By Jonah Goldberg
Wednesday, April 22, 2020
Our culture has a wonderful way of taking controversial
or partisan figures and weaving them into the broader story of America.
When Abraham Lincoln was assassinated, for example, his
secretary of war, Edwin Stanton, purportedly said, “Now he belongs to the
ages,” which was a way of saying that the battles Lincoln fought and the
leadership he provided would stay with us and shape the nation going forward.
This kind of recognition is common when it comes to dead
presidents, but it’s even more valuable when it comes to moral heroes. It’s
appropriate that Republicans and Democrats alike celebrate the legacy of Martin
Luther King Jr. It’s a great and glorious thing that civil-rights activist Rosa
Parks is talked about as an American hero, not solely as an African-American
one.
That said, can we not be idiots about it?
“I call these people the modern-day Rosa Parks,” Stephen
Moore, an economic adviser to President Trump, said several times last week,
referring to the small crowds protesting government lockdown and quarantine
orders. “They are protesting against injustice and a loss of liberties.”
Many have noted the bizarreness of a presidential adviser
and avid Trump supporter — a man who sits on the president’s movable feast of a
committee to reopen the economy — also serving as an organizer of protests
against policies Trump himself has advocated.
But that contradiction merely reflects the president’s
own inconsistent behavior. Trump acknowledges that masks are a good idea for
all but then says he won’t wear one. He insists his power is absolute but then
says governors are the ones who should “call the shots.” He issues guidelines
for combating the pandemic but then lends support to protesters denouncing them
and decrying the governors who are enforcing them. “LIBERATE MICHIGAN!”
“LIBERATE MINNESOTA!” “LIBERATE VIRGINIA!” the president has tweeted.
Apparently, the hunger for the sweet air of liberty is
most desperately felt in swing states.
It’s notable that Trump has not actually abandoned his
view that he has “total authority” to call the shots; he merely chooses not to
exercise the untrammeled power the Constitution does not give him. (The
calculation seems to be that the president can pocket the successes of
state-led efforts while casting blame elsewhere for any resulting problems.)
If Trump actually believed these states were in need of
liberation, he could do something about it. Places in need of liberation suffer
from tyranny, and the president has a constitutional obligation to ensure that
American citizens do not endure tyranny.
It was this obligation that justified President
Eisenhower’s decision to dispatch the National Guard to safeguard the lives of
African Americans trying to go to school in Arkansas. It was why the Justice
Department under Lyndon Johnson intervened to protect the civil liberties of
African-American citizens.
Which brings me back to Rosa Parks. The Jim Crow system
she famously defied codified the notion that some Americans were fundamentally
inferior to other Americans. The notion that some citizens don’t share the same
constitutional rights as others is by definition tyrannical.
Nothing like that is happening here. I’m perfectly
willing to concede that some governors have made mistakes. Banning Michiganders
from purchasing gardening equipment and car seats for babies strikes me as
heavy-handed.
But this Rosa Parks comparison is grotesque in its
asininity. Unlike the quarantine protesters, Parks wasn’t fighting to regain
temporarily suspended liberties, but liberties many Americans had never fully
enjoyed. She was a nonviolent warrior in a struggle to guarantee the rights and
dignity of all Americans. Her struggle was grounded in the idea that all
Americans are born with the equal right to life and liberty.
The quarantines are grounded in a not-altogether-dissimilar
understanding: that we all deserve protection from a virus that
disproportionately strikes our most vulnerable citizens and is now the
second-leading cause of death in America, quickly closing in on heart disease.
And because of the nature of the crisis, it requires cooperation and sacrifices
from everybody.
As a matter of law and morality, these intentions matter.
If you could ask the Founding Fathers whether what we’re going through is
tyranny, they would answer, collectively, “Are you high?” or whatever the
Colonial-era equivalent was.
But we live in a time where inconveniences and hardships
must be turned into acts of deliberate villainy by our political opponents or
nefarious overlords. It takes a remarkable amount of cynicism to simultaneously
impose hardships on American citizens and claim to be outraged by them. While
we can marvel at that cynicism, we shouldn’t lose sight of the asininity — and
villainy — also on display.
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