Dr. Lynda Alexander responded to my recent piece about Will Pelkey with a piece entitled “Let’s Celebrate Our Freedoms” in the Windsor Journal.

I have some thoughts.

It may surprise some of you to learn that I grew up in a very conservative family of lifetime NRA members, libertarians, mainline conservatives, and believers of a variety of Christian faiths. Windsor has always reminded me of the floodplains on the north Potomac where I spent most winters hunting waterfowl, one more reason I’ve always felt at home here. Both sides of my family are from Mississippi. Vigorous political debates were a frequent occurrence at family gatherings in Natchez. Among the many topics in these discussions, I heard outrage over armed IRS officers, unelected judges, and federal incursions into state prerogatives. It was assumed that citizens should stay vigilant against unaccountable power. Imagine my surprise then at some of the same family members now gleefully cheering on warrantless “arrests” by masked federal officers.

My point isn’t to highlight hypocrisy (we all have our blind spots), only to note that I watched the conservative movement change from the inside. I have noticed a rhetorical tick among conservatives in Windsor that very much mirrors my family members’ newfound appreciation of maximalist government power. I think it’s worth teasing this out, because it’s worrying, and because I’m not sure they’re fully aware they’re doing it.

The opening line of Lynda’s piece is indicative, “Our founders granted us considerable freedoms in our constitution[sic].” This is a fundamental misunderstanding of the relationship between the people and the government. We are a free people. We are not granted rights: our rights are inalienable. The government is an instrument of our sovereignty. It does not dictate our rights to us.

Rights that are granted are rights that can be revoked. In Dr. Alexander’s formulation, the relationship between the citizens and the government is inverted. Rather than the government representing a sovereign people, the people become subjects to a government that is sovereign unto itself (or perhaps by divine right?), which is kinda’ what the framers were trying to avoid when they launched a rebellion against the anointed monarch of the globe’s most mighty empire.

This isn’t an isolated example. We see this kind of language slipping into local politicians’ rhetoric with alarming frequency. When discussing the recent assassination of Charlie Kirk, Councilor Ron Eleveld said the following, “Because you cannot accept the fact that someone does not agree with you, you have to use violence to quiet them down. In Nazi Germany they silenced the opposition, in Russia, China and North Korea they silence the opposition, even today. In America we do not silence the opposition. We have something called free speech. We should all defend the right to this Right in our Constitution.”

It’s a noble sentiment, but expressed in a way that dangerously inverts the Constitution’s intent. In this framing, individuals’ use of political violence is equated with government repression. The trouble is that the Constitution does not constrain individuals: the Constitution constrains the government. It even states this explicitly in the amendment Councilor Eleveld is referring to, “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech…” We, the people, elect a representative government which passes laws to govern individual behavior. The Constitution protects us from overreach by that government.

When Councilor Eleveld confuses limits on government with limits on the people, he changes the Constitution from a shield into an instrument of censorship.

Other town Republicans have repeated this misunderstanding recently. Earlier this year, I pointed out that opponents of the road diet referendum had been very aggressive, yelling epithets from moving trucks (how brave…) and in one case brushing me with a pickup truck while I was putting out signs. Rather than address this alarming behavior, the Chair of the Republican Town Committee wrote that I was “tone policing.”

Dr. Alexander’s response is of a piece. She says, “In granting us freedom of speech and expression, by implication, [the framers] expected us to exercise our judgment.”  

The idea that the framers expected nothing but good judgement and uprightness in speech falls apart on the slightest contact with early American history. Many of the framers were polemicists of the first order and had no qualms hiring unscrupulous journalists to savage each other in the press. The career of James Thomas Callender is a good example of how the framers used their own First Amendment rights to publicly smear each other without mercy. I don’t hold this out as the paragon of upright behavior, only to point out that for the framers, freedom of speech was a good unto itself and was not contingent on the good intentions of the speaker. One glaring exception to this is John Adams’ Sedition Act, which is (and was at the time) widely regarded as an utterly shameful power grab.

Dr. Alexander goes on,

Speakers and writers are permitted to express their opinions without restrictions. These opinions include the interpretations, speculations and even at times, fabrication of information in order to make a particular point. And we are charged with investigating the motivation of the writers and speakers who have their own goals and agendas.

In short, Dr. Alexander read a piece laying out a factual critique of a government official and, rather than considering the claims against that official, she questions the motivations of the speaker. Seeing a citizen use freedom of speech to hold the government accountable, the very act with the framers sought especially to protect, Dr. Alexander sees nothing but poor judgement and distasteful agendas.

Perhaps it’s no wonder we see this kind of language slipping into local discussions of politics. We’re living through an utterly warped reactionary movement, one that has birthed the dystopian constitutional fiction of the Unitary Executive. For the first time in our nation’s history we have an actual secret police. The government is using its regulatory leverage over the private sector to silence voices it doesn’t like. And when millions of people took to the streets to state clearly that Donald Trump isn’t the sovereign, we are, he responded with shocking contempt by publishing imagery of himself, wearing a crown, dumping excrement on people who were (say it with me!) exercising their actual First Amendment rights.

So, fellow citizens, listen for this type of constitutional sophistry, and guard against ideas that turn the Constitution against us. Now more than ever, we must use our voices to hold power accountable.