Should Americans get to own guns?

If you live in the US like I do,  you can’t get away from this debate,   and it feels like there’s no agreement in sight.

Some people argue that they have a  constitutional right to own guns.

Meanwhile, others argue that they have the right to live in a country free of gun violence.

The thing is, in a liberal democracy  like ours, both arguments kinda hold up.

Which raises the question: how do you  protect everyone’s rights at the same time?

I'm Ellie Anderson and this is  Crash Course Political Theory.

[THEME MUSIC] Last time, I asked if democracy is failing.

And a big reason it can feel that way is  because we can’t agree on what liberalism,   the bedrock of democracy, actually means.

Individual rights and how the government protects them are core questions of liberalism.

And no, I don’t mean “liberal” as in your cousin who wears Birkenstocks and voted for Obama.

Liberalism is a political philosophy of   its own—a centuries-old one that  focuses on liberty, or freedom.

To understand how we got here, I had to go on a bit of a journey — all the way back to the 1600s.

Back then, most of Europe was  ruled by churches and noblemen.

That system was great for the people  in charge — they had a lot of rights.

But not so much for the people they ruled.

Turns out you get to do whatever you  want when you’re running the show.

Must be nice!

So a few philosophers proposed a fairer system,   where all people have certain essential rights, and the government protects those rights.

But there was a catch: To get that protection,   the citizens would have to give up a little of their freedom.

To me, this sounds like a terms of service agreement.

Before you call a car with a ridesharing app, you have to agree to some terms: you’ll give the   service your real name, pay for your ride, and let them track your location while you’re in the car.

They promise to send a car that’s safe to ride in, protect your information, and charge a fair price.

You give up some of your freedom,   and the service provider agrees to  protect the freedoms you still have.

That was the bargain that thinkers like Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau   proposed: Give up some of your freedom to the state, and the state will protect the rest.

Rousseau named this theory the social contract.

And if you didn’t have a social contract?

Well, Hobbes thought life would be pretty bleak.

He worried if everyone had the  freedom to do whatever they wanted,   it would be chaos — a lawless dystopia to rival the exodus at the end of Coachella.

He called this the “state of nature,” and said the only way to avoid it was to make a government.

But not just any kind of government.

Hobbes thought the best way to enforce a social contract was   to give all the power to one absolute  authority, what he called a Leviathan.

Unfortunately, he wasn’t referring to a  giant sea monster, which would’ve been metal.

On the other hand, Hobbes’s contemporary John Locke wasn’t into the whole single   authority thing—he pointed out that  an all-powerful government would   probably create your garden-variety oppression.But he did agree that the key to a healthy society   was individual rights—especially the right to property.

This idea is the seed of libertarianism.

But the more I read these thinkers,   the more I realized that they really  only cared about liberty for some.

Like, Locke helped draft the Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina, a legal document that   aimed to give every free man, quote, “absolute power and authority” over enslaved people.

He wanted liberty for all… free white men.

Bit of a flaw in your logic there, John.

The social contract and the right to personal property make up the core of Classical Liberalism.

And Europeans brought them along  when they founded the United States.

Along with guns, wheat, and a lot of disease.

But Locke and Hobbes don’t quite cut it in terms of understanding what liberalism really is today.

In order to get closer to my answer,  I had to jump forward to the 1970s.

Let’s go to the tape.

[upbeat music plays] The Civil Rights movement had recently ended,  securing more rights for Black Americans.

Second-wave feminists were  marching for women’s equality.

And the income gap was widening, calling attention to the gulf between rich and poor.

So the question became, in a diverse society, how do we make sure everybody has liberty?

Some philosophers tried to answer this question with modern liberalism, which wouldn’t just   protect individuals but would also, ostensibly, produce a more just and equitable society.

One guy you really can’t avoid once  you start reading about this stuff   is John Rawls, who floated a thought experiment: imagine there are a bunch of people in  a room, trying to make a fair society.

They don’t know what their life is like outside the room—what   race or gender they are, if they’re rich or poor, disabled or not, etc.

They’re behind what Rawls called the  “veil of ignorance,” and they have to   choose some principles of justice that will be good for everyone.

Rawls thought a just world is one where everyone benefits.

This is the theory of justice as fairness.

He figured everyone in the room would  pretty much agree on the equality principle:   that everyone should get the same  access to rights and opportunities.

If one person has the right to own property or go to school or eat a whole pizza in one sitting, don’t judge me, everyone has that right.

But that wouldn’t mean everyone  has the exact same life.

Rawls thought there would always be some inequality,   and that was OK—as long as two things were true.

First, everyone should get the same chance at a better life.

Someone can have a higher-paying job as long as everyone has an equal opportunity to get that job.

And second, inequality should give the most benefit to the people who have the least.

Like, the person getting paid more should have a job that   helps everyone—especially the least advantaged.

He called this the difference principle.

This is where we can see partisan views of Rawls in   some of our most pressing political debates today.

A progressive interpretation says government works only if it helps the most marginalized people.

If it doesn’t, it’s unjust, and it’s the  state’s responsibility to correct it.

This might mean establishing a universal basic income or   healthcare for all—what’s called distributive justice.

A conservative interpretation says more or less the opposite.

If everyone has the same access to opportunities,   then inequality is the result of individual choices.

This is part of the anti-welfare argument,   that giving people so-called “handouts”  doesn’t serve them or the broader society.

Which brings us back to one of the trickiest and most persistent problems liberalism faces: What happens when one person’s freedoms conflict with another’s?

Like, should someone’s right to self-defense trump another’s right to live?

Does a right to free speech cover hate speech?

Should governments have access to private data if it lets them prevent crimes against children?

My questions could go on for days.

Luckily, 20th-century theorist Isaiah Berlin helped me out.

He describes two ways of thinking about liberty.

But when I was first getting started in  this field, I made myself a solemn promise.

Never try to approach dense political theory without being properly prepared.

[womp womp] So here are the two ways of thinking about liberty.

Negative liberty is the absence of obstacles.

If you have negative liberty, nobody’s  interfering in your life or blocking your way.

This is that “classical liberalism” kind  of liberty: leave me and my stuff alone.

Positive liberty, on the other hand,  is the presence of self-determination.

If you have positive liberty,   you have control over your life and can make the decisions you want.

Here’s another way to think about it.

Imagine that a person decides to apply for a job at the mall.

She goes right up to the store, resume in hand, and nobody stops her.

This is negative liberty—no person or entity is interfering in her decision to apply.

Now let’s say this person’s real  dream is to study archaeology.

But she comes from a low-income family, so she’s unable to go to college and pursue that dream.

In that way, she’s driven by her  circumstances, not her own sense of purpose.

She doesn’t have positive liberty.

Berlin thought positive liberty was  too abstract to work in the real world.

Like, how can you attribute everything to   self-determination when there are always so many factors?

But, others argue that focusing on negative liberty — overt obstacles like laws against   women or people of color attending college, for example — ignores the fact that people and   the choices they make are shaped by their social environment in subtler ways, too.

Even without those kinds of obvious  obstacles, other things interfere,   like race and class privilege, social  norms, and even language itself.

Like, maybe our job-seeker's family has limited   income in part because of bygone racist housing laws.

The obstacle has been removed, but there's still inequity there in terms of generational wealth.

Or, say every professor in the local university's archaeology department is white and male.

Even if she could afford to go there,   she may not be set up to succeed  by the culture of the institution.

So here’s what I learned.

Whatever way you slice it, liberalism is all about individuals’ rights,   and protecting them means stopping people from interfering in the rights of others.

But in a diverse society with legacies of  inequality, that’s… easier said than done.

To maintain equality, should a society  ignore the differences among people,   or should it emphasize difference?

Some philosophers, like Chandran  Kukathas and Kwame Anthony Appiah,   say that liberalism already  protects people of all cultures.

If everyone has individual liberties, we don’t need to   do anything special for particular groups.

Thinkers in this tradition advocate for less   intervention from the state, which is why some argue against measures like affirmative action,   saying that it's an overcorrection  that could create unfair advantages.

Others, like Will Kymlicka, think we need to go beyond individual   rights and give people with historically  marginalized identities group rights too.

He says we need to reinterpret classical  liberalism to make it multicultural,   which would mean rebalancing the scales to correct legacies of unequal treatment.

And then there are the thinkers,   like Bhikhu Parekh, who think we need to upend the whole system.

Liberalism can’t solve the problems it created,   he says, especially when it’s rooted  in European colonialism—because,   spoiler alert for every Crash Course history series, colonialism created a lot of inequality.

These debates are ongoing, and they’ll keep shaping the future of American politics.

How do we protect everyone’s rights,  and what do we do when they conflict?

Journeying into liberalism gave me a framework for answering these kinds of tricky questions,   but it’s definitely not a blueprint.

Applied to different situations,  the path forward can look different.

But understanding liberalism  better is essential to making   sense of American politics—and deciding what we want liberty to look like today.