On Violence and Today

Donald Trump, a buffoon who stumbled into the Presidency and nevertheless did much more good there than I might have expected, was unwise to call for today's march. Having tens of thousands -- hundreds of thousands -- of angry people outside Congress while they counted the Electoral College votes was bound to result in an attempted incursion. The failure of the police and the military to take this seriously is almost unaccountable, but the President should have known it would happen too. It was wrong to call for such a thing unless he was intending to lead it in an actual revolutionary attempt to overthrow and replace the government.

This is a moral claim presented as a material conditional. I believe that no true son of the American revolution can ever reject political violence per se. How could you vote for a successor of George Washington, who crossed the Delaware and killed sleeping soldiers on Christmas morning? How could you honor the Founders at all, or what they built? Revolutionary violence is at least sometimes called for in human history, and when it is, it is. 

What is never called for is endangering lives when you don't mean to follow-through. Trump was just attempting some political theater, the obvious consequences of which he didn't bother to understand. The military I criticize in the post below for failing to do the obvious thing too. The DC police apparently opened the barricades and let the mob though. 

After a year of watching mobs storm police stations and Federal buildings, or attempt to set them on fire (often with police inside!), it should have been obvious that this was going to happen. Apparently almost no steps were taken to prevent it.

Now we will be told, in the interest of unity and calming the waters, that we should give up all our grievances and admit that there was no truth in them. There was, though.

The elections really were illegitimate and stolen, and it really has been proven: Pennsylvania blatantly violated its state constitution. Wisconsin violated its laws. Georgia violated its laws both in the 3 November election and again in the run up to yesterday's.  For example, Georgia allowed Stacey Abrams to continue to register new voters even though Georgia law specifically forbids voting in a runoff if you didn't vote in the general. 

There still remain important matters that haven't been proven in court, such as the ballots-in-suitcases that were pulled out in Fulton County after the poll watchers and media were dismissed from the building, then counted for hours. Even if every one of those turned out to have an innocent explanation, though, it's clear that this election was illegally conducted in ways designed to give Democrats an advantage.

That being true, it is right and proper to say that it is true. The fact that there are weak-minded people out there who might engage in bad actions if they get excited doesn't excuse us from the duty to speak the truth. This is especially binding when we are speaking a truth that those in power would very much like suppressed. Right now the whole of the media and the Democratic party -- which is about to assume all three elected parts of the government, having promised to pack the fourth one to their satisfaction -- wants you to quietly pretend that they won fair and square.

They would also like you to be ashamed to have been associated with any of this, so you won't push back on what they do with their newfound power. 'Wouldn't that be giving encouragement to crazies, like your friend in the buffalo hat and Viking tattoos? You shouldn't encourage them. We won fair and square. Say it again. Everything we're doing is legitimate and justified, because we won fairly and you are bad people.' 

We do have to decide on basic question of what is to be done. Elise asks, in one of the Plato posts below, what we do if the government falls into wickedness and also there is nowhere else to go. That's a good question. There's nowhere else to go.

Does that justify revolution? Maybe. At this point, I'm inclined to be stoic in the literal sense -- to return to philosophy, accept what can't be changed, and to hope that the Biden crew of Establishmentarians won't get too crazy. I'm going to try, in other words, to obey the constitutional order and do what a citizen ought to do. 

That said, I absolutely do embrace political violence on those occasions in human history when it is truly called for and necessary. I do not reject it as an option. I just intend to try to live peacefully, and see if that works. Even the mighty Declaration of Independence says:

"Prudence, indeed, will dictate that governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and, accordingly, all experience has shown, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed."

So we'll try that first.