Plain Talk

The demonstrations, in Minneapolis and other cities,  against the enforcement of US immigration law are a vivid illustration of what the American people, in their childish pursuit of what they imagine to be human rights, have become.  Statements made by the governor of Minnesota and the mayor of Minneapolis should be carved in stone on Mt. Rushmore to give enduring witness to the degradation of the American ruling class.

One of the most striking aspects of  this crisis is the public debate that broke out over the shooting of the woman whose supporters describe as a poet and mother of three and whose detractors point out is a Lesbian who abandoned husband and children.  Neither side had any evidence, but neither side hesitated to make absolute declarations of certainty.  A sane and rational person would withhold judgment until the evidence were in, but even as evidence mounted up, showing Ms Good to he an aggressive activist who, along with her partner,  deliberately taunted and provoked the ICE agent, the Mayor has doubled down on his certainty that a cold-blooded murder had been committed.

I simply do not know what conclusions to draw from the evidence.  Ms Good and her partner were  certainly looking for trouble, but it is not at all clear that the agent acted properly.  Let us, then, begin (as Rousseau begins his famous essay) by setting aside the facts of the case and look at the reasoning of the demonstrators.

Once upon a time, normal people believed in the rule of law.  Naturally, this conviction did not prevent them from trying to twist the law in their own favor, but they understood that rules and regulations, however irritating they might be, had to be followed.  Only a crackpot like Thoreau or Gandhi or "Dr." King--and their gullible followers--would openly assert that it was morally right to break a good law in order to protest what they regarded as a bad law.  When John Brown, acting out his psycho-drama of civil disobedience, tried to foment a servile rebellion in Harper's Ferry, he was suppressed, arrested, and hanged as a traitor.

Decent people--a term that does not cover New England Unitarians and Transcendentalists like Emerson, Thoreau, and Henry Ward Beecher--who oppose slavery or abortion or immigration law--understand clearly that it is never right, in pursuing change, to interfere in other people's business, destroy other people's property, block traffic, scream obscenities, or even to  issue threats against life, liberty, and property.  We have a system of elections, and when one side loses, they have the opportunity to organize and attempt to take power in the next election.  I don't happen to believe that democratic  elections are anything better than a means of maintaining the power of the current bipartisan ruling class, but that does not give me the right to declare Charles III the king of America or drive on the left side of the road.

When people decide to ignore rules, regulations, laws, and even social conventions, they are responsible for the consequences of their decision.  For example, if as a monarchist, I did decide to drive on the left side of the road or, as an anarchist, to run red lights, the accidents I caused would be my fault.  In The Morality of Everyday Life, I proposed the analogy of the practical joker.  Suppose as a joke, I pretended to be Ed McMahon or Dick Clark, and I showed up at someone's house and declared him the winner of one million dollars from the Publisher's Clearinghouse.  Suppose the victim of my prank were in desperate financial straits and rejoiced at the windfall only to sink into depression, upon learning the truth, and kill himself.  Or suppose I carried the prank out further and set up a series of  payments that would supposedly pay him $10,000 a month, on the strength of which he went into debt.  Or suppose he was a heart patient and died from the excitement.  In every case, the fault would be mine.

Whenever, out of whim, fancy, delusion, or some belief, we step outside the rules and conventions of everyday life, we are responsible for the results.  So when a judge violates the rules of her position and sets free a rapist-murderer or illegal alien, that judge is responsible for the crimes the criminal commits afterwards.  Similarly, when people put themselves on the side of illegality and  disorder in order to support illegal aliens, some of whom are criminals, they should be held collectively accountable for what happens.

Of course this will never happen, but the least we can do is to deprive all these busybodies, no matter how noble their cause, of all moral standing.   They will not suffer the fate of John Brown that they deserve, but they should be all dead in the eyes of decent normal people.