The Right, the Left, and the Law
Sunday, March 19, 2006
OMG, the quarter is over!
In a political thread with some family I wrote something which came out reasonably well. I'm reprinting here, sans the first mostly unrelated paragraph:
> If some one breaks the law for the the greater good of the country
> is that something we should be attacking?
If we as a nation feel that it's ok to break laws "for the greater good", then why have laws at all? Why not simply place our fate in the hands of a benevolent leader?
One obvious problem here is "the greater good". Clearly as evidenced by this very thread of conversation "the greater good" is not a constant. My greater good is clearly not yours. My greater good is adherence to the rule of law. If Bush were merely a "benevolent" dictator then I'd be part of the rebellion. It is the rule of law which keeps me from forming a revolution. I see adherence to law as the *greatest* good. It is the only thing the pulls us out of anarchy. It is the only philosophical ideal which separates us (imperfectly) from arbitrariness. Needless to say I find it particularly *not* good if our president does not follow the law.
It has been an observation of mine and other's that the left cares much more about the law than the right does. I don't mean that to be a flip attack on the right. Your very comment is evidence of this. You feel, it seems, that it's ok to bend the rules. I believe that is actually a common feeling among the right, but equally common is an obsession on the left with the rule of law (it is certainly an obsession of my own). I also think (and again this is all just my personal feeling not "fact"), that this is part of the power of the right. The right just goes out and does things, they don't obsess over whether or not it's correct. Polls taken soon after the invasion of Iraq showed that an overwhelming majority of Bush's base felt it was more important to just do something than to pause to decide if it was right or wrong. I might sum up the ideological divide by saying that the right is decisively imprecise and the left is indecisively precise. But that's just my opinion.
My point is I believe it's a very bad thing for a president to break the law. If the laws are wrong then we need to ride Congress to change the laws, but so long as they're laws they need to be followed.