Political Violence and the Centralization of Power
Who is ultimately responsible for personal safety?
The rise of politically motivated violence and terror in the United States in recent years foregrounds an issue that goes right to the heart of the American experiment. The United States was founded on a belief that the widest possible distribution of human agency and power is morally right and practically effective. The nation has continually struggled with the implications of that choice, and there has always been a strong undercurrent of opinion calling for stricter regulation of all areas of life by both the national and state governments.
The widespread distribution of power makes great things possible, as the history of the United States amply demonstrates. The freest nation in the world transformed an underpopulated wilderness bursting with natural resources into the most powerful and prosperous nation in the world. The move from a centralized, hierarchical system under a king to a distributed, highly parallel form of organization in a democratic republic brought forth both more power and greater vulnerability within the nation’s borders.
Computers provide a good illustration of this tradeoff. Centralized computers are easy to build, maintain, and keep secure, but they limit what users can do with them, and component failure can abruptly shut down the entire system. Distributed computers greatly expand the use and reach of memory and of processor power, and they are resilient in the face of component failure, but they afford many more avenues for corruption and inherently make the spread of destructive influences easier (such as viruses, misinformation, fraud, and panics).
The major social weakness of centralized systems is their suppression of individual initiative and creativity. The corresponding weakness of distributed systems is their vulnerability to a rapid spread of destructive activity.
This is the source of the perpetual tension between liberty and state power in America, and it is evident in the amount of internal discord and violence that the nation has always endured. As regards personal safety, the United States was designed to distribute self-protection widely, notably through the Second Amendment, the limiting of police powers to the states, and the preference for state militias instead of a standing national army. The national government was given the responsibility to protect the nation’s borders and to resolve disputes among the states.
Our constitutional structure posits a distributed system of power, with safeguards provided by the national government to protect the public from outside forces (analogous to computer viruses and misinformation from abroad) and internal conflicts (analogous to the ability of distributed computer systems to accommodate differing programs and operating systems).
That was a wise choice. Unfortunately, governments’ efforts to enhance the safety of various groups of people it perceives as being exceptionally vulnerable to force and fraud undermine people’s sense of responsibility for their own protection of their own safety and that of family members, neighbors, the community, and ultimately the state. That flips the relationship away from citizens protecting the state to the state protecting the citizens. This dependency on the state evokes more government intervention toward the prevention of crime, as opposed to the government’s proper sphere of identifying and punishing for crimes that have already been committed. This process creates a gigantic system of moral hazard and perpetual government expansion.
In the New Orleans case, as with most of the heartbreakingly numerous mass murders committed on American soil, a widely distributed system of self-protection would probably have prevented the attack, and it certainly would have reduced the carnage to a minimum. That is why these killers choose soft targets: a swift and sure demise is a great deterrent to ambitious schemes of mayhem, as it thwarts the person’s ability to kill multiple people. The goal of public policy in this regard is to eliminate or at least greatly reduce the chance of success of the murder element of such a murder-suicide plan. Widely distributed self-protection is a sound foundation for that.
Self-reliance as the first order of protection from violence is thus the most effective and unobtrusive approach. There are cases, of course, such as the 2017 mass shooting by Stephen Paddock in Las Vegas, which took the lives of 60 people and injured more than 400, in which self-protection is not a practical option and the perverse determination of the killer makes post-crime punishment no appreciable threat.
Although it is true that hard cases make bad law and extremely bad government policy, the public rightly expects governments to do whatever is reasonable to avert such atrocities. We cannot expect people simply to shrug their shoulders and accept that unstoppable mass murders are going to happen.
This is where government action is called for, and there are a variety of ways for law enforcement agencies and the public to harden potential targets and create obstacles to killers’ plans. The hotel from which Paddock fired on the crowd in Las Vegas, for example, allowed him to bring all those weapons in and prepare a mass murder. Liability laws should not allow the managers and stockholders of corporations to escape responsibility for actions and inaction that cause death, injury, and destruction. Similar reforms of other laws could help enhance a culture of first-order protection of self and others for whom one has responsibility.
These efforts will not be perfect. Risk will remain. That is the natural state of life within a sphere of freedom. Freedom distributes power widely. In that truth, one can see the thought behind John Adams’s statement that such power requires a strong sense of moral responsibility and self-control on the part of those who hold it, which in a democratic republic is nearly everyone: “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”
A nation with so much crime, so many people on the public dole, so much addiction to damaging substances and activities, declining marriage and birth rates, and deteriorating church attendance, to name only a few indicators among many, can hardly be said to comprise a moral and religious people.
This is not a side note. It is important to recognize that the welfare state is a powerful force in undermining the connection between actions and consequences. The imposition of work requirements in the 1990s was a good start toward a partial solution for the problem, but states have unfortunately scrapped them over the years, with the collusion of the federal government. The moral hazard of the welfare state remains pervasive through American society.
A similar process has gone on in the nation’s schools, accelerating in the past decade, with a steady removal of rewards for achievement and undesirable consequences for failure, plus the teaching of moral relativism and denigration of the nation’s laudable history of pioneering support for the expansion of liberty and the rewarding of personal initiative. The schools have thus been steadily increasing the perceived distance between actions and consequences.
There is no quick answer or perfect fix for this problem. There is always risk under liberty. Ordered liberty requires a people who respect others’ life, liberty, and property and who expect misdeeds, negligence, idleness, and other wrongs to result in undesired consequences for those who commit them. We do not have that kind of public in the United States today, though there is much more support for this mindset than the press generally acknowledge, much less represent or serve. We can start to encourage the spread of such simple decency by dismantling the welfare state, reforming education, and punishing crime, so that most people will more naturally tend to connect actions with consequences.
That is a big lift, of course. Until we undertake such a social and political effort with full seriousness and determination, we will be doomed to accept either havoc or servitude—or, more likely, both.