I don’t tend to let political differences get in the way of friendships, though I may be nonplussed at what people I know claim to believe and purport to support. I quietly note disconnection from facts, as when a friend of mine in Israel caustically described Paterson, NJ, as akin to the Muslim banlieues outside Paris, having so little familiarity with the majority-Hispanic city near my house that he didn’t even spell its name correctly.
I put political signs up, often supporting principles rather than candidates (though that’s partly because the Democrats in my area of North Jersey sometimes don’t get anyone on the ballot, and even when they do, are slow and sporadic in distributing campaign signs). Recently I put one up with a Frederick Douglass quote, seeing it as timely: “Liberty is meaningless where the right to utter one’s thoughts and opinions has ceased to exist. That, of all rights, is the dread of tyrants. It is the right which they first of all strike down.”
That’s from an 1860 speech Douglass gave in Boston, days after a mob forced him and other abolitionists off another stage in that city. Thinking it might be too wordy, though, I put the sign away after some days. This prompted a text from a neighbor inquiring what’d happened to it, worried something “nefarious.” I’d swapped in a smaller sign, of the “In This Home We Believe” type but with a “Democracy Over Dictatorship” tone of classical liberalism over identity-oriented progressivism. Then I added a bigger sign: “Defend the Constitution Against All Enemies Both Foreign and Domestic.” What enemies I’ve particularly in mind I left as an exercise for the reader.
We live in a world, to some degree, of social constructs. In the 1990s, when the right was partly aligned with science against the postmodern left, I’d little patience for the concept of social construction, espoused by people who’d scoff at things like “You believe in DNA?” In the 2000s, I took a second look at the concept, inspired by writings of philosopher John R. Searle (who recently died) and interested in what makes socially-constructed things—money, marriage, the Constitution, Splice Today—real in a universe of particles and forces.
The upshot of such thinking is that institutions exist because people agree they exist, and on how they work and what they’re for; their purposes and rules can be resilient over long periods of time—but also fall apart quickly when people stop believing in their integrity. Consider money. People exchange their labor and possessions for paper or metal or electronic blips, all without intrinsic value but agreed as a prized commodity. But a currency can face decline and destruction in a country where the institutions that support it are eroding, as when an old law is skirted to put the leader’s face on a coin, for instance.
Don’t assume that institutions you’ve trusted or taken for granted throughout your life will endure. Also don’t assume they’ve already collapsed when the evidence isn’t conclusive. Aspiring autocrats want people to believe they’ve won, so the public will give up trying to forestall such an outcome. At the same time, the would-be dictator maintains a constant claim of threat and emergency, one that can be handled with forcefulness and will.
Putting up lawn signs is a small thing, but there are plenty of countries where you can’t do it or are limited to ones approved or supplied by someone in charge (and in the latter case, it may be mandatory). As Frederick Douglass said about tyrants and free speech: “They know its power. Thrones, dominions, principalities, and powers, founded in injustice and wrong, are sure to tremble, if men are allowed to reason of righteousness, temperance, and of a judgment to come in their presence.”
