STRONG SIDE BACK 2

I owe the allocentric framing entirely to Mark Hatmaker. In his most recent post (The Orthodox Fighting Stance, part 2), he introduced the neurological language that gives shape to a phenomenon fighters adopt reflexively; the preference for placing the dominant side to the rear when the stakes rise. Hatmaker wrote that this posture “turns off thoughts of the self and constant performance evaluation,” moving the mind from egocentric to allocentric focus, or what the samurai called mushin, “no mind,” the clear calm state in which perception becomes action. He found in recent research what warrior cultures had stumbled on long before science could name it: by altering how we stand, we alter how the brain attends.

The science he cites comes from Kenneth Heilman and others who have mapped how the cerebral hemispheres divide attention. The right hemisphere handles broad spatial awareness and allocentric mapping (perception oriented toward the world) while the left hemisphere favors analytic, self-referential tasks. The left visual field therefore enjoys an attentional edge for scanning, motion prediction, and global context. Hatmaker builds on this to argue that the orthodox stance (dominant hand and eye to the rear, chin tucked, gaze through the upper-left visual field) engages the brain’s most efficient network for allocentric processing. “By gazing in this manner,” he writes, “we engage the sensorimotor allocentric bias so greatly that we can attend and perform with greater efficiency.”[1]

That claim is elegant and plausible, though not without limits. The left-field advantage is well supported; the vertical, “upper” component less so. The upper visual field tends to specialize in far-space search, while the lower favors peripersonal, action-based control (Previc 1998). Fighting, like fencing or swordplay, traverses both domains in a single heartbeat. It is therefore safer to say that orientation and field of gaze shape perception, but not that one configuration is universally superior. The brain provides biases; the art chooses when to exploit them.

This, I think, is where our paths converge. Hatmaker sees stance as a neurological key to outer-directed focus; I see it as an evolutionary compromise between readiness and commitment. He approaches from the ring and the clinch, where range collapses and reaction is the currency of survival. I approach from the sword (and the pistol), where geometry and precision govern the encounter. The sword, being a lever, demands orientation more than torque. In single-line systems, fencing, kendo, or the Western cut-and-thrust, the forward lead reduces time to contact and keeps the point alive. Power comes not from the rear but from linear alignment, from the ability to control centerline. In these systems, the strong-side lead is not a defiance of physiology but an adaptation to a constrained geometry: the duel, one opponent, one vector.

When range closes or the cut must finish decisively, the logic reverses. The rear leg coils, the hips twist, and the cut releases through the full kinetic chain. The old schools knew both conditions and trained them deliberately. Kashima Shinden Jikishinkage-ryū alternates right and left leads to cultivate bilateral coordination (Otake 1977–82). Yagyū Shinkage-ryū masks intent by beginning left-forward, then reverses mid-cut (Yagyū 2004). Ono-ha Ittō-ryū uses alternating footwork so that whichever side leads arises from opportunity rather than doctrine (Warner and Draeger 1978). They were already training against reflex; recognizing that any fixed habit could be read, timed, and killed.

Firearms reverse the order again. Sight alignment and recoil management replace torque as the governing variables. In the modern pistol stances that grew from Fairbairn’s one-handed method to Weaver’s two-handed compromise and finally to Cooper’s isosceles, the human geometry gradually squared itself to the target. The goal was not allocentric awareness but visual dominance and recoil recovery. In these contexts, the placement of the dominant eye relative to the target dictates posture more than any hemispheric bias. The right-hemisphere advantage might contribute to calmness of perception, but the weapon demands that the sights, not the mind, stay level.

sangfroid & mushin: Yusuf Dikec

Still, Hatmaker’s principle of “hacking attention” through posture remains valuable. The same stance that quiets the self in combat may also train calmness in daily life. His description of the feedback loop, the way orthodox stance cultivates mushin, and mushin in turn reinforces allocentric awareness, rings true. It also hints at something deeper; that the stance might serve as a daily mnemonic for composure, a bodily reminder that perception precedes thought. I take this as a very powerful reminder that shizentai must become the repository for mushin. Our neutral open-stance becomes the “natural” posture of “no-stance,” so mushin becomes the default state.

A martial artist, however, must train awareness. Every common pattern is a potential target. If most fighters coil the strong side to the rear, one must learn to read and exploit that habit. Lead-side power is the natural antidote: the intercepting jab, the fencing thrust, the stop-hit that lands in the half-beat before the rear chain fires. Angle is the next weapon: step outside the loaded hip, steal the torque, and force the opponent to reset. Ushiro-tenkan is a perfect example of Aikido’s solution to the power strike. Close the range until the fight enters the lower visual field, where tactile and vestibular cues replace distant scanning. This is JKD’s and FMA’s trapping range. Sensitivity to pressure and pattern now take priority over vision. Vision, like stance, is a lever that can be turned against itself.

Left-handers offer another reminder that nature’s tendencies can be overturned by training. Southpaws are overrepresented among successful fighters (Richardson and Gilman 2019). The reason is simple: rarity. Most orthodox fighters spar mainly with their own kind, and the unfamiliar geometry of a southpaw (mirrored stance, reversed angles) creates momentary cognitive lag. The orthodox fighter starts behind the OODA loop. This “fighting hypothesis” has held up across decades of boxing and MMA data. Yet the advantage is frequency-dependent; it fades with exposure. The antidote, again, is training: make the rare common.

In the end, the strong-side reflex is an adaptive equation solved differently by context. The rear coil conserves potential; the forward lead spends it. The allocentric bias Hatmaker describes may govern the probing phase, where awareness must widen and the self must quiet. The egocentric bias returns in the moment of commitment, when everything narrows to the cut, the trigger, the decisive act. The human nervous system toggles between these states endlessly: scanning and striking, perceiving and doing. This rhythm, probe and commit, widen and narrow, is the grammar of combat.

Hatmaker’s practical insight, that the orthodox stance engages a neurological predisposition toward allocentric calm, is a significant addition to the literature of the fighting arts. My counterexamples from sword and pistol do not refute it; they delimit it. Where weapon geometry or visual precision dominate, other priorities supersede. But his larger point that body orientation governs attention, and that the trained warrior learns to direct that attention outward is an important reminder to us all. The lesson is to learn both sides of the equation: the coil and the release, the calm gaze and the decisive cut.

Hatmaker is preparing his third installment, and I look forward to his conclusions. If his preview holds, he will carry the discussion from neurology to ethics, showing that posture, attention, and conduct are ultimately one continuum. That movement from stance to spirit is a worthy frontier for any martial study.

[1] The general argument of dominant hand and eye to the rear is challenged by left-handers and those with cross-eye dominance, but those are statistical aberrations.

References (selected):

Heilman & Valenstein, Clinical Neuropsychology of Attention and Neglect (1985).

Previc, F. H. “The Neuropsychology of 3-D Space,” Behavioral and Brain Sciences (1998).

Otake, R. Katori Shintō Ryū: The Life-Giving Sword (1977–82).

Yagyū, M. Heihō Kadensho (2004).

Warner, G. and Draeger, D. Japanese Swordsmanship: Technique and Practice (1978).

Richardson, C. and Gilman, J. “Left-Handed Advantage in Combat Sports,” Laterality (2019).

Cooper, J. Principles of Personal Defense (1989).

STRONG SIDE BACK

Mark Hatmaker recently asked why the human animal so often places its dominant side to the rear whenever power, precision, or survival are at stake. His list was broad and historically informed: the boxer with his power hand back, the batter with his strong foot behind the plate, the quarterback and pitcher who coil their dominant side before the throw, the soldier with rifle butt tucked to the rear shoulder, even the Spartan hoplite with sword drawn behind the shield line (Hatmaker, The Orthodox Fighting Stance). In every case, the body arranges itself to strike with strength that begins in the rear.

Hatmaker’s question is the old paradox of laterality: why, when stakes rise, do we reverse what we do in daily life? In ordinary fine-motor tasks (writing, cooking, threading a needle) the dominant side leads. But when the task demands full commitment, or when under pressure, the body instinctively loads it behind the line, and releases from there. He once explained this as an artifact of historical combat transitions, the move from sword-and-buckler to modern pugilism but now questions that reasoning. The truth, he suggested, might run deeper. Perhaps stance is not an invention of craft but a manifestation of neural architecture, a pre-existing condition of the human animal. His essay ended not with a conclusion but with a challenge: “I’ll leave my thoughtful Warriors to cogitate,” a challenge to test whether our methods reveal a deep physiology or merely a lineage of copied forms.

The distinction between form and fact is what drew my attention. Hatmaker’s musing echoes an older archaeological principle: study the artifact but seek the behavior that created it. As Grahame Clark wrote, “the archaeologist studies not the antiquity, but how men lived” (Clark 1939, 15). Forms that survive are rarely decorative; they persist because they solved problems. A kata that endures through generations is not a convention, it is a frozen victory, a testimony to the importance of winning.

Hatmaker’s survey on strong-side rear is compelling and obvious as a combat reflex in fisticuffs. But my thoughts turned to Bruce Lee’s strong-side lead (based on fencing principles) and to the use of the sword (Lee and Little 1978, 22-24). These codify the opposite, a strong-side lead.

The right-foot-forward chūdan stance in modern kendō is left-foot pressure and right-hand dominance create a forward-linear vector that mirrors the Western fencing stance (Castle, 2003). The weight rests subtly on the left foot, the right heel poised to drive forward. It is a geometry designed for one line of engagement and one opponent. The raised kissaki, aimed at the throat, constrains both fighters to a shared centerline; initiative is defined by who breaks it first. This architecture makes perfect sense for a codified sport. The front-weighted bias favors speed, precision, and minimal movement along a single vector. It is elegant, fast, and perfectly limited.

Aiki-ken, however, preserves the older pattern of balance and torque. The rear foot remains anchored because it must serve in multiple directions, the weight shifts laterally rather than purely forward. Where kendō rewards linear penetration, Aiki-ken trains a responsive readiness, a residual battlefield logic that privileges adaptability over first-strike advantage (Saitō 1973–78, vol. 3, 51). Its stance is not a posture for sport but an attitude toward uncertainty.

The classical scrolls confirm that earlier systems prized adaptability. Kashima Shinden Jikishinkage-ryū alternates kata between right (migi) and left (hidari) leads to cultivate bilateral coordination (Otake 1977–82, vol. 1, 72). Yagyū Shinkage-ryū opens Sha-no-kamae left-foot forward to mask intent, then reverses during the cut (Yagyū 2004, 54-55). Ono-ha Ittō-ryū emphasizes ayumi-ashi (alternate stepping) so that whichever foot leads arises from opportunity, not doctrine (Warner and Draeger 1978, 63). They engender the capacity to strike or withdraw in any direction. As Donn Draeger wrote, the old schools “cultivated ambidexterity not to balance form but to preserve function under duress” (Draeger 1973, 58).

Modern (post WW2) pedagogy sought standardization and disrupted that pragmatism. The twentieth-century budō systems, as Draeger observed, were intended “to educate the masses, not cultivate the few” (Draeger 1974, xii). Uniform instruction required uniform direction. Hence kendō’s fixed right-forward stance: a method optimized for clarity, and measurable progression. What began as an adaptive geometry hardened into administrative orthodoxy. The older ryū, less democratic and more Darwinian, preserved both sides because survival rewarded variability. The modern art preserved only one because teaching rewarded consistency

Sports physiology gives modern vocabulary to these old observations. In striking disciplines, the rear-hand attack consistently produces greater impulse than the lead by virtue of the kinetic chain: power initiated by the rear leg, transmitted through the pelvis, trunk, and shoulder before release (Draeger 1973, 64; Adamec 2021, 3125). This “coiling” structure multiplies mass and distance into force. Studies of lead-hand techniques, even in elite boxers and fencers, show that while total impulse is lower, time-to-contact is shorter. The lead hand wins in speed and precision; the rear hand wins in torque and commitment. The choice of stance thus reflects an underlying question: which goal to prioritize, first touch or decisive strike?

That trade-off, dexterity versus power, is more predictive than any neurological bias. Rear-loaded postures maximize stored potential; forward-loaded ones minimize reaction time. The first privileges power, the second, initiative. When space and preparation permit, the human animal coils; when pressed, it extends. This is as true in the dueling ground as in the animal kingdom. The coiled snake and the striking mantis, the boxer and the swordsman; all solve the same physical equation differently depending on proximity and risk.

The Japanese sword traditions embody this continuum. Ittō-ryū’s doctrine of itto sunawachi banto, “one sword, all strikes,” implies that the decisive cut requires total commitment, but the preceding movement, semé, demands subtlety and control. The transition from lead probing to rear release is the choreography of decision. Similarly, Aiki-ken’s awase drills (meeting cuts) train the practitioner to test range, rhythm, and timing with minimal commitment before releasing the decisive strike (Saitō 1973–78, vol. 4, 62). In both, dexterity and power are phases of the same process, not opposites but sequenced necessities.

Perception shapes this continuum but does not determine it. The classical injunction toward metsuke, to “see the whole without fixation,” is less about stance orientation than about attentional economy. Heihō Kadensho warns that the swordsman must not look directly at the opponent’s weapon but must perceive movement through the body’s periphery (Yagyū 2004, 77). This is cognitive, not optical: training the brain to integrate motion prediction and inhibition. Eye dominance, often cited as a determinant of lead, is fluid and task-specific. Skilled practitioners adjust head tilt and shoulder line to maintain binocular function in any stance (Draeger 1973, 59). Vision adapts to posture, not the reverse.

In this light, the argument that we withdraw the dominant side to “protect sight” collapses. Both leads can preserve equal visual access if the body aligns properly. What differentiates them is not what the eyes see but how the body commits. The strong-side-rear stance favors decisive, mass-driven action; the strong-side-lead favors probing, sensory-driven engagement. Each reflects a distinct logic of risk. One seeks accuracy and continuation, the other power and finality.

Firearms training reproduces the same dialectic. The one-handed, duelist-style stance of Fairbairn and Applegate in Shooting to Live (1942) was designed for close, unsighted encounters (the quick-kill method). It maximized reaction speed and mobility under stress, when orientation mattered more than precision. As engagement distances increased and sighted fire became decisive, Jack Weaver’s two-handed grip and the later isosceles stance emerged. Weaver’s system blended control and recoil management with rapid re-targeting (Weaver Stance). Jeff Cooper refined both approaches at Gunsite, arguing that “square to the threat is square to the problem” (Cooper 1989, 41). The squared stance maintained binocular vision while providing stable recoil recovery. When ballistic armor removed the penalty for frontal exposure, the isosceles became doctrine. Each shift represented a new equilibrium between speed, power, and sensory acquisition.

Massad Ayoob later captured this synthesis in StressFire, defining stance as “the integration of weapon, vision, and intent” (Ayoob 1984, 44). In his model, technique is not fixed but contextually reactive: the shooter flows between Weaver and Isosceles as distance, stress, and visibility change. The old Japanese model said the same thing more poetically: ma-ai and hyōshi, distance and timing, govern all technique. The body adjusts its geometry to preserve initiative and stability simultaneously. When the terrain, the weapon, or the task changes, so does the stance.

Seen through this lens, Hatmaker’s question about dominant-side placement becomes a question of temporal strategy. The rear-loaded stance is a geometry of potential energy; the forward-loaded stance, of kinetic immediacy. One is preparation for the decisive act, the other the act itself. We do not stand strong-side-rear because of any deep evolutionary bias toward one eye or limb, but because the body alternates between two enduring strategies of survival: probing and committing. The rear-loaded posture delays engagement to ensure completion; the forward-loaded one accelerates engagement to ensure contact. The difference is not in nature but in intention.

The surviving kata of the old schools reveal this understanding. Their forms, alternating migi and hidari, were perceptual and tactical drills, training the practitioner to act decisively regardless of which side happened to bear weight. As Omiya wrote of Ueshiba’s early practice, alternating right and left was “a search for unity within change, not symmetry for its own sake” (Omiya 1998, 103). The goal was adaptability and internal balance. By training both configurations, the fighter internalized the shift between dexterity and power as a single continuum.

This adaptability is also perceptual. Draeger noted that the purpose of kata was “to coordinate perception and action until they become one” (Draeger 1973, 91). Alternating stances forces the nervous system to remap proprioception and attention continually, producing what modern psychology would call situational awareness or Gestalt perception. In practice, this means that stance becomes less a fixed shape than a mode of attention. The swordsman who can move from lead to rear without hesitation has integrated the full rhythm of combat.

The same integration appears in evolutionary terms. Lynne Isbell’s theory of primate vision proposes that our perceptual systems evolved under the pressure to detect movement (specifically snakes) before conscious recognition (Isbell 2009, 78). Omiya interprets Aiki’s evolution as the reconciliation between “natural movement and cultivated perception” (Omiya 1998, 119). The link is direct: both imply that the nervous system is built to alternate between scanning and striking, between awareness and action. Combat stances exploit that oscillation. The coiled posture heightens perception through readiness; the extended posture resolves perception through action. What we call “stance” is therefore a physicalization of a neurological potential.

The lesson, finally, is humility. The koryū masters did not reason their way to these truths; they suffered them into knowledge, Pain as a Teacher. Each cut, like each shot, was a test of judgment under pressure. When we train these patterns today, we are not reenacting rather re-entering the same experiment: discovering when to value accuracy over power, speed over decisiveness.

Both of Hatmaker’s intuitions stand. The unarmed or shield-bearing fighter presents the sacrificial, non-dominant lead in anticipation of delivering a decisive blow from the rear. When armor, space, or time allow, we coil power behind the line, favoring commitment over speed. When immediacy and precision rule, we bring strength forward, favoring dexterity over mass. Both are correct because both are conditional.

Stance is not a relic of habit or a flaw of neurology. It is the record of an adaptive equation, how human combatants learned to balance dexterity against power, perception against decision, freedom of motion against finality of intent.

Stand where you can respond. Move when you must commit. The rest is practice.

Selected Bibliography

Adamec, J., et al. “Biomechanical Assessment of Various Punching Techniques.” International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health 18, no. 6 (2021): 3125.

Ayoob, Massad. StressFire: Gunfighting for Police—Advanced Tactics and Techniques. Police Bookshelf, 1984.

Clark, Grahame. Archaeology and Society. London: Methuen, 1939.

Cooper, Jeff. The Modern Technique of the Pistol. Gunsite Press, 1989.

Draeger, Donn F. Classical Budō. New York: Weatherhill, 1973.

Draeger, Donn F. Modern Budō and Budō Systems. New York: Weatherhill, 1974.

Fairbairn, W. E., and E. A. Sykes. Shooting to Live with the One-Hand Gun. Paladin Press, 1942. (summary link)

Hatmaker, Mark. “The Orthodox Fighting Stance.” Extreme Self Protection (online essay).

Lee, Bruce, and John Little. The Tao of Jeet Kune Do. Santa Clarita: Ohara Publications, 1978.

Omiya, Ryuji. The Hidden Roots of Aikido. Tokyo: Kodansha, 1998.

Otake, Risuke. The Deity and the Sword: Katori Shintō Ryū. Tokyo: Japan Publications Trading, 1977–82.

Saitō, Morihiro. Traditional Aikido, Vols. 3–4. Iwama: Minato Research, 1973–78.

Warner, Gordon, and Donn F. Draeger. Japanese Swordsmanship: Technique and Practice. New York: Weatherhill, 1978.

Yagyū, Munenori. Heihō Kadensho. Translated by William Bodiford. Tokyo: Kodansha, 2004.

Isbell, Lynne A. The Fruit, the Tree, and the Serpent: Why We See So Well. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2009.

If there isn’t a live link – buy the book for your library, lest the information be lost!

No Kings

Public virtue cannot exist in a nation without private, and public virtue is the only foundation of republics. But virtue must be vigilant lest it become tyranny.

-John Adams, Discourses on Davila

This Saturday (10/18/25), Portland filled with 40,000 protesters. The “No Kings March” is meant to remind those in power that sovereignty belongs to the people (We the People). I agree with the sentiment, but not the theater. Protests like this have become ritual consolations, moral pageants whose utility is their recursiveness, showing others of like mind that they are not alone. The Trump administration will not be swayed, and Trump relishes shouting the counter-narrative to justify sending in the National Guard. Still, I understand why people march. It is the same impulse that stirred my ancestors: the conscience of a free people bringing right order to the world.

When I trace my family line, from the Wadhams who fought in the Revolution and the Civil War, to the utopian Tafts and Messingers expelled from their pacifist commune for taking up arms, to the pragmatic Barkers who arrived later, I see an unbroken struggle between virtue and power. Every generation learns anew that moral men, convinced of their righteousness, do the greatest harm when armed with certainty.

The Tafts and Wadhams built their lives in the covenantal logic of New England Puritanism. They were farmers and soldiers who believed that conscience, bound by duty, was the only reliable governor of human affairs. When war came, first against King George, then against disunion, they fought for order grounded in consent.

The Taft and Messinger branches turned moral energy toward reform. Their flirtation with Adin Ballou’s Hopewell Community reflected a generational faith in perfectibility; an American translation of the ancient dream of virtue without violence. But the Civil War shattered it. When the call came, they left their communal experiment to defend the Union, earning expulsion from their idealists’ circle. I admire that decision.

The Barkers, who crossed from industrial England decades later, contributed a note of skepticism. The family motto, Fide sed cui vide, trust, but in whom take care, was not cynicism but experience rendered as caution. It has become my own watch phrase: trust but verify. They entered an America already rich in ideals and added the physician’s realism: every sickness demands diagnosis.

Herbert Hoover, though no relation, marks the hinge where private conscience first sought legitimacy through public administration; the moment when the moral impulse to serve hardened into the executive creed of coordination. His Quaker upbringing taught him that service to others was a sacred duty; his instinct was to save and to organize, to redeem suffering through coordination. That impulse first found expression in Europe. As head of the Commission for Relief in Belgium during the First World War, Hoover managed food for nearly ten million civilians, an unprecedented humanitarian effort conducted by a private citizen. In practice he acted as a quasi-sovereign, negotiating with both the British Admiralty and the German General Staff. The success of that moral enterprise convinced him that goodwill, properly organized, could substitute for government itself. Alas, he inverted the lesson once he was invested with the power of government.

When the United States entered the war, President Wilson appointed Hoover to lead the U.S. Food Administration under the Lever Food and Fuel Control Act (1917), which granted the president emergency powers to control agricultural production and prices. Wilson delegated those powers to Hoover personally, legalizing his moral voluntarism and transforming exhortation into administrative authority. The “Meatless Mondays” and “Wheatless Wednesdays” that millions observed were, in truth, the first national exercises in coordinated moral regulation; voluntary in tone, compulsory in effect.

As Secretary of Commerce through the 1920s, Hoover institutionalized this creed. He expanded the Bureau of Standards, promoted trade associations to self-regulate industry, and advanced the 1927 Radio Act, which established federal control over the airwaves, the new moral commons. His “associationalism” blurred the line between public guidance and private compulsion. In Ellis Hawley’s phrase, Hoover’s America became an “associative state,” where virtue was to be achieved by coordination, and coordination by administration.

Herbert Clark Hoover must be considered the founder of the New Deal in America… Hoover’s administration originated much of the fascistic central planning and coercion that Franklin Roosevelt later carried to completion.

Murray N. Rothbard, America’s Great Depression (Princeton, D. Van Nostrand, 1963), 464.

Rothbard meant it as indictment, not praise. Yet his phrasing proved prophetic: once moral authority legitimized administrative power, its growth became self-justifying. By the time of the Depression, Hoover’s faith in voluntary coordination had matured into national policy. The Reconstruction Finance Corporation (1932), the Federal Home Loan Bank Act, and the Emergency Relief and Construction Act all extended executive authority into finance and welfare. Each was presented as moral necessity, each as temporary expedient, and each survived him. Benevolence had become structural. Hoover was the first technocrat of virtue, deluded by the conviction that goodwill and information could substitute for freedom. Hayek would later show why this faith must fail: knowledge is dispersed, tacit, and perishable; it cannot be centralized without distortion (“The Use of Knowledge in Society,” 1945).

Hoover’s tragedy was that he acted from virtue. He mistook goodness for governance; the conviction that compassion could be legislated and that virtue, once nationalized, would ennoble rather than entangle. He was the first president to moralize efficiency, to treat coordination as a moral act. His failure was not corruption but faith that benevolence could be scaled.

Franklin Roosevelt and Rexford Tugwell “perfected” Hoover’s moral premise and institutionalized it. What Hoover proposed as volunteerism inspired by conscience, Roosevelt imposed in law. Tugwell called it “cooperation enforced by law,” a righteousness administered by bureaucracy. The New Deal transformed charity into regulation and compassion into command. It was the greatest encroachment upon individual liberty ever undertaken in the name of preserving livelihood. Once the state became the arbiter of compassion, every future crisis invited greater intervention. The Great Depression thus marked the true revolution: the substitution of civic agency with administrative benevolence. Thus was born the benevolent Leviathan. The Nanny State arrived not by force, but under a pretext of virtue.

Each generation has repeated the same reflex. Lincoln saved the Union, Roosevelt saved capitalism, Truman and Eisenhower saved the free world. So runs the catechism of moral necessity that have become historical platitudes. And each salvation expanded the concentration of power. What began as Hoover’s Quaker instinct to help the common man evolved into the permanent conviction that “government should” solve whatever afflicts him. The citizen, succored by compassion, surrendered agency for comfort. To believe that government should do X, whatever X may be, is to accept that the state must hold the power to compel it. Every time we vote for virtue rather than practice it, we trade conscience for convenience. The serpent of moral governance always turns its head. If Acton warned that power corrupts, Spooner completed the logic: that even benevolent power violates liberty by definition.

A man’s natural rights are his own, against the whole world; and any infringement of them is equally a crime… whether committed by one man, calling himself a robber, or by millions calling themselves a government.

Lysander Spooner, No Treason: The Constitution of No Authority, No. VI, 1870

Lord Acton’s warning that power corrupts was too mild. Power moralized becomes irresistible, because it disguises domination as duty. The moralization of the past has become the perversion of the present: virtue no longer restrains power; it justifies it. Max Weber called this the routinization of charisma, the transmutation of moral fervor into bureaucratic routine.

The Anti-Federalists foresaw this. They feared that Rome’s fate would be ours: a republic of virtue collapsing into empire through perpetual emergencies. Madison in Federalist 51 tried to answer them (ambition would counteract ambition) but ambition now resides in a single branch. How did we get here?

Walter Russell Mead calls Americans “moral engineers,” a phrase meant kindly but tinged with prophecy (Special Providence, 2001). The moral engineer sees every problem as a design flaw. Lincoln, Hoover, Roosevelt, and today’s idealists share the same faith: that structure can redeem sin. It is a secularized soteriology; a Protestant impulse translated into politics. As Hayek and Oakeshott warned, the rationalist mind cannot grasp the organic order it disrupts. And that is the best prognosis; it assumes right-minded actors.

Thus, the futility of this weekend’s march. “No Kings” is a noble slogan, but we live in a kingdom of committees in the best of times, and under the current administration, one which recognizes that the constraints on power were always moderated by convention. Any actor willing to dispense with convention has power to wield without constraint. What protestors see as an abuse of power wielded by a singular man they happen to dislike (with good reason) is simply missing the point. The problem is not the actor; it is the concentration of power. As Tocqueville foresaw, the tutelary state does not enslave, it infantilizes.

I seek to trace the novel features under which despotism may appear in the world. I see an innumerable crowd of like and equal men who revolve on themselves without repose, procuring the small and vulgar pleasures with which they fill their souls… Above them rises an immense and tutelary power, which takes upon itself alone to secure their enjoyments and to watch over their fate. It is absolute, minute, regular, provident, and mild… It does not break wills, but it softens them, bends them, and directs them… it does not destroy, it prevents things from being born; it does not tyrannize, it hinders, compromises, enervates, extinguishes, and stupefies.

Tocqueville, Democracy in America, II.4.6, 663–664

And yet, history delivers its own ironies. When virtue exhausts itself in administration, power becomes brittle. A demagogue may do what reformers could not, expose the weakness of a government built on the illusion of goodness. Trump is no reformer; he tears down only to enthrone himself. Yet in doing so, he reminds us that the edifice of moral power rests not on law, but on convention. Once those conventions are despised, the people must decide whether to rebuild them or to reclaim what was theirs before the age of kings.

Trump has not drained the swamp so much as torn at its surface; in breaking norms, he exposes how deeply the system depended upon them. The assumption was that a bureaucracy endures because it is self-replicating, not self-limiting. Trump’s dismantling of the edifice exposed the fragility of its architecture. He seeks dominion, not renewal; yet in doing so, he reveals the extent to which our system depends on the moral habits of those who wield power. The citizen feels virtuous shouting in the street but fails to recognize that replacing this king with a benevolent one who restores the status quo ante is not returning power to the people. Lincoln’s war powers, Roosevelt’s alphabet agencies, the national-security state of the Cold War, all began as temporary expedients. None were repealed.

I find myself torn: I admire the marchers’ spirit, yet I know their indignation cannot touch the machinery they oppose. The republic survives not through noise but through virtue; the hard, quiet discipline of citizens who refuse both tyranny and spectacle. And when necessary, the citizenry effect change through violent revolution: a well-documented English tradition. My fervent hope is that armed rebellion is never warranted again. My hope is that the Trump abuse of power will remind America that its foundational documents were intended to prevent the very abuses we have witnessed in the long arc of the Republic. Each abuse had its moral justification, and perhaps in the moment it was necessary expedience, but once the crisis was resolved, the power was never returned.

If there is any lesson my ancestors offer, it is that moral courage must be matched by faith in people, and, when all else fails, the willingness to take violent action. The Wadhams fought because conscience demanded it, but they returned to their farms when the fighting ended. The Tafts abandoned utopia but did not seek to enforce another. The Barkers distrusted authority yet still served their communities. They understood something our modern moralists forget: liberty depends less on leaders than on citizens, who do not look to government to solve their own or society’s problems.

And yet despair would be another form of abdication. The duty of a free man is not to withdraw in disgust but to guard the small perimeters of autonomy still available (family, craft, locality, speech) and to model restraint when politics no longer can. The Anti-Federalists were right: only the virtue of citizens can prevent tyranny. Institutions cannot substitute for character. The republic is always one generation away from servility.

“Power can be resisted and undermined by laughter.”
—Milan Kundera, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting (1979)

As I watched my wife don her inflatable costume to wear to the “No Kings” protest, I thought again of my ancestors. Their lesson endures: trust, but in whom take care. Power never returns itself. Every man who claims to save the republic diminishes it instead. The work of liberty is not salvation but stewardship; a patient vigilance that knows when help becomes harm, when virtue hardens into domination, and when we must relearn the grace of doing less. Stewardship is not passivity. My forebears knew that peace sometimes demands the courage to act; the tree of liberty, as Jefferson famously put it, must occasionally be “refreshed…with the blood of patriots and tyrants.” In extremis, that means armed resistance, the grim remedy of last resort. The subtlety, and the moral burden, is to know precisely when violence is warranted: only for a just cause, only after exhausting lawful and peaceful means, and with a realistic prospect of restoring liberty rather than perpetuating chaos. Resistance, when undertaken with such restraint, can itself be a form of care. A government worthy of a free people must always be fearful of them, for only then will public virtue remain tethered to private conscience.

Each ask becomes a mandate, caveat salvator!

References (selective)

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