In our ignorance, we could not see that the Kaiser’s Germany and the Communist International were merely two aspects of the Old World’s reaction against the new, the American principle of individual liberty and human rights.
Rose Wilder Lane, Give Me Liberty (1936).
On January 21, 1950, Alger Hiss was convicted of perjury, with Whittaker Chambers being the main witness in Hiss’s prosecution. Chambers confessed to having been a Soviet spy, and accused Hiss as an accomplice, which Hiss denied to his dying day. Chambers gave a fascinating account of all this in his bestselling memoir, Witness.
Today, Joseph Robinette Biden Jr., the former Vice-President and longtime U.S. Senator from Delaware will become the 46th president of these United States. Speaking of being united, or getting united, that’s something the 78-year-old Biden, with 43-years of Washington experience, wants to work on.
Good luck. Let me offer some advice: Recognize when the country is already united, then play into it by advancing policies supported by overwhelming majorities.
Term limits come to my mind, as does another issue, popular left to right: criminal justice reform. Americans are solidly for that . . . but instead of political action, we got a lousy summer of double-digit deaths by riot. And, as civil disorders go, last summer’s unrest was the most expensive destruction ever — over $1 billion in senseless damage.
Unity also suggests not needlessly dividing folks.
Which makes me wonder why, the day after the capitol riot, Biden characterized the police response as “a clear failure to carry out equal justice.”
A woman was shot dead within the capitol building; I’m only glad more people weren’t killed.
Aren’t you, Joe?
“No one can tell me,” Biden argued, “that if it had been a group of Black Lives Matter protesting yesterday, they wouldn’t have been treated very, very differently than the mob of thugs that stormed the capitol. We all know that’s true, and it is unacceptable.”
Well, at Reason/The Volokh Conspiracy, David Bernstein calls that gaslighting, rattling off the reality of stand-down orders for police in Minneapolis, Chicago, Indianapolis, Columbus, Louisville, Portland, Denver and elsewhere — not to mention demonstrators setting up a Seattle “autonomous zone” treated to weeks of hands-off non-policing.
Americans, black and white, liberal and conservative, are united against violence, at the U.S. Capitol or anywhere else.
Don’t divide us, Joe.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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One of the chief charms of Political Economy is the open secret, that it deals not with rigidities and inflexible qualities and mathematical quantities and the unchanging laws of matter, but with the billowy play of desires and estimates and purposes and satisfactions, all of which are mental states, and all of which are subject in the general to ascertainable laws, though laws of a quite different kind from those of Mechanics. Values come and they go. Within certain limits and under certain conditions they may be anticipated and even predicted, but never with the precision of an eclipse or the result of a known chemical combination.
On January 20, 1920, the American Civil Liberties Union was founded.
In this frightening time marked by actual violence — five dead in the attack on the U.S. capitol and many more killed during last summer’s unrest* — last week’s very scariest news was this admission by Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY):
Several members of Congress, in some of my discussions, have brought up media literacy because that is a part of what happened here [the capitol attack] and we’re going to have to figure out how we rein in our media environment so that you can’t just spew disinformation and misinformation.
Two things immediately came to mind.
First, AOC has herself “shown a tendency to exaggerate or misstate basic facts,” as a year-old Washington Post report noted.
“I think that there’s a lot of people more concerned about being precisely, factually, and semantically correct,” the progressive pol explained, “than about being morally right.”
Second, I recall taking President Trump to task in 2017 after he asked in a tweet: “With all of the Fake News coming out of NBC and the Networks, at what point is it appropriate to challenge their License?”
“The answer to his question is,” I wrote, “never.”
But when Twitter blocked Trump for life, many pro-democracy activists in Hong Kong and Taiwan replaced their profile pictures with a photo of their ally, Trump.
“People in China use VPN [a Virtual Private Network] because they crave uncensored information,” explained Taiwanese media commentator Sang Pu, “but now when they climb over the Great Firewall what they’ll find is more partisan, more censored, more narrow speech rather than an open arena for debate.”
Sad. Tragic. For America is free speech. It is our gift to the world.
Or was?
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
* Be skeptical of these numbers. Of the five deaths at the capitol, one was due to stroke and another a heart attack, both occurring outside the capitol and away from the violence. Three deaths are, of course, three too many. Likewise, the deaths linked to the summer riots include violence by both police and civilians with the details and motivations not always known.
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On January 19, 1808, Lysander Spooner was born.
Spooner’s achievements in American life, law, and political philosophy, are among the most colorful of the 19th century. Studying law privately, he sued to practice without joining the bar, and won the suit. He set up a postal service that directly competed with the United States Postal Service, delivering mail at a fraction of the cost. He wrote The Unconstitutionality of Slavery, and convinced noted Garrisonian abolitionist Frederick Douglass of his argument. (The book became the centerpiece of intellectual ammunition for the Free Soil Party.) Later in life Spooner turned against constitutionalism itself, and penned some of the most radical political works of his day, including Vices Are Not Crimes and The Constitution of No Authority. Spooner also clearly articulated a “jury nullification” position in his classic treatise Trial by Jury.
As long as I don’t write about the government, religion, politics, and other institutions, I am free to print anything.
“Deep down in our non-violent creed is the conviction there are some things so dear, some things so precious, some things so eternally true, that they’re worth dying for. And if a man happens to be 36-years-old, as I happen to be, and some great truth stands before the door of his life . . .
“A man might be afraid his home will get bombed, or he’s afraid that he will lose his job, or he’s afraid that he will get shot, or beat down by state troopers, and he may go on and live until he’s 80. He’s just as dead at 36 as he would be at 80 and the cessation of breathing in his life is merely the belated announcement of an earlier death of the spirit.
“A man dies when he refuses to stand up for that which is right. A man dies when he refuses to stand up for justice. A man dies when he refuses to take a stand for that which is true. . . .
“We’re going to stand up amid anything they can muster up, letting the world know that we are determined to be free!”
— Brown Chapel, AME Church, Selma, Alabama, March 8, 1965
On January 18, 1689, Charles-Louis de Secondat, Baron de La Brède et de Montesquieu, French satirist and philosopher, was born.
His treatise The Spirit of the Laws was a major influence upon America’s founding generation. He is famous for his articulation of the theory of separation of powers, which is implemented in many constitutions throughout the world. He did more than any other author to secure the place of the word despotism in the political lexicon.
In 1811, former U.S. President Thomas Jefferson translated and published Destutt de Tracy’s Commentary and Review of Montesquieu’s ‘Spirit of Laws,’ a very popular review of republican principles — which helps demonstrate how important these French writers were to the American form of government.
Montesquieu died on February 10, 1755.