This week has challenged much that I’ve long believed about my principles, starting with free speech. Like most free speech absolutists, I’ve never been doctrinaire in my views, and have embraced certain necessary limits. In the days following the racist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, I wrote that a free society has an obligation to limit language that crosses the line into action, and the most prominent form of such language is the incitement to violence.
I needn’t restate the argument in full. The short version, long shared by everyone from small-L liberal philosophers to the Supreme Court, is that when you use “free speech” to encourage violence, that isn’t speech, that’s an action. Thus police have solid First Amendment grounds to break up neo-Nazi rallies and Klan gatherings. A free society cannot muzzle people from speaking even vile and offensive principles… until their words cross the line into action.
This otherwise noble principle comes a-cropper, though, on certain kinds of action. I draw the line between speech and violence, which tacitly assumes violence is bad. Yet we can all imagine times when violence is arguably the right choice. Reasonable people can dispute when those times might arise, because our choices are fueled by our respective values, which are personal rather than universal. Yet this week, something happened to trip my value switch.
The President openly floated the idea of declaring a state of national emergency, seizing power from the Legislature, and passing laws without the consent of the Constitution.
Holy shit.
Avid history readers like me see this and feel great alarm. Previous national leaders who declared national states of emergency, including Napoleon Bonaparte, Jean-Bédel Bokassa, and Adolf Hitler, have used the opportunity to dismiss the Legislature, impose one-party rule, and start wars. States of “emergency” in formerly democratic nations tend to end in a mix of territorial expansion and the suppression of internal dissent. Each led directly to their respective nations’ downfall.
Our President isn’t Hitler. Let’s dismiss that accusation immediately. But Robert O. Paxton, emeritus professor at Columbia University and historian of Vichy France, describes a pattern of Fascist history that situates our current state as incipiently small-F fascist. The parallels are inexact at best, and America currently enjoys a robust (if rudderless) opposition party. However, a declaration of emergency could disrupt the precarious balance.
If that happens, I’ve realized this week, any moral precept that silences violence in advance becomes an impediment. Because, let’s not kid ourselves here, violence is a reasonable response to such naked seizure of power.
If I’ve created an ethical code that makes all calls for violence morally wrong, a priori, and I encounter a situation where principled application violence becomes the only way to resist an unjust government, I’ve prevented myself from acting. I’ve immediately foreclosed from myself the only means of direct action against a power structure that believes itself separate from its citizens. I’ve rendered myself either powerless, or a hypocrite.
In the event, now painfully imaginable, that our President declares an emergency, arrogates to himself the powers of Congress, and passes laws without restraint, I’d actually advocate for direct action against him. I’d prefer the military to step in and restore democracy, as happened in Egypt in 2013. (I know that didn’t end well. I’m trusting that someone like James Mattis, a scholar and true American, would take point in such an activity, which is a huge leap of faith.)
Failing that, citizens would be justified in direct action like spiking the roads in front of troop transports, sabotaging public buildings, and smashing roads. I’d hope we wouldn’t have to to go full Michael Collins and begin assassinating collaborationists, but if this week has taught me anything, we can’t rule anything out preëmptively. We need to guard against overreach, but we also need to act against tyrrany.
Don’t misunderstand me. Violence, while sometimes necessary, must always be tempered by principle and reason. When violence becomes self-justifying, it frequently begets something worse: the revolution against Charles I, for instance, created Cromwell’s dictatorial Protectorate. Robespierre fell victim to the moral purges he once created. All appeals to violence contain the potential for abuse, which those within the resistance must consciously work to curb.
This puts me in an awkward position. I’ve erased the one line I drew previously, and if I erase it for me, I theoretically erase it for everybody. Where, then, do we draw the line at unacceptable speech and behavior? I can’t say. I’m venturing into the territory of ad hoc morality, which history shows doesn’t end well. But recent history proves we cannot, unilaterally, take anything off the table. America is headed into uncharted territory, and it’s taking my soul with it.
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