Trump demonstrates what law really is

The way we all look at law is very important.  It consists of rules, of course, like those for driving a car, purchasing a home or business, and getting married.  It also has its criminal component for things ranging from misdemeanor petty theft to felonies including homicide.  The state, or government, runs the court system, and it also operates the prosecution market, which ranges from your local village authority complaining that your dog bit your neighbor to being charged with assault and more.  It seems that law, as we know it, is about all the rules, authorities, prosecutors, the courts and judges, and the government. 

But what law is really about is resistance.  I don’t mean “resisting arrest” with your local police officer after being pulled over for erratic driving or destroying property in a political riot, but rather standing up in a legal forum and defending yourself.

What makes this especially fascinating in the former president’s case is that he is actually aligned, in law, with liberal progressivism, in their belief over individual resistance to oppression and power, drawing effectively on their ideological heroes including Foucault, Hirsch, Gramsci, and others, who provide the progressive left with its inspirations against tyranny and its assertions that law is made into law precisely because it is contestable.

President Trump is the embodiment of their legal idealism, if they can put aside their political partisanship.  He is deepening the American public’s (and the West’s) understanding of its own socio-political tradition, and how law and history are intrinsically intertwined.  Moreover, the president is resisting formally, in a legal forum, and in a legal manner (unlike the “Summer of 2020” and what will likely be a “Fall of 2024” by a desperate DNC).

(For those who may be interested in legal philosophy that President Trump is demonstrating by the left’s own justice standards, see a review of Contested States: Law, Hegemony and Resistance.)

Whatever you may think of the former president of the United States based on your political ideology, there is one thing that everyone — the left, the right and all shades in between — should be paying attention to as common citizens: how President Trump is standing up as an individual, against an army of attackers and tyrants.  He is providing a profound public lesson on the rule of law, and what a true living Constitution consists of.  Law is made into a system of actual justice by the art of defense.  As some have put it, “hegemony and resistance are ‘mutually constitutive’ in the legal arena — that is, law is both the vehicle for domination and for opposition to that domination, and for meaning.”

In plain English, defense is what makes law work; otherwise, you may find yourself back in the Middle Ages, facing an effective tribunal, subject to pronouncement (which is where the DNC apparently seeks its model of law).  The president, by contrast, is effectively embodying the essence of John Locke’s moral philosophy, and showing Americans the link between natural right and natural law.  No U.S. president could provide a more important public lesson in core American philosophical values than by living them for himself and for his people.

The DNC is losing its case against the former president, not only in fact, but in public opinion and judgment.  In Trump’s case, millions of American “jury members” in the public square are using their natural intuition and common sense — which are what “common law” consists of — and the conclusion they are coming to is changing the entire nature of the legal battle, turning it into a public counter-claim against the DNC, the media, and public corruption backed by private interests.

President Trump is providing the highest public duty a nation can demand of its citizens, both as a former president and as an individual with natural rights, and with a moral law infused into his formal defense.  This is the best lesson any law school student could have, and this contest may go down in history as one of the most important legacies to law and order.

That makes the 2024 “election” about much more than politics.  It may not unreasonably be called a constitutional convention.

Matthew G. Andersson is the author of the upcoming book Legally Blind.  A former transportation CEO, he has been featured in the Wall Street Journal, the Financial Times, the New York Times, the Washington Post, Time Magazine, the National Academy of Sciences, and the 2001 Pulitzer Prize report by the Chicago Tribune.  He received the Silver Anvil award from the Public Relations Society of America and has testified before the U.S. Senate.  He is a graduate of the University of Chicago, and studied with economist and White House national security adviser W.W. Rostow at the LBJ School of Public Affairs.

Image via Picryl.