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Civil Disobedience 101: No Blank Checks For Being Right
Despite my admiration and agreement with the Canadian truckers, I think some considerations about limitations related to lawbreaking and civil order need to be made. Antifa/BLM openly want to bring down the existing political order by means of violent tantrums. But if one does not want to end the existing constitutional order but seeks instead to make it live up to its ideals, to what extent is express lawbreaking justified?
Protest and civil disobedience are integral features in a democracy. Citizens need to understand their nature, uses, and purpose. Those in government need to know how to respond in a manner that respects the values they reflect.
Let’s review some basics:
Pure Civil Disobedience. In its ideal form, civil disobedience is about breaking an unjust law and only the unjust law for the express purpose of forcing a broad public act of conscience. The lawbreaker wants to be put on trial. When the conspicuously just person forces us to those between upholding an unjust law versus respecting the rightful liberties of a just citizen, that is civil disobedience in its purest form.
Rosa Parks’ refusal to move from her seat on the bus broke the law. Upon arrest, she did not disrespect the police, punch any hecklers, kick out a bus window, or otherwise violate any law or rule of decorum that would distract from the focus on an unjust law.
The heroic optimism of the American civil rights movement was stunning, in that despite the history and prevalence of racial prejudice and hatred the leaders of the movement believed that white Americans would ultimately do the right thing when compelled to choose. To affirm the essential goodness of others (even at personal risk) is ennobling for all.
Peaceful Demonstration. The goal of such activity is to make others aware of the extent of one’s concerns and, hopefully, a show of numerical strength. Done right, the tone is not off-putting to potential allies and supporters but still disconcerting to opponents. Violence, destruction, and gratuitous lawlessness are contrary in nature to this form of protest and invariably counterproductive. If the jurisdiction requires a permit to use public streets, peaceful demonstrators invariably obtain one. The annual Right to Life March and the Tea Party rallies exemplify this mode of action.
Peaceful Trespass Occupying public spaces, blocking roads, seizing public buildings, or chaining oneself to a condemned tree are unlawful forms of protest but with purpose. The lawbreaker creates a disruption, expects and accepts arrest in the hope that the legal process pursuant to that arrest will become a proxy for a referendum about whatever injustice for which the demonstrator seeks to bring public attention. Again, violence or other gratuitous lawbreaking is to be avoided to preserve the focus and the implicit justice of the appeal to conscience.
The Antifa/BLM rioters undeservedly expected that their arrests and trials will be perceived as a surrogate for the issues involved in the deaths at the hands of the police or whatever else was claimed to prompt the riot. They have been largely successful in imposing that perspective on prosecutors and mayors.
The Canadian truckers have also engaged in peaceful trespass but have received a rather different response from authorities. Instead of sympathy or respect for the ostensible cause of the protest, authorities (and the increasingly authority-adjacent laptop class) have tried to deny, conceal, and recast the objectives of the demonstrators and to criminalize the caricature they create.
The Canadian truckers are unlawfully blocking thoroughfares to the detriment of the larger community. The fact that it is done without violence doesn’t make it lawful. The fact that the policies they oppose are unreasonable, unduly burdensome, falsely claim to promote safety and public health, falsely claim to be based on science, and are of dubious legality does not change the specific situation of breaking laws with respect to blocking public access.
Therefore, the Canadian police are not wrong to enforce the law. However, they are wrong if they use disproportionate force, knowingly injure innocents, or manufacture additional charges.
It is also not possible to take actions like freezing bank accounts or seizing personal assets without also knowingly restricting other basic rights in a blatant attempt to restrict the rights of petition and peaceful assembly. To remove all material means to act on the grounds that such actions might include future unlawful acts is not merely overreach, it is tyranny.
Similarly, denying bail on the grounds that the defendant is presumed to continue to unlawfully participate in nonviolent protest if released is not only legally wrong, it approaches criminal abuse of process to accomplish censorship.
If the goal is a revolution and the end of the political order, then all lawbreaking is consonant with such a purpose. However, those who respect ordered democracy and enumerated rights and seek to use concerted public demonstrative acts to correct and preserve the institutions of law designed to protect intrinsic rights cannot tear down lawful order under the rubric of a presumed higher purpose.
Some truckers are going to take one for the team as a matter of law. But political retribution by government overreach has to be universally condemned and fought. Left of center Americans and Canadians appear to be incapable of making such distinctions and appear to be increasingly immune to appeals to conscience. Nevertheless, we have to preserve faith in the essential goodness of the majority and that those shared dispositions will prevail.
God save the truckers and the rule of law.
Published in General
I don’t think there are many here who disagree with your premise that the truckers were breaking laws for which criminal charges and punishment are warranted. The question becomes what happened to law enforcement in the local jurisdiction? I kept expecting some action but saw little until a worldwide emergency was declared calling for all but execution of those involved. Something is wrong.
I hope this example explains to the Right that supporting the police and army is all fine and good but make no mistake they answer to other forces and will have absolutely no issue putting a beating on you or riding you down.
Maybe not criminal charges. In my local jurisdiction an illegal parking citation would be issue with an immediate requirement to move the vehicle, after which a tow of the vehicle would be in order with an addition citation in effect informing the violator of fines and other assessments including the sale of the vehicle. It is clear that these remedies were bypassed in favor of the more drastic remedies.
Not so much bypassed as augmented.
Does it strike anyone as odd that Trudeau never considered a public meeting, some token concessions, or some other gesture common in democratic countries? Issuing repressive orders from a hidden bunker is what you would expect from a besieged dictator?
But they had to go to the Emergency Declaration to get the augmentation.
Nope. They were already going after funding and doing the Nazi/racist/whatever shtick. A demonstration is time when both sides need to affirm some basic principles. The protestors do not have a blank check to break the law and the government does not have a right to assume ungranted powers to violate basic rights.
The outcome was decided ahead of time just like Jan 6 in Washington.
Do you think I am arguing with you? I don’t think anyone could have gone after the bank accounts without the emergency declaration. Am I wrong about that. I don’t know much about Canada.
Agreed. But when toddlers are frustrated in their desires, they tend to strike out. I believe Trudeau is emotionally still a toddler. He feels frustrated, so he is using the power at his disposal.
I have been wondering about this, but everything I’ve read has said there were detours available at all times. And they were very nice to people who needed to get through.
I think this was a good model for peaceful protest in 2022. I think that’s exactly why Trudeau took the actions against them that he did. Because this kind of protest would be effective. It scared the heck of out of them.
You know I always thought to petition the government for redress of grievances was to present a written, thought-out, articulate, signed document on the desk of the governing authority, to which the governor would respond something like
“You have presented an articulate, well-thought out list of grievances, which should be deeply looked into. As it is I see the accuracy of items 4, 5, 6 nd 9. In response I will offer a bill tomorrow for the rectification of these grievances and will seriously address your remaining concerns with the Cabinet.”
But though this process is thoughtful, logical, salted with fact, and peaceful more often than not the governor stands up and tosses the petition and authoritatively pronounces “Overruled and any further discussion will be met with first slander and then gratuitous physical force. Such that mere imprisonment shall be your fondest unfulfilled desire. Good day.”
When this happens what remains to be done within the category of petitioning the government for the redress of grievances?
I think of this obscure text:
The current Canadian truckers’ protests, like the historic Boston Tea Party, is somewhere in between these two extremes.
Do you think the truckers were likely breaking local law? @marcin
I think by-passed is correct. They were already freezing assets before they started towing.
I have no idea about the local Ottawa traffic flow laws. But as to the laws of commonsense in which it is rude and possibly dangerous to block a pathway, no. As far as I know, they were more than helpful and courteous to people who needed who pass by them. They created a barrier to the usual traffic flow, but there were easy detours around it, excect for the short time they blocked the Windsor Bridge (I think I have that name right). That did not last long enough to cause outlandish harm.
From the timeline that I’ve seen, there were local efforts to resolve the unlawful blockages for a week or two, which did not succeed.
I have been unable to get an impression of the extent of the disruption. I don’t know the area, and I don’t know of a reliable source that could explain it.
I do a lot for you miscreants, but I ain’t going through the entire Ontario Highway Traffic Act. That sucker is huge.
Emotional Toddler: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r8fhHWnnX-Q
If that ‘physical contact’ was considered a great offense then there really is no hope for Canada, a nation of cupcakes, snowflakes, and dweebs. I am giving Trudeau a pass on this one.
I don’t know. It’s not so much the actual strike—whatever it consisted of, and whatever damage was done—as Trudeau’s aggressive charge across the well and into the group that looks puerile and tantrum-esque. Especially compared with the mellow, polite-grown-up Canadian body language of everyone else in the frame.