A basic question all Americans should ask themselves before they draw any other conclusions about events in Minneapolis is this: when is it right to interfere with law enforcement?
The consequences of doing so are, obviously, potentially grave, even fatal. Obstructing or harassing officers of the law could put their lives in danger as well as yours, and bystanders’ as well. Law enforcement, of necessity, involves risks and the potential for violence, which officers are authorized to use and criminals – or third parties – are not.
One side in the Minneapolis turmoil does not accept these premises, or at least doesn’t accept they apply when the laws to be upheld are laws that leftists don’t like.
This side, when it’s honest, simply says that immigration laws are generally unjust, claiming they’re racist or contrary to the higher law of free-market principles. (The latter is the Wall Street Journal line.)
If there is violence between officers and someone else, officers have the superior right to use force
But that reasoning, such as it is, doesn’t go far enough: even if one thinks the laws are wrong, there are other moral considerations that apply, such as whether there aren’t other ways to fix the law that don’t involve endangering police or anyone else. Why not vote? Why not make a reasoned case to your fellow citizens that they should elect lawmakers to change the policy?
There’s no need to look to the most radical activists – people who are more or less open revolutionaries – to find an answer to those questions. Everyday commentary in the legacy media – or on social media from ordinary Democrats, NeverTrumpers, libertarians, and others who don’t think of themselves as hard leftists – will explain well enough.
These people all believe that America, and especially the Trump administration, is fascist, and so of course elections and persuasion are not enough.
What the “moderate” incendiaries don’t dare say, but their more truthful radical brethren do, is that if America is fascist, then police are the enemy. It’s always ok to cause trouble for law enforcement: there is, in fact, a moral right to resist arrest as well as to assist anyone else who is doing so.
You can always yell at a cop, punch back at a cop if her or she tries making an arrest, and be ready to run over or shoot a cop in the midst of a confrontation. Alex Pretti may have been prepared to do that. His weapon wasn’t for show – he had a laser sight and plentiful ammunition.
It’s not that he was planning a massacre, as the Border Patrol’s Greg Bovino asserted. But Pretti was not simply a gun enthusiast who happened to be carrying the day he died. He went into an organized effort to interfere with police and quite reasonably expected a conflict.
Anti-ICE activists believe in a right to resist arrest all the way up to the point of using lethal violence. The Democrats, media commentators, libertarians and Trump-haters who are lionizing Pretti should be asked if that’s their principle, too. They’ve already tacitly affirmed that it is, but do they have the courage to say it out loud?
The other side in the moral conflict here doesn’t have to prejudge matters of fact. The ICE officer or officers who shot Pretti might have been wrong. But the presumptions of civilization are on law enforcement’s side. If there is violence between officers and someone else, officers have the superior right to use force. The attempt to negate laws through mob actions and systematic harassment campaigns – which is what the anti-ICE activists have been conducting – are wrong in themselves, whether or not the laws are entirely right. This is because, as everyone knows, America is not a totalitarian society, elections do matter and immigration enforcement is necessary for any country. It’s a basic form of the rule of law; it is not fascism.
In fact, the use of mobs to intimidate designated enemies and overawe the forces of law is historically characteristic of fascism and other revolutionary movements. The anti-ICE movement may not be fascist, but if it were really so sensitive about anything that bears the faintest similarity to fascism, it would have to renounce its present tactics. That won’t happen because while the anti-ICE activists and their allies in the media and politics do truly hate Donald Trump and anything that defends our immigration laws, they don’t actually believe that fascism has come to America. It may be Trump they hate, but it’s America they’re angry at – the left considers the country quite racist and wicked enough on its own terms, without its having to owe any debt to Mussolini, while the NeverTrumpers are cynics who are happy to ally with ideologues who aspire to revolution, as long as doing so promises to hurt the man (and the MAGA movement) they resent.
The libertarians, for their part, are just too weak-minded to recognize that whatever constraints on freedom ICE might represent, the anti-ICE coalition is much more inimical to liberty. The anti-ICE movement isn’t defending the right to keep and bear arms, of course; they’re only celebrating a right to take arms against America’s laws. The Bolsheviks wanted Russian soldiers who were released from service after World War I to keep their weapons to help overthrow the tsar. Once in power, the Bolsheviks showed just what they thought about private firearms ownership.
What the anti-ICE coalition represents is not a throwback to the Russian Revolution of a century ago, needless to say. But it does represent a revolutionary system. That system is one in which left-wing activists decide which laws may be enforced, using mobs and harassment networks to enforce their own decrees. The choice in Minneapolis is not between law and freedom, it’s between two different versions of power and legitimacy. The old constitutional order derived legitimacy from the people’s choices in elections, and that legitimacy both authorized police to use coercion and provided legal and political restraints upon them. The radical new order derives its legitimacy from a claim that progressive morality is a superior morality, and so progressives have the natural authority to make and enforce rules for everyone, using any means necessary. The old constitutional system separated government and civil society, giving the former coercive power but subjecting it to legal and electoral limitations, while civil society was free to ignore the Bill of Rights but had little right to use force. The new system that lies behind the anti-ICE movement unites private power and government coercion, using one when the other is not available, but employing both whenever possible.
Trump’s presence in the White House is intolerable because he doesn’t defer to progressives in using the power voters have given him. Choosing not to enforce the law is as much an assertion of power as enforcing it – it’s an assertion of the power of left-wing ideology over constitutional government, in defiance of voters’ control.
Democrats are brazenly open about their contempt for immigration laws, as seen not only in Joe Biden’s performance as president but also in their declaration of “sanctuary” cities and states, where local authorities will not cooperate in enforcing federal law. The Democrats can afford to be so bold because they have power bases outside elected office, in the courts, the media, and in the streets. The protesters are a wing – an armed wing, in the case of Pretti – of a para-government. This unconstitutional alternative government is what is laying claim to power in the Minneapolis tumult.
It is a larger apparatus than the federal government, in part because much of the federal government – the so-called Deep State – really belongs to the para-government. Officers of the federal government are supposed to be bound by the First Amendment. Agents of the para-government, such as the anti-ICE activists who have been invading Minneapolis churches, are not bound by such quaint popular rules. They’re bound only by their own progressive conscience, the same thing that authorizes them to brawl with police.
Because the para-government is a hybrid of bureaucratic power and lawlessness, it doesn’t suffer systemic damage if individual activists get arrested and prosecuted – though that doesn’t happen all that often, anyway.
Thinkers like Michael Walsh and Angelo Codevilla have used the term “cold civil war” to describe America’s condition today. An actual civil war is a war between rival governments claiming a single land, or a war between a government and a proto-government movement of some kind, often one seeking independence for a breakaway region. America’s cold civil war is between rival governments, one formal and constitutional, the other hybrid and unlike anything seen in traditional political science. These opposing systems recognize different rights and different sources of authority, and they legitimize different people in the use of force – law enforcement, in the one instance, and, in the other, law enforcement’s enemies.
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