In light of the Bush's administration's glaring lack of respect for the rule of law, these immortal words from Robert Bolt's"A Man for All Seasons" are particularly apt:

Roper: So now you'd give the Devil benefit of law!

[Sir Thomas] More: Yes. What would you do: Cut a great road through the law to get after the Devil?

Roper: I'd cut down every law in England to do that!

More: Oh? And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned round on you -- where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat? This country's planted thick with laws from coast to coast -- man's laws, not God's -- and if you cut them all down -- and you're just the man to do it -- d'you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then? Yes, I'd give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety's sake.

Daniel B. Larison - 5/9/2004

My thanks to Mr. Richman for citing this example. The sentiment expressed by More is precisely the one that real conservatives take very seriously. I would just note that it is precisely the loss of this respect for law among most so-called conservatives that has proven their apostasy from the conservative philosophical tradition. Real conservatives remain as committed as ever, perhaps more now than ever before, to combating the State, because such fanaticism and statism are not the expressions of conservatism or the 'right wing' as such. There are, sadly, very few such people left.

Contempt for law is a revolutionary and gnostic trait, neither of which has anything to do with the Right. I accept that many people who are conventionally considered to be on 'the right' have gone in for such barbaric notions, but I dispute that they any longer deserve to possess that appellation. Call them savages, if you like, but don't drag the Right into it. It is a measure of how much the GOP has gone back to its old 'Red Republican' mindset that such awful ideas can prevail there.

Gus diZerega - 5/7/2004

For more on the rule of law as it is now practiced by the American Right Wing, see Joe Conason's piece in Salon:
http://salon.com/opinion/conason/2004/05/07/rights/index.html

A brief decsription of this article is on
http://www.atrios.blogspot.com
under the title Thugs and Sadists, which is a very appropritae term for decribing the Republican Right and their key allies.

That some classical liberals and libertarians once thought people like these could be allies against the State is remarkably akin to some progressive liberals once thinking the Communist Party could help build a just America.