Precedented

new era, old dynamics

As the Justice Department of a Democratic administration raids the home of the opposition leader and serves dozens of subpoenas on his supporters, Tucker Carlson nails the meaning: It’s a political operation, aimed at disincentivizing future participation in politics. Merrick Garland is a completely shameless political operative, using power against enemies.

(There was a video here, but it vanished on YouTube, so I took it down. Will replace if I find it elsewhere.)

But it’s not “unprecedented.” It’s amply precedented, a return to a version of more or less normal. I’ve written about this before (and Jonathan Turley has just written a useful piece on the same topic), so I’m not going to start from the beginning again, but John Adams and Woodrow Wilson put their political opponents in prison, and the Civil War was preceded by a long series of warm-up exercises. Twitter won’t let you speak obvious truths about mRNA injections and the genital mutilation of children (“gender-affirming care”), but the US Mail was closed to abolitionist literature. It has often been the case in America that power seeks to avoid losing an argument by not allowing the argument; open society has been locked in struggle with closed culture for a long time. We lived through a period of relative domestic peace, and it distorts the way we see the evil in our own moment. Here are some coal miners preparing for a labor dispute in 1914:

And here’s the other side of that debate, showing up to represent the views of the mining companies and the State of Colorado:

We are not living through a more tumultuous time.

More recently, Democratic Party lawfare has become an obvious go-to tactic, as a giant scumbag of a local DA performatively indicted a four-term governor in Texas over a budget veto that took funding from her office, and supporters of a Republican governor in Wisconsin had their homes raided by police acting on the directions of mostly Democratic prosecutors. In Michigan, the office of the Democratic attorney general has appointed a special prosecutor to open a criminal investigation into…the Republican candidate for attorney general, the person currently running against the Democratic attorney general. There are no mysteries about any of this: Democrats think it’s a crime to disagree with them, or they at least find it useful to pretend that they do, and they use the criminal justice system to harm and impede political opponents. Merrick Garland is using the FBI to try to keep Donald Trump from running for the presidency again, full stop.

We’ve faced this behavior before, and Americans have defeated this behavior before. Nothing that we face is as dire as the Colfax Massacre. Don’t catastrophize; organize.

What’s striking about the current crisis is the degree to which the political party criminalizing disagreement is running from discussion:

By the way, the attorney general in Michigan is refusing to debate the opponent she wants investigated as a criminal. That’s weakness and panic, and it’s pathetic.

John Adams imprisoned his critics; then he lost the presidency. The naked turn to the suppression of dissent and the use of government power to attack political enemies is a sign of decline and failure. Merrick Garland is the weak man he seems to be. People who act like this have no argument, and they have no future. The same is true all over the world, and a leader who responds to peaceful protest by ordering banks to freeze the accounts of the protesters is not in the ascendant. Drive on.