By Kevin D. Williamson
Monday, January 22, 2024
I
take a relatively narrow view of legitimate government power. Some of you will
disagree, but indulge me for a moment.
You
know those videos that go around about once a year in which some jackass police
officer from San Bernardino or some comparable hellmouth pulls
over an unoffending motorist (disproportionately young women) and then
laughingly presents the obviously terrified driver with a
Thanksgiving turkey or a Best Buy gift card or something like that? I think
every one of those guys should be fired—and where there is a law to prosecute
them under, they should go to jail. These pranks are a grotesque abuse of
police power, subjecting innocent people to stress, anxiety, and serious
physical danger (traffic stops increase the risk of being involved in a wreck)
because some gormless state functionary is bored and decides that his life will
never have any meaning until he stars in a viral video on YouTube.
If
the police in Springfield, Missouri, wanted to hand out turkeys to little old
ladies, they could walk into any bingo hall or strip-mall parking lot and do
it. But that wouldn’t be a very good video, would it? Why? Because the
entertaining part is the fear and anxiety inflicted on people who already are suffering the
indignity of living in Springfield, Missouri. Getting pulled over by
the police is an involuntary detention, i.e., the mildest form of arrest. And
before all you lawyers out there fire up your emails, I don’t care how fine you
want to cut it: If you can’t say “Go f—k yourself, ossifer” and drive off
without getting shot and/or put in jail, then you’re under arrest, whatever the
lawyers call it. For a normal person, that’s extremely stressful—and if you are
the kind of guy who is willing to use his badge and gun to subject someone to
that kind of stress in a quest for social-media likes and giggles, then you
shouldn’t have a badge or a gun. The eternal problem with police work is that
the kind of people who have the capacity to use violence when doing so is
legitimate and necessary live in a Venn diagram circle with a great big overlap
with the world of vicious bullies with mental problems. That’s why so
many cops are criminals.
That’s
a relatively petty example. Let’s look at another one where I was in the
minority.
As I
wrote at the time, I believe Barack Obama should have been impeached and
removed from office for—and let’s not polish it up too much—murdering an
American for political reasons. The American in question, Anwar al-Awlaki, was
an absolute heap of garbage, a jihad apologist who became known as “the Osama
bin Laden of Facebook.” And here, I’d like to emphasize the final two words in
that epithet: of Facebook. Not the Osama bin Laden of Tora Bora or
Nairobi or Dar es Salaam, but the Osama bin Laden … of Facebook.
He was an al-Qaeda apologist and recruiter who was no doubt guilty of a whole
raft of crimes for which he was never tried on account of his being a smoking
cinder. He could have been captured and put on trial, if he hadn’t been blown
up. Alternatively, he could have been killed in combat—in Afghanistan or
somewhere else—and you wouldn’t have heard any complaints from little ol’ me.
My libertarian heart would have been content.
But
he wasn’t killed in combat, because he was … the Osama bin Laden of
Facebook. He didn’t die on some battlefield in Afghanistan. He was killed
in Yemen, on his way to breakfast, in an operation that targeted him,
specifically, for being the Osama bin Laden of Facebook, i.e.,
a wretched propagandist and troll and an advocate of evil things. The Obama
administration would attempt to ret-con the homicide and insist after the fact
that he had gone “operational,” whatever that means in this context, which is
approximately squat. Al-Awlaki’s beliefs were reprehensible. But there are lots
of people out there with reprehensible political views, and nobody is planning
a drone strike on the Claremont Institute or on Steve Bannon’s favorite bar, or
whatever cuckold-fetish sex dungeon full of “exceptional,
muscular well-hung single men” Roger Stone is swanning around in these
days.
The
Obama administration wasn’t shamefaced about assassinating an American
political dissident—and it wasn’t exactly a covert operation: They bragged
about maintaining a “kill list” to
the New York Times. Anwar al-Awlaki was Barack Obama’s answer
to Ricky Ray Rector, the brain-damaged guy whose execution Gov. Bill Clinton of
Arkansas oversaw with unseemly gusto (seriously, Slick Willie did everything
short of hiring a marching band to play “The Washington
Post March”) in order to burnish his tough-guy credentials
prior to running for president. (Rector, who had shot himself in the head after
committing one murder and several other shootings, was so brain-scrambled that
he left the pecan pie he was served at his last meal on the tray, telling
guards he was “saving it for later” as he was led off to the death chamber.
Just straight-up, high-grade pathos.) But, hey—they got the Osama bin
Laden of Facebook! Eventually, they got the real Osama bin Laden,
too, and no tears were shed. But repulsive cretin that he was, Anwar al-Awlaki
was a U.S. citizen, killed by the U.S. government, having been targeted for
things he had said and written. Citizenship is supposed to mean something in
these United States.
I
threw a fit about the al-Awlaki assassination at the time, and my fit caught
the attention of, among others, Sen. Rand Paul, who read some of my columns
into the congressional record while staging a 13-hour filibuster of John
Brennan’s nomination to run the CIA, demanding that the Obama administration at
least forswear conducting drone attacks on U.S. citizens inside the United
States (as though they stopped being U.S. citizens when abroad). This was a
pretty modest ask, to be sure, but that’s a libertarian for you.
A
fair-weather libertarian, at that. A very strange thing has happened to Sen.
Paul. When Donald Trump’s lawyers went to court to argue that the president
could order SEAL Team 6 (everybody loves writing and saying
“SEAL Team 6”!) to assassinate a rival presidential candidate and then remain
immune from criminal charges unless impeached and removed from office, Sen.
Paul developed an acute case of sudden-onset mushmouth, answering:
“It’s a very specific legal argument, and I’m afraid I’m just not up on it
enough to be able to comment.” For context, Trump’s current claim is that the
president can do literally anything he wants without
facing criminal charges. How far we have come from knocking off the Osama
bin Laden of Facebook!
All
of this is, of course, insane.
After
hearing Sarah Isgur talk about typefaces on a recent podcast, I now know how
she feels when she reads my writing about legal issues. I am sure there are all
sorts of cocktails-at-Harvard-Law nuances and good points and important
technical questions and such that I am here going to run roughshod over,
but—this conversation is insane. The job of the president—his
office—is to “faithfully execute the laws of the United States.” By definition,
crimes cannot be legitimate official acts—acts of office—for the president, or
for anybody else in government. There isn’t a damn thing in the law or in our
Constitution providing blanket criminal immunity to presidents for crimes
committed in office. We have a prudential convention holding that sitting
presidents shouldn’t be indicted, for practical reasons, based on a Richard
Nixon-era (ho, ho!) Justice Department opinion. The Constitution, which does
confer certain privileges and immunities on members of Congress, does not
confer these on the president. In fact, the Constitutional Convention
considered the question and declined to extend any privileges to the president
save the guarantee of his salary. You can read all about the legal and
constitutional issues in full in Saikrishna Prakash’s very
interesting paper, but consider this:
Any interpretation of the Constitution that
demands impeachment and removal before arrest and prosecution of a President
makes it possible for a chief executive to continue to violate the law,
including criminal laws, and to continue to subvert the Constitution. The
arrest of a sitting President serves two distinct purposes: to ensure presence
at trial and to incapacitate someone who might commit further crimes and
constitutional wrongs. Of course, incapacitation is impossible if the criminal
justice system must await a protracted House impeachment and Senate trial that
might never occur or, worse yet, might result in an acquittal of someone guilty
of crimes but not impeachable offenses.
In
fact, we had a president arrested while in office, long before anybody was
thinking about immunity for Donald Trump: Ulysses S. Grant (talk about
“Hyperion to a satyr”!) was arrested by a Washington policeman for habitually
speeding in his buggy after having been previously issued a warning by the same
officer. President Grant didn’t claim immunity—he commended the officer for
doing his job and enforcing the law, no matter who the offender is. President
Grant, as you students of history will know, had some serious stuff to deal
with during his administration. And he was the general who had saved the Union,
not some two-bit gameshow host and quondam pornographer. The Grant episode was
a small thing, but it was a small thing that illustrates one of the big
things.
Certain
conservative lawyers, including my friend Andrew C. McCarthy, have spent years
building an imperial model of the presidency that puts the chief executive
effectively above the law. I’ve discussed this at some length with Andy, though
not recently, and his argument is, put simply, that the president personifies a
branch of government, and that separation of powers prevents one branch from
exercising dominion over another, meaning that, as a practical matter, the only
cures for a lawless president are impeachments and elections. I think that
argument is bonkers—and I have great respect for Andy—but, even if it weren’t
bonkers, it would be an argument that applied to sitting presidents.
Even Andrew McCarthy concedes that there is no question that presidents can be
criminally prosecuted for private conduct, advising only that there may be
ambiguities in distinguishing private from official acts. Where there is less
ambiguity is in Trump’s demand for “total immunity,” which Andy describes
in a
recent column as “provocatively wrong and dumb.”
Donald
Trump does not personify a branch of government today—he does not personify
anything other than cowardice, venality, and bad taste. That supposed
libertarians such as Sen. Paul can be so easily buffaloed into accepting his “infinite
crimes” model not only of the presidency but also of the post-presidency is
a reminder of how easy it is to morally corrupt such a figure—a reminder that
weak men are not only contemptible but dangerous. Consider that
Sen. Paul’s partner in that filibuster, Sen. Ted Cruz, described Donald
Trump as a “sniveling coward” and characterized him as utterly unfit for the
office—and has just endorsed Trump for president, again, calling on Republicans
to unite behind him. Trump, for his part, recently was quoted in the New
York Times saying that Ted Cruz “shouldn’t
even exist.” But after a guy has called your wife ugly and your father a
murderer and you still can’t get on your knees for him fast enough, where else
is there to sink? Oh, don’t worry—if there is a lower place to sink, Ted Cruz
will find it. You know that one guy who supposedly slunk away from the Alamo
after Col. Travis drew his famous line in the sand? That’s Ted Cruz.
When
Trump boasted that he could murder someone on Fifth Avenue in broad daylight
and not lose any support, everybody thought he was just talking about the rubes
up in the cheap seats. Turns out there are cheap seats in the Senate, too, and
rubes to fill them. I wouldn’t have thought, watching that Obama-era
filibuster, that such figures as Sen. Paul and Sen. Cruz would turn out to be
leading enablers of tyranny in the United States. I would have expected them to
err on the other side, if anything. But man is a fallen creature, and these two
apparently have fallen from a considerable height and landed on their heads,
not that they’ve used the atrophied organs within their thick skulls in the
better part of a decade or so, if not longer.
The
question of blanket criminal immunity for such a figure as Donald Trump is
rooted in a few different things: One is a persistent misunderstanding of the
respective roles and status of the president and Congress in our constitutional
order; another is the servile character of such men as Cruz and Paul and others
of their ilk, whose main political position is supine; a third is failure to
understand that in The Tragedy of Julius Caesar, the hero is
Brutus, whose great failure was in disposing of Caesar but letting Caesarism
live. We don’t want assassins for the problems we currently face—but we do want
a few men and women, maybe even senators, with enough guts and self-respect to
say in plain English what needs to be said.
Economics
for English Majors
Sunday
marked the 100th anniversary of the death of Vladimir Lenin, who has as much of
a claim to having been the great monster of the 20th century as Adolf Hitler
did. I have often remarked that a telling episode in Lenin’s life is that in
the early stages of the revolution, some of his more liberal-minded colleagues
proposed abolishing capital punishment. Lenin spat at the idea: “You cannot
make a revolution without executions,” he said. On another occasion, Lenin
remarked: “We shall return to terror and to economic terror.” And so he
did.
I
wonder if we have learned anything in the century since his death? A. Kursky, a
leading Soviet economist and champion
of central planning, wrote, with great hubris, in 1949: “The fact that the
socialist national economy is planned precludes the possibility of crisis,
unemployment, and economic upheavals.” Everything, as Kursky and fellow
apostles saw it, could be incorporated into the plan and thereby controlled.
“The state … utilises economic categories like value, money, price, wages, and
credit. The role and significance of these categories in Soviet economy differ
[in] principle, however, from what they are under capitalism. In the Soviet
system of economy they are used as instruments for planning the Socialist
national economy.”
Ironically,
socialist notions about central planning drew heavily from what had once been
cutting-edge capitalist thinking, particularly the late-19th-century mania for
“scientific management” associated with Frederick Winslow Taylor. (I have long
thought it both ironic and telling that one of the great and thoughtful
libertarian advocates of our time, Charles Koch, should echo these ideas,
perhaps unintentionally, calling his big businessthink book The
Science of Success.) Science—not understood as entirely distinct
from engineering—enjoyed tremendous prestige in the late 19th century when
Taylorism took off, and it is not hard to see why—consider the practical
advances of the century: the first steam locomotive, Erie Canal, first electric
motor, first telegraph, first isolation of aluminum, invention of Bessemer
process for steel manufacturing, the opening of the London underground, the
opening of the first petroleum refinery, the first audio recording, completion
of the transcontinental railroad, first commercial typewriter, Edison, Tesla,
Maxim, Singer, Benz, Marconi, X-rays.
The
notion that scientific principles could solve any practical problem seemed, at
the time, self-evident. First, you rationally plan discrete industrial actions,
then you rationally plan the whole factory based on those rational foundations,
and then you achieve the dream of rationally planning the entirety of society
as though it were one big, scientifically managed factory—the dream not only of
communists but also of fascists and of many liberal capitalists of a
progressive bent, who foresaw a day in which rationally administered monopolies
would do away with what all the smart businessmen used to call “destructive
competition,” replication of effort, redundancy, etc., along with redirected
all of the resources wasted on irrational projects such as marketing and
advertising. You can still hear echoes of that kind of thinking when Bernie
Sanders complains, “You don’t necessarily need a choice of 23 underarm spray
deodorants or of 18 different pairs of sneakers when children are hungry in
this country.”
The
problem, of course, is information. You don’t actually have a Laplace’s
Demon to run the economy. The great insight of F.A. Hayek and Ludwig
von Mises and the rest of the Austrian school is that information cannot be
aggregated and stockpiled like gravel or canned peas—it is a lively, active,
slippery, and often short-lived commodity, and it is dispersed throughout
society, residing here and there in every household, firm, and shop,
unavailable for use “as instruments for planning the Socialist national
economy.”
For
a long time, the Soviets believed that solving the planning problem was a
matter of technology—that you needed a kind of meta-Taylorism to enable your
Taylorism. And the Soviet government for a time invested in some interesting
and far-sighted projects related to computer science and information
technology, believing that the problem was the means rather than the end, that
the problem was one of execution rather than one of conception. The socialists
and their admirers thought they were getting rational planning—what they got
was “terror and economic terror.”
We
haven’t yet reverted to economic terror, but we have inflicted a lot of
needless stupidity on ourselves. Every time somebody tells you that we’re going
to use this or that tariff to “create jobs” and that this or that subsidy will
have such miraculous economic effects that it will—all together now!—“pay for
itself,” the corners of Lenin’s death-rictus move one angstrom up in the
direction of a smile.
Words
About Words
New
York Times headline:
“Frozen
Iowa Is Set to Vote as G.O.P. Presidential Contest Gets Underway.”
Something that is in progress is under way; an underway is
the complement to an overpass, a means of passing underneath a
street or railroad track, usually meant for pedestrians. Yes, I’ve mentioned
this before—and will again, until it sinks in.
And
Furthermore …
One
additional thing worth noting about the U.S. Grant story related above: At the
time of President Grant’s arrest for being a menace on the public roads,
Washington had something you didn’t see in very many American cities: black
police. And President Grant was indeed arrested by one of these, William H.
West, a former slave and Civil War veteran (Company K, 30th United States
Colored Infantry) who had been on the police force only a year. Unlike a few of
our contemporaries, Officer West apparently had a notion in his head that he
should be “dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.”
In
Closing
I
did not much enjoy reading Friday’s edition of Dispatch
Politics. Not that it was anything other than the team’s usual
excellent work—but I found the section on No Labels depressing. I have friends
who are involved in No Labels, and I think their hearts are in the right places
and that, in many ways, their vision is the right one. But the notion that
their critics, excitable and daft as they are, might be involved in some kind
of legally actionable conspiracy against them is meretricious.
But
the critics here are even worse, of course: Jonathan V. Last, whom I like and
admire, is quoted saying “anybody who participates in this No Labels malarkey
should have their lives ruined.” Lives ruined? That is not a
sensible or healthy way to think about political disagreement—in this case,
honest and good-faith disagreement. Other people said even more indefensible
things. If you think that people who disagree with you politically need to have
their lives ruined, then you are on a road that leads to nowhere good, and it
is one that I, for my part, will not follow you down. And, of course, the
tragedy of it is that this kind of thinking and approach leads to precisely the
kind of politics that I assume decent and well-intentioned people would like to
avoid.
As
a purely practical matter, mob politics is not obviously the most attractive
model for a mob that’s small enough to fit into the bar at Café Milano.
No comments:
Post a Comment