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If, as has been suggested by some, the first ten U.S. Constitutional Amendments were listed in order of importance, then the Second Amendment must have been heavy on the minds of those Founding Fathers. But it would have been nice if they had clarified their reasoning by adding a few more words or phrases, rather than leaving it to 21st Century originalists like Supreme Court Justice Anton Scalia to interpret. The Second Amendment is, as author Paul Auster wrote, an “ambiguously worded, bizarrely punctuated sentence that sat quietly on the first page of the Bill [of Rights] and was largely ignored for most of our history until it stopped being ignored…” Here is the Second Amendment, all twenty-six words: A well-regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.

When the Second Amendment was proposed, in 1787, individual States were concerned about a Federal government running roughshod over them, and insisted on what amounts to the right to defend themselves from a tyrannical government. States and their local governments also maintained militias to protect themselves from incursions by indigenous peoples with whom they were regularly having disputes, and also to manage those whom they had enslaved, which sometimes outnumbered the white population. And that should have been it. Right? Well, it was, for a long while.

The indigenous populations were mostly wiped out and the rest herded into ghettos and, for quite a while, after the Black populations were released into society through President Lincoln’s efforts, guns were not an issue, even though the new citizens had been eager to bear arms during the Civil War, and then the World Wars. As they slowly inched their way towards obtaining their full civil rights, some Blacks got antsy amidst all the abuse, (the lynchings and all) and decided to protect themselves.

Eventually, when in 1967 the Black Panthers of Oakland, California armed themselves (legally under the laws) and entered the State Capital in Sacramento, it got the attention of the nation. Thus began the defense of individuals keeping guns (not “bearing arms,” which, at least back in the day referred only to military actions). The late 1960’s were not a peaceful time. Around the time when Bobby Seale and his Panthers were seeking to protect themselves, there was war starting up in the Middle East, and Viet Nam was polarizing the nation. Violence broke out in a number of cities throughout the country, and Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy were shot and killed.

Over the following years, the National Rifle Association (NRA), which had been apolitical, evolved into a powerful lobbying group in Washington, D.C. As Mr. Auster points out in his book, “The irony is that a movement which is predominately white, rural, and conservative should have come into being because it embraced the gun philosophy of a group which was Black, urban and radical: the foundational belief that guns are primarily and instrument of self-defense… The Black Panthers’…ideas stuck—and are now accepted as one of the fundamental dogmas of American life for a large segment of the population.”

The Supreme Court has bolstered this idea of individual rights. Anton Scalia, writing for the majority in a 2008 decision (District of Columbia v. Heller) upheld a broader interpretation of the Second Amendment. He wrote that the right to keep and bear arms applies to individuals as well. But the majority had the good sense to point out that “the right secured by the Second Amendment is not unlimited.” This seems in conflict with the Amendment language that states that the right “shall not be infringed,” but perhaps the majority were making a distinction, and that the untrammeled right belongs to Militias but not to individuals. The Court also stated, “… nothing in our opinion should be taken to cast doubt on longstanding prohibitions on the possession of firearms by felons or the mentally ill, or laws forbidding the carrying of firearms in sensitive places such as schools and government buildings, or laws imposing conditions and qualifications on the commercial side of arms.” So, all who are mentally ill, please raise your hands. And were they not suggesting that laws concerning gun sales and manufacture were still allowed? Ah, yes, laws.

First you must remember that even though we refer to America as a democracy, it is not a pure democracy (for more on this, refer to essays on democracy in Commentary). We are a Republic. We elect representatives to pass laws to help or protect us. But even though about seventy-five per-cent of the citizens of this country (which is a super-majority) would like to see sensible gun control legislation passed, Congress has found it impossible to do so, influenced by an aggressive NRA membership as well as well-funded representatives of gun manufacturers, who have managed to prevent effective laws from being passed.

Reconciling America’s relationship to gun ownership is complicated. We are given a short, sacred, ancient twenty-six word document to work with and a fear of violence associated with a history of the repression and subjugation of our own citizenry. As Paul Auster writes, we have a citizenry, “…divided between those who believe that democracy is a form of government that grants individuals the freedom to do whatever they please and those who believe that we live in a society and are responsible for one another, that the freedom given to us by democracy also comes with an obligation to help those who are too weak or too sick or too poor to help themselves—a centuries-long conflict between the need to protect individual rights and freedoms and the interests of the common good.”

This mix of history, tradition, economic philosophies and governance, with more than a soupçon of racial and religious prejudices, now stoked by fear, leaves us with a Gordian knot of a problem. Certainly fear, and the ever increasing threat of violence serves to exacerbate the problem. “Stand your ground” laws protect gun owners from liability for their actions but they also encourage vigilantism. And while mass-shootings by mentally ill individuals capture the headlines, suicides contribute to over half of the death-by-gun statistics. Gun defenders blame mental illness, stating that guns don’t kill people. Motor vehicles don’t kill people either, but it has not stopped government from encouraging manufacturers—sometimes under threat of legislation—to make safety improvements (Hat tip to consumer advocate Ralph Nader). And yet, as Mr. Auster writes in his book, “Congress has denied the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention [CDC] from using federal funds to conduct research ‘that may be used to advocate or promote gun control.’“ One has to wonder if perhaps the CDC should examine Congress. We should be able to make this country safer through a combination of initiatives, but we will need everyone to help if we are to make any progress.

Richard Waterman

For further reading on the Second Amendment, I recommend Paul Auster’s, Bloodbath Nation Also, The Second Amendment: A Biography, by Michael Waldman

One of the most useful and effective weapons used by oligarchs, autocrats, and capitalists
against the forces of democracy is the concept of race*. It’s not always easy to divide and
conquer unionists or community organizers by trying to identify and separate by religion or
political ideology or other not-so-evident distinctions; but physical features, that’s a natural
wedge.

Prejudice is learned. It is taught. It is universal in this world. As newsman Edward R.
Murrow famously wrote, “Everyone is a prisoner of his own experiences. No one can eliminate prejudices—just recognize them.” And that seems to be at least a good start to tackling the problem: recognition. Along with acknowledgement and acceptance.

When Presidential candidate Nikki Haley was asked, “Is America a racist country?”, she
refused to accept the idea that it might be the case, saying, “We’ve never been a racist country.” And this: “…the founding fathers had the best of intentions when they started, and we fixed it along the way.” Let’s set aside the fact that she was a national candidate for high office and probably was attempting to quickly calculate in her head whether answering in the negative or the affirmative would gain or lose more votes. It seems proper to first ask what is meant by a racist country. Or how might we define “racist”? Or maybe it would be fairer to pose the question differently, such as: “Do you think racism has played a significant part in the formation of this country?”

Let me ask you this question: When you first started reading this essay about race, what
group or groups came to mind? Chinese? Filipino? Mexican? Pakistani? Inuit? Perhaps. Or
maybe not. Did it occur to you that your answer may have something to do with your own race or ethnicity? I would guess, if you are white, the people of color you would most likely associate with the word race used in this context are dark skinned and as a group identified as “Black.” But that may be my own prejudices speaking. Let’s get back to examining the accuracy of Ms. Haley’s comments.

When our Founding Fathers patched together an agreement to form a government, in
order to get those oligarchic-minded southern planters to come along they allowed that enslaved persons would count as three-fifths of a person. These were mostly Africans brought here or born here in bondage. This was hardly the beginning, but merely a chapter in this country’s long history of using race as a weapon in the furtherance of prosperity. Fears associated with national security have also played a part in our historic treatment of racial or ethnic groups, such as the internment of Japanese-Americans during the Second World War. To learn more about the treatment of minority groups, whether by race, ethnicity, religion or gender by capitalist interests —often aided and abetted by our own government—you are encouraged to read Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States. (This book is available free on-line in PDF format or at better libraries.)

For the greater part of this country’s existence, those of white European origin have been
the dominant shapers of this country, for better or worse; at least that is what American history books tell us. This narrow perspective is in large part because white Americans were able to write their history and subordinate nearly any other racial, ethnic or cultural perspective; and so they were able to teach what frequently amounted to white supremacy. [For more on this, see Teaching White Supremacy: America’s Democratic Ordeal and the Forging of Our National Identity (2023) by Donald Yacovone.] Only been in recent years have historians started to expose to an uninformed public some of the less-than-noble behaviors attributable to the generations of America’s past. Should today’s white Americans be ashamed of themselves for the sins of their forefathers? In my opinion, no. But neither should they ignore or dismiss those events, or repress or prohibit the teaching or introduction of other perspectives, as has recently been attempted in some cases.

It would be easy to place blame on others for what has happened in this country since before its founding, if we agree that racism, so-called, might be considered part of our
human nature. But we are not blameless if we have perpetuated what came before. There was a term—now since retired—called the “white man’s burden.” It was a term used in the late 19th century and popularized by a Rudyard Kipling poem. It represents imperialism as the moral burden of the white race, who are divinely destined to “civilize” the brutish, non-white “others” who inhabit the barbarous parts of the world, but its message could easily be applied to any vulnerable minority population. Kipling was, at the time exhorting the United States to assume colonial control of the Philippine Islands, a brutal episode in American history, an action that prompted a scathing satire by Mark Twain in his essay: To the Person Sitting in Darkness.

The so-called white man’s burden was a spurious argument that rationalized the
exploitation of the indigenous populations of countries by powerful military and economic
forces. The true burden—for all of us—for the family of man, is one faced by all those who
support democracy and the belief in words borrowed from English philosopher John Locke, set down by our Founding Fathers, and which I have amended, that: “We hold these truths to be selfevident, that all men [and women, regardless of color or ethnicity] are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

Prejudice, whether racial, religious, or sexist, exists and will always exist. We will experience it in our lives and we would do well to recognize it in ourselves, to teach about it, explain it, accept its existence while still resisting it, and to the extent we are able to, when we recognize it in others, call it out. Nicely.

Richard Waterman
For further reading: Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents by Isabel Wilkerson

* For this essay, I have used these definitions: “Race refers to the concept of dividing people into groups on the basis of various sets of physical characteristics and the process of ascribing social meaning to those groups. Ethnicity describes the culture of people in a given geographic region, including their language, heritage, religion and customs.”
(Washington University in St. Louis)

Excerpts from the book On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons From the Twentieth Century, by Timothy Snyder

Do not obey in advance. Most of the power of authoritarianism is freely given. In times like these individuals think ahead about what a more repressive government will want, and then offer themselves without being asked. A citizen who adapts in this way is teaching power what it can do.

Defend institutions. It is help us preserve decency. They need our help as well. Do not speak of “our institutions” unless you make them yours by acting on their behalf. Institutions do not protect themselves. They fall one after the other unless each is defended from the beginning.

Beware the one-party state. The parties that remade states and suppressed rivals were not omnipotent from the start. They exploited a historic moment to make political life impossible for their opponents. So support the multiparty system and defend the rules of democratic elections. Vote in local and state elections while you can. Consider
running for office.

Take responsibility for the face of the world. The symbols of today enable the reality of tomorrow. Notice the swastikas and other signs of hate. Do not look away, and do not get used to them. Remove them yourself and set an example for others to do so.

Remember professional ethics. When political leaders set a negative example professional commitments to just practice become more important. It is hard to subvert a rule-of-law state without lawyer, or to hold show trials without judges. Authoritarians need obedient civil servants, and concentration camp directors seek businessmen interested I cheap labor.

Be wary of paramilitaries. When the men with guns who have always claimed to be against the system start wearing uniforms and marching with torches and pictures of a leader, the end is nigh. When the pro-leader paramilitary and the official police and military intermingle, the end has come.

Be reflective if you must be armed. If you carry a weapon in public service, may God bless you and keep you. But know that evils of the past involved policemen and soldiers finding themselves, one day, doing irregular things.

Be ready to say no. Stand out. Someone has to. It is easy to follow along. It can feel strange to do or say something different. But without that unease, there is no freedom. Remember Rosa Parks. The moment you set an example, the spell of status quo is broken, and others will follow.

Be kind to our language. Avoid pronouncing the phrases everyone else does. Think up your own way of speaking, even if only to convey that thing you think everyone is saying. Make an effort to separate yourself from the internet.

Read books. Believe in truth. To abandon facts is to abandon freedom. If nothing is true, then no one can criticize power, because there is no basis upon which to do so. If nothing is true, then all is spectacle. The biggest wallet pays for the most blinding lights.

Investigate. Figure things out for yourself. Spend more time with long articles. Subsidize investigative journalism by subscribing to print media. Realize that some of what is on the internet is there to harm you. Learn about sites that investigate propaganda campaigns (some of which come from abroad). Take responsibility for what you communicate with others.

Make eye contact and small talk. This is not just polite. It is part of being a citizen and a responsible member of society. It is also a way to stay in touch with your surroundings, break down social barriers, and understand whom you should and should not trust. If we enter a culture of denunciation, you will want to know the psychological landscape of your daily life.

Practice corporeal politics. Power wants your body softening in your chair and your emotions dissipating on the screen. Get outside. Put your body in unfamiliar places with unfamiliar people. Make new friends and march with them.

Establish a private life. Nastier ruler will use what they know about you to push you around. Scrub your computer of malware on a regular basis. Remember that email is skywriting. Consider using alternative forms of the internet, or simply using it less. Have personal exchanges in person. For the same reason, resolve any legal trouble. Tyrants seek the hook on which to hang you. Try not to have hooks.

Contribute to good causes. Be active in organizations, political or not, that express your own view of life. Pick a charity or two and set up autopay. Then you will have made a free choice that supports civil society and helps others to do good. Learn from peers in other countries. Keep up your friendships abroad, or make new friends in other countries.
The present difficulties in the United States are an element of a larger trend. And no country is going to find a solution by itself. Make sure you and your family have passports.
Listen for dangerous words. Be alert to the use of words extremism and terrorism. Be alive to the fatal notions of emergency and exception. Be angry about the treacherous use of patriotic vocabulary.

Be calm when the unthinkable arrives. Modern tyranny is terror management. When the terrorist attack comes, remember that authoritarians exploit such events in order to consolidate power. The sudden disaster that requires the end of checks and balances, the dissolution of opposition parties, the suspension of freedom of expression, the right
to a fair trial, and so on, is the oldest trick in the Hitlerian book. Do not fall for it.

Be a patriot. Set a good example of what America means for the generations to come. They will need it. Be as courageous as you can. If none of us is prepared to die for freedom, then all of us will die under tyranny.

Timothy Snyder is the Levin Professor of History at Yale University. He is the author of Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin, and Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning, and the recently published On Freedom. Snyder is a member of the Committee on Conscience of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
and a permanent fellow of the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna.

Just because your voice reaches halfway around the world doesn’t mean you are wiser than when it reached only to the end of the bar. -Edward R. Murrow (1908 – 1965) American broadcast journalist

lie: A lie is a statement made by one who does not believe it with the intention that someone else shall be led to believe it. – Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

Humans have all lied; it is part of our nature. Therefore we can, without causing controversy, say that all U.S. Presidents have lied at one time or another, with or without malevolent intent. Donald Trump has gained notoriety for the number and audacity of his many lies, though according to The Washington Post, our President’s so-called lies are not lies but “false statements”. And WaPo has a point. There are many English words that variously shade what we commonly call a “lie”, and Roget’s Thesaurus devotes half a page to the word untruth. An important factor is the intent of the person delivering the words. After so many years of analyzing Donald Trump’s record and his seeming disregard for whether something he says or writes is true or false, it is probably fair to say that he meets the standard for what professor Harry Frankfurt of Princeton University calls a “bullshitter”. You can read all about the subject in his fascinating analysis titled, On Bullshit. According to Frankfurt, a bullshitter is a person who has no concern for whether or not what he is saying is true or false; you know, like the guy who sits at the end of the neighborhood bar. So Trump bullshits; he does not lie. But is it intentional, his behavior, or is it simply part of his psychological make-up? Can he turn on and off as needs be what appears to some to be
pathological?

By now you must be wondering: What does any of this have to do with authoritarianism? Well, what is true and what is false has much to do with authoritarianism, and Donald Trump is aiding and abetting our country’s drift towards it, even if you do not think his actions are intentional.

Authoritarianism is, according to one definition, “a political system characterized by the rejection of political plurality, the use of strong central power to preserve the political status quo, and reductions in democracy, separation of powers, civil liberties, and the rule of law. Political scientists have created typologies describing variations of authoritarian forms of government. Authoritarian regimes may be either autocratic or oligarchic and may be based upon the rule of a party or the military. States that have a blurred boundary between democracy and authoritarianism have sometimes been characterized as “hybrid democracies”, “hybrid regimes” or “competitive authoritarian” states.

An authoritarian system works well with a compliant populace. Philosopher Hannah Arendt, in her 1951 book The Origins of Totalitarianism, wrote, “the ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction…and the distinction between true and false no longer exist.” And we get there by having people in power using bullshit to blur those distinctions until enough people can no longer trust what they hear or read. In other words, the more confused everyone is about what is going on, what is real and what is not real, the easier it is to maintain power and authority. Think of it as pollution of or poisoning of the body politic of democracy.

This confusion can be disorienting. Noted historian Heather Cox Richardson recently wrote in her daily “Letters from an American” series, “it is starting to seem like the best way to interpret social media posts from President Donald Trump is through the lens of professional wrestling.” It was always fake, a kabuki theater for the American masses, employing a term called “kayfabe”, the shared agreement between audience and actors that what was pretend would be accepted as real. Then came “neokayfabe”, in which producers and consumers tended to lose the ability to distinguish between what’s real and what isn’t.” Then there is the unreality of “gaslighting”, a type of psychological abuse that involves manipulating someone into questioning their own reality, perceptions, or
memories. Neokayfabe and gaslighting echo of totalitarianism, a world in which the distinction between fact and fiction and true and false no longer exist for its inhabitants.

We may have elected to the Presidency a person who does not find it necessary to distinguish between lies and truth, who has no concern about whether what he says is true or false, and who may be a victim of his own neokayfabe theater, a situation exacerbated by a compliant if not disoriented constituency. With apologies to Rod Serling, we may have entered a dimension little known to man; a dimension as vast as space and as timeless as
infinity. It is the middle ground between light and shadow, between science and superstition, and it lies between the pit of man’s fears and the summit of his knowledge. This is the dimension of delusion, an area which we might call “The Trump Zone”.

References for further reading:
Lying In State . Eric Alterman (2020)
Letters from an American. Heather Cox Richardson December 26, 2024
On Bullshit. Henry Frankfurt January 30, 2005
On the Origins of Authoritarianism. Hannah Arendt (1951)
On Tyranny Democratic Town Committee website commentary
Richard Waterman

Those who maintain even a passing interest in the news will sometimes hear pundits and politicians lamenting that Americans have a short memory of events, whether good or bad, or that their recall often departs from what has been recorded. And the further back in time one travels, the more likely recollections will pass into oblivion.

We rely upon historical records to buttress important decisions or to support continuing maintenance of long-established practices for the safety or health of our country’s people. If you were born prior to 1972, as a child you may have noticed on your upper arm, near your shoulder, a round scar, smaller than a dime. Those born after that date would be blemish free. The scar was the result of a vaccination for the smallpox virus, eliminated in the
U.S. by 1952. And in 1972 the vaccine was no longer included in the routine childhood vaccinations such as polio, diphtheria, tetanus, measles, mumps, rubella (German measles), and pertussis, commonly referred to as whooping cough.

The greater part of our population today did not have to endure the terrifying panic of parents in the early 1950’s when poliomyelitis, more commonly known as polio, was damaging the brain and spinal cords of children and killing as high as twenty percent of those young children stricken. The list of viral diseases for which vaccines were discovered and successfully administered is a timeline into history that can be documented simply by walking through an old cemetery. Take a look, not at the names on the gravestones, but the ages of the occupants in any of these lapidary collections. You will notice that many of the deceased who were born in the 1700’s and 1800’s are young children. Notice also that you find fewer deaths at a young age for those born in the second half of the twentieth century. This is not coincidence. Nor is it because of an improvement in the safety regulations of the
horse and buggy or farm machinery. It was the investment by our government in the expansion and recommendations of nationwide vaccination guidelines and availability that reduced childhood deaths.

The elimination of childhood diseases may have given many people a false sense of security, with some not recognizing that with lax implementation of vaccination comes an increase in risk. We seem to have dropped our guard as evidenced by more and more frequent outbreaks of these diseases that were until recently almost completely eradicated. Those who find fascination in science fiction will recall the line from the film Jurassic Park, “Life finds a way,” the outcome of which presented a terrifying scenario. That line is a variant on the saying “Nature finds a way.” If nature is relentless, we must at least attempt to match it with our vigilance. Nature is not evil, it is amoral.

Those who consider vaccination against communicable diseases to be ineffective or harmful are ignoring both the historical record and the legitimate scientific evidence, or more often are being misled by disinformation from unreliable pseudo-scientific(1) sources. There are also those who resist vaccination by hiding behind their rights under the U.S. Constitution, and in doing so endanger the lives of their children and the children of other
citizens. Some of these same people protest the rights of others to make life and death decisions concerning pregnancy or end of life choices, both of which are often a matter of anguished decision. On the other hand, for a parent or guardian to forgo vaccinations for infants and the young might well be considered child neglect.

Democracy, under our U.S. Constitution, sometimes finds our individual rights in conflict. You can use harmful tobacco, but you have no right to harm others with your smoke. If you ignore the risk of declining to have your child vaccinated against childhood disease, how can you reconcile parading your child through a store, knowing your child may be a vector for a disease that might be fatal to my infant who is not yet old enough to have received the scheduled immunizations?

The defense of our citizenry against foreign invaders requires a uniformity of purpose; our country, by dint of geography, has historically been spared invasion. But we are now beset with a different invader, microscopic but just as deadly. In order to protect ourselves, we should not have to defend against a disease that is allied with the menace of ignorance, amplified by disinformation and thus aided and abetted by our countrymen. A patriot would
get vaccinated.

(1) See also, essay “On Democracy and Science”