Your Independent Journal from the Heartland
Law and order became a brand beloved of right-wingers. They have an Orwellian regard of Liberty!, and actually believe in top-down authority. Principled libertarians break law and order into its components. The people owe order to their government; law binds the government from abusing authority.
The Trump administration is lawless. It ignores court orders. It violated an embassy. It files frivolous charges against partisan foes. It deploys immigration officers against citizens. They use goon tactics to provoke a response that becomes the pretext for arrest. The Pretti homicide in Minneapolis looks like a death squad operation.
To counter lawless tyranny, the people must ramp up disorder beyond First Amendment rights. I call for property damage and self-defense against unaccountable goon squads. Invest the Whipple Bastille, and the Versailles at Mar-a-Lardo. Civil disobedience is an unenumerated right as declared in the Ninth Amendment.
The Trump regime, claiming authority—but with authoritarian disregard for truth and the Constitution—will declare insurrection. And here I ask those right-wing bastions of whatever they hold right, i.e. Second Amendment fanatics and police and National Guard, choose a side!
This is purely an intellectual exercise. (To this point.)
I believe that left-wing backlash against the federal secret police is getting some organizing and communications support from Russian spycraft—as indeed did Trump’s transition from laughingstock businessman to game show “tycoon” to politician. Putin cares not in the least about ideology; he just wants Americans at each other’s throats.
So here is the civics test. Can Americans come together over a definition of America? Are we a Constitutional republic binding the leaders to serve the masses? Or do we choose leaders to impose a social order, privileging one faction over inferiors? Are we a nation of shared principles, and striving for “more perfect union”? Or are we idiot children with no more comprehension of “America” — beyond flag, and geography, and glorious wars — than Second Graders pledging allegiance?
I rather suspect the latter. In which case we can dispense with the whole second Civil War (the outcome is foregone, so why give Putin the satisfaction?) and get down to the mingey business of being a stretch North Korea, isolated from the world and riding a hollowed-out economy into misery self-proclaimed Great Again.
M. WARNER, Minneapolis, Minn.
