By Alan Keyes
Friday, June 15, 2007
When poor policy produces bad results, it's often painfully easy to recognize inadequate leadership.
Unfortunately, when this standard becomes the main criterion for assessing the quality of our leaders, we end up losing ground -- because we only remember to move forward when we realize we're falling behind.
While it's true that the first order of business is to keep the ship afloat, if that becomes the goal of captaincy, the ship is unlikely to take us where we want to go. The better captain is the one who keeps our goal in mind and knows his craft well enough to use the wind, the waves, and the stars to plot a course that gets us there.
According to the oath that all public officials swear when they take office, our leaders' principal goal is to preserve our liberty -- which is to say, to preserve, protect, and defend the constitutional form of government that gives the people of our country a decisive voice in its affairs. The failure to take account of this goal isn't just an incidental shortcoming. It's an indication of fatally defective leadership that must eventually produce the destruction of our way of life.
It makes sense, therefore, that every time we assess the performance of our chosen leaders, we should do so in light of criteria that go beyond our physical survival or welfare.
It's essential of course that we survive, that our economy be healthy, and that we maintain the material means to defend the property that represents our physical strength. But as we achieve these results, we must also maintain the moral and spiritual strength that allows us to recognize and preserve our character as a free people.
We cannot afford leaders who do not keep this in mind as they deal with every issue, every challenge, every crisis. As a people, we must continually ask ourselves the political version of the question Christ poses with respect to salvation: What does it profit a free people if it gains the whole world and loses its own liberty?
If we do not ask this question as we judge the promises and actions of our political leaders, we will end up with a political system that allows our leaders to purchase short-term political success at the price of our sovereignty and freedom -- making themselves and the cliques that support them more powerful, as we grow every day weaker and less capable of recognizing, much less making use of, our authority as the ultimate arbiters of constitutional power.
The 9/11 terrorist attacks and their aftermath over the past several years offer a perfect illustration of this point. The debates in Congress over the so-called Patriot Act have highlighted potential threats to individual constitutional rights and liberties. Our politicians have engaged in extended debates about how much of a sacrifice of freedom our safety requires. But their first sworn duty is not to our safety. It's not even to our individual rights and liberties. It's to preserve our Constitution, which establishes government of, by, and for the people. As we formulate our policies in response to terror, therefore, the first responsibility of our leaders is to make sure that what we do to secure our physical safety also preserves and strengthens our capacity for self-government.
Now when it comes to safety, we can either secure it by our own strength and capacity, or the strength and capacity of others. When it comes to their personal safety, private individuals may learn the martial arts, or they can buy and become proficient with firearms. On the other hand, they may rely on the police or hire a personal bodyguard.
A free people, however, cannot afford to go wholly one way or the other. If it relies only on the capacities of individuals, it faces the prospect of defeat at the hands of nations or groups with professionally trained and organized armed forces. If it relies wholly on professionally trained and organized armed forces, it faces the prospect of domination and tyranny at the hands of the individuals or cliques that control those armed forces. A free people needs professional forces to defend the nation, but it also needs individuals with enough spirit and capacity in their own defense to discourage would-be tyrants from abusing the forces the people have entrusted to government.
In either case, one key element of success is education. We see this clearly enough where professional armed forces are concerned, since proper training is one of the bedrock prerequisites of their existence. Unfortunately, we have utterly lost sight of it with respect to the people in their individual capacities. This, despite the fact that the Constitution of the United States clearly states that "a well regulated militia" based on "the right of the people to keep and bear arms" is "necessary to the security of a free State." It is a right of the people -- not a power or feature of government -- that the U.S. Constitution aims to secure.
But a right means nothing unless the capacity to exercise the right has been preserved. The sworn duty of America's leaders must therefore involve efforts to assure that the people retain the capacity to use arms in defense of their freedom. Such efforts are precisely what took place in the towns and hamlets of America at the time the people ratified the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. Yet as we deal with issues of our national security today, from border security to terrorism, no thought is being given to this vital element of our constitutional system.
Given the unique challenges posed by the terrorist threat, it's especially hard to understand this failure. Professional armies are trained and equipped to deal with threats of invasion or acts of aggression undertaken by one state against another. But as we have discovered in Iraq, professional armies are hard pressed to deal effectively with threats that arise in the midst of society, aimed at people as they go about their everyday business and carried out by ruthless forces arising from or planted in their midst. This, however, is precisely the kind of danger the constitutional concept of a well regulated militia is meant to handle.
Where the people, in their very midst, are threatened, they must themselves be prepared to respond. They must be sufficiently armed, disciplined, and exercised to respond to immediate threats with an immediate defense that no organized police force or army is capable of providing. Such professional forces take time to mobilize, and as we learned at Virginia Tech, it doesn't take much time for scores of innocents to be slaughtered.
Like the people in early America, our people must have the ability to respond as the threat emerges, not after it has done enough damage to awaken bureaucracy-bound professionals. Like the professional forces of early America, those of today are too far away to defend against such threats -- though the distance they must traverse is measured not in miles but in red tape and CYA dithering.
I realize that this constitutional concept runs counter to the gun control mania fostered by so many of the demagogues who dominate our politics these days. They focus their rhetoric on the inherent evil of firearms, but their real point is not about weapons, it's about people. Simply put, they believe that people can't be trusted with weapons, so weapons are inherently dangerous to people.
This is not a new point. In fact, it is the mentality that kept the masses in some form of subjection to armed feudal champions everywhere in the world through most of human history. The new form of feudalism dresses in bureaucratic jargon and procedure, but it has the same implication as the forms that
wore fancy feathers and bones in Africa, fierce masks in Japan, or powdered wigs and ermine robes in Europe: some people are made with saddles on their backs, and others booted and spurred to ride them.
America was founded to refute and forever dethrone this invidious principle of power. Yet the politicians of our day are such strangers to our country's purpose that they can't even conceive of the possibility that the present threat to our safety offers an opportunity to revitalize and renew our capacity for self-defense and self-government. Demagogues and self-serving politicos build their power with promises about what they will do for us. Real statesmen would be leading as we rediscover and rebuild our capacity to do what we must for ourselves.
As this is true in the effort to secure our communities in the face or terror, it is also true in the effort to secure our borders and the integrity of our identity as a free people. And as we examine it in that context, I think we will realize that across the board, the desire to help people govern themselves is the key to American statesmanship.
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2007 Alan Keyes
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