Trump's (Dis)order Gamble

Trump is invading U.S. cities.

It's a disgraceful assault on American liberty; the predictable upshot of electing a tinpot authoritarian to the most powerful office in the world.

But because this is still (nominally) a democracy, we also have to consider how it will play out politically.

These moves are not popular. And I think that over the mid-term, they will backfire on Trump, because paradoxically they give the appearance of disorder.

To be clear, I think it's clear that the main motivator of the Trump invasion of our cities is not about short-term political calculus at all. It is a genuine, earnestly-felt commitment to sadistic authoritarianism that in particular views terrorizing blue city residents as its own reward. We shouldn't overinterpret this as a product of deep strategy.

That said, the political logic at work here is I think clear enough: it's a gamble that when voters see these images of the disordered city, they'll instinctively race back to the "law and order" party. Cities are dangerous (so dangerous we need the military to step in); Trump is keeping you safe.

But I don't think the gamble is going to pay off. When one sees men in army fatigues marching down city streets accosting residents (and the inevitable protests and resistance such conduct inspires), the thought that tends to follow is rarely "things are going great!" Deploying troops to American cities is the sort of thing one does in chaotic, all-is-near-lost situations. And so the more we have imagery coming out of an America where our communities are under military occupation, the more it entrenches a public sense that we're in dire straits -- a sentiment that rarely redounds to the benefit of the incumbent party.

So I do think that Democrats need to press that sense of disorder -- not randomly or haphazardly, but intelligently and judiciously (and yes, I recognize the paradox of promoting strategic, well-calibrated "disorder"). You want to encourage voters to associate the Trump reign with thoughts like "things are falling apart," "I'm afraid to go downtown because of the men Trump sent there," "is my job going away?", "things feel very unstable," and "I'm sick of this ride and I want to get off."

The trick -- and it's not always an easy trick -- is to make it so that voters attributed these sentiments to Trump, not the Democrats resisting Trump. But one major advantage Democrats have is that they're the out-party, and voters (rightly or wrongly) tend to attribute anything going on in the world, good or bad, to the incumbent. And in the current moment, where Trump is doing so many things that seem to prompt those negative thoughts, Democrats have a lot of opportunities to entrench a very simple overarching message: All those fears, all those anxieties, all those bad thoughts you're having -- that's Trump.

What If Black Liberty Mattered?

Jacob Levy writes on the history of "liberty" as a trope in American racist movements, and the corresponding flirtation that many libertarians have had with White supremacy. Levy's essays for the Niskanen Center have been consistently superb -- I already wrote on his fantastic defense of identity politics as against the Mark Lilla critique -- and this is no different. Give it a read.

"The Liberty To Do What We Ought."

New York state appears on the verge of recognizing gay marriage, and that has put opponents of LGBT equality in a bit of a panic. Take New York Archbishop Timothy Dolan:

Dolan equated the move to allow same-sex marriage to life in China or North Korea, where "government presumes daily to 'redefine' rights, relationships, values and natural law."

"Please, not here!," Dolan wrote. "We cherish true freedom, not as the license to do whatever we want, but the liberty to do what we ought."

Legalizing gay marriage is precisely akin to living under North Korean totalitarianism -- of course. But I'm more interested in that last line, that "true freedom" is not "license to do whatever we want, but the liberty to do what we ought."

Can you think of a more Orwellian definition of freedom? It is a definition of liberty that could only appeal to a tyrant. Indeed, it bears far more in common with the standards of "liberty" in places like North Korea than marriage equality ever could. After all, Articles 62-86 of the North Korea constitution contain many putative protections for human freedom and liberty, but all are circumscribed by various restrictions which demand that any such "liberty" be in furtherance of the normative principles of North Korean socialism (see, e.g., Articles 63, 64, 68, 81, 82, 84, and 85). The effect, of course, is that they don't have freedom or liberty at all.

In North Korea, they have only "the liberty to do what they ought." In America, we've charted a different path.