If the law represents nothing more than the will of whoever has
the most audacity to hijack it, won’t it occur to the American
people at some point that they too can join in the nihilistic
jostling? What if the people thought, “the law is just the will of
the strongest,” and marched on courthouses and threw lawless judges
out on the street? What appeal could these judges make to them —
“You must follow the laws that we don’t”?
Lawless judges operate according to a very cynical assumption:
that the people they abuse will never behave as recklessly and
ruthlessly as they do. But this is not a durable assumption.
Treating the people as docile chumps will work in the short term,
but one of the more reliable patterns of history is that anarchy
follows tyranny. Tyrants live by lawlessness and die by it. There
is no reason to suppose that the convulsions that every other
corrupted Republic has choked on through history won’t eventually
seize the throat of our tyrants.
But for now they will console themselves with the comic hubris
of spreading the “rule of law” to foreigners while traducing it
themselves at the expense of their countrymen. The irony is beyond
absurd: at the very moment America seeks to spread the “rule of
law” abroad, its judicial class wages war on the rule of law at
home. As America tells foreigners to replace the rule of corrupt
men with the rule of law, it hastens a culture at home that
replaces the rule of law with the rule of corrupt judges.
Americans are supposed to be horrified that mullahs in the
Middle East are micromanaging the lives of people and standing in
the way of their self-government. Yet that’s exactly what’s
happening to Americans under the modernist mullahs of its judicial
class. Both the Supreme Court and state courts routinely lecture
the people like overweening mullahs, saying in effect: we will not
let you govern yourselves; you must submit your way of life to our
approval; we don’t trust your “values.”
American judges have a contempt for God-given freedoms that
would make an Arab autocrat proud. Because these judicial tyrants
know that letting the people exercise God-given freedoms will not
produce the liberal society they have long wanted to engineer, they
will squash that freedom by judicial decree. The Monday ruling of
San Francisco County Superior Court Judge Richard Kramer throwing
out Californians’ opposition to same-sex marriage illustrates this
once again.
What laws can the American people pass under these mullahs? Only
laws based on their will. Under the “living Constitution,” which
resides wholly in the will of judges, the American people can’t
govern themselves according to laws that come from God — the whole
point of establishing a constitution after overthrowing a British
tyrant — and must forsake those laws in favor of the tyrants’
vision. If judges in Iraq behaved like judges in America, our
diplomats would call it a human rights abuse, a denial of religious
rights, and a diminution of democracy. Tyranny happens here and
liberals call it a “maturing society.”
Having no respect for the laws of God, modern liberalism is by
nature lawless, and the judicial tyranny under which we now live is
its natural outgrowth. Since liberalism rests on nothing that
precedes human will, what else can the rule of law for it be but
the rule of corrupt men? The idea that man would form laws on the
basis of an order from which he came — namely, the order that God
established and promulgates to man through his reason — is an
outrage to liberalism. This idea of law is “authoritarian.”
However, experience should have taught us by now that modern
liberalism produces not an absence of authority but an explosion of
new and abusive authority, a pitiless authority that tends toward
totalitarianism.
The Supreme Court’s practice of replacing the law with its
vision of a “maturing society” is nothing more than a totalitarian
power grab: judges’ engineering the perfect society by forcing the
people to embrace approved fictions and handcuffing them whenever
they pass laws that might conflict with that perfect society. If
you doubt liberalism’s movement toward totalitarianism, look at the
myriad ways in which its courts force people to be “equal” and
punish them for not upholding its requirements; look at all the
freedoms they abolish in the name of “equal protection”; and look
at the blatant assault on self-government as one of the acceptable
costs of progress.
These tyrants do not want one nation under God; they want one
nation under them. The tyrants and totalitarians we seek to
overthrow abroad are in our midst.
George Neumayr is executive editor of The American
Spectator.
