ANARCHY: THE OTHER ENEMY BY WILLIAM HAWKINS
I was recently in Fort Worth, Texas and happened upon the National Sheriffs’ Association annual conference and exhibition. A two-part seminar presentation scheduled for June 25 caught my eye: “The Sovereign Citizen Movement— The Emerging Threat to Law Enforcement, What Cops Need to Know.” The SCM is the latest round of what is a constant plague that ebbs and flows through American (and other) society: anarchy. A “sovereign” has the highest authority; nothing can overrule him or constrain him. He is entirely self-governed, which means he is above the laws enacted by others. Indeed, he is literally an outlaw living in a “state of nature” which Thomas Hobbes described as being where life is “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.”
The term “sovereign citizen” is an oxymoron because a citizen is a member of an organized state with duties as well as rights. A citizen is subject to the sovereign power of the government and the moral order of the society the government has been established to defend. The personal declaration of “sovereignty” by the anarchist removes him from both state and society.
The concern of law enforcement for such “individuals” is clear and certainly took on more meaning this month with the cold blooded murder of two Las Vegas policemen by Jerad and Amanda Miller who were practicing anarchists. They yelled to others at the pizzeria where they shot the cops at lunch: “Tell the police the revolution has begun.” And they had shown their rejection of law earlier by stealing cars in Washington and Indiana. They had posted photos of themselves dressed as the psychotic comic book villains Joker and Harlequin. They draped a Nazi flag over the body of one of the dead officers.
The slain policemen were Alyn Beck, who left a wife and three kids, and Igor Soldo, whose wife had just given birth to their first child. The Millers then killed a woman at random in the entrance of a Wal-Mart. In the gun battle with responding police, Jerad was fatally shot and Amanda committed suicide. Beck and Soldo were not the first victims of anarchists. The FBI attributes the deaths of six officers between 2000 and 2011 to “sovereign citizen extremists.”
In should be noted that the vast majority of Americans do not share the Miller’s antipathy towards authority. The latest Gallup Poll (June 5-8) on confidence in institutions rated the Military first with 74% support and the Police third with 53% support.
Violence is not (yet) the main threat from anarchists. A 2011 report on the SCM by the FBI’s Counterterrorism Analysis Section opens “They could be dismissed as a nuisance, a loose network of individuals living in the United States who call themselves ‘sovereign citizens’ and believe that federal, state, and local governments operate illegally. Some of their actions, although quirky, are not crimes. The offenses they do commit seem minor, like creating false license plates, driver’s licenses, and even currency.” They have also printed up fake “diplomatic” papers that claim to make them exempt from all taxes and laws of the United States. Financial fraud is also common, as they do not believe the banking system or the national currency are legitimate so they can abuse both at will.
In a democracy, the spread of such dangerous notions can make it more difficult to address the real problems of society which necessitate concerted action. There has long been a loose alliance on the Left between anarchists and seditious political groups. The Left has always tried to use “individual rights” as a battering ram against social convention and traditional values in order to pave the way for a revolutionary new order that would turn civilization on its head. As Russell Kirk argued in his magisterial Ten Conservative Principles,
When every person claims to be a power unto himself, then society falls into anarchy. Anarchy never lasts long, being intolerable for everyone, and contrary to the ineluctable fact that some persons are more strong and more clever than their neighbors. To anarchy there succeeds tyranny or oligarchy, in which power is monopolized by a very few.
The conservative endeavors to so limit and balance political power that anarchy or tyranny may not arise.
Though it is generally useful to talk about Right and Left in politics, the true conservative position is in the center, maintaining a balance between order and liberty that holds society together internally with the strength to defend against external threats.
Unfortunately, the appeal of the simpleton “ideals” of anarchy to demagogues is posing a threat to conservatism in the current environment of extreme partisanship. Radio hosts Mark Levin and Sean Hannity frequently use the term “sovereign individual” which, despite their attempts to fudge the meaning, is actually a better description of anarchy than “sovereign citizen.” The “libertarian” movement has been growing, but also changing. Conservatives used to be able to work with libertarians because the latter were mainly motivated by a shared opposition to socialism. People deserved freedom because it allowed them to be the best they could be. Now, there is a current of thought that holds that one can only be truly “free” if they are allowed to do evil. They must be allowed to stick their fingers in the eyes of society to prove they are not controlled by convention.
In 1988, Kirk gave a lecture at the Heritage Foundation on the topic of libertarianism which I was privileged to attend. He warned, “Of society’s old institutions, they would retain only private property. They seek an abstract Liberty that never has existed in any civilization – nor, for that matter, among any barbarous people, or any savage. They would sweep away political government; in this, they subscribe to Marx’s notion of the withering away of the state.” He continued,
One trouble with this primitive understanding of freedom is that it could not possibly work in 20th century America. The American Republic, and the American industrial and commercial system, require the highest degree of cooperation that any civilization ever has known. We prosper because most of the time we work together – and are restrained from our appetites and passions, to some extent, by laws enforced by the state. We need to limit the state’s powers, of course, and our national Constitution does that – if not perfectly, at least more effectively than does any other national constitution. The Constitution of the United States distinctly is not an exercise of libertarianism. It was drawn up by an aristocratic body of men w ho sought “a more perfect union.” The delegates to the Constitutional Convention had a wholesome dread of the libertarians of 1786-1787, as represented by the rebels who followed Daniel Shays in Massachusetts. What the Constitution established was a higher degree of order and prosperity, not an anarchists’ paradise.
I was thus happy to learn of the “reform conservatism” agenda recently released in eBook form as Room to Grow: Conservative Reforms for a Limited Government and a Thriving Middle Class by the Young Guns Network. It emphasizes community as Kirk did, giving conservatism the mission of “creating, protecting, and sustaining” the mediating institutions of civil society, “the space between the individual and the state – the space occupied by families, communities, civic and religious institutions, and the private economy.” These are what Kirk called the “little platoons” of civil society. Man is a political animal who thrives best in groups. And the building blocks of society are where people first enter it. Civilization is not built by outlaws, but it is properly defended by conservatives who hold to principles that transcend the mere gratification of personal appetites.
William R. Hawkins is a consultant specializing in international economic and national security issues. He is a former economics professor and Republican Congressional staff member.
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