So I wrote my Los Angeles Times column this week on how I think this will all end badly. You might ask, “What is ‘this’ referring to?” (I know my editors—who are constantly asking me to replace pronouns with actual names, objects, terms, etc.—would ask, if it wasn’t clear at this point I was going to tell you.)
The “this” in the column was specifically referring to Trump’s push to send troops into California, and ultimately, other states. But, more generally, I think the concerted, multifront effort to assume war powers will end badly, too. If you look under the hood at the arguments that Trump, his administration, and his cheerleaders have been making in courts, executive orders, interviews, and speeches, the single most important through line is Trump’s desire to be a wartime president without a war. When he accuses political opponents of “treason,” as he invokes the Alien Enemies Act and similar laws, when he insists everything is a crisis and an emergency, the logical and psychological next step from that—not to mention the implicit and explicit legal and political arguments he and his defenders have been making—is that he should be an American Cincinnatus, or what some of his intellectual enablers have dubbed a “Red Caesar.”
On riots.
I’m going to go on a bit of a digression for a moment.
I have gotten into some, mostly civil, disagreements with friends about how to interpret Trump’s activation of the National Guard and, now, the Marines to deal with the unrest in Los Angeles. I use the word unrest because the other terms ignite distracting arguments. If I call them riots, some will say, “They’re not riots!” or, “They weren’t riots until Trump’s escalation.” If I call them demonstrations or protests, others will angrily say, “They’re riots!” And then proceed to—rightly—point out that throwing rocks at cop cars, looting Apple stores, and setting Waymos on fire is not mere “protest.” So, I call it “unrest,” because I think both sides have a point. And unrest is sufficiently capacious to cover both legal protests and illegal violence.
I understand that some people, like Rep. Maxine Waters, think violence against property isn’t violence. I think this is indefensibly stupid not just semantically, but politically and prudentially. Destruction of property is violence. And even if you feel otherwise, the fact remains that destruction of property is illegal, and rightly so. More importantly, most violence against people in these kinds of situations begins as violence against property. Before an archetypal abusive husband beats his wife, he first throws his beer bottle at the wall. Arsonists may start out just burning a store or a car, but death and injury are foreseeable outcomes of throwing Molotov cocktails.
I have zero patience for defenders of rioting in democratic societies. It is amazing to me how some people will resort to speciously idiotic arguments about the First Amendment or civil disobedience to defend wanton destruction. The First Amendment protects speech, and burning a cop car is not speech. The only civil disobedience I respect—and I really do respect it—is nonviolent civil disobedience in which the dissenters willingly face the legal consequences of their actions. Burning or smashing property and wearing a mask so you can get away with it isn’t legitimate civil disobedience in free society.
Now, you might call these actions “expression” or some other euphemism, and that’s defensible from some angle. But if we’re going to call them expression, they remain illegal expression. I bring this up because so many people interpret objections to Trump’s use of the military as a backhanded endorsement of the violence in question. Not me. I’d have no problem whatsoever if Gavin Newsom cracked down on the unrest. I’d have no problem with him asking Trump to activate the guard if he thought it was necessary.
‘Good’ for Trump.
But that is not what happened here. Trump has been waiting for an opportunity to push the envelope of his already established desire for war powers on the “homefront.” Indeed, my problem is with the very idea of America being a “homefront.” That term came out of World War I to describe domestic military mobilization during total war. We are not in a war. And America certainly isn’t a “front” in any war. But since the days of his “American carnage” talk, Trump has been trying to turn our country into a war for his own purposes.
Thus, the context of what is happening in L.A. is precisely the kind of pretext he is looking for. Indeed, my primary disagreement with my friends is that they seem to want to look at this context in isolation rather than as part of that broader context.
It’s a bit like the arguments over Trump’s expansive view of the unitary executive. I am very sympathetic to many of those arguments, in the abstract. But the political reality is that Trump isn’t using those arguments as an exercise in constitutional hygiene, he’s using those arguments to staff the entirety of the executive branch with as many loyalists as possible—and their loyalties are not to the constitutional order, or even the unitary executive, but to his own desire to maximize his power heedless of constitutional limits.
And, please, don’t tell me that the guy who pardoned the cop beaters whom he encouraged to intimidate Congress is sincerely committed to law and order and the Constitution.
So when I hear my friends say something like “Good for Trump, he’s doing something about these anarchist pinheads,” my response is no, this is good for Trump, and the anarchist pinheads’ comeuppance is incidental.
While I was writing my column, I searched for examples of moments in American history when presidents paid a political price for clamping down on domestic unrest excessively. But such examples are very hard to find. I thought maybe Kent State was one. Nope. The 1970 shooting at a campus anti-war protest, which killed four students and wounded others, was very bad and had many negative political consequences. But not for Richard Nixon—who went on to win a 49-state landslide in 1972. And, recall, the 1968 riots after the Martin Luther King Jr. assassination helped Nixon win the presidency that year.
I am sincerely open to correction, but the only obvious example of political blowback I could find was Herbert Hoover’s crackdown on the Bonus Army in 1932. If you’re the sort of left-winger who thinks “direct action” is a political winner, this is not a great precedent for you. Hoover, already in political trouble because of the Depression, crushed American veterans demanding just compensation for their military service. They marched on Washington with their families in tow. In short, they weren’t a bunch of anti-American hippies.
Meanwhile, the anarchists of the Progressive Era hurt their cause with violence. They didn’t get some anarcho-socialist nirvana, they got the Palmer Raids and the American Protective League. The 1960s “activists”—including domestic terrorists like the Weathermen and some branches of the Black Panthers—turned off hundreds, maybe thousands of voters for every one person they persuaded. Now you could argue, as some do, that focusing on presidential politics misses some broader cultural or political context. I’m open to that. There’s a strong case to be made that the riots of the 1960s fueled arguments for the progressive welfare policies of the Great Society. Fred Siegel wrote at length about how “riot ideology” of the establishment left was sold as a way to prevent riots. After the Watts riots in 1965, LBJ said such behavior was to be expected when “people feel they don’t get a fair shake.” Hubert Humphrey said that if he’d been born poor, he might have rioted also. As Siegel argued, rioting became a kind of “collective bargaining” for urban renewal and other (mostly failed) policies.
But that’s a rabbit hole for another day. Besides, if you think that rioting to stop the deportation of illegal immigrants is a sound strategy, I refer you to the fact that immigration remains a great issue for Trump, according to the polls.
Besides, presidential politics matter, particularly if you want to live in a democratic society.
What I mean is, if you have some radical desire to overthrow the system, then a Leninist policy of “the worse, the better” and “direct action” against the systems of oppression in “Amerikkka,” might make sense. But if you’re not an anarchist pinhead, or some other kind of revolutionary, and you actually like the idea of living in a constitutional democracy, with regular elections, then political violence is just really stupid. Because the people who do like living in a constitutional democracy will side with those claiming to protect it.
The moral equivalent of war, again.
There are few topics I’ve written more about than the pernicious legacy of what William James called the “moral equivalent of war.” This concept has formed the intellectual superstructure of Woodrow Wilson’s “war socialism,” FDR’s New Deal, the war on poverty, and the Green New Deal. I can go in a thousand directions on why I am so hostile to such arguments. For instance, my aversion to the left’s love of moral-equivalent-of-war arguments is why I went ballistic when Barack Obama called for America to emulate Seal Team Six in a State of the Union Address. In short, we have a military to protect a free society, not to provide a model for how to organize it.
War is, and has always been, the indispensable rationale for the state. It is why states exist in the first place. The state is first, and foremost, a tool of war. As the historian and political scientist Charles Tilly famously said, “War made the state and the state made war.” Humans, for entirely understandable reasons, defer to the state during times of war. They subordinate personal interests to the war effort. This, in a nutshell, is why I loathe the left’s repeated efforts to declare metaphorical war or some other “existential crisis” or “Sputnik moment”—it’s a way to silence dissent and bully the citizenry into a kind of obeisance to the government, and for politicians to win arguments without having to make arguments. Disagreeing with the government during war is denounced as unpatriotically trying to undermine the war effort. This is why Randoph Bourne declared, “War is the health of the state.”
There are times when this sort of thing can be justified—when we are at war. Real war. But not even all wars. I’m fine with the idea that the U.S. can and should use force abroad to protect American interests. The use of such force usually doesn’t require domestic mobilization—and that is a good thing (with some downsides to be sure). The total mobilization of America during World War II was necessary, but it came at a cost. It led to a massive expansion of government into the domestic economy. Rent control and paycheck withholding are just two of the legacies of “temporary wartime measures.”
In the lead up to WWI, Bourne was almost alone in noticing how would-be economic planners and social engineers took to the war so quickly and with such alacrity. They saw in the conflict what John Dewey dubbed “the social possibilities of war”—the opportunity to not let a crisis go to waste, so they could redesign society to their liking. There was a “peculiar congeniality between the war and these men,” Bourne observed. He added that, “It is as if the war and they had been waiting for each other.”
For progressives, war was the perfect pretext for what they wanted to do anyway.
Orange Caesar bad.
I’m no Randolph Bourne, but that’s how I feel about this moment. The people in and out of the administration shouting “insurrection” and “invasion” want an insurrection and an invasion because that would give them the permission to do what they already want to do. They don’t have that. So the next best thing is for them to convince people we have one anyway.
Strictly speaking, Trump isn’t so much making a moral-equivalent-of-war argument. He’s just lying about being in a war. But that’s not much of a distinction, if you ask me.
For understandable reasons, conservatives in particular think of statism as a collective, institutional enterprise—imposed by the “deep state” or the administrative state, bureaucrats, and social engineers. Statism can be that. It often is. But that is also a modern version of statism, made possible by modern technology and the welfare state. But ur-statism is autocracy of one sort or another. Before there were faceless bureaucrats, there was “L’État, c’est moi.” The idea of a benign dictator is a statist idea, whether we’re talking about Hammurabi, Frederick the Great, or Lee Kuan Yew.
Trump wants war powers for statist reasons. Patrimonial government is still statism. He doesn’t want faceless bureaucrats hammering out trade deals. He wants that power all for himself. And it’s no coincidence that he is using laws intended for war or some other crisis to push his mercantilist view of trade which, by the way, is fundamentally martial in its assumptions. As Henry George famously said, “What protection teaches us, is to do to ourselves in time of peace what enemies seek to do to us in time of war.” Trump doesn’t want courts ensuring due process, he wants to make such calls on his own. He doesn’t want the market to determine what products to manufacture, he wants to run America like a big department store. And he certainly doesn’t want local authorities and elected officials to decide when to impose order on their cities. That’s a call for the commander in chief.
But that’s the thing. The president isn’t your commander in chief or mine. He’s not even Gavin Newsom’s commander in chief. He’s the commander of the armed forces, and that’s it. But like all statists before him, he thinks he can convince you otherwise—if he can first convince you that we’re at war.
