Garry Wills - Politics

Politics

Wills began his career as an early protégé of William F. Buckley, Jr. and was associated with conservatism. When he first became involved with National Review he did not know if he was a conservative, calling himself a "distributionist." Later on, he was self-admittedly conservative, being regarded for a time as the 'token conservative' for the National Catholic Reporter and even writing a book entitled Confessions of a Conservative.

However, during the 1960s and 1970s, driven by his coverage of both civil rights and the anti-Vietnam War movements, Wills became increasingly liberal. His biography of president Richard M. Nixon, Nixon Agonistes (1970) landed him on the master list of Nixon political opponents. He supported Barack Obama in the 2008 Presidential Election, but declared two years later that Obama's presidency had been a 'terrible disappointment'.

In 1995, Wills wrote a long article about the Second Amendment for The New York Review of Books. Though the article was originally titled ‘Why We Have No Right To Bear Arms’, that was not Wills contention and he neither wrote the title nor approved it prior to the article’s publication. Instead, Wills argued that the Second Amendment does not justify private ownership of guns but rather refers to the right to ‘keep and bear arms’ in a military context only. Furthermore, that military context does not entail the right to overthrow the government of the United States:

The Standard Model finds, squirrelled away in the Second Amendment, not only a private right to own guns for any purpose but a public right to oppose with arms the government of the United States. It grounds this claim in the right of insurrection, which clearly does exist whenever tyranny exists. Yet the right to overthrow the government is not given by government. It arises when government no longer has any authority. One cannot say one rebels by right of that nonexistent authority. Modern militias say the government itself instructs them to overthrow government - and wacky scholars endorse this view. They think the Constitution is so deranged a document that it brands as the greatest crime a war upon itself (in Article III: 'Treason against the United States shall consist only in levying war against them...') and then instructs its citizens to take this up (in the Second Amendment). According to this doctrine, a well-regulated group is meant to overthrow its own regulator, and a soldier swearing to obey orders is disqualified from true militia virtue.