Rioting and Rebellion

 Political riots and vandalism in the last year by antifa, Trumpists, and BLM and QAnon activists should have led people to consider an important question: under what circumstances is rioting or rebellion against government justified?  

The extremal answers of “never” or “whenever one’s rights are violated” are wrong. An undeserved speeding ticket from a crooked cop hot to make his quota or a twenty dollar fine from an obnoxious bureaucrat for putting a plastic Coke bottle in the wrong trash bin does not justify  calling people to the  barricades.  A more proportionate response would be called for. On the other hand if some future administration decided to seize the production and property of the farmers in a large area and forcibly starve them to death or to arrest, transport, and murder all the members of a religious minority, armed rebellion by the victims and anyone else who choose to help them would be fully justified. (For the benefit of people who recently were pupils in government schools, these last two  examples are not the product of morbid fantasy but rather taken from fairly recent history. Soviet Communists and German National Socialists did those things to Ukrainian farmers and  to European Jews in the 1930s and 1940s  in places where a quarter of a century before such savagery would have been thought impossible.)

Thomas Jefferson gave the right answer  in general  principle in the Declaration of Independence. People have unalienable rights, and  “That to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed; that, whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it“. It is important that Jefferson said destructive and not merely harmful.  All modern American governments are in some ways harmful (and in some ways beneficial)  to those ends. That is not enough to justify rebellion.  Ours is not a fully free society, but it is a mainly free one.  The present government is not nearly as bad as the colonial administration of George III and his ministers.  To see that one can read the rest of the Declaration and also the section in Jefferson’s original draft which included allowing and supporting  the slave trade among the crown’s offenses. Our government  is even farther from the tyranny of  the Nazis and the Soviets, and cranks should stop pretending otherwise.   As long as people have  freedom of speech and the  power to change the government in elections,  and as long as  governments mainly follow  the Constitution, not only rebellion but also rioting  would be foolish and unjustified.

There are good reasons for people to be skeptical and suspicious of  politicians and bureaucrats, and it is healthy for then to do so. But they should avoid and oppose those – left, right, or otherwise – who think rioting and insurrection are appropriate in the present context.  In the aftermath of Trump,  it would not hurt for sensible people of all political opinions to keep their tempers under control, cut back on the hyperbole,  and refrain from labeling their opponents as monsters or exaggerating political issues and questions  into  apocalyptic threats  – you know,  to start conducting political discussions and disputes in the manner of civilized citizens of a worthwhile republic.