By Kevin D. Williamson
Friday, May 15, 2020
The Republican political power of the state of Texas has
deployed itself in the cause of protecting from legal sanction a hairdresser
who repeatedly and willfully violated the law, in this case a Dallas County
order that had required businesses such as hers to suspend operations as part
of the social-distancing regime.
Salon owner Shelly Luther refused to comply and was given
a seven-day sentence for her violations. Senator Ted Cruz called the sentence
“nuts.” Governor Greg Abbott called the sentence “excessive,” and Attorney
General Ken Paxton, denouncing the move as “outrageous,” demanded Luther’s
immediate release — an extraordinary thing for a state’s chief law-enforcement
officer to do in the case of an offender who is guilty, prima facie, on the
charge, in this case contempt of court. Talk radio and cable news made the case
a cause célèbre.
In Owosso, Mich., members of the self-style Michigan Home
Guard militia staged an armed protest on behalf of a local barber reopening in
defiance of the law. In Texas, bars and tattoo parlors witnessed similar
scenes, with the familiar props: the Gadsden and Gonzales flags, red MAGA hats,
black guns. Polite coastal progressives, among them the headline writers of the
Washington Post, are scandalized and repulsed. That isn’t a question of
public safety (the District of Columbia’s murder rate is four times that of
Texas) but a matter of aesthetics, in much the same way that the corporate
response of well-scrubbed progressives to the Tea Party protests was “Eww,
gross.”
But the Tea Party gang was a law-abiding bunch.
Rhetorical flourishes from constitutional street scholars notwithstanding, the
armed protests in Texas and Michigan and elsewhere are being organized on
behalf of people who are breaking the law — not ordinary protest but civil
disobedience.
Civil disobedience is a necessary item in the libertarian
toolkit, but a dangerous one. The problem, as I wrote in the matter of Cliven
Bundy, is “the
fact that every Timothy McVeigh thinks himself a Paul Revere.” The theory
of the American militia movement is that organized but decentralized groups of
armed citizens are desirable in cases in which local social order breaks down
and, in extremis, as a check on tyranny. Progressives scoff at that notion on
tactical grounds — they simultaneously denounce the scary black guns as
“weapons of war” and insist that those guns are insignificant as weapons of war
— but the question isn’t who’d come out on top in a pitched battle between the
Michigan Home Guards and the Green Berets. The question instead is that of the
citizen’s relationship to the state. Progressives see the state as a
magisterial and tutelary power over and above the citizenry — as individuals,
businesses, churches, etc. — while the American order is founded on the
assumption that the state is the instrument of the people. A conflict between a
British king and an army led by a Virginia farmer implanted very deeply into
our political culture the belief that the right to keep and bear arms is the
difference between a citizen and a subject.
And for that reason, the American tradition of civil
disobedience is not remarkable for its nonviolence. For every Henry David
Thoreau or Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. we have a Patrick Henry, standing up
in the general assembly and calling for the murder of the king, or a John Brown
organizing a massacre in Kansas. The American self-conception is right there on
the Virginia
state seal, among other places: Virtue treading on Tyranny, Brutus over the
bloody corpse of Julius Caesar. You may think of that as delusional, and you
may be correct, but if it is a delusion, it is a delusion that is central to
the American political character.
But we are greedy, and we are childish. We want to enjoy
the pleasures and benefits of civil disobedience without paying the
accompanying price for them. King George would have been doing his duty to hang
George Washington et al. We hanged John Brown. Henry David Thoreau spent time
in jail for his antiwar activism, as did the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. in
the cause of civil rights. Thoreau did his time happily. “Under a government
which imprisons any unjustly,” he wrote, “the true place for a just man is also
a prison.”
That is part of the deal, too. If we were to take leave
of our senses and take seriously the proposition that Dallas County’s
coronavirus order is tyranny in the sense the Founding Fathers had in
mind, then surely seven days’ imprisonment would be only a modest price to pay
for opposing that tyranny. By way of comparison: Sister Megan Rice, 84 years
old at the time of her sentencing, served two years in a federal penitentiary
for her lawbreaking anti-nuclear protests, and she might easily have spent the
rest of her life there had not her conviction been overturned.
Set aside the usual snobbery from our progressive
friends, who take it as an article of faith that right-ish protest is
categorically unacceptable. (Remember not only the tea parties, and the
dishonest accounts of them, but the so-called Brooks Brothers Riot and other
incidents of that kind.) Consider instead the perversity of having a state’s
chief law-enforcement officer extend himself so far in the cause of
programmatic law-breaking: If that is not the politicization of the attorney
general’s office, then what is? And such politicization should be resisted,
reversed where possible, and punished where necessary. The protests against
coronavirus orders may resonate culturally on the right, but the attorney
general’s job is not to be the Right’s cultural champion in Texas, any more
than it is to be the Left’s cultural champion in New York. Shelly Luther’s part
is to break the law. The part of law enforcement is to enforce the law.
There is a time for willful lawbreaking. But if you are
going to open up that can, you’d better be prepared to eat it all.
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