Friday, April 19, 2024

It Takes A Village Where No One Is Above The Law To Bring Down A Tyrant

It Takes A Village Where No One Is Above The Law To Bring Down A Tyrant is a post at toays Morning Memo at TPM.  Here's an excerpt:

So it has warmed my heart this week to hear multiple prospective jurors in the Trump hush-money case assert that no one is above the law. As a statement of fact, that is unassailable. But it’s more important as a civic virtue. It states an expectation and an aspiration for who we are and what we want to be.

Nothing is quite as succinct a distillation of the American revolutionary experience: No one is above the law. (Where we have been at our worst is putting people – enslaved peoples, minorities, women, immigrants – outside of the law.) We are seeing random citizens who are imbued with an innate understanding of what the rule of law means. That civic-minded understanding of the rule of law is the bedrock foundation for the legal structures we erect upon it. Without it, we have nothing. It’s a small sign of hope in a troubled time.


This reminds me of the brilliant speech Ursula K LeGuin put in the mouth of her character Shevek in her novel The Dispossesed. Have a look.

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