President Trump has added military flourishes to the July 4th celebrations in Washington, DC. Critics have questioned the militarization of a holiday that has traditionally foregrounded the non-martial courage of the signers of the Declaration of Independence. A group of lawyers, farmers, and merchants defied the most powerful empire in the world by producing a single sheet of paper containing a list of political grievances and a declaration of abstract philosophical principles. That document was powerful enough to channel a revolution, turn colonists into Americans, and inspire democratic movements around the world long after it was written. It has not lost that radical charge today.

But if you take the time before tomorrow’s “Bonfires and Illuminations” to read through the Declaration of Independence’s long list of abuses committed by King George III and British officials in 1776, it is impossible not to hear in those same words a ringing indictment of the Trump administration in 2019.

Here are a few of the most biting passages for modern ears:

“He [King George] has refused his Assent to Laws, the most wholesome and necessary for the public good.”

“He has forbidden his Governors to pass Laws of immediate and pressing importance, unless suspended in their operation till his Assent should be obtained; and when so suspended, he has utterly neglected to attend to them.”

The complaint in 1776 was that colonial legislatures, which had become used to a relatively laissez-faire Britain regime in the mid-18th century, were increasingly frustrated by Parliament and the King overturning colonial legislation, including various currency controls as well as taxes to discourage the slave trade and the importation of convicts. The colonists saw this as a sweeping and tyrannical expansion of royal authority over against legislative authority. The King’s refusal to recognize the validity of these laws was a tacit veto, a way of bending legislatures to the King’s will on other, unrelated issues.

In the winter of 2018, Donald Trump used the threat of a veto to hold up the passage of a budget for the federal government that had initially received overwhelming bipartisan support. While Presidential vetos of appropriations bills are not novel—the first was from John Tyler in the 1840s—they have become much more frequent since the 1960s, raising questions about a growing imbalance between the legislative power of the purse and the executive obligation to enforce laws it does not like while also respecting a legislature’s decision not to pass a law. In any case, Trump turned the 2018 spending bill into a tool for bending Congress to the executive will on an unrelated issue, building a southern border wall.

“He has endeavoured to prevent the population of these States; for that purpose obstructing the Laws for Naturalization of Foreigners; refusing to pass others to encourage their migrations hither, and raising the conditions of new Appropriations of Lands.”

The southern and middle colonies wanted to attract immigrants because of the shortage of labor and the desire to expand west. King George, however, worried that more migrants from other countries would weaken colonial dependence on Great Britain, further shifting the balance of political power to the colonial legislatures. As a result, the Royal Proclamation of 1763 prohibited settlement west of the Appalachian mountains (though it was often honored in the breach).

Furthermore, the colonies wanted rapid naturalization of immigrants through a process that often took less than a year with the goal of enabling immigrants to more quickly and legally hold title to land. The British naturalization system took longer, as much as seven years, and all but prohibited naturalization of foreign Catholics. Bear in mind that many recent immigrants to the colonies had come from the predominantly Catholic southern Germany. Traditional Protestant suspicion of Catholics as dangerous, unassimilable ‘others’ played an important role in the new British restrictions on colonial efforts to extend citizenship to immigrants.

One of the reasons why the Trump administration opposes immigration is the fear that migrants will support Democratic politicians rather than Republicans. Although it is a self-fulfilling prophecy, migration from Central America has indeed played an important role in turning formerly red states into blue or purple states, shifting the balance of partisan power. The GOP’s own retrospective report after the 2012 election called for the party to embrace comprehensive immigration reform or else risk political suicide as the declining party of white resentment in a majority-minority future.

Trump’s attempts to seal off the border—while they may ultimately be as futile as the Royal Proclamation of 1763—have outraged those states that have benefited the most from immigration. Indeed, the naturalization process in those states—measured by, for example, the ability to acquire legal documents like drivers’ licenses—is much quicker and more certain than the federal naturalization process.

“He has obstructed the Administration of Justice by refusing his Assent to Laws for establishing Judiciary Powers.”

As the North Carolina colony expanded, it needed to establish formal courts of law, but King George saw this as a violation of his sovereign prerogative to decide when and where courts should be established and so denied the validity of the new courts. Without courts, basic law and order suffered as a result.

President Trump has undermined the rule of law in states like Arizona by pardoning political ally and disgraced former Sheriff Joe Arpaio, who had been convicted of contempt of court for defying a court order prohibiting racial profiling. Trump may have tampered with witnesses including Michael Flynn, Michael Cohen, and Paul Manafort by publicly hinting at the possibility of pardons in exchange for loyalty. He has used the pardon power to undermine courts that threaten him or his allies and in so doing has created a moral hazard by signaling that lawbreaking will be forgiven as long as it is in the best interests of the administration.

“He has affected to render the Military independent of and superior to the Civil Power.”

“For protecting [soldiers], by a mock Trial from punishment for any Murders which they should commit on the Inhabitants of these States.”

British troops stationed in the colonies were not under the control of colonial legislatures. When General Thomas Gage was appointed the military governor of the restless Massachusetts colony in 1774, he dissolved the colonial legislature entirely. Informed by that experience, civilian control of the military would be written into the US Constitution, which gave the power to declare war to Congress while making the President, an elected civilian, the commander-in-chief of wartime military forces.

Also in 1774, Parliament enacted a law requiring that soldiers or law enforcement officers accused of committing crimes be sent back for trial to England. Given the natural advantages of holding a trial in Britain for the defendants, and the difficulty of having witnesses cross the Atlantic to testify, the law made it harder to hold British officials to account. Doing so saved the British the embarrassment of having colonial courts convict British officials of crimes, but it enraged the colonists.

Today, civilian control of the military has been weakened by Trump’s appointment of four former military generals to prominent White House cabinet positions, including naming General Jim Mattis as Secretary of Defense. It is not entirely unprecedented—President Truman appointed former general George Marshall as the Secretary of Defense in 1950—but both the number of generals and the recency of their service is unusual. Making generalship a stepping stone to high, unelected civilian office could undermine the tradition of non-partisan professionalism in the officer corps and further politicize military service and policy.

Additionally, Trump recently pardoned former Lt. Michael Behenna for murdering a prisoner of war and Trump has, reportedly, considered pardons for several other alleged war criminals. Doing so signals that military service people are held to a lower legal standard than civilians and that murder will be tolerated by the commander-in-chief in order to avoid national embarassment.

“For cutting off our Trade with all parts of the world.”

“For imposing Taxes on us without our Consent.”

After a period of salutary neglect and relative free trade in the mid-18th century, Britain began enforcing trade restrictions between the colonies and geopolitical competitors like Spain and France. The British needed tariff revenue to pay off the large national debt accrued during the Seven Years War and the economic recession that followed. Parliament had enacted several protectionist regulations in the decade and a half before 1776, placing tariffs on goods including paper, lead, paint, glass, and china as well as, eventually, granting a tax-free trade monopoly for tea to the British East India Company. Angry colonists started boycotts, famously dumped tea in Boston Harbor, and formed the Stamp Act Congress to formally protest the trade restrictions.

Trump has brought protectionist tariffs back into the political mainstream to a degree not seen since the Smoot-Hawley tariffs of 1930. In less than two years in office, Trump has unilaterally enacted new tariffs on steel, aluminum, solar panels, washing machines, video game consoles, and hundreds of other products with particular attention paid to those coming from China and the European Union, the next two largest global economies after the United States.

Tariffs are taxes that are ultimately paid by consumers. And when other countries pass retaliatory tariffs, it hurts American producers as well, like the Iowa soybean farmers who used to sell a majority of their crop to China. Furthermore, Trump raised the tariffs on steel and aluminum by abusing an old rule giving the President power to adjust tariffs on products that affect national security interests, thus allowing him to bypass Congressional consent.

“For depriving us in many cases, of the benefit of Trial by Jury.”

In response to British trade restrictions, some colonial merchants began smuggling goods or finding other ways to avoid the tariffs. Those caught for such violations had previously been tried in common law criminal courts, but the British gave jurisdiction over such cases to admiralty courts, which were run by Crown-appointed judges, did not provide trial by jury, and shifted the burden of proof onto the defendant.

The Trump administration’s single-minded focus on immigration law enforcement has led to US citizens being swept up by ICE, unlawfully detained, and deported to foreign countries without due process. Despite being called “courts,” immigration courts are actually administrative hearings and are not part of the judicial system. The judges are attorneys from the Department of Justice, there are no juries, and defendants are not entitled to an attorney.

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That is just a sampling of the twenty-eight specific grievances listed in the Declaration of Independence, but the Trump administration seems determined to violate the general spirit of the document as well. The Trump administration’s policies, including its Muslim ban and family separation policy, as well as Trump’s own nativist, racist, and sexist statements, stand in opposition to the preamble’s assertion that “all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, [and] that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

Our founding fathers were an optimistic bunch. They thought that abstract ideas mattered, that fact-based political discourse was not only possible but persuasive, and that a nation could be founded on the not yet fully realized ideal of human liberty. Thus, it is less a reflection on them than it is on us that the final line from the preamble to the Declaration of Independence sounds so radical, so naive, and so impossible today.

“To prove this, let Facts be submitted to a candid world.”

Source Recommendations:

Sydney Fisher’s article, “The Twenty-Eight Charges Against the King in the Declaration of Independence,” is old but still useful for discerning the specific motivations behind each of the charges.

If you want a history that emphasizes the transformative, radical aspects of the American Revolution, then run, don’t walk, to pick up a copy of Gordon Wood’s classic book The Radicalism of the American Revolution.

On July 4, 1821, then-Secretary of State John Quincy Adams, delivered a now-famous address here in Washington, DC. I discuss the speech in my latest book, Peace, War, and Liberty: Understanding U.S. Foreign Policy, and it is featured in this “Liberty Chronicles” episode (dramatic reading starts around the 17 minute mark).

If you haven’t read the speech in its entirety, you might find it worthwhile. Some are familiar with Adams’s admonition that America “goes not abroad in search of monsters to destroy.” The veteran diplomat and scholar George Kennan invoked that passage in an essay in Foreign Affairs, and it even serves as one of the founding principles for a new organization named after John Quincy. Others have scorned Adams’s sage advice as synonymous with “cowardice and dishonor,” arguing instead that America is made great by frequent monster-searching and destroying. That they cling to such beliefs despite the counterproductive military adventures of the last several decades suggests that no amount of pleading could convince them of Adams’s timeless wisdom.

But there’s so much more to the speech! To be sure, some elements are anachronistic, or just downright bizarre (e.g. Themistocles? fustian romance and lascivious lyrics!?). And Adams certainly wasn’t aiming for brevity. This kind of thing simply can’t be crammed into even a hundred 240-character tweets. But his words are important because they spell out so clearly a positive vision for America’s role in the world. He speaks eloquently of what America can accomplish, and what Americans are for, not merely what we’re against.

For example, if the philosophers and inventors “of the older world” ever asked, “What has America done for the benefit of mankind?” Adams had a ready answer.

America, he said:

has invariably, though often fruitlessly, held forth to [other nations] the hand of honest friendship, of equal freedom, of generous reciprocity. She has uniformly spoken among them, though often to heedless and often to disdainful ears, the language of equal liberty, equal justice, and equal rights.

[…]

Wherever the standard of freedom and independence has been or shall be unfurled, there will her heart, her benedictions and her prayers be.…She will recommend the general cause, by the countenance of her voice, and the benignant sympathy of her example. 

[…]

Her glory is not dominion, but liberty. Her march is the march of mind. She has a spear and a shield; but the motto upon her shield is Freedom, Independence, Peace. This has been her declaration: this has been…her practice.

There’s been a fair amount of commentary about the way that the current occupant of the White House plans to celebrate the 4th. I’m reasonably confident that JQA wouldn’t approve. You decide. 

Everyone dislikes the social media companies these days. Conservatives (that is, Republicans) decry alleged bias against their views. Liberals (that is, Democrats) complain about hate speech online and market domination. And that’s just the start for both sides. Of course, both sides believe “something must be done,” ranging from federal agencies controlling the platforms to breaking up the companies. Both see government as the solution for what is thought to ail social media. In his own way, Mark Zuckerberg agrees. He could not be more wrong.

Engineers and economists often focus on the tradeoffs inherent in a project. Zuckerberg has emphasized the tradeoff between the values of voice (speech) and safety (or protection from speech). At a recent appearance, he said most people do not want private companies making such fundamental tradeoffs by themselves. He continues, “I think we would be better off if we had a more robust democratic process setting the rules on how we want it to arbitrate and draw some of the tradeoffs between a lot of these values that we hold dear.”

What is a “more robust democratic process”? It could mean a process where majorities, highly organized minorities, or elected and unelected officials determine the tradeoff between speech and safety. They might do it indirectly as with Sen. Josh Hawley’s proposal to empower the Federal Trade Commission with life-or-death authority over tech companies and thereby, over their policies. All of us, including Zuckerberg, have little desire for government without constraints.

We live in a republic. The rule of the people comes with restraints on political power, not least protection for “the freedom of speech,” which places it, mostly, outside the reach of government decisions. The courts protect speech by interpreting and enforcing the First Amendment. They generally favor free speech with a few limited exceptions.

Zuckerberg wants democracy to help determine the tradeoff between speech and safety online. He may believe public involvement might accord legitimacy to online content moderation at least compared to efforts by private companies.

But what could the federal government actually do? The courts could apply the First Amendment to the tech platforms by overturning or ignoring precedents. They would invalidate parts of Facebook’s Community Standards including rules against hate speech. If other parts of the republic – say, Congress – decided to draw a line between acceptable and unacceptable speech online, the courts would be obligated to strike down such rules. Even if the courts allow Congress to act, one side or the other of our highly polarized polity would likely see a win or a loss in that outcome leading to acrimony and distrust rather than consent and legitimacy. Government actions in the tech space cannot foster legitimacy, not now at least. 

Of course, the courts have generally found that the First Amendment does not apply to private companies like social media. If that policy status quo remains valid, we would be back to industry self-regulation. What’s a tech mogul to do?

Facebook in fact is moving forward in creating an appeals board for its content moderation. Zuckerberg notes, “We’re starting this as a project just for Facebook. But over time I could see this expanding to be something that more of the industry joins.” In other words, self-regulation just by Facebook might not work, but a private effort across companies might. Keep in mind also that we are in early days with such self-regulation; the Facebook board (or an industry-wide board) does not yet exist so it hardly can be judged a failure. Could they gain legitimacy? Perhaps. Might it fail for many reasons? Of course. But the board is an attempt to deal with immense and surprising challenges that have been evident since at least November 2016. The board deserves a chance.

We know the other path forward. The concrete alternatives are the courts enforcing the First Amendment in private forums or Congress, state officials, and the president drawing lines between permitted and suppressed speech, lines that the courts then invalidate (we hope). Neither option seems likely or desirable. The leaders of social media may regret the political and social dangers and complexities of content moderation. The tradeoff among values is hard, no doubt. But their task cannot be avoided. No one else, least of all government, can or should do the job.

For more on the limits of government regarding online speech, see my recent policy analysis.

Although President Trump apparently called off a planned airstrike on Iran at the last minute in late June, he subsequently warned Iranian leaders that the military option was still very much on the table. He emphasized that if the United States used force against Iran, Washington would not put boots on the ground but would wage the conflict entirely with America’s vast air power. Trump exhibited no doubt about the outcome, asserting that such a war “wouldn’t last very long,” and that it would mean the “obliteration” of Iran.

His boast was eerily reminiscent of the statement that Kenneth Adelman, a former assistant to Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and a prominent figure in the U.S. foreign policy community, made prior to the Iraq War. Adelman famously predicted that a war to oust Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein would be a “cakewalk.”

The notion that a looming war will produce a quick, definitive victory for the “right” side is a fantasy that has lured numerous statesman throughout history. Occasionally, the prediction even turns out to be true, as it did for the United States in the 1898 Spanish American War and the 1991 Persian Gulf War. Far more often, though, a predicted “cakewalk” turns into a multi-year human meat grinder, as in the U.S. Civil War and World War I. Even if subsequent events do not produce a bloodbath on such a monstrous scale, the war frequently becomes a prolonged, futile, and counterproductive mission. Washington’s military interventions in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan fall into that category.

Trump’s rosy assurance that a war against Iran would be easy, quick, and decisive is especially misplaced. As I outline in a National Interest Online article, Tehran has multiple ways to retaliate for a U.S. attack, including using its Shia religious allies in Lebanon, Iraq, Yemen, and Bahrain to damage U.S. military and commercial targets, as well as inflict casualties on U.S. military personnel. Even pinprick attacks can cause a distressing toll over time, and Iran is more than capable of mounting such a campaign.

Unfortunately, President Trump is hardly the only one who embraces the delusion that a war against Iran would be the proverbial cakewalk. Ultra-hawkish Sen. Tom Cotton (R‑AR), a rising conservative star in the Republican Party, quipped that the conflict would be over in two strikes, “the first strike and the last strike.”

That is a frighteningly cavalier attitude. It’s worthwhile recalling how Adelman’s prediction of a cakewalk war in Iraq turned out. At last count, the United States has spent well over a trillion dollars trying to pacify and stabilize Iraq. Worse, more than 4,400 American soldiers have perished in that effort, with thousands more suffering wounds—many of them severely life-altering.

A war against Iran likely would be much worse. Iran is a larger country, both in terms of area and population. Although the Iranian military has been weakened over the years as a result of U.S.-led international economic sanctions, it still is substantially more capable than Saddam Hussein’s decrepit army and the ragtag insurgent militias the United States later confronted in Iraq. Rep. Tulsi Gabbard (D‑HI), a military veteran and an outspoken candidate for the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination, likely is correct that a war in Iran would make the Iraq War look like a cakewalk. That outcome would be a bitterly ironic fulfillment of Adelman’s prediction about the earlier conflict. President Trump would be wise not to venture down such a perilous path.

It is advised to speak no ill of the dead. So I don’t. I just add a bit of context to the headlines calling Lee Iacocca “the man who saved Chrysler.” With a hat tip to David Henderson, who dug up Cato Policy Analysis no. 4, from 1980, which David wrote. The title was “A Step Toward Feudalism: The Chrysler Bailout,” and here’s some of what he wrote:

Since the summer of 1979, Chrysler executives have sought a federal subsidy to save their company from possible bankruptcy, and they appear to be near their goal. (Because the subsidy Congress passed December 21, 1979, will be given only if Chrysler receives private financing and reduces employees’ wages, whether the company will get the subsidy is uncertain at this writing.) They have talked throughout their negotiations with the government as if a bankruptcy would necessarily cause them to shut down, but if Chrysler went bankrupt it would agree with its creditors on a future repayment scheme and could survive and even thrive. The company’s survival would depend on whether projected revenues exceeded or fell short of projected costs. However, Chrysler executives have talked as if the company would necessarily fail, and therefore I will take them at their word and assume that it will indeed go out of business if the government does not subsidize it.

Should the U.S. government let Chrysler fail? Let’s reword the question: Should the government force taxpayers to subsidize a company whose products do not meet the market test? The answer becomes clear: No. Why should taxpayers have to pay to keep a firm in business? As consumers and producers, they have shown that they do not want to keep it going. Consumers are not willing to pay enough for Chrysler’s products to cover the company’s costs; producers — including suppliers to Chrysler and Chrysler employees — are not willing to sell their goods and services at a cost below Chrysler’s projected revenues. Consumers and producers have spoken, and that should be the end of it.

Chrysler executives reply that if the company fails their workers will be unemployed and their suppliers will lose business and lay people off. But surely this unemployment of resources cannot last long: if this were a likely prospect, Chrysler would not be in its present bind. Precisely because the resources have higher-valued alternate uses, Chrysler cannot afford to pay them out of projected revenues. Other potential users of the resources are willing to pay more than Chrysler can. The cost of a resource is its value in the highest-valued alternate use, and therefore to say that Chrysler’s costs exceed its revenues is to say that Chrysler resources are worth more elsewhere.

Henderson pondered the political economy implications of the bailout:

The video of President Trump shaking hands with North Korean leader Kim Jong-un and becoming the first sitting U.S. president to cross the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) into North Korea should have been a welcome sight in both East Asia and the United States. It was a powerful symbol of warming relations between Washington and Pyongyang—a process that had stumbled in February when a summit meeting abruptly ended in an impasse.

Trump’s domestic critics, though, seem unwilling to accord him any credit for his diplomatic breakthrough with North Korea and the easing of dangerous tensions that have plagued the Korean Peninsula for seven decades. Of the many criticisms directed at Trump, the most annoying and unrealistic one is that even choosing to interact with Kim reflects questionable judgment. Some opponents denounce the president for meeting with such an odious tyrant under any circumstances; others insist that Trump at least should have refused to do so until Pyongyang made major, irreversible steps to abandon its nuclear weapons program. Both criticisms show a disturbing lack of realism about how diplomacy must be conducted and what objectives can be achieved.

A popular cliché in American foreign policy and journalistic circles is that merely meeting with Kim accords the tyrant undeserved ”legitimacy.” Indeed, that accusation was prevalent regarding the earlier summits in Singapore and Hanoi. Senator Chuck Schumer, for example, issued a statement following the Singapore summit that Trump had given “a brutal and repressive dictatorship the international legitimacy it has long craved.” Such complaints have gained new volume after the meeting at the DMZ.

Those objections are shockingly naïve. Effective diplomacy requires a willingness to engage unpleasant regimes and leaders. Indeed, U.S. presidents have routinely done so throughout the history of the republic. Several summits took place with Soviet dictators during the Cold War, and the normalization of U.S. relations with Communist China occurred because Richard Nixon was willing not only to open a dialogue with Mao Zedong and Zhou Enlai, but travel to China to start the process. Any progress with North Korea would be unlikely if President Trump followed the advice of his critics and refused even to meet with Kim Jong-un.

The slightly more sophisticated criticism that no summit should have been held until Pyongyang made preemptive concessions on the nuclear issue is nearly as unrealistic. As I discuss in a recent National Interest Online article, it is doubtful that North Korea will ever relinquish its small nuclear arsenal. But if Pyongyang does take that step, it will occur only after prolonged, difficult negotiations with a substantial amount of give and take on both sides.

What Trump’s critics seek is capitulation, not negotiation. But such a one-sided outcome almost never occurs except when a country is decisively defeated in war. One hopes that those politicians and pundits who demand Pyongyang’s capitulation are not implicitly advocating a war against North Korea. Absent that scenario, though, their insistence on massive, preemptive concessions makes no sense.

President Trump does have a tendency to oversell his successes, and he has done so regarding his personal diplomacy with Kim. Significant tensions remain on the Korean Peninsula, and because of Washington’s foolish insistence on keeping U.S. forces in South Korea as a tripwire, this country continues to run needless risks. But it is a good development when tensions decline even modestly, and U.S. and North Korean leaders are smiling rather than snarling at each other. A succession of U.S. administrations refused to engage North Korea even as the already toxic bilateral relationship worsened. President Trump appears to have abandoned that futile course, and for his decision he deserves credit and support, not petty criticism.

An article in the Los Angeles Times last week frets that Los Angeles transit buses are “hemorrhaging riders,” which is supposedly “worsening traffic and hurting climate goals.” In fact, the decline of bus transit is actually helping California achieve its climate goals.

In 2017, Los Angeles Metro buses used 4,223 BTUs and emitted 349 grams of greenhouse gases per passenger mile. By comparison, the average light truck used only 3,900 BTUs and the average car just 2,900, with light trucks emitting 253 grams and cars 209 grams per passenger mile. By raising bus fares and reducing bus service, L.A. Metro is getting people out of dirty buses and into clean cars.

Of course, L.A. Metro officials probably don’t realize they are doing that. They are so bone-headed that they want to convert a dedicated bus route into a light-rail line in order to “increase its capacity.” At present, they run a maximum of 15 buses an hour on the dedicated bus lanes, which is less than 6 percent of its capacity.

Dedicated bus lines in other parts of the world move as many as 30,000 people per hour in each direction. By comparison, no light-rail line can move more than about 12,000 people per hour. As one study concluded, “there are currently no cases in the US where LRT [light rail transit] should be favored over BRT [bus-rapid transit].”

Los Angeles Metro’s CEO is currently paid well over $300,000 a year, which is almost twice as much as the governor of California and far more than the director of the state Department of Transportation, whose agency moves far more people and ton-miles of freight per day than Metro moves in a month. Yet Metro’s CEO is not being paid to move people, but to separate people from their tax dollars, and so far he is doing that very well. 

For more information about the future of public transit, see my recent article about LA Metro’s climate strategy.