“Liberal Logic”

If you are a passionate advocate of what has simplistically come to be known as “social justice,” the Rule if Law is for others, not for you! Indeed those legal sanctions inconvenient to your cause are merely what Marx termed vehicles of oppression. Apparently incapable of understanding the logic of government sanctioned regulations as essential to any Civilized Society, the Left has launched us into a literal civil war, racial minorities, feminists, gay rights activists, radical environmentalists, etc., all being exempt from the rules governing the rest of we mere mortals. It is a hypocritical double-standard that pervades the mainstream culture, any deviation from its narrative mindlessly denounced as “hate speech.” As it is a rationally indefensible orientation, the violations of fact and logic perpetrated by those who would defend it are often ridiculous.

In the opening paragraph of a Globe and Mail article of Feb. 21, 2020, Andrew Coyne outlines the events of a few days earlier in which a group of Indigenous protesters erected a barricade on a railway line in Edmonton, Alberta, only to have a few young White guys show up hours later with a pickup truck and clear it away. Disruptive protests had sprung up across Canada in support of the Hereditary Chiefs of the Wet’suwet’en tribe of British Columbia who objected to the building of a pipeline through their traditional lands. The problem was that the Elected Chiefs of the twenty tribes impacted by the pipeline, including the Wet’suwet’en themselves, had given their approval to it, indeed were looking forward to profiting from it. Photographs of the Indigenous insurrectionists invariably revealed the presence of White, environmental radicals who were clearly inciting them in their actions.

That the Canadian government had extensively studied the environmental impact of the pipeline in question, that it had received the approval of the Elected Chiefs of the tribes involved, that the alternative to a crippled energy sector in this country is reliance on various nations with utterly deplorable environmental records, none of this mattered to those across the Great White North convinced that they had every right to impede and perhaps imperil the lives and jobs of thousands of Canadians on behalf of their sacred cause. While pretending to be otherwise, Andrew Coyne is clearly of that mindset. Behold the logic of the second paragraph of his article: “Neither group,” we are told, “was, strictly speaking, acting either inside or outside the law. No court injunction had been issued against the protesters at the time the counter-protesters moved in….”

So, Coyne would seem to be arguing, unless a “court injunction” has been issued forbidding you from piling furniture on some remote railway track or indeed in the middle of a busy urban thoroughfare, you are perfectly entitled to do so. The protesters were not actually breaking the law! And to those tempted to exonerate the young men who cleared the tracks, Coyne insists they were “vigilantes” in no way entitled to do what they did. It is a term which the CBC and Maclean’s Magazine also used, they too disingenuously intent on blurring the lines between what was clearly illegal behavior and that which was designed to nullify its possibly dangerous impact.

The introduction of the term “vigilante” is interesting. Were I to intervene upon coming across a fully grown man brutally beating a six year old girl, would I be a “vigilante” guilty of taking the law into my own hands, or a hero who had saved an innocent life? Coyne would of course argue the situations are in no way comparable, though disruptions to Canada’s energy sector have in fact led to the waste of tens of millions of dollars and the devastating loss of thousands of jobs, particularly throughout the West. My point, as the balance of his article illustrates, is that he is decidedly of the Left, decidedly unconcerned with Canada’s economy, decidedly on the side of the indigenous/environmental protesters, yet seemingly embarrassed to abandon the principle of the Rule of Law. It is a conundrum which leads him to pose a number of opinions which would seem to be mutually exclusive, a conundrum which in fact renders his article no more than a collection of cliches, a pretentious dissertation which ultimately says nothing meaningful at all.

I am reminded of the absurdity of the Sam Harris book “The Moral Landscape” which argued that while we absolutely do not have free-will, we are nevertheless responsible for everything we both do and think!

Having granted that those on both the Left and Right tend to misinterpret the Law to suit their agendas, Coyne states in his fifth paragraph “that both sides are in need of a little refresher course in the rule of law, a defining characteristic of which is that it applies equally to all.”

Fine. That would seem to be a fundamental truth. Significantly, however, he cannot help but add, a few paragraphs later, that the tendency to mutilate the law in accordance with their bias “would appear to be even more prevalent among its self-styled defenders on the right.” Lost on him, apparently, the irony of the fact that the events which led to his article involved dozens of illegal acts perpetrated by those on the Left! But beyond that, as I have said repeatedly, the Neo-Marxist basis of the Leftist world-view is that the Law is as often as not a mere tool of oppression, making revolutionary acts of resistance morally mandatory. The thousands of illegal acts committed in the name of “social justice” in the 15 months since Coyne wrote his article would seem ample evidence of this truth. Have the ignorant, frequently armed, obscenity spewing idiots who have been disrupting American life since the death of the saintly George Floyd been universally denounced as the vigilantes that they most definitely are? Of course not! But should a few White guys wearing Maga hats get into a scuffle with the rioters of Portland, Rochester, New York, etc, the mainstream media will explode with news that alt-right fanaticism is on the march once again.

It is from a decidedly Leftist perspective that Coyne sees those whom he characterized as vigilantes, adding that the people across Canada calling for the dismantling of the various barricades disrupting their daily lives seemed to be of the mistaken belief that “the rule of law depended on no more than rules and law.” Having spent some time endorsing the principle that in a Democracy those of every persuasion need to submit themselves to its duly considered, legally sanctioned guidelines, Coyne proceeds to spend most of the rest of his article dismantling that very argument.

The law, he says, cannot be imposed “upon an unwilling population.” A predominantly criminal population, one supposes, might be so “unwilling.” Is that the sort of unprincipled chaos Coyne is recommending? In a Democracy, of course, laws can be changed. That is why we have elections. That is why we have various legally sanctioned avenues of recourse and a myriad of lawyers willing to exploit them. No doubt numerous authoritarian regimes have used and continue to use the power of the State to pursue utterly indefensible agendas against which all civilized people must rebel. But is B.C.’s Coastal Gaslink pipeline such an abomination? Having received the approval of the twenty tribes impacted by its construction, having considered that natural gas is far less a threat to the environment than oil, has the Canadian government not fulfilled its responsibility as a democratically elected representative of its people? Indeed are the hereditary chiefs of the Wet’suwet’en not being manipulated by environmental radicals to flout the will of the majority of their own tribe?

We are a flawed species and no political or economic system is beyond abuse. Underlying the Neo-Marxist/Postmodern vision of the Left is the assumption that we are all predatory monsters. This leaves us no hope whatsoever, though those of that persuasion ludicrously exempt themselves from their very own cynicism [once again, the double-standard]. It is they in their arrogance who tend to denounce any opposing p.o.v. as hate speech, they for whom Free Speech is actually a threat. “Liberals,” that is to say, given their lowly vision of the species, are inherently Anti-Democratic! Hence their unapologetic disdain for “populism.”

But the philosophers of the Enlightenment could see no other option to the arbitrary rule of an arrogant elite than to put their faith in the capacity for both Reason and Empathy of an educated, enlightened population. That was the basis of their faith in Democracy, a faith which has in fact been vindicated by the history of the last two hundred years. To those seething with contempt for Western Colonialism, learn some history. As I have discussed elsewhere, it was the British who, while the Non-Western World was still perfectly comfortable with the outrage of slavery, banished it 200 years ago, patrolling the shores of Africa throughout much of the 19th Century, ultimately liberating the prisoners of approximately 1600 slave ships. Mid century, of course, the U.S. would lose well over a half million of its citizens in pursuit of the same end.

None of the above is meant to exonerate the Democracies of Western Europe, North America or Australia their various predictable failures of vision or policy. But Coyne, having introduced the problem of an “unwilling population,” rather than supporting the Rational Western principle that dissidents need to pursue the prescribed legal options in advancing their cause, actually seems to support their right to break the law, particularly when they are the members of a sector “that feels itself set apart from the main, notably by race or ethnicity.”

Having flirted with the notion that the Rule of Law ought to be equally applicable to all, Coyne finally comes out of the closet, endorsing the Leftist idea that members of the “marginalized” are perfectly entitled to violate the rights of others to achieve their ends. In his final paragraph he congratulates the Liberal government for its handling of the uproar over the Gaslink Pipeline, saying “it has not made it vastly worse.” Yes, by basically allowing the disruption of road and rail traffic to continue, by not enforcing the Law, our beloved Liberals did not spark any major outbreaks of violence. In concluding, Coyne’s smugly asks: “Can Conservatives claim the same?”

His final sophisticated position, then, would seem to be that if imposing the Rule of Law might lead to some degree of conflict and perhaps even violence, the only humane [i.e., “progressive”] alternative is to simply allow lawlessness to proceed unchecked. That would seem to be the policy of the spineless Justine Trudeau and indeed the mindless Democrats now come to power in the country to the south of us where the rule of Law has been suspended both at the Mexican border and throughout many of its urban centers.