One of Victor Davis Hanson’s best: on lawlessness
And that’s saying a lot.
Hanson’s not a flowery writer who dazzles with his technique, but he has a knack for diving straight to the heart of the matter without wasting words. Here he tackles a very basic rot that has set in and solidified during the Obama administration, lawlessness in a host of manifestations:
In our cynicism we accept, to avoid further unrest, that no government agency will in six months prosecute the looters and burners, or charge with perjury those who brazenly lied in their depositions to authorities, or charge the companion of Michael Brown with an accessory role in strong-arm robbery, or charge the stepfather of Michael Brown for using a bullhorn to incite a crowd to riot and loot and burn. We accept that because legality is becoming an abstraction, as it is in most parts of the world outside the U.S. where politics makes the law fluid and transient.
Nor can a government maintain legitimacy when it presides over lawlessness. The president of the United States on over 20 occasions insisted that it would be illegal, dictatorial, and unconstitutional to contravene federal immigration law ”” at least when to do so was politically inexpedient. When it was not, he did just that. Now we enter the Orwellian world of a videotaped president repeatedly warning that what he would soon do would be in fact illegal. Has a U.S. president ever so frequently and fervently warned the country about the likes of himself?
What is forgotten about amnesty is that entering the U.S. illegally is not the end, but often the beginning of lawlessness. Out here in rural central California we accept a world where thousands drive without insurance, licenses, and registration. Fleeing the scenes of traffic accidents earns snoozes. There is no such thing as the felony of providing false information on government affidavits or creating made-up Social Security numbers. Selling things without paying taxes and working off the books while on assistance are no longer illegal. The normative culture is lawlessness.
Amnesty, granted through a lawless presidential act, will not stop but only encourage further lawlessness. If someone has become used to ignoring a multitude of laws without consequences, there is no reason why he should suddenly cease, given that punishment for breaking the law is still considered a politically-incorrect rather than a legal act ”” and that even with amnesties it will still be far easier and cheaper to break than obey the law. Who will deport an illegal alien beneficiary of amnesty when he again breaks the law? Amnesty will be seen as both reactive and prophylactic, a waiver for both past and future behavior.
More disturbingly, we have engendered a strange culture of justifiable lawlessness: those who are deemed exploited in some ways are exempt from following the law; those without such victim status are subject even more to it. Executive authorities compensate for their impotence in not enforcing statutes for some by excessively enforcing them on others.
The whole thing is well worth reading, and sending to others to read. One of the most important distinctions between liberals and conservatives is that the former focus on ends rather than means, justifying any means if they achieve the desired ends. Conservatives are far more likely to pay attention to means, because they realize that if you use nefarious means to achieve your desired ends you have set up the conditions for dangerous and continuing tyranny.
Of course, if the evil alliance’s goal is totalitarian control, then the means that get there, is just the bonus and the required means to get the goal. It cannot be sacrificed for the goal itself.
On means and ends. The administration continues to use despicable methods to divide the country.
One more explanation of it:
The Narrative (despite the numbers and facts):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iGTUcS-yQtQ&feature=player_embedded
Ignored by the masses and covered up by the jackasses (well, those in the Donkey Party).
VDH: “Nor can a government maintain legitimacy when it presides over lawlessness.”
Correct. Hence, the disgusted disdain and lack-of-trust-and-faith in the government and in the Constitution.
To attempt to win it back, or at least attempt to partially win back the faith, the Conservatives have to impeach the Lawless Tyrant Obola.
Refusal to do so because of fear of the MSM further fuels the disdain and distrust of the government and of the GOP. Who can trust a coward?
I said it yesterday, and again today “We are neither a nation of laws, nor even of men, but of perfidy.” I need only figure out how to date/time stamp the line so as to make it contemporaneous to the daily philippics against the horrid little demolisher in the White House and the desultory responses by those who claim to be upset by his lawlessness.
TUaD, there’s no good outcome if the Senate will not concur. Futile gestures are worthless. Let the House nibble him to death.
I thought it was one of VDH’s too when I read it earlier this week.
And to think he wrote it within a month of his daughter’s death.
VDH
Our bureaucrats thirst for the single infraction by the law-biding citizen who can pay…
and let the criminals run riot, others across the border, and still others for public office. Each in turn, hold themselves up as paragons of great expectations unmet, high aspirations to be awarded, and professional pain feelers i.e., sinecurists who take kinky pleasure at cocking a snook at the law-abiding, the producers, the squares. When confronted, opposed, each responds with threats and ultimatums that work like charms.
The late, great, Sam Francis had made of all this, operational ‘anarcho-tyranny’. We are now well into it as SOP in our daily lives.
And the Sunday morning blather will lead with the top contenders for 2016. The truly great thing about democracy, the greatest, is that the electorate, the morons, having elected their betters, the idiots, have no-one to pass the buck to. Thank you for voting.
Boston radio guy Howie Carr has a neat retort should he get apprehended with expired license, or non inspection, or
Iinsurance less, “officer treat me like an illegal alien”
Late boston mayor , menino noted for saying, “stealing a car
that’s not really a crime”. Uh, lets just you or me do it!
”Futile gestures are worthless “
As was Custer’s last stand — but it lead to something. As was the gesture, in its immediacy, of the three hundred at Thermopylae — but it led to something. If the case (impeachment) makes no better a showing than a party count, what of it? It may lead to something. I don’t much care if the vote was 1 yea 97 nays and 2 abstentions — what of it? The entire point of VDH’s article gets a slap in the face if the law is not tried. Every prosecutor, nearly always, believes he has made a sturdy case, but none is ever sure of a unanimous guilty conviction. But the law demands the effort. And so too does the law requiring impeachment for malfeasance, misfeasance, misprision. For God’s sake the man took an oath; the man stated a score of times that what he is doing is unconstitutional. What is the standard for bringing a case? He’s Adolf, Joe, and Mao rolled into one? He’s the devil himself? Is a certain conviction the measure? I think VDH would disagree.
What VDH describes in his home turf around Fresno, California is typical of all banana republics I have experienced. Right now we have localized banana republic activity. As the progs continue to tear down the rule of law, it spreads more each year.
Can it be stopped? I am reminded of the turn-around in New York City. Before Giuliani became mayor the place was a sinkhole of criminal activity typical of a banana republic. One man turned that around. It wasn’t easy and without vigilance it never lasts. But it can be done. Keep fighting for candidates who believe in the rule of law.
“More disturbingly, we have engendered a strange culture of justifiable lawlessness: those who are deemed exploited in some ways are exempt from following the law; those without such victim status are subject even more to it….”
By design.
This perfectly describes their precious “Social Justice.”
“Has a U.S. president ever so frequently and fervently warned the country about the likes of himself?”
Amen, VDH. Amen.
At his publicized sit-down with Holder, Tawana Sharpton and slathering newsies, he said that(in the wake of Ferguson and its meaning on police/black relations)this was going to be different because(Focus closely,’Yo!!)HE IS GOING TO GET INVOLVED. Uummmmm…
6-years into his astonishingly divisive, incompetent administration and NOW he’s gonna get involved in racial stuff??!!!!!!!
Memo to Jimmah Cawtah: Next to this loathsome twit, you might just deserve Rushmore. Happy, Happy, Relieved Jimmah!!
What VDH is referring to is the broken window theory which states criminal behavior both small and large is still criminal behavior and if law enforcement focused on rooting out the petty crimes it would be a ripple effect to the larger ones as well.
He’s correct they didn’t just cross the border they had to engage in more and more criminal activity to stay and while these may be “petty” crimes if left unchecked and rewarded may lead to larger more harmful law breaking.
It seems such common sense stuff, yet DC is a product of this very theory. They allow themselves to be swayed or bought by one interest group or another and the chain reaction of events snow balls from there.
It’s the same with the laws they write. First they write a flawed law and then write a law to fix the flaw and so on and so on.
There exists in Washington and the illegal immigrant world an entire class of lawlessness and we are expected to just ignore it all.
For a modern liberal, the notion of freedom is best represented by a social smorgasbord of self-actualization opportunities, and not as freedom from social compulsion.
That constitutional stuff is for old style organisms which insist on boundaries, and demand definitions as the predicate for community life.
For the modern liberal, the exigencies of natural life, of dealing with nature, are just as odious as the political dictate of the other. Marx made that perspective clear enough. “Peace be upon on the primeval forest” he sarcastically declared, in implying that that kind of freedom was no freedom at all.
As the modern liberal’s fundamental ontology is both evolutionary, and nominalistic, the reductively sui generis but continually arising “liberal” novelties (i.e., the liberal persons and their tastes), require continual social adjustments on the part of those others already inhabiting the social environment which the liberal wishes to access. This unrestricted and unconditional access is necessary in order for the liberal to realize its particular desires for physical and emotional satisfaction and esteem.
Since there are on the modern liberal’s core worldview no natural kinds much less proper types, and no objective standards by which to evaluate anything, the suggestion that associative difficulties might be sometimes traceable to the liberal’s behaviors, are taken as an insult to the very being of the organism we call, or calls itself, “liberal”. Standards ostensibly based on objective norms or types, are ruled out of court in favor of a politico-evolutionary template in which the liberal novelty – immune from judgment or even analysis – must be not only accommodated, but enabled and underwritten on its own terms.
This is why they cannot stop with mere indifferent tolerance, but require your affirmation. And the esteem of others, as Rawls noted, is very much a critical element of the modern liberal’s needs. To resist or withhold, is to deprive them of a resource and comfort necessary to their self-actualizing project: which per stipulation, requires your participation – or at least contribution.
What is mere law, in comparison with that?