Dec. 21, 2010 (Salon) -- Different ideas about the rule of law in the United States and a certain nation in Latin America were explained to me once by a distinguished professor of law from that country. "In your country, the Constitution and the laws are considered to be binding," he told me with an ironic smile. "In my country, they are considered to be ... aspirations."
Further evidence, if any is needed, that the 21st century U.S. is degenerating into a banana republic can be found from the increasingly casual attitude toward the law that is displayed all across the American political spectrum. Liberals, conservatives and centrists, it seems, all agree that laws are aspirations, not commands. Individuals should be free to selectively disobey laws of which they personally disapprove. What is more, there seems to be a consensus that the American nation as a whole has no obligation to obey the system of international laws that the U.S., more than any other nation, spent much of the 20th century attempting to promote.
Most of the American left has made a hero of Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks. For Assange's admirers, the embarrassment that his publication of stolen government and corporate documents produces for government policymakers, bankers or corporate executives whom they dislike more than compensates for the theft of classified or private information on a grand scale. The idea that the law in its majesty is supposed to protect the bad as well as the good apparently is rejected by those who celebrate information vandalism, as long as its victims are the State Department or big banks.
When it comes to immigration, many progressives have not been content to argue for a path to legalization on the part of many illegal immigrants. Much of the left has attempted to erase any distinctions between legal and illegal immigration -- for example, by denouncing critics of illegal immigrants and the scofflaw businesses that employ them as "anti-immigrant." To read much of the liberal blogosphere, it would appear that immigrating to the U.S. by following U.S. laws, and immigrating to the U.S. by breaking those same laws, are equally legitimate.
READ MORE: Salon
