Codevilla: The Ruling Class v. Truth

Once again, Prof. Codevilla gets to the heart of it.

...The ruling class’s component groups jointly dismiss America’s traditional liberties because they aim to replace them with their own primacy. Having seized the power to redefine liberty, our rulers tighten their definitions around their opponents’ necks like nooses. Since their desire for primacy has no limit, they can’t stop tightening. The norms that they demand that we honor help sustain each constituency by letting its members feel good about themselves while looking down on others. Their “dignitary interests” (to use Justice Kennedy’s term for who must be honored vs. those who must submit to being vilified) simply trump those of others. This is why the ruling class demonizes any questioning of its demands’ substance by imposing modern equivalents of the slave-era “gag rule.” They wage identity politics as war....

(With that said, there is an implicit warning in that graf:  practice humility!  The root vice of which Codevilla warns here is Pride, so its opposite must be present in any well-ordered opposition.)

But Oppose!!

...Lincoln, following John Quincy Adams, pointed again and again to the slaveholders’ efforts to silence debate about slavery’s moral and political effects as evidence of the slaveholders’ threat to the freedom of whites as well as of blacks. Like Adams, Lincoln pressed slavery’s hard, ugly realities upon audiences that preferred to evade them. As Lincoln brushed away the euphemisms and legal constructs in describing the slave trade’s merchandising of human beings, so should we not mince words regarding all that the ruling class demands that we honor. ...

Yes.  Get out the pictures of the aborted babies.  And the victims of AIDS.

...Why should not all “classes” be equally protected? Does the rule of law even admit of “classes”? Does not the 14th Amendment promise “the equal protection of the laws” to all alike? But when presidents and supreme courts tell us that “equal” can mean “unequal” as willfully as that “is” can mean “is not,” when what is written counts less than what the powerful want, what can “law” mean? What obligation has anyone to obey such pretend-law?...

...As the great Solzhenitsyn reminds us, the sine qua non of liberty is refusal to live by lies. 
We need neither submit nor secede....

Resist by proclaiming the truth.  Loudly, often, and at any price.