Suppress the Riots, Mr. President

Ed Feser argues that President Trump not only has the legal authority to suppress the L.A. Riots, he has the natural right, and the moral duty to do so swiftly and harshly until order is restored.

As riots afflict Los Angeles and threaten to spread to other cities, progressives fret over whether the Trump administration is overreacting by deploying the National Guard and Marines. They are wrong, and the administration is in the right. Riots are not like criminal activity of the kind best dealt with patiently and subtly. Of their nature they require an immediate and severe response. And under current circumstances, it is not unreasonable for the administration to judge that federal action is required in order to ensure this.

Rioters are very different from everyday offenders – thieves, murderers, and the like – who typically do their work in secret. Even robbers are typically seen only by their victims, and quickly flee the scene. The mode of such lawbreaking manifests an overall fear of the law and of police. These offenses are also typically committed on a small scale, by one or a handful of individuals, and directed only against other particular individuals rather than against the law as an institution. Moreover, police and other public officials are usually able to enter the picture only after the fact, to punish the crime rather than prevent it.

A riot, by contrast, involves a large number of people openly and brazenly showing contempt for the law, and for the police and public officials who are sworn to uphold it. And it is not a brief episode that police can react to only after the fact, but an ongoing event that they can and must respond to as it happens. For public authorities to dither in the face of a riot, or to treat rioters with kid gloves, is to aid and abet the rioters in their aim of bringing the law and its representatives into contempt and making them appear ineffectual. Such toleration thus has an inherent tendency to weaken the state. In this way it is analogous to a failure to repel an act of war.