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Are prosecutions for sedition practicable?
Writing at Human Events and TownHall, Ben Shapiro argues for dusting off America’s sedition laws in order to use them against people engaged in openly treasonous conduct, such as former Vice President Al Gore’s outrageous recent speech in Saudi Arabia. However, in the circumstances of this current war I think such efforts will go nowhere, and here’s why. The U.S. has shown that it has the will to prosecute people for sedition or treason when the country has a strong sense of itself and its cause. Then sedition has meaning and arouses general indignation. The U.S. had the will to execute the Rosenbergs for giving atomic secrets to Soviet Russia, for example. But this current war is so ill-defined, so ambiguous, and so profoundly compromised, that the idea of finding a person to be treasonous or seditious for undermining it gets very weak. For example, who is our enemy in this war? Islamic terrorists and jihadists, right? Yet last week our Secretary of State called the Palestinians a “wonderful people” after they had overwhelmingly elected a terrorist organization to lead them. When the U.S. government is making friends with the enemy and undermining everything the U.S. supposedly stands for, how does the government turn around and prosecute an Al Gore for doing the same thing? To put it another way, President Bush stands in relation to this supposed war the same way he stands in relation to conservatism. Thus in the 2000 campaign, which set the tone for his presidency, he said he is a conservative, but then added that he is a “compassionate” conservative, a leftist term (it entered the Western political lexicon with Rousseau) that contradicts the very idea of conservatism. In the same way, he keeps talking about the war against terror and Islamic radicalism that he’s waging, this war that is the transcendent project of his presidency, even as he continually makes friends with terror and jihad supporters. The ultimate irony is that this anything-but-conservative president is unceasingly attacked by the anti-American left as the most right-wing president in our history, which makes conservatives rush to his defense, seeing him as a true-blue conservative and patriot, while he goes on making nice-nice with the enemies against whom he is supposedly fighting a war. Last year Freedom House published a widely discussed report detailing the vociferously anti-American, anti-Christian, and anti-Jewish literature being disseminated by the Saudi government in U.S. mosques. Far from demanding of the Saudis that they stop, Bush hosted the Saudi Crown Prince at his ranch. To my mind, that was an act tantamount to treason, giving aid and comfort to the enemy. So, once again, how do we prosecute Gore for giving aid and comfort to the enemy?
When we cannot have basic confidence in the honor and loyalty of our own president and our own government, prosecutions of U.S. citizens for sedition and treason are out of the question. Email entry |