Militias both home and abroad

Sandy Levinson

If there is any proposition that almost all right-minded people are committed to, it is the illegitimacy of "private militias" in Iraq and Lebanon. The sole alternative to such militias appears to be a single centralized army controlled by the national government, thus adopting Max Weber's dictum that the (centralized) state apparatus must possess a "monopoly" over the legitimate means of violence.

There is undoubtedly much to be said with regard to the desirability of disarming such private militias as Hezbollah in Lebanon and the various militias in Iraq. From my own perspective, the world would be better off with the disappearance of Hezbollah, not to mention many of the Iraqi groups who are taking the country into what appears to be an already savage civil war. But a brief look at both American history and, indeed, the American present, demonstrates why much of the discussion about such militias approaches the fatuous.

The Second Amendment is widely agreed, even by those who oppose the "individual rights" view that would protect individual ownership of arms, to protect "state militias" as a complement, or even alternative to, the standing army that was, not without controversy, authorized by the original constitution. Such state militias were scarcely insignificant, either ideologically or even, on occasion, in practice. Thus, one contributing factor to Thomas Jefferson's election in 1800, over intense Federalist opposition, was the threat by the Democratic governors of Pennsylvania and Virginia to call out their state militias to march on the new Capitol in Washington if the Federalists did not recognize the legitimacy of the 1800 election and their displacement by the radical new sensibility represented by Jeffersonian and the Jeffersonians. It is, to put it mildly, ironic that a US Government that has assidulously courted the NRA and adopted a strong reading of the Second Amendment is so devoted to centralization of the means of violence elsewhere, since that is contrary to the American political tradition. George W. Bush keeps prating about the universal desire for "freedom," yet one constitutive aspect of that "freedom," his Administration argues with regard to the US, is the "right to keep and bear arms." Is this a right to be enjoyed only by Americans--if so, why?--and not by all freedom-loving peoples' everywhere? If others are to be expected to surrender their arms to a centralized state, then why shouldn't Americans be expected to do so as well?

Just to be clear, I do not necessarily mean to be praising this aspect of the American tradition. It directly contributed to the relative ease with which secession and resistance to the central government could be contemplated--and carried out in 1861. But this doesn't lessen the fact that any serious examination of our tradition must recognize that it rejects in very dramatic ways the Weberian dictum, at least if one defines "the state" as the central government.

Nor is the controversy entirely absent today. David Broder has an interesting article in yesterday's Washington Post setting out gubernatorial opposition, from Republicans and Democrats alike, to proposals "to expand the president's authority to take over National Guard troops in case of natural disaster or homeland security threats." Republican Governor Mike Huckabee of Arkansas, who is apparently contemplating a bid for the White House in 2008, said that such a shift of control "violates 200 years of American history" and is symptomatic of a larger federal effort to make states no more than "satellites of the national government." He was joined in his opposition by Iowa Gov. Tom Vilsack, who has also been mentioned as a potential Democratic candidate, who called the proposal "one step away from a complete takeover of the National Guard, the end of the Guard as a dual-function force that can respond to both state and national needs."

To be sure, contemporary state militias do not present the same kinds of threats to political stability as to militias in Lebanon and Iraq. But the central point is that no one should readily expect complete centralization of the means of violence in any polity where a significant body of the citizenry, especially if it is geographically distributed, simply does not have sufficient trust in the central government to disarm and/or accept complete subordination to the center.

I have earlier referred to "private militias." But one might also consider the "permurga," the functionally independent army of the Kurds in northern Iraq. Consider the following question: Would any serious person advise the Kurds to turn their arms over to a central Iraqi government dominated by Shi'ite (and Sunni) Arabs? I trust that the question answers itself. So why, precisely, should be answer be different for "private militias" representing significant groups who, with some justice, do not yet trust the Iraqi government to be adequately protective of its interests?

Again, to be absolutely clear: I would much prefer a world in which Hezbollah devoted itself only to doing good works for Lebanese citizens and where the Mahdi militia laid down its arms and acquiesced to the sovereignty of an Iraqi government that indeed fairly represented all of the groups within Iraqi society. But this is to engage in fantasy, alas. One might at least try to understand why control over the means of violence is perhaps the central political issue in any serious design of a constitution for a divided society. This is why the Second Amendment should be front and center in any consideration of the nature of our own original constitutional system, whatever it should mean today, and how our own history might lead us to a more complex and nuanced view of what we can plausibly demand and expect to receive from the deadly serious political groups in such countries as Lebanon and Iraq. (And, I note for the record, Israel has scarcely moved to disarm right-wing settlers in the West Bank.)



Posted 11:50 AM by Sandy Levinson [link]