President Trump’s decision today to federalize the DC police and deploy National Guard troops to the city is a good reminder of the importance of what we discussed Friday: the necessity for the political opposition to narrate Trump’s abuses of power and the contents of the U.S. Constitution, to be crystal clear on what will be reversed when Democrats are back in control of the government and how they’ll provide civil and criminal accountability for those who have broken the law. It makes it even more relevant to review and remember the critical importance of the consent of the governed.
It’s part of American civic culture to marvel at the process of the peaceful transfer of power. We hold an election under a specific set of rules. The winners of those elections inherit a vast array of powers. The president gains control of the military and a vast federal bureaucracy. The president has a huge array of prerogative powers. What he or she says goes, in specific realms. Legislators make new laws. Judges make rulings on imprisonment, people’s redress of harms, etc. etc. The marvel is that a whole population of more than 340 million people freely accede to this power. We have ordinary criminal conduct which is policed and punished. But focus in on the fact of that free compliance. The vast majority of us never come into real contact with the coercive power of the state. And yet virtually everyone, even the most diehard opponents of this administration, recognize that this president has a whole bundle of legitimate powers and we will comply with them.
Why is this?
Some of it is inertia. Some is learned behavior. But at heart we have a civic agreement that we will hold elections, give powers to the winners and comply with their governance within a broad set of rules. That’s the civil compact.
But we don’t agree to become slaves. We don’t agree to comply with every demand elected officials make. We comply on the basis of elected officials operating within a certain set of rules. We do that because we think the system of regular elections, government within a certain set of rules, works in our general interest. We see it as the best way to coexist in a country of hundreds of millions of people on land taking up a big chunk of a whole continent.
I know this probably sounds very clean, Lockean and rational, perhaps too much for how government actually works. But it actually is how government works — only it’s not necessarily clean at all. It can get messy and even violent very quickly. People’s free compliance with government authority rests on their belief in its legitimacy. That is especially so in our system of government because the coercive power of the state is very limited — very limited if you’re actually trying to ensure compliance by force.
Donald Trump is already governing way outside the agreed upon rules. He’s still getting free compliance in virtually every instance, inclusive of seeking redress from the courts and so forth. He’s now not only operating outside the rules but using that freely given power to try to build a new system built not on rules but on force. That means we’re now entering a liminal moment in which he really has no right to free compliance. He’s trying to squeeze the inertia and learned behavior of free compliance for everything its worth while breaking the rules at every turn. He’s trying to use that free compliance to build a system to destroy it.
Let’s not kid ourselves. The potential breakdown of state authority in a vast nation of hundreds of millions spread across a continent, with a vast military, is a harrowing, terrifying prospect. But that is where we are right now. And we need to take that seriously.
As I’ve written before, the most important citadels of civic authority and sovereign power in this country are the states and their separate and distinct sovereign powers. This is also why actions like we’ve seen today make it absolutely essential that Democrats make Washington, DC a state at the very next opportunity it is in their power to do so. In the old days, DC’s unique and un-sovereign status was mostly theoretical. It had a system of self-government. Its residents voted for president. Not having congressional representation was a big deal. But in practice, the current system mainly didn’t affect the day to day lives of those who chose to live in the district. Bot now it’s allowing a lawless president to treat DC more or less like a conquered territory. That’s untenable.
For now, we will have to look to the actual states to leverage their sovereign authority, their control over government-in-depth to contest the lawlessness and illegitimate power of the current government of the United States. That can go in some very dark directions.
When I wrote the piece I wrote Friday, many of you respond and the response was very positive. People want to know what Democrats will do when they are back in power. But I noticed that in some of those comments there’s an idea or a hope that Democrats will or can conquer Trumpism. This is a flawed goal. It’s one MAGA currently has about Blue State America. You’re simply not going to conquer or destroy one side of the country. You’re not going to hit a point where that other side suddenly realizes they’re categorically wrong. What you need is for Blue State America to use political power as ruthlessly and as maximally as Red State America does. And one has to hope this will lead to an understanding that neither side is going to conquer the other, and neither side will want to live under that absence of rules when it’s not in power. That’s the basis of the emergence of new rules of the road that everyone feels they can live under regardless of who is in power. That is a realistic goal. There are certainly many darker ways this can play out.
For now, elected officials, especially in the states, need to be thinking seriously about where the limits of their compliance will be. Because there must be limits.