The Law Is King

The principle is ancient, but in recent times it has begun to seem outdated. Elements on both the right and the left find ready justification to defenestrate the law when some political outcome looks desirable.

On the right, Donald Trump’s most reliable supporters—Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham chief among them—either cheered or made jokes when the president pardoned Joe Arpaio, the former sheriff of Maricopa County, Ariz. Arpaio had been convicted of criminal contempt of court for racial profiling. He and his deputies were notorious for their aggressive targeting of anyone with brown skin and dark hair. The sheriff was ordered by a federal judge to halt his office’s practice of workplace raids and targeted roundups. He refused, and in consequence he was indicted for contempt.

But that was only a part, and a small part, of the abuses and gross mismanagement for which the lawman is known. His office neglected hundreds of sex crimes, burned down a home in a botched raid, and misspent tens of millions of dollars in public money. Arpaio harassed political adversaries with trumped-up charges, ordered journalists arrested, fabricated an assassination attempt on himself, and once sent a deputy to Honolulu to find Barack Obama’s birth certificate (“It’s one deputy, so what?”). Arpaio felt he was above the law. “Nobody is higher than me,” he once said to an inmate who questioned his authority (the words were caught on camera). “I am the elected official, elected by the people. I don’t serve any governor or any president.”

The president’s power to pardon is a necessary and defensible one, but it is also a dangerous temptation. The Arpaio pardon was neither necessary nor defensible. He was a badged hooligan who openly flouted federal law. The U.S. government has generally failed to enforce its own immigration laws along the Mexican border, but that doesn’t exempt local authorities from the obligation to follow them. When Donald Trump on August 22 asked a Phoenix crowd if Arpaio was “convicted for doing his job” and the crowd cheered its affirm-ative answer, you heard an ascendant populist right that no longer views the law as an impediment to anything that outrages its political enemies.

You will hear the same unthinking assent on the left whenever the subject is that confederation of hoodlums known as “antifa.” The group considers itself a modern manifestation of leftist resistance to German, Italian, and Spanish fascists in the 1930s—or, maybe, the leather-clad ruffians who fought neo-Nazi skinheads at punk rock concerts in the 1980s. The group now consists largely of anarchists who oppose police and corporations and who feel entirely free to disrupt any event and assault any group it deems “fascist,” the term applying to any organization it finds insufficiently disapproving the presidency of Donald Trump.

Antifa engages in vandalism and intimidation, but seems to specialize in physical assaults on small peaceful crowds that pose no threat to anyone. The movement is a hellish combination of malice and self-righteousness, as Matt Labash chronicles elsewhere in these pages.

Anarchists and anti-capitalist troublemakers are nothing new, of course. What makes Antifa’s nihilistic violence genuinely dismaying is the fact that most of the nation’s elite liberal politicos can’t bring themselves to condemn it. Apart from House minority leader Nancy Pelosi, who on August 29 condemned Antifa by name after masked toughs attacked a small and peaceful rally in Berkeley, Calif., the vast majority of prominent elected Democrats have either kept silent or avoided outright condemnation. When Massachusetts senator Elizabeth Warren was asked if she condemned Antifa and its tactics, she sidestepped the question by censuring Donald Trump for failing to condemn neo-Nazis in Charlottesville two weeks before. She sounded for all the world like one of those right-wingers who can’t muster any criticism of Donald Trump because “the left” is so awful and they started it anyway.

But the left’s problem with lawlessness is not confined to Antifa thugs. It is just one of several groups engaging in threats against and assaults on conservative and right-leaning speakers invited onto university campuses. In the worst of these disruptions, at Middlebury College in Vermont in March, the scholar Charles Murray was shouted down and literally chased off campus; his liberal interviewer, Allison Stanger, was attacked, sustaining a neck injury and a concussion from which she is still recovering months later. Condoleezza Rice, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, and Ann Coulter, among others, have all been disinvited from our institutions of higher learning as a result of student protests and threats.

A not insignificant number of influential progressives either defend or make light of these tactics. Dartmouth professor Mark Bray, for instance, openly justified the group’s attacks on the grounds that “fascism cannot be defeated by speech.” The college’s president, Philip J. Hanlon, quickly dismissed Bray’s statement: “The endorsement of violence in any form is contrary to Dartmouth values.” And, as of August 29, more than 100 faculty members had signed a letter of condemnation—of Hanlon for rejecting Bray’s praise of violence. When white nationalist Richard Spencer was punched in the head by an Antifa bruiser in January, Twitter and Facebook were alight with expressions of glee from liberal academics and journalists.

In all these cases, an abhorrence of political foes has grown unchecked and encouraged otherwise decent people to excuse acts of lawlessness they would rightly denounce in every other circumstance. Hypocrisy and double standards are ever-present in democratic politics. They are nothing new. But the cynical intellectual stance that’s lately begun to trivialize criminality or condone it by jokes or silence—this is something new.

We will not lecture the public officials and academics and journalists perpetrating this affliction. They wouldn’t listen anyway, so emotionally invested are they in their perverted judgments. Instead we will only remind our readers—and ourselves—that the health of our republic demands that we assess each problem against a fixed set of principles, not according to the political implications or what our antagonists did or said yesterday. To make excuses for villainy may feel right, but it leads to a kind of regicide. The law, remember, is king.