Falling Skies, The Walking Dead, and Conservatism

Several articles have already been written on how The Walking Dead, one of the most popular shows currently on TV, is inherently conservative (most notably here and here), from the necessity of guns and the short life expectancy of those who refuse to use them, to the absolute importance of the main characters’ not depending on anyone but themselves and their closest friends for safety. Less noted is the fact that many similar shows, generally depicting a post-apocalyptic future world, often convey similar conservative messages, lessons which take little imagination to apply to modern life.

Two prominent examples, both dealing with guns (a common theme on post-apocalyptic shows), occur on Falling Skies, a sci-fi drama on TNT which concluded last year after five seasons. The basic premise of the show involves an alien invasion which sees the capture or extermination of most humans on Earth, along with the fall of all major governments, including the United States. The show follows a group of survivors as they travel up and down the East Coast, attempting to fight off the invaders.

The group spends the second season attempting to reach Charleston, where rumor has it that a new U.S. government has been established. After reaching their destination, the main characters are asked to hand over their weapons, because in Charleston ordinary citizens don’t carry guns. Weapons are kept in a communal armory, and assigned to individuals on an as-needed basis. The group is reluctant, but eventually complies.

What happens next should come as no surprise to Second Amendment defenders. The self-appointed President takes issue with the group’s differing opinions on alien-fighting policy, and its overall questioning of his leadership, and has them arrested. Without weapons they’re helpless, until a coup forces the President out of power and frees the main characters.

Something similar happens in season four, when the group discovers a utopian colony miraculously untouched by the aliens. Weapons are forbidden inside the colony, which leads to a split between those who aren’t willing to give up their arms and those who are lured in by the promise of a break in the endless fighting. The former are soon proven correct, as the leader of the colony turns out to be secretly in league with the aliens, and several major characters are killed in the ensuing invasion.

The first, most obvious lesson from these apocalyptic-style shows is that, in case of alien invasion or zombie infestation, a gun-free populace will be overrun much quicker than a community with a Second Amendment and high proportion of gun ownership. Similar shows become much less believable if set in, say, Germany or Australia.

But, setting aside the sci-fi themes and plot elements, the real life importance of a individual right to bear arms is put on stark display. The authors of the Second Amendment may not have been planning ahead for the time when an alien spaceship lands on top of Boston, but they did have intimate knowledge of cases in which civilians would need to defend themselves, their families, and their property, whether from burglaries and home invasions, national invasion by a foreign country, or (as they well understood) an illegitimate central government unresponsive to the needs of the people.

The Second Amendment is, at its heart and in addition to a defense against burglaries and individual assaults, a doomsday provision meant to safeguard the rest of the Constitution and Bill of Rights from any overt, comprehensive assault by a future government. Not merely liberal Congresses and Presidents who sometimes intrude on Constitutional provisions but still stand for election and are responsive to the will of the people. Those must be fought, but rhetorically.

But a nightmare scenario, one in which Congress or the President overtly moves to suppress all individual rights, potentially through force, or refuses to leave office at the expiration of their term, is the true vision of the future the Framers feared. The true value of Falling Skies, The Walking Dead, and shows like them, in the protection of individual freedoms, is the reminder they offer about how the Second Amendment is a right guaranteed for a reason, because its necessity in such circumstances is only impossible to imagine actually happening until it does happen. As Circuit Court Judge Alex Kozinski, whose parents were Holocaust survivors and with an eye to Nazi Germany, wrote in his masterful Silveira v. Lockyer dissent, “[h]owever improbable these contingencies seem today, facing them unprepared is a mistake a free people get to make only once.”

And if the right to bear arms also ends up stopping a zombie apocalypse or alien invasion, so much the better. Just always beware of utopian communes.