This article is going to make my liberal friends angry. I do not endorse it. It is worth reading because it helps you understand the reasoning of someone who feels justified in continuing support for policies that treat minorities as if having less votes means they should have less rights and less of the wealth our nation offers. Here’s the paragraph that shows their poor reasoning but includes between the lines, a way to find understanding:
“When a government loses legitimacy, it loses some of the allegiance of its citizens. That weakened allegiance means, among other things, a greater willingness to ignore the law. The federal government has enacted thousands of laws and regulations. Many of them apply to every family and every business in the nation. They cannot possibly be enforced by the police or courts without almost universal voluntary compliance. When a government is seen as legitimate, most citizens voluntarily comply because it is part of being a citizen; they don’t agree with every law and regulation, but they believe it is their duty as citizens to respect them. When instead people see laws and regulations as products of the illegitimate use of power, the sense of obligation ends.”
What this article misses: our government has been promoting illegitimate laws since it’s inception. We can forgive our founding fathers for a lack of imagination, an inability to solve the difficulties of multi-cultural governance, but now that we have more tools, we can’t forgive ourselves for inaction.
The above is very close to a definition of systemic racism and the fitting reaction of civil disobedience. I find it hard to believe that the author did not have the first sentence in the Declaration of Independence come to mind while writing this; “When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.”
The author of the article, and many who read the Spectator, see the paragraph I quoted from the article as a definition of illegitimate civil unrest in reaction to propaganda from a minority supported by elites. What I find interesting, is we all understand how citizens react to illegitimate government and we all understand that we are created equal and should have equal opportunity. I think we can build on that understanding.