CSotD: When ignorance sets the agenda
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Boy, the new year has sure kicked off with a bang for the paranoid and undereducated.
The immediate response to Obama's executive order has been interesting. The usual suspects have, as Wasserman suggests, jerked their knees, but I've also seen a lot of response from gun owners that what he has ordered doesn't infringe on their rights and mostly codifies what the more responsible among them have been doing anyway.
And even those who refuse to give any credit to the Kenyan Kommie are having trouble mustering up more than "it won't make any difference," which makes you wonder why they have a problem with it.
If you're keeping score at home, BTW, Obama still trails W on the issuing of executive orders, but, with a year left on his odometer and his growing impatience with Congress, I'm betting that gap won't last.
Switching out to Oregon, I don't know — or much care — if the BLM grazing land regulations were done by legislation or executive order, though I suspect the former. But Theodore Roosevelt did use executive orders to institute wildlife preserves and to protect public lands, so there's some crossover between these two cartoons.
Roosevelt was a conservationist rather than a protectionist, and recognized a distinction between making prudent use of land and exploiting it, which meant, in practice, that you could set aside more land if you didn't take it completely out of productive use, while maintaining preservationist restrictions only on the most vulnerable and critical.
This meant permitting closely-regulated timbering, mining and damming of rivers on certain public lands, but he also recognized the need to keep other places wild and undeveloped.
In setting up Yellowstone and the Grand Canyon as national parks, he had to deal with a Congress that didn't see a value in "idle" land, by which they meant "not being fully exploited," and this backlash has had a rebirth in rightwing libertarian pressure to ease restrictions on all public lands, including the national parks.
So the question Horsey raises is the extent to which this particular band of yahoos knows that they are being led around by the nose, and how much their demand for "local control" is sincere ignorance. And I say that having grown up in an area with a constant struggle in sorting necessary regulation from the overreach of cityfolk raised on "Bambi."
His essay also made me try to recall if Washington had, indeed, signed off on the Constitution (which he had).
That sent me into Jefferson's letters, because, as we all know, I hope, he was in France during the Constitutional Convention and could only watch and comment, but not really impact things.
What I kind of knew but was able to dig deeper into this morning was his response to Shays' Rebellion, that short armed uprising that has all the earmarks of similar anti-tax anarchist movements since, including abject failure.
First of all, on this side of the Atlantic, the crisis – which took place under the old Articles of Confederation, before the Whiskey Rebellion Horsey cites – sparked demand for a stronger central government and drew Washington off the sidelines and into representing Virginia at Philadelphia.
At the time of the uprising he wrote to Henry Knox that "If government shrinks, or is unable to enforce its laws; fresh maneuvers will be displayed by the insurgents – anarchy & confusion must prevail – and every thing will be turned topsy turvey in that State; where it is not probable the mischiefs will terminate."
So, as Horsey says, he's hardly on the side of the rebels.
Nor, for all that anarchists love to cite his quote on refreshing the tree of liberty, was Jefferson a whole lot more supportive of Shays & Co.
I have often cited his January, 1878, letter to Edward Carrington, with the famous quote about preferring newspapers without government to government without newspapers, which was in response to Shays' Rebellion:
The tumults in America, I expected would have produced in Europe an unfavorable opinion of our political state. But it has not. On the contrary, the small effect of these tumults seems to have given more confidence in the firmness of our governments. The interposition of the people themselves on the side of government has had a great effect on the opinion here. I am persuaded myself that the good sense of the people will always be found to be the best army. They may be led astray for a moment, but will soon correct themselves.
He goes on from there to call for universal literacy and an active press so that people not act out of ignorance.
It's a point he makes more emphatically in a letter to William Smith that fall:
I say nothing of its motives. They were founded in ignorance, not wickedness. God forbid we should ever be 20 years without such a rebellion. The people cannot be all, & always well informed. The part which is wrong will be discontented in proportion to the importance of the facts they misconceive. If they remain quiet under such misconceptions it is a lethargy, the forerunner of death to the public liberty.
He goes on to note that 13 colonies have existed for over 11 years with only one such uprising, which he calls a single rebellion in a composite century and a half of government, asking
What country before ever existed a century & a half without a rebellion? & what country can preserve its liberties if their rulers are not warned from time to time that their people preserve the spirit of resistance? Let them take arms. The remedy is to set them right as to facts, pardon & pacify them. What signify a few lives lost in a century or two? The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots & tyrants. It is its natural manure. Our Convention has been too much impressed by the insurrection of Massachusetts: and in the spur of the moment they are setting up a kite to keep the hen-yard in order.
It's an interesting point of view, one perhaps better delivered theoretically and from a distance, but the chief weakness in it is Jefferson's trust in the effectiveness of universal education.
In praising the outcome, he relies on the fact that a few ignorant people, acting on sincere but misguided understanding, were condemned by the majority of well-informed, public-spirited citizens.
That's the thing we need to take forward: Ignorance may well be inevitable, but it must not be permitted to become the default.
Nick Anderson
Which makes school board elections as important
as presidential ones. Perhaps moreso.
Mike Peterson has posted his "Comic Strip of the Day" column every day since 2010. His opinions are his own, but we welcome comments either agreeing or in opposition.
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