If you look at the laws passed in the United States from the very beginning of the American republic down to the present day, you’ll find that most of the legislation passed is class legislation that favors the elite, that favors the rich.
Newly-minted Professor Zinn at Spellman college
You’ll find huge subsidies to corporations all through American history. You’ll find legislation passed to benefit the railroads, the oil companies, and the merchant marine and very little legislation passed to benefit the poor and the people who desperately need help. So the Law should not be given the holy deference that we are all taught to give it when we grow up and go to school, and it’s a profoundly undemocratic idea to say that you should judge what you do according to what the Law says – undemocratic because it divests you as an individual of the right to make a decision yourself about what is right and wrong and it gives all of that power to that small band of legislators who have decided for themselves what is right and what is wrong.
As I read that, I could not help thinking about how Alexander Hamilton structured the whiskey tax so that individual distillers would have to pay more taxes than larger corporate distilleries – one of the first such laws that amounted to a corporate subsidy, which had such a severe effect that it triggered a rebellion in the newly established republic.
Zinn’s concluding point: that we are doing ourselves a moral disservice if we allow the servants of oligarchs to decide what is right and wrong for us, is one of the central arguments of anarchism: the state does not have legitimacy because it cannot act for the collective good. Therefore, if it does good, it’s largely by accident. Or, as Winston Churchill said, “The Americans will always do the right thing, but only after they have exhausted all the other options.”
I always point out my parents’ marriage was illegal in Virginia until I was 12 years old.
Are American schoolchildren taught that the law should be given holy deference? I was never taught anything similar at school. For us teachers told that since we live in a democratic country, we must obey the laws, but we are free to campaign for any specific law to be changed if we believe that any of the existing laws are bad. The idea was: “Be a good citizen, obey all the laws, and if you don’t like any of them, you are free to write letters to elected representatives, start collecting signatures for a referendum and so on.” At school for me the bullshit lesson was that the existing laws represent what majority of the citizens want. School curriculum failed to mention that actually it’s whatever the oligarchs want. But holy deference, nope, I was never taught that particular kind of crap.
robertbaden@#1:
I always point out my parents’ marriage was illegal in Virginia until I was 12 years old.
Yipe.
This is why I get all ornery when someone says “those migrants are already breaking the law!” as if that justifies doing horrible things to them. No, sorry, the law is useful if you’ve got to poop and haven’t got any nice paper to use. Other than that, not so much.
Ieva Skrebele@#2:
Are American schoolchildren taught that the law should be given holy deference?
I think so, yes. Kids are taught that the justice system is your first line of appeal against injustice. The whole constitution-worship is worship of the laws.
And watch what’s happening right now with “president” Trump and you can see how useful a line of appeal that is.
It either can do good or it cannot. If it can’t, it doesn’t, so the second statement is vacuous.
You presumably mean the state doesn’t usually act for the collective good, at least when we focus on the specific types of cases you’ve selected (with the hope that they’re representative). It’s an empirical statement — something we may learn from experience (historically or otherwise), not an impossibility one could have derived independent of such experience. The conclusion doesn’t follow “by definition” or what have you; it comes from the particular phenomena that (it just so happens) we actually observed (perhaps by accident, perhaps by tweaking things until we got what we were looking for, perhaps a lot of other stuff).
This isn’t at all equivalent to your “argument for anarchism.” We can form social institutions like governments to do certain things on our behalf, like encoding the laws. This is what makes them legitimate. Those laws can change, and we should think for ourselves about whether they ought to. Our representatives in government may not (if we allow it) do what is right or what we believe is right, but that is part of their job description, whether or not they (or we) are doing the right things. Of course we shouldn’t assume that the laws are always correct. But one thing history shows is that they do change. So it would make no sense to view that entire set of contradictory things and say that it is always correct. A person who supports liberal democracy (or “the state” if you prefer) does not need to entertain absurd ideas like that.
The idea that the justice system is just existed also in my school curriculum. I was also taught that the police and the court system are there to protect each of us from injustice.
What I wasn’t taught was the idea that the existing laws are perfect in their current redaction; instead I was told that in a democratic country citizens are free to change the laws. This was one of the lines that were supposed to separate a democratic country from a totalitarian one—in a democratic country citizens can decide what laws they want and they are also free to change them; in a totalitarian country the dictator decides what laws he wants and those are proclaimed as infallible.
Constitution worship or worshiping laws in general is just a circular argument. Something is right, because the law says so. The law says so, because that’s what is right. In debates I have noticed that whenever my opponents have no good arguments for why something ought to be done in a specific way, they will often argue that “that’s what the law says.”
For example, in 2006 Latvian constitution was changed to include the words: “The State shall protect and support marriage – a union between a man and a woman, the family, the rights of parents and rights of the child.” Back then a “Christians’ Party” got a couple of seats in the parliament, they became a part of the coalition government, and, as it usually goes with coalition governments, parties started scratching each other’s backs. The “Christians’ Party” wanted the constitution to be changed so as to outlaw gay marriage, and they got that. Nowadays, whenever somebody starts talking about legalizing gay marriage in Latvia, all the opponents talk about how that’s anti-constitutional and how law abiding citizens ought to respect the constitution. At this point in debates I usually feel like facepalming—after all, I still remember what happened in 2006 and how exactly this constitutional amendment got passed.
Breaking unjust laws, getting convicted, and having the Supreme Court overturn the law is how we got rid of miscegenation laws. So I have no automatic respect for laws. I look at them to see if they appear moral to me.