The Right to Arm Bears

I just finished reading Pulitzer Prize winning author/historian Garry Wills' A Necessary Evil: A History of American Distrust of Government. I had hoped that the book would help me to understand why there is such a massive degree of mistrust of government - and not just mistrust of a government, or a particular form of government, but mistrust of government itself as a means of regulating human society - in American culture.

Well, it doesn't really look into that, but it is a very detailed examination of the struggle between pro-government and anti-government forces during the process of the establishment of the American Constitution, and of the history of various kinds of anti-governmental thought and action in America since that time. A bit too detailed for me, I must admit - I skimmed some of the lengthier discussions of what various drafters of various articles, clauses and amendments thought various other drafters of same wanted or did not want to have happen.

The basic gist of Wills' argument appears to be, however, that the first reaction of the revolutionary-minded colonial leaders during the American Revolution was that they wanted to have as little government as possible, and that they wanted what little government that was necessary to be locally-based, run by non-professionals, populist, highly participatory and subject to extensive control by the people - which was to be done by such means as having all governmental functions done in committee of the whole and by having very short term, rotation of terms, and the like.

However, within a few years, it became very obvious to most that this made government largely unworkable, and so when it came time to draft the constitution, most framers were actually trying to prepare a fairly pro-government constitution that would allow for a more efficient, centrally-based and professional government that delegated governmental functions to various branches and agencies, many of whom would not be elected nor a part of the committee of the whole.

Wills argues that over the years since, the mythology of government in the US has reversed the intents of the framers of the Constitution, creating the belief that they were engaged in creating a government that would be deliberately inefficient due to all of these supposedly built-in checks and balances, when in fact the framers were trying to do the opposite. He describes a process in which, over the past 200 years or so, those who hold anti-governmental values have managed to create a mythology in which it was the anti-governmental faction that ended up having the most influence on the Constitution, where it is believed that the intent behind the language of the Constitution favours anti-governmental values, and in which the various forces of anti-governmentalism since the establishment of the US government have been the heroes. It's fascinating to look at this process of myth-building, but alas, I still remain as ignorant as ever about why Americans are so prone to this particular myth.

Wills also spends some time on what he describes as the myth of the Minuteman - the idea that every - or almost every - American home at the time of the Revolution had guns and that the men who served as irregulars were experienced and accomplished marksmen. Wills says that, on the contrary, many American families had no guns, that a large proportion of the guns they did own were obsolete and in poor repair, and that most of the Minutemen were very poor shots. Later in the book, Wills also spends some time demolishing the myth of the gun-slinging West.

For me, however, the most thought-provoking element was one which did not appear to be a conscious theme within Wills' argument. It was just there, mentioned in almost every discussion of both the process of creating and developing the American Constitution and of the aspects of the political history of the U.S. that Wills covers in his book, but never analysed in itself.

That element is the importance and magnitude of the role played by the insistence of the Southern states that slavery be protected and preserved. This really is institutionalised racism at its extreme - the structure of the Constitution itself is shaped by the necessity of creating a political and legal system that will support the enslavement of human beings.

Maybe he didn't mention it because everyone in the U.S. knows that the drafters knowingly agreed to place language intended to support slavery in the Constitution, and that future politicians knowingly agreed to keep it there and buttress it with other language of similar intent, but I'd never realised before how much of an influence this issue has had, not just on the history, but on the very structure of the American state.

All in all, an interesting book in a number of ways, just not the book I wanted it to be.