, a forty-six-year-old Black man, was killed by a white police officer, Derek Chauvin, in Minneapolis, when he knelt on Floyd's neck for nine minutes, with Floyd repeatedly saying "I can't breathe."  When a video of this circulated online the next day, people across America reacted with disgust.  Protests spread all across the country in almost every city.  Most of them were peaceful.  But some turned violent.

On the evening of Friday, May 29, the demonstrations reached the White House.  Some of the protestors jumped over the fences around the White House complex.  Fearing that the President was in danger, the Secret Service rushed up to Trump's private quarters and guided him, along with Melania and Barron, down to the emergency bunker under the East Wing.  Two days later, when The New York Times reported this, Trump became enraged that someone had leaked this story, because it made him look scared and weak.  A few days later, he said it was a "false report," although everyone knew he was lying.

Over the weekend, Trump called his military leaders and other top advisors into the Oval Office to plan a way to end the protests.  He proposed deploying the military in Washington and around the country.  Milley and Mark Esper (Secretary of Defense) objected that employing active-duty troops to suppress civil unrest was almost always a bad idea, because it violated the principle that military force should not be employed for domestic political ends.  Moreover, they argued that the protests were mostly peaceful exercises of the constitutional rights to freedom of speech and public assemblies to petition the government.

In the back of the room, Stephen Miller yelled out: "Mr. President, you have to show strength.  They're burning the country down."  Milley pointed a finger towards Miller and shouted: "Stephen, shut the fuck up.  They're not burning the fucking country down" (156).  But Miller continued: "It's an insurrection," and so the President should invoke the Insurrection Act.  Milley insisted that law enforcement could handle the situation.

On Monday, June 1, Trump had a plan for a staged production to show that he and the military were in control of the situation.  He called Milley, Esper, and others to follow him as he walked out of the White House and across Lafayette Square, which had been cleared of protestors.  Trump then stopped in front of St. John's Episcopal Church and held a Bible in the air, the perfect photo op.  Esper and Milley had not known that Trump was going to do this, and they were shocked that they had been photographed marching with him to his public display.

Two days later, Esper told reporters at the Pentagon that the military should not interfere with the Constitutional right of the BLM supporters to protest, and that he did not believe that the Insurrection Act should be invoked.

Trump was angry, and he called Esper to the White House.

"'You betrayed me!' Trump screamed at Esper.  'You're fucking weak!  What is this shit? I make the decisions on the Insurrection Act.  I'm the president, not you.  You're taking options away from the president.  This is about presidential authority.  This is about presidential prerogative.  And you're not the fucking president!'" (175)

On June 10, Milley spoke to the graduating class of the National Defense University, and he took the occasion to apologize for his appearance with Trump in Lafayette Square: "I should not have been there.  My presence in that moment, and in that environment, created the perception of the military involved in domestic politics" (187).

Trump was furious.  Meeting Milley in the Oval Office, Trump complained: "Why did you apologize? Apologies are a sign of weakness."

"This had to do with me and the uniform and not politicizing the uniform," Milley answered.  "I'm not apologizing for you.  I was apologizing for me."

What stands out, however, in this debate in the White House is that with all of Trump's insistence that "I make the decisions on the Insurrection Act," he never did decide to invoke the Act.  He was too weak to exploit the opportunity of the first Reichstag moment by declaring martial law.

The second Reichstag moment began on November 4, the day after the election.  Joe Biden was in the lead; but Trump had declared "we already have won it." And as he had suggested during the campaign, he said that Biden could not have won the election without fraudulent voting, and therefore Trump could refuse to step down.

Beginning in June, Milley had told his aides that his mission was to "ensure the United States of America has a free and fair election with no U.S. military involvement whatsoever" (189).  That meant that if Biden won, the military must not be used by Trump to stop Biden's inauguration on January 20, 2020.

On November 9, Trump fired Esper and replaced him with Chris Miller--a Trump loyalist--as Defense Secretary.  On November 10, Trump began filling other top Defense Department positions with his loyalists.  

General Milley began receiving phone calls from friends fearful that this was preparation for Trump's military coup to overturn the government by declaring martial law under the Insurrection Act with Trump as military dictator.

"'They may try, but they're not going to fucking succeed,' Milley told them.  'You can't do this without the military.  You can't do this without the CIA and the FBI.  We're the guys with the guns'" (366).

On November 14, the Proud Boys and other extremist Trump supporters came to Washington for the "Million MAGA March" to "Stop the Steal" of the election by Biden and the Democrats.  In the evening, violence broke out.  Milley told his aides that this looked like the American version of "brownshirts in the streets"--the paramilitary forces that protected the Nazi Party rallies.

Trump's lawyers filed over three-dozen lawsuits to overturn the elections.  But they all failed--even when the judges were Trump appointees.  (I have written about Trump's bizarre court cases here and here.)

On December 14, the Electoral College met in every state.  Biden received 306 electoral votes to Trump's 232.  On December 15, Mitch McConnell spoke: "The electoral college has spoken.  So today, I want to congratulate President-elect Joe Biden."  Trump called McConnell to curse him for his disloyalty.  This would be the last time the two men spoke for the rest of Trump's presidency.

On December 18, Michael Flynn and Sidney Powell were in the White House laying out a plan for Trump to cancel Biden's election.  Flynn proposed that Trump invoke the Insurrection Act to declare martial law, so that the military could rerun the election and show that Trump was re-elected.  Powell proposed that Trump should issue an executive order naming her a special counsel to seize voting machines in key states so that she could expose the fraudulent voting.  Trump never carried out their proposals.

Now, there remained one last chance for Trump to keep himself in power--the joint session of Congress on January 6 when Vice President Pence, as President of the Senate, would preside over the counting of electoral votes as certified by the States.  Trump had been told by John Eastman (a law professor at Chapman University) that Pence had the authority to refuse to accept the certified electoral votes from some states where Biden won, and then the Republican-controlled legislatures in those States could declare Trump the winner of their electoral votes.  Pence, however, believed that he did not have the constitutional power to do this, and that to do so would be an unconstitutional usurpation of power that would destroy the American system of constitutional democracy.

To put pressure on Pence and the Congress to overturn the election results, Trump organized the "Save America" rally at the Ellipse on January 6.  He invited all of his supporters to come, saying "Be there, will be wild."  Milley told his staff this would be Trump's attempt to provoke unrest as an excuse to invoke the Insurrection Act and call out the military.  On January 3, the Washington Post published an article signed by all ten living former secretaries of defense warning that Pentagon leaders should never allow the military to interrupt the peaceful transfer of power after an election.

Trump concluded his speech on January 6 by saying that "Mike Pence is going to have to come through for us."  "We're going to walk down to the Capitol and we're going to cheer on our brave senators and congressmen and women. . . . We're going to try and give our Republicans--the weak ones, because the strong ones don't need any of our help--we're going to try and give them the kind of pride and boldness that they need to take back our country."

But when the crowd started walking toward the Capitol, Trump did not go with them.  Instead, he went back to the White House to watch TV the rest of the day.  

By 1:00 pm, the Capitol police were being overwhelmed by the mob of Trump supporters surging towards the Capitol building.  By 2:10 pm, the first rioter had broken into the building, and a wild stream of rioters rushed into the building.  Some of them shouted "Hang Mike Pence!."  At 2:24 pm, Trump tweeted his support for this: "Mike Pence didn't have the courage to do what should have been done to protect our Country and our Constitution."

The Congressmen and Senators were forced to flee their chambers and to hide in secure areas, while the angry mob roamed the building looking for them.  Pence took command of the military, ordering them to clear the building so that the work of the Congress in certifying the election could resume.  He refused to leave the building because he insisted that the Congress should finish its work in the evening, and thus show to the world that the insurrectionists had failed: "We need to get back tonight," he said.  "We can't let the world see that our process of confirming the next president can be delayed."  As Pence gave his orders to the military, the commander in chief had no contact at all with any of the military leaders.  He was too busy watching TV.

By 8:00 pm, Pence called the Senate back into session.  At 3:24 am, the Congress voted to confirm Biden's 306 to 232 electoral vote win; and Pence formally declared Biden the next president of the United States.

Leonnig and Rucker write: "At no time that Wednesday since the Capitol siege began did these government and military leaders hear from the president.  Not even the vice president heard from Trump" (481).

Trump did not march with his supporters to the Capitol.  He did not command the military.  He did not take control.  He did not invoke the Insurrection Act.  He did not declare martial law.  He did nothing to overturn the election and establish his military dictatorship.  He became a passive observer.

On January 20, Biden was inaugurated President; and Trump left the White House to fly to his new home in Mar-a-Lago.

Since then, hundreds of his supporters have been arrested for their participation in the Capitol insurrection.  Trump did not pardon them.

I have written about the chimpanzee politics of Trump's attempts to become the alpha male.  Now we see that he has never had the will to power to become America's alpha male.

Contrary to what many of his critics have claimed, Trump is not a populist strongman.  Those who identify Trump as a strongman fail to see the discrepancy between his words and his deeds.  He talks like a strongman, but he does not act like one.  He's all bluster.  That's what the Proud Boys and the other Trump extremists discovered on January 6.  They took seriously his words about marching to the Capitol to "fight" for him.  And then he abandoned them. 

Hitler was a strongman.  Stalin was a strongman.  General Min Aung Hiaing of Burma is a strongman today.  Trump is a weakman.

And that's good.  Because his weakness of character--his lack of manly spiritedness--so enfeebled him that he could not impose a military dictatorship on the United States.

But should we worry that his experience has taught him that he needs to change his character--to become a true strongman so that he can successfully become a military dictator, perhaps when he's elected president again in 2024?  

There is some hint of that in the interview that Trump gave to Leonnig and Rucker on March 31, seventy days after leaving the White House.  Trump almost never expresses regret about anything he has said or done, presumably because that would be a sign of weakness.  But in his interview, in response to questions about his response to the BLM protests, he said: "I think if I had it to do again, I would have brought in the military immediately" (516).  Does this mean that if he is given another chance, he will immediately declare himself America's military dictator?

Recently, in a Claremont Institute podcast ("The Stakes"), Michael Anton interviewed an alt-right monarchist Curtis Levin; and they talked about why the United States needs an "American Caesar," who could rule as a military dictator.  They suggested ways that Trump could do this after being elected in 2024.  Does this suggest that some American conservatives--particularly those connected to the Claremont Institute--are now prepared to set aside the Constitution so that Trump can rule as a dictator?  Let's hope not.

Elite Control of Gunpowder Weaponry Supports the Early Modern State

I have been writing a series of posts on Paul Bingham's social coercion theory as explaining the evolutionary history of what Locke called the executive power of the law of nature. I am doing this despite the fact that Bingham has no knowledge of Locke.

If the coercive threat of violence is the only solution to the problem of conflicts of interest, and thus the only way to secure non-kin social cooperation, then every human social order should depend upon armed coercive enforcement of law, and the scale of cooperation should expand in proportion to the scale of the weaponry for coercion.  This coercive power serves the special interests of an elite ruling class whenever the access to that power is restricted to the elite rulers.  That coercive power will serve the general interests of all or most members of society only when all or most individuals have some access to the weapons of coercion.

The evolutionary state of nature--the original human condition in stateless societies--was largely egalitarian and democratic because most or all adult individuals had access to the weapons of coercion for enforcing the norms of cooperation.  That original condition of liberty and equality was largely lost with the establishment of centralized bureaucratic power in states where ruling elites controlled the weapons of coercion.  A modern liberal democratic state can restore some of that original liberty and equality, in which government is directed to securing the natural rights of equal liberty, only if all or most individuals have some access to the weapons of coercion.  In this way, we see how every human society rests on Locke's executive power of the law of nature.

Another way of putting this is to say that humans have always had only those rights they could coercively defend, and in that sense might does make right.  Or, as Spinoza said, "The right of nature extends as far as its power" (Theological Political Treatise, 16.3).  That is, I think, the fundamental insight in Bingham's social coercion theory or Locke's theory of the natural executive power to  punish.

Here is a TED talk by Bingham and Joanne Souza explaining their social coercion theory:

A crucial turn in the history of weaponry that led to the emergence of the modern world arose from the invention of gunpowder (see Jack Kelly, Gunpowder: Alchemy, Bombards, & Pyrotechnics--The History of the Explosive that Changed the World [Basic Books, 2004].)

Gunpowder comes from grinding together the right combination of saltpeter (75%), charcoal (15%), and sulfur (10%).  It was first invented by the Chinese around 1100 CE.  Ignition turns the gunpowder's stored chemical energy into the thermal energy of flame and the mechanical energy of compressed gases.  Containers of some sort are needed to direct that energy and put it to work.

Chinese fireworks craftsmen designed the four basic forms of containment that constitute all the uses of gunpowder--bombs, incendiary weapons, rockets, and guns.  A bomb is created by putting gunpowder in a container sealed up and with a fuse, so that ignition generates enough pressure to blow up the container.  An incendiary weapon is created by putting gunpowder into a tube with one open end, so that the combustion produces a fiery spray.  A rocket is created when the burning powder drives the tube forward.  A gun is created when the powder is put in a tube with one end open and some object is put in the tube on top of the powder, so that when the powder burns, the expanding gases push the projectile out at a high rate of speed.

Gunpowder technology entered Europe sometime between 1200 and 1250 CE.  Advanced artillery and guns were developed between 1350 and 1500 CE.  This new weapons technology brought the collapse of the European feudal order of archaic states based on a small elite of armored warriors and kingly chiefs in their castles.  Gunpowder weaponry could defeat armored warriors, and gunpowder artillery could blow up castle walls.

The first guns invented in Europe were bombards--a three-ton barrel fired a marble ball weighing over 500 pounds that could smash the walls of a castle.

These new weapons were so expensive to build and operate that only powerful centralized states could use them to defeat the many small feudal states.  This improved coercive power supported the rise of early modern states in Europe and elsewhere.

This was the end of feudal knighthood.  Don Miguel de Cervantes was a European noble who had fought in some of the wars establishing early modern European states.  He expressed his scorn for the new gunpowder weapons through the words of his fictional knight, Don Quixote:

"Blessed were the times which lacked the dreadful fury of those diabolical engines. . . whose inventor I firmly believe is now receiving the reward for his devilish invention in Hell; an invention which allows a base and cowardly hand to take the life of a brave knight, in such a way that, without knowing how or why, when his valiant heart is full of courage, there comes some random shot--discharged perhaps by a man who fled in terror from the flash the accursed machine made in firing--and puts an end in a moment to the consciousness of one who deserved to enjoy life for many an age."

Once handguns became cheaper and easy to use--beginning in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries--they became weapons for common individuals to attack elite power, which brought a democratization of power.  I will turn to this in a future post on the American Revolution and Civil War.

Trump's Martial Law in a New Civil War?

                                                            The Portland "War Zone"

In previous posts, I have argued that Trump's biggest mistake was following the recommendations of Leonard Leo and the Federalist Society in his judicial appointments because judges who are constitutional originalists and textualists will not support Trump's claim that "as President, I can do whatever I want to do"--that is, become a dictator unconstrained by law.

The most recent case illustrating this point came just a few days ago--State of Oregon and the City of Portland v. Donald Trump et al.  On Saturday, U.S. District Court Judge Karin Immergut issued a temporary restraining order halting Trump's deployment of National Guardsmen to Portland, Oregon, as an unconstitutional act.  She declared: "this is a nation of Constitutional law, not martial law."  To show that the American Founders feared the sort of military tyranny that Trump is now launching, she quoted from James Madison at the Constitutional Convention: "A standing military force, with an overgrown Executive will not long be safe companions to liberty.  The means of defense against foreign danger have been always the instruments of tyranny at home."

Remarkably, Judge Immergut was appointed to her position by Trump in 2019.  But now Trump says "to have a judge like that, that judge ought to be ashamed of himself" (strangely referring to her as a man).

As in so many previous cases, Trump is being frustrated by judges he appointed because their jurisprudential originalism and textualism deny his claims to dictatorial power.  If Trump were smart, he would scorn conservative jurisprudence and argue for a "living constitution" that allows the president to rule as a king above the law.

Judge Immergut's case involves Trump's order on September 27, 2025, directing Pete Hegseth to provide troops to protect "War ravaged Portland" from "Antifa, and other domestic terrorists" and authorizing "Full Force, if necessary."  Hegseth authorized the deployment and federalization of 200 of Oregon National Guard service members to be sent to Portland, even though Oregon's Governor, Tina Kotek, objected.

Under the Militia Clause of the U.S. Constitution, Congress has the power "to provide for calling forth the Militia to execute the Laws of the Union, suppress Insurrections, and repel Invasions" (Art. I, sec. 8, cl. 15).  In the Militia Act of 1792, the Congress first delegated this Congressional authority to the President to call forth the militia in extraordinary circumstances.  The modern version of that law is the Militia Act of 1903, which today is codified as 10 U.S.C, sec. 12406, which says that the President may federalize National Guard service members if:

(1) the United States, or any of the Commonwealths or possessions, is invaded or is in danger of invasion by a foreign nation;

(2) there is a rebellion or danger of rebellion against the authority of the Government of the United States; or

(3) the President is unable with the regular forces to execute the laws of the United States.

In this case the Defendants (Trump et al.) argued that Trump's military mobilization for Portland was authorized under the second two conditions: there was "rebellion or danger of rebellion against the authority of the Government of the United States" in Portland, and the President was "unable with the regular forces to execute the laws of the United States" in Portland.

Judge Immergut employs a strict textualist standard to rebut the appeal to "rebellion."  She asks how would the Congress have understood the term "rebellion" in 1903 when it passed the Militia Act of 1903?  Drawing from a previous case, where the court surveyed four dictionaries from the late 1800s and early 1900s, she states this definition:

First, a rebellion must not only be violent but also be armed.  Second, a rebellion must be organized.  Third, a rebellion must be open and avowed.  Fourth, a rebellion must be against the government as a whole--often with an aim of overthrowing the government--rather than in opposition to a single law or issue.

By that definition, Judge Immergut concludes, the protests in Portland were not a "rebellion."

She also concludes that the history of the protests in Portland from June to September do not show that the President was "unable with the regular forces to execute the laws of the United States."  She surveys the record of the protests in Portland to show that while the disruption outside the Portland ICE facility peaked in June of 2025, federal and local law enforcement quelled the disorder.  And, more importantly, as of September 27, 2025, when Trump issued his order, there had been months without any serious level of violent or disruptive protests in Portland.

Trump said that Portland was "War ravaged," and there was "lawless mayhem" and "Chaos, Death, and Destruction."  But Judge Immergut observed: "The President's determination was simply untethered to the facts."

Federal judges have said that in such cases, the courts must show "a great level of deference" to the President's judgment.  But still, the courts must "review the President's determination to ensure that it reflects a colorable assessment of the facts and law within a range of honest judgment."

In this case, any reasonable assessment of the history of the protests in Portland over the three months before Trump's order on September 27 do not support his claim that "War ravaged Portland" required federal military intervention.

TRUMP'S CIVIL WAR?

It is easy to predict, however, that Trump will soon employ a new legal maneuver to justify his imposition of martial law on cities and states that he sees as under the control of Democrats and thus constituting "the Enemy Within"--in other words, his political opponents.

He will invoke the Insurrection Act of 1807.  Here's the crucial clause:

 An Act authorizing the employment of the land and naval forces of the United States, in cases of insurrections

Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled, That in all cases of insurrection, or obstruction to the laws, either of the United States, or of any individual state or territory, where it is lawful for the President of the United States to call forth the militia for the purpose of suppressing such insurrection, or of causing the laws to be duly executed, it shall be lawful for him to employ, for the same purposes, such part of the land or naval force of the United States, as shall be judged necessary, having first observed all the pre-requisites of the law in that respect.

In 1861, at the beginning of the Civil War, a new section was added to allow the President to use the militia (the National Guard) and the regular military forces against the will of state governments in the case of "rebellion against the authority of the government of the United States."

We can foresee that Trump will declare that states like Illinois, Oregon, and California are in rebellion against the government of the United States, and therefore he will launch a full military invasion of those states.

We will then see whether the courts can stop him.

But the ultimate question is whether the U.S. military will obey his orders.  When they are ordered to kill Americans protesting Trump's dictatorship, will they obey?

Previously, I have written about how in the last two months of his first term, after he had lost the election, Trump did not have the guns or the guts for becoming a military dictator.  He did not have the guns because military leaders such as General Mark Milley (Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff) made it clear that they would not allow the military to support a presidential dictatorship.  And he did not have the guts because he lacked the courage to assert his dictatorial will in violation of the Constitution. 

But now it might be different because Trump is surrounded with sycophantic loyalists eager to obey his every whim.

We can hope that the U.S. military will resist.  A few days ago, when Hegseth and Trump gave their political speeches (for over two hours) to all of the top U.S. military leaders from around the world gathered in Quantico, Virginia, there was no applause from the audience, and Trump was clearly disturbed by that silence.  That's a good sign of resistance.

Another good sign is that when ICE has tried to prosecute protesters for harassing them, grand juries are refusing to indict.  This has already happened in Washington, D.C., Illinois, and California.  It is also possible that even if indicted and taken to trial, people resisting ICE can expect that juries will refuse to convict them.  Jury nullification has a long history in America as a way for citizens to impede unjust laws and governmental misconduct.  For example, this was one way that citizens resisted the enforcement of the fugitive slave laws before the Civil War and thus protected runaway slaves from being captured.

Trump and his people could evade this constraint of jury nullification by suspending the writ of habeas corpus, which would allow them to arrest and imprison anyone--to "disappear" them--without having to give any legal justification.  This would be the ultimate suspension of all individual rights.  Stephen Miller has proposed this.  That would be a police state.