Dissent, Patriotism, and Insurrection: A Complicated History :: 01/24/2021

We should stop acting like every dissenter is a terrorist-in-waiting. We should also call out actual insurrection when we see it, on both sides.

Thomas Jefferson did not actually say, “Dissent is the highest form of patriotism.” The dodgy New York City mayor John Lindsay did say it. Yeah, that’s a comedown . . . but it was the Sixties, Lindsay was the original “limousine liberal” — to hear Mario Procaccino, a Bronx pol of my youth, tell it — and who on the center-left wasn’t saying it by then? Vietnam had become Nixon’s War.

Decades later, as a U.S. senator, Sixties deb Hillary Clinton revived the thought, in her less-than-sonorous way: “I’m sick and tired of people who say that if you debate and disagree with this administration, somehow you’re not patriotic. We need to stand up and say we’re Americans, and we have the right to debate and disagree with any administration.”

Well, I guess . . . that was then.

Then was 2003 and “this administration” was that of George W. Bush. Seems strange remembering that now, given Mrs. Clinton’s obvious fondness for the former president, on display again this week at the Biden inaugural. President Bush is so philosophically and temperamentally different from his two successors, it has become easy to remember him with admiration. It is also the way these things go: By 2024 or 2028, the Left will swoon over even Donald Trump if it helps them to comparatively bash whatever Republican is in the hot seat by then.

Strange new respect notwithstanding, the Bush years were no oasis of calm. The shocking 9/11 attacks, the mass murder of nearly 3,000 Americans in atrocious clandestine strikes on centers of American economic and military might, had been preceded by an underestimation of the jihadist threat (the Clinton years) and were followed by enough overcompensation in domestic surveillance and overseas adventurism that then-senator Clinton’s sensible screeching about patriotism being exemplified by dissent soon devolved into slanderous chants of “Bush lied and people died.”

Was it an extraordinarily turbulent time in American history? Not really. As our Kevin D. Williamson sagely points out, unity is not what we do.

To go back just to the Sixties, President Kennedy’s murder marked an era of political assassinations — Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr., to name the other two most shattering — and racial tensions that often burst into violence. They weaved seamlessly with anti-war activism — violent and nonviolent — and with it, inevitably, investigative overreach. Watergate and spy scandals spawned FISA . . . and abuses of FISA — inevitable since the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act attempts to regulate national-security and foreign-intelligence collection, which are political responsibilities of government, through an ill-fitting judicial process.

Meantime, President Nixon was run out of town, President Ford was the subject of not one but two assassination attempts 17 days apart, and President Carter flopped in a fulminating nation immiserated by economic woes. After nearly getting killed in a political assassination, President Reagan was hounded by the media-Democrat complex throughout his successful but often tumultuous presidency (and his stature inexorably vaulted in succeeding years, the better to bash Bush 43 by comparison). In the blink of an eye, Bush 41 crashed from 90 percent Desert Storm approval ratings to a defeated one-term president. President Clinton careened from scandal to scandal in a time of prosperity and relative peace . . . until Republicans, in their fury, impeached him against the public will. Our politics have been even more vicious and dysfunctional ever since — and if you want to take that back to the character assassination of Judge Robert Bork, you’ll get no argument from me. The incensed Left never accepted Bush 43’s legitimacy after the disputed 2000 election. President Obama squandered his historic opportunity to move us beyond the country’s racial and ideological divisions, intensifying them instead. And then came Trump . . . the progressive bureaucracy’s plot to take him out . . . his combustible responses . . . pandemic . . . economic crash . . . a summer of rioting . . . and January 6.

A highly selective thumbnail sketch of 60 years can’t convey history in any meaningful way. It should show us, though, that dissent is our default condition. And that each side of our deep political divide is in dissent mode about half the time.

So maybe we shouldn’t try to wipe out dissent.

The Left is ascendant now, at least for the moment. As Democrats gear up to annihilate their political opposition because it is supposedly too threatening to abide, they might bear in mind that they were the bitter dissenters of the Sixties and Seventies. Dissent may have been the highest form of patriotism, or so they said, but it was also sprinkled with insurrectionists. They were not numerically dominant, but they were the loudest and most audacious. They made it easy for those in power to distort all dissent as if it were sedition. In response, our government used its covert, national-security-surveillance powers against our own citizens — doing very little to thwart domestic terrorists, but intruding profoundly on the constitutionally protected speech and assembly rights of Americans who were as opposed to violence at home as they were to military force in Southeast Asia.

It was left to the Supreme Court to explain the obvious:

The price of lawful public dissent must not be a dread of subjection to an unchecked surveillance power. Nor must the fear of unauthorized official eavesdropping deter vigorous citizen dissent and discussion of Government action in private conversation. For private dissent, no less than open public discourse, is essential to our free society.

These words written by Justice Lewis Powell almost a half-century ago have a special resonance today. As President Biden launched what plainly aspires to be a rebirth of the Obama-Biden administration, John Brennan, CIA director under that administration, crowed that the new Biden team was “moving in laser-like fashion to uncover . . . what looks very similar to insurgency movements that we’ve seen overseas.” Continuing, Brennan traced the “insurgency” — patently, he was alluding to the January 6 Capitol riot — to “an unholy alliance” involving “religious extremists, authoritarians, bigots, racists, nativists, even libertarians.”

Have you noticed that Portland, Seattle, and Denver are exploding once again? Thank the arsonists of the left-wing persuasion — domestic terrorists who, like their foreign-jihadist model, have made it clear that they hate Americans without distinguishing between Republicans and Democrats (in Portland, this “mostly peaceful protest” was against President Biden and vandalized the Democratic Party’s local headquarters, along with the usual government targets). Remarkably, though, Democrats in Washington, D.C., don’t have much to say about it, being preoccupied with the only domestic terrorists they care to notice: neo-Nazis and white supremacists, against whom they want the Biden administration and the FBI to ramp up.

It is quite amazing: For the eight Obama-Biden years, we were told that law enforcement had to limit itself to acting against “violent extremism” — which generally means waiting until after something terrible happens — because it was too perilous, too chilling of constitutionally protected dissent, to take investigative notice of the animating ideology.

The violent extremism in question at the time tended to be jihadist terror, so the animating ideology the Obama administration instructed us not to notice was sharia supremacism. That wasn’t because a nexus between ideology and forcible attacks was lacking. The nexus was crystal clear, had been proved in court countless times, and featured heavily in the 9/11 Commission Report. No, ideology was off the table because “moderate” Islamist organizations that spout softer versions of sharia supremacism just happen to align with Democrats. As do the Black Lives Matter activists and sundry communists and socialists whose protected constitutional expression is, for Antifa, the rationale for violent insurrection.

But now, noticing ideology is cool again! That is, as long as it’s a “far-right” ideology. (In the Democrats’ taxonomy, the National Socialist Party is right-wing. So is white supremacism, now that Joe Biden’s favorite Klansman, Robert Byrd, is no longer around.)

As Democrats are teeing this up: (a) the January 6 Capitol riot equals a Donald Trump-incited white-supremacist insurrection; (b) the motivation of Trump’s incitement was the unconstitutional effort to undo Biden’s election victory by preventing Congress from counting the electoral votes of several states; (c) that effort was supported by over 100 Republicans in Congress (who foolishly believed they could escape accountability by claiming they were “just raising questions” about election fraud); (d) ergo, Republicans and conservative ideas (and, according to John Brennan, “even libertarians”) cause terrorism. Quod erat demonstrandum.

If this is President Biden’s idea of uniting the country, I think some kinks need working out.

What might better unite the country is this: Americans, all of us, whatever our political persuasion, condemn all political violence, whatever its ideological catalyst.

Pro-tip: Terrorism cannot be competently investigated — i.e., it cannot be prevented, which is the goal — unless investigators are free, within constitutional constraints, to explore its ideological underpinnings. What we invariably find in that exploration is that some breed of dissent that many Americans express with good-faith passion has been distorted into a justification of violence by militant anti-Americans (who are anti-American even if they delusionally see themselves as the second coming of Paul Revere).

Dissent can indeed be a high form of patriotism. We need to protect it, not just because it is valuable in its own right but because what goes around comes around. Our boisterous democratic society moves in cycles, and we all periodically find ourselves in dissent. The ideas that move any one of us to dissent can be twisted by maniacs into sedition. That doesn’t make us terrorists, and we need to stop portraying each other as if it did. We might get there if we could just condemn Antifa insurrectionists and the January 6 insurrectionists on the same standard and with the same full throat.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/01/dissent-patriotism-and-insurrection-a-complicated-history/