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I would actually venture the opinion that the South did have the legal right to rebel and secede. The North just reconquered the South and readmitted it to the Union state by state.

In other words, you can try to rebel. You don't have the right to win though ;)

I see what you're saying, although I'd quibble with the word "legal."

It certainly seems very American to think that people have a right to rebel...that's how we got our country, after all. But I'd say that's more of a natural right than a legal right--one that supercedes the typical concept of legality in its very nature.

What I meant above was more that the U.S. Constitution does not provide a power, right, or mechanism for states or individuals to violently rebel. It's certainly not the reason we have the 2nd Amendment (quite the opposite, actually).

Sure. It's a logical absurdity to suppose a legal right to rebel, since the act of rebellion is the act of rejecting that legal authority in the first place.

I would actually say, though, that the Second Amendment is likely intended to put governments at explicit risk of rebellion, especially when it comes to day-to-day enforcement. It's not so much about rising up and marching on DC when they decide to oppress people. It's more about not being able to send in the cops to oppress people in the first place, because if they do, they'll end up being shot. Even within this century, the Black Panthers used the Second Amendment to protect blacks from police brutality: http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2011/09/the-secr...

And used effectively in the Battle of Athens, too. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Athens_(1946)

They had the right to self-determination, just as the 13 rebel colonies did in seceding from Britain. But they gave up that right a-priori by enslaving an entire section of their population. The same could be argued about the American Revolution, but Britain had not raised any significant complaint about colonial slave-holding, so had no real standing from that perspective.

> What Americans actually believe is that government actions should not be trusted merely because they are government actions.

This is precisely the exceptionalism I'm talking about. Americans do not have a monopoly on the understanding that individuals are sovereign and that the government operates only with the consent of the people.

The citizens of other liberal democracies are not passive subjects - indeed, aside from selective dogmatism around gun ownership, Americans are far more passive and fatalistic toward their government's abuses and intransigences than the citizens of many other countries.

The US political system is as dysfunctional as it is precisely because so few Americans believe it can be made to work. In the absence of a culture in which large groups of people people actively engage in the formal and informal mechanisms of democratic governance, too many Americans instead express contempt and despair and stockpile guns.

I didn't say that Americans are the only ones who believe that. You are the one who is singling out the U.S. for some sort of special criticism--based on gross misunderstandings of the state of things here.

>The 2nd Amendment is still in force today not because it is old, but because the American people, today, want it to remain in force.

How does this apply to the rest of the bill of rights, though? Two major instances I can think of the oft-maligned "legislating from the bench" both apply to civil rights, first desegregation, and more recently marriage equality.

The courts are ruling the existing laws cover marriage equality despite the outcry - and this is a good thing. Some things are right and wrong regardless of how many people want it to be a certain way.

I don't think whether people "want" something especially when it comes to equal rights should have any impact on how the law is interpreted. One of the good arguments against direct democracy, IMHO.

If U.S. citizens do not like a Supreme Court ruling, they can pass a Constitutional amendment overturning it. After the Civil War, the 14th Amendment was ratified, overturning the Dred Scott Supreme Court decision and allowing former slaves and their children to become citizens.

That Amendment has since provided the legal power behind most civil rights decisions, including desegregation and (if they win) marriage equality. The "equal protection" clause justifies rulings against needless discrimination, and the "due process" clause makes those rulings apply to state and local laws in addition to federal law.

So here is an example where a huge swatch of what people take for granted today as Constitutional protections, in fact dates only to the 1860s.

If Americans as a whole wanted to get rid of the 2nd Amendment, they could pass a Constitutional amendment revoking it. They did it to Prohibition. The reason that is not happening is that most Americans like guns, or at least they respect the desire of other Americans to own them.