History, always messy, has a wrong and a right side, and
sometimes the right side is the revolutionary one; such was the case during the
American Revolution.
When U.S. Senator Chris Murphy says that the National Rifle
Association (NRA), and others who support the Second Amendment to the Bill of
Rights, is “on the wrong side of history,” he shows a lack of understanding
concerning what history is, what being on the wrong side of it is, and possibly
what “is” is. If the NRA is on the right side of the Second Amendment, it is on
the right side of history, as were American revolutionists who fashioned it in response
to a British attempt to deprive colonists of their weapons. The most prominent lawyer
of the day, Judge St. George Tucker, appointed by President James Madison as
U.S. District Judge for Virginia, characterized the right of citizens to bear
arms as “the
palladium of liberty, the right of defense upon which all the other
imprescriptible rights in the Bill of Rights depend. Such was the historic understanding of the Second Amendment throughout American history – before the advent of Murphy.
What most people who are not Murphy mean by history is a
faithful record of the past. All history is past history. Both the U.S.
Constitution and those who had a hand in constructing it are part of history.
But Murphy's “history,” is an imagined record of the
future, not a faithful record of the past and, as such, the past may easily be
dispensed with in our reckoning. Most recently, former Justice of the Supreme Court John Paul Stevens,
tying his courage to the hitching post, declared that the U.S. Congress should repeal
the Second Amendment, a useless artifact of an earlier age. The far left Stevens
has yet to provide the New York Times with a list of other ancient imprescriptible
rights listed in the Bill of Rights that a modern age should also deposit on
the ash heap of history.
Murphy’s real quarrel is with what former Justice Antonin
Scalia called the originalist interpretation of constitutional rights.
There are those who argue that an originalist view of any
and all constitutions, not to mention history itself, is a morally blighted
view. Because the U.S. Constitution should be regarded as a “living document,”
constitutional interpretation, they argue, must change with the times. But this
has little to do with history and a great deal to do with using courts as a
sort of cattle prod to more quickly move the rest of us, most especially resistant
legislators, in a progressive direction. Once the court, by vetoing the dictates
of representative government, effects a progressive change, those moved by the
progressive afflatus, will be “on the right side of history,” because judicial
interpretation will have changed history, progressives hope, for the better.
There is a snake in the grass here: Any non-democratic constitutional change
brought about by progressive courts over the helpless objections of
representative bodies may always be reversed by conservative courts. And that
is why court appointments have become in our time brutally politicized.
History is backward looking. But Murphy’s “history” occurs
in the future and is brought about by an act of will on the part of well-intended
progressives, such as himself. The
progressive view of real history was expertly expressed by Henry Ford: “History
is bunk.” It put forth bitter fruit in Karl Marx’s “Eleven Theses on Feurbach:
“The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various
ways. The point, however, is to change it,” lines that serve
as the epitaph on Marx’s tomb in London’s High Gate Cemetery.
Real progressive history occurs in the collective will of
the moment, not in the past. Therefore, one need not consult the past when
fashioning a brave new future. The Constitution, for example, belongs to a
remote past that should have no claim on us. G. K. Chesterton used to say
approvingly that tradition is the “democracy of the dead,” an extension of the
democratic franchise to those who have shaped our freedoms and liberties, at
great expense to themselves. Chesterton’s view of the obligations WE owe to
both our forefathers and our children yet unborn is good common sense. Murphy’s
view of the obligations that tie us to our past – to real history – is neither
common nor good. It is far worse than nonsense.
It is, to quote Ford, bunk.
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