Postconstitutional America by Nathan Pinkoski | Articles | First Things
Anton does not indulge in such speculations, nor is he out to invoke the right to revolution. But he admires the fortitude of those who formed revolutionary committees in America in the 1770s. Moreover, he admires the fortitude of those who, responding to the affront delivered by the British monarchy, declared on the basis of natural law their right to revolution in 1776. He is aware that in taking the Declaration seriously, we take the right to revolution seriously, a right that the 1787 Constitution cannot revoke. For Americans, the easiest path to justifying revolution was set out by Abraham Lincoln, in his First Inaugural: Think, if you can, of a single instance in which a plainly written provision of the Constitution has ever been denied. If a minority is deprived of any clearly written constitutional right, and if such right were a vital one, then the deprivation certainly would justify revolution. But Anton restrains himself from such a Livy-esque exhortation to imitate former times. West Coast Straussianism may have changed, but not to the point of turning Lincoln s obedience to natural law against Lincoln s reverence for constitutional law.
How about the right to keep and bear arms?