How close is the 9th Amendment to anarchy?
Charles Tips, Serious student of US and world politics
Answered Nov 17, 2017
The republican is the only form of government which is not eternally at open or secret war with the rights of mankind.
—Thomas Jefferson
It’s amazing how few realize just how radically empowering our Constitution, including the Bill of Rights, actually is. And that would be radical in its political science meaning of getting to the very root of things and discarding that which does not work.
Jefferson, in the quote above, crystalizes what we pared back to and why—republicanism, so that we could each freely and potently contribute our talents toward the betterment of all. No more monarchical constraints on the freedom of individuals! That’s what works!
Here’s a picture of where that put us:
You can see republicanism on the chart [Note: while the Republican Party was founded largely in defense of republicanism, that is, the rights of all, that relationship has attenuated over time to a faint echo]. You can see that we are part of liberalism, the range of ideologies that arose during the Age of Enlightenment to reduce the power of the state over individuals.
We are the pinnacle of liberalism, no longer the subjects of a ruler, but citizens of a republic with political representatives to carry out the enumerated powers of governing on our behalf. That stands statism on its head—you’ll see that the right pole of the chart, authoritarianism, confers sovereignty, on a single individual, typically with life-and-death power over his subjects. At the left extreme, each individual is sovereign, free to determine the best choices for his or her life, with no one having legitimate power over him.
I’ve actually got the left pole labeled incorrectly. The adjacent anarchy depends on individual sovereignty. It is our republican minarchy that employs popular sovereignty—the collective power of people to come together and decide things for themselves. We’re not anarchy, but we’re next door.
Morality
You’ll see that republicanism is bracketed by mainstream conservatism (all of this referring to the US, the only nation still clinging to a shred of republican heritage) and more rightward as, yes, they endorse our liberal framework of rights and freedoms but with an admixture of morality when it comes to creating the laws of the land. It is also bracketed by libertarianism, basically republicanism on steroids—“All men are created equal” is not some reference to Anglo-Saxon Protestant males (though originally intended as one) but to all people.
Democracy
But there was another conservatism, much more potent, but no longer with us in identifiable form, and that was the Democratic Party, formed to preserve slavery and an elevated status for the white race. When the Republican Party formed in the 1850s and many northern Democrats joined, the Conservative Democrat faction in the South was willing to go to war to preserve their hierarchical view of racial and economic relations. But meanwhile, the Democratic Party intended to preserve the lofty status of whites with a straightforward tool—majoritarian-rule democracy.
This violated our republican heritage how? As John Adams put it:
"I do not say that democracy has been more pernicious on the whole, and in the long run, than monarchy or aristocracy. Democracy has never been and never can be so durable as aristocracy or monarchy; but while it lasts, it is more bloody than either."
Further to the left you will see Marxism meaning, Marx’s version of communism, but this is an historical chimera as true anarchists were quick to point out. When Marx showed up half a century after our founding, the salons of Europe were happy to accord him a position on the political spectrum further to the left than our republicanism (we were not highly represented in the salons of Europe after all). However, Marx’s transitional dictatorship of the proletariat put the lie to that (and was what gave the anarchists indigestion). There was also the complication that Marx’s voluntaristic version of communism/socialism was never cut out to govern any polity larger than a community.
Statism
With liberalism potently arrayed against the monarchical state and aristocracy, in fact, early socialism was conceived as a dodge to that tension, a withdrawal to a pipedream in which, hocus pocus, everything would be better. All early socialism had going for it was its wide popular appeal.
Along comes monarchist Otto von Bismarck, tasked by Kaiser Wilhelm I with uniting all the many German principalities under his rule, and, in need of leverage to perform such a monumental task, he decides to take a closer look at that popular appeal. In a series of meetings with leaders of the social democratic party (the name communists went by to imply they were not fomenting revolt), he quickly determined that the socialists had no power, no leadership and what leadership they did have was made of opportunists who could be easily co-opted, and so he did and swiftly succeeded in uniting Germany by implementing Marx’s plan under state authority (making Marx apoplectic). As he put it:
My idea was to bribe the working classes, or shall I say, to win them over, to regard the state as a social institution existing for their sake and interested in their welfare.
With that dependence on state authority, all of the forms of socialism that actually did succeed in running nations vaulted to the right, as you can see on the chart above. You can follow the Counter-Enlightenment swing back to increased statism. Where World War I was a battle of increasingly nationalistic forces against waning empires and kingdoms, World War II was the turf battle of the three emerging forms of state socialism, each seeing itself as the inevitable and proper end-state of mankind.
With its militarism and genocide, fascism discredited itself during the war and ceased to be. With its refusal to use capitalist economics and its own slowly revealed internal genocide, state communism followed suit.
Progressivism
Many conservatives in the US put pressure on our Constitution with their desire for the law to reflect their morality. And there are statist forms of conservatism in the US as well. On the chart, you can see nationalist conservatives labeled—those who believe, for instance, that the flag should be protected from desecration or that a military draft is perfectly constitutional. You will also see “big government” conservatives, our Establishment Republicans, who argue that big government is here to stay; the best we can do is try to preserve what rights and freedoms we can.
But the overwhelming assault on our constitutional guarantee of republicanism came in the form of progressivism—a movement that crossed both parties and came to encompass some four-fifths of Anglo-Saxon Protestants, who, in turn represented some four-fifths of the US population. Multiply that out, and you have a supermajority doubling down on democracy over republicanism.
Republicanism is the idea that no law that disparages any right of any individual is valid. Majoritarian-rule democracy is “two wolves and a lamb voting on what’s for dinner.”
What was happening in the US starting around the year 1870? For one, the Radical Republican string of presidents was pushing the notion that “all men are created equal” means just what it says. Meanwhile, in our North, a bastion of liberal sentiment in the absence of diversity, diversity was arriving. Farm boys from the Midwest were showing up at train stations looking for factory jobs as were former slaves from the South. Along the eastern seaboard, “teeming masses” of “new immigrants” were arriving—Catholics from southern Europe and Jews and Orthodox from eastern Europe. The North freaked, and liberalism was right out the window.
At the same time, Spencerian Darwinism was providing scientific conviction that the white race, the Anglo-Saxon strain in particular, was endowed with superior qualities. By god, there are hierarchies. Some are leaders of men and some are followers (Woodrow Wilson made a fetish of that one). We need this as our framework, not some idealized notion of equality.
Our assault on our own Constitution
All three tools listed above—morality, democracy and statism—made up the progressive assault on our own Constitution, a charter that both Teddy Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson referred to in similar terms as a relic document that needed to give way to the new statecraft out of Prussia.
I think that the word liberty in the Fourteenth Amendment is perverted when it is held to prevent the natural outcome of a dominant opinion.
—Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr, in his famous Lochner dissent of 1905 Moralism—The Lochner era in Supreme Court jurisprudence, Wikipedia to the contrary notwithstanding (as lawyers like to say), was actually about the justices at that time having been appointed by the Radical Republican “beard” presidents who actually believed in our founding charter and so were at odds with the mischief progressives sought to accomplish. Lochner v. New York was itself a three-pronged attack on Jews. But the moral component was that the Victorian morality of progressives bristled at the notion of using wives and children as economic assets. Christian socialism was a large component of early progressivism, and it was highly moralizing. All such moralizing led to most people’s candidate for most bone-headed idea in American political history, Prohibition. The backlash against the banning of sale of alcoholic beverages soon cost progressives both their hold on the presidency and half their numbers as liberalism revived as a political force.
Democracy—Progressives joined seamlessly with Conservative Democrats and actually doubled down on democracy—ballot initiatives, referenda, recall elections, women’s suffrage (to dilute the black vote and prevent repeal of Prohibition) direct election of senators (and they kick themselves now that they didn’t rid themselves of the Electoral College back when they had a super-majority). Harvard, Yale and other leading law schools devoted themselves to democratic interpretations of our Constitution and have done so ever since, a fact you can see reflected in the quote above from Holmes, the Court’s first progressive appointee, with his lonely opinions that the majority should be able to dictate to minorities.
Statism—Three things define the top-down authority of a state. One, naturally, the authority must be centralized and top-down. Two, it will seek a monopoly on the means of violence. Three, it will broaden the power of the public sphere over the private and civil spheres by pulling such areas as education and health care not only under its control but using them to control.
As you can see in the chart, social democracy, the ideology of governing our progressives pursue, is on the right and statist. All you need to know to understand that they properly belong there is that they pursue all three goals of statism. They favor transferring sovereignty from the level of the people state-by-state to the federal government. They have long favored the transfer of education and health care to government administration and have largely succeeded. When “new immigrants” started showing up on the eastern seaboard in the 1870s, Horace Mann, secretary of education for Massachusetts, who had imported the highly statist Prussian volksschule as the educational model for his state, began peddling his school model to eastern legislatures as “the solution to the immigrant problem.” And by 1910, the Flexner Report began bringing health care in this country under political control.
Firearms in this country are protected more by a long history of usage than by the Second Amendment. Accordingly, progressives have had difficulty gaining an unarmed population. Conservative Democrats following the Civil War swiftly legislated to make certain that former slaves could not legally own guns. It was not until Franklin Roosevelt’s presidency, though, that progressives went boldly after gun rights with passage of the National Firearms Act. They’ve been bolder ever since. In a republic, all armed agencies of the law will be citizen-aligned and locally administered. Over the last couple of decades we’ve seen not only the arming but the militarized arming of national agencies answerable to federal authority only.
It has been an all-out assault to turn us from a bottom-up free republic, the last of its kind, to a centralized top-down state.
What does the Ninth Amendment have to do with this? For that matter, what does the sister amendment—the Tenth—have to do with it?
Both are bulwarks of republican government. Both are one sentence long. Ninth—“The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.”
Tenth—“The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.”
Short, sweet, unambiguous, straightforward in meaning and intent and wholly ignored.
The Ninth plainly requires that government at all levels have a legitimate, articulable interest when passing any law that impinges on citizen behavior. The Tenth plainly requires that legislation be as close down to the people as possible, affording them participation and a measure of control. It certainly does not lend itself to the progressive desiderata of a large, powerful central government.
And so the brightest minds at Harvard, Yale and other law schools came up with the equivalent of “let’s pretend they don’t exist, just ignore them, refer to them as ink blots on the page incapable of meaningful interpretation.”
And it is with just such gutless sophistry that we have been steadily getting deprived of our rights as sovereign citizens. Our progressives are not liberal—they’re anti-liberal. They’re not left-wing—they’re firmly on the authoritarian right wing. They wish for us not the egalitarian republican model that was bequeathed to us going back a dozen or more generations but the putrid shepherd-and-flock model of governing they’ve been working toward for six generations now… with themselves as the shepherds, naturally.
The Ninth and Tenth Amendments do not mean anarchy but insurance for our republican heritage of freedom and equality. Time we pumped some life back into them and held our political class accountable to their oaths of office.
Poster Comment:
Ignorance of the U.S. Constitution will be the downfall of the Republic. Study the Constitution and hold our elected officials to it.
Lots of links in text at source, and a chart.