We have resigned ourselves to the fact that winter will never end. The first week of May has brought snow, sub-freezing temperatures, yet another global warming speech by Al Gore, and a glum realization that the cold and gray will persist for the rest of our days.
The political climate is every bit as dispiriting, but even in this endless winter of our discontent we are not yet readying a musket for an armed revolution against the government. One always hopes things won’t come to that, of course, but one never knows. Revolutions have always become necessary at some point, and there are reasons to believe that many of our fellow citizens expect it to happen sooner rather than later.
One reason is a recent opinion poll conducted by Farleigh Dickinson University, which found 29 percent of registered voters agreeing that “In the next few years, an armed revolution might be necessary in order to protect our liberties.” Only 47 percent of the respondents said they disagreed, hardly a reassuring show of confidence in the safety of our liberties, with 18 percent neither agreeing or disagreeing, 5 percent saying they were unsure, and 1 percent shrewdly refusing to give any answer at all. Those not registered to vote might be more or less inclined to foresee the necessity of an armed revolution to remain free men and women, but in any case there seems to be a very sizeable minority of Americans who share this concern.
The sentiment is so widespread that 18 percent of Democrats concede the possibility of an armed revolution becoming necessary, although it is hard to say what reasons they might have. Perhaps they are worried about the possibility of another Republican administration in the next few years, or they regard the soon-to-be-bankrupt entitlement programs as liberty, or are quietly hoping that a few years of revolutionary bomb-throwing will pay off with a prestigious professorship somewhere down the line just as it did for the likes of Bill Ayers, Bernadine Dohrn, and Kathy Boudin. Regardless of the rationale, 18 percent is a significant chunk of the party of Hope and Change and all things government, and an even larger 27 percent of independents also believe a revolution might soon be required.
Republicans are most inclined to think so, with a whopping 44 percent of them agreeing with the poll’s premise, but at least they have made their many reasons loud and clear. On countless issues ranging from health insurance mandates to expanding regulatory bureaucracies to a spread-the-wealth economic program to bans on everything from that rusty old musket to big ol’ cups of soda pop, many Republicans have consistently argued that the constant and rapid expansion of government’s size and power eventually encroaches upon personal liberties to an intolerable extent. This oft-stated theory also holds that when a long train of abuses and usurpations reduce a people to despotism, to paraphrase the Declaration of Impendence, it is the right, it is the duty of the people to throw off such a government, and a good many of the Republicans we know take this very seriously.
Such insurrectionist talk is clearly taken seriously by others. The Department of Homeland Security has famously warned that Barack Obama’s election as president would unleash a wave of white supremacist violence and warned the nation’s law enforcement officials to be on the lookout for disgruntled military veterans, Army training materials explain that Catholics and Evangelical Christians are every bit as dangerously extremist as al-Qaeda’s brand of Islam, and numerous Democratic politicians have publicly fretted that those crazy Tea Party people are going to don their tri-cornered hats and take up arms. Such nervousness about a right-wing uprising are so prevalent in government that we suspect the Federal Bureau of Investigation agents who were so uninterested in the Boston Marathon bombers even after explicit warnings from the Russian government felt obliged by multi-cultural sensitivity to be snooping around some Free Republic poster instead. The view is also common to much of the media, who immediately suspect conservatism any time something blows up, and the more strident liberals of our acquaintance are downright doctrinaire about it.
Such worries, we think, are exaggerated at the moment. The Tea Party people that we know are all lawn-mowing, credit card-carrying, fastidiously law-abiding folk who are disinclined by a conservative temperament to quit their hard-earned jobs and wage an armed revolution against the government. They certainly don’t have the same romantic notions about it that Professors Ayers, Dohrn, and Boudin once had, or that the Occupy Wall Street hobos in their Che Guevara t-shirts still have. Instead they believe that prudence will dictate that governments long established should not be changed for light and instransient reasons, to further paraphrase the Declaration, and they don’t believe we have yet reached the point that rebellion is necessary. Not yet, anyway, and the defeat of the recent gun control bills and the resistance of many state governments to federal over-reach and the prospect of a mid-term election next year all give hope that we can avoid that point through democratic means.
When something blows up and it turns out the work of an Islamist rather than a conservative, as is so often the case, the same people can be counted on to thoughtfully consider what they have done to provoke such an unpleasant act. They never seem to ponder why a full 29 percent of their countrymen, many of them lawn-mowing and cred card-carrying and fastidiously law-abiding folk, might think it possible that they’ll need an armed revolution in the next few years. Nor do they wonder why only 47 percent dismiss the possibility. Perhaps they should give it some thought.
— Bud Norman
The Central Standard Times 