Early in the fifth century, a masterpiece of literature was produced. Entitled The City of God, the now classic consolation was composed by a man destined to become the foremost scholar of the early Christian Church.
Saint Augustine wrote his renowned work under terrible conditions though, for the age he lived through was one nothing short of utter chaos and upheaval. Only a few short years had passed since Visigoth armies had taken the city of Rome by force — ransacking the symbolic headquarters of the civilized world in an Earth-shattering feat that no barbarian tribe had dared undertake for some eight centuries.
Thus, by Augustine’s day, the Roman Empire was collapsing — and with it, many of the principles that had laid the groundwork for what we moderns call the Rule of Law.
One profound remark from Saint Augustine’s extensive work can illustrate the crux of a dire condition our modern society now finds for itself: “Without justice, what is government but organized robbery?” In other words, if the State ceases to reflect the very essence of its social function — the honest pursuit of Justice — Augustine correctly reasoned that no real way is left to distinguish such an organization from a common band of thieves and criminals.
Although the Roman way of life perished not long after Saint Augustine’s death, the Catholic bishop’s influential treatment of this crisis survives to this day. Unfortunately, several of the lessons within his treatise may be going the way of the ancient order they were written under, for by no means is it an exaggeration to say that Western civilization is once again on the brink of ruin — not from external forces such as barbarian tribes, but from an inner corrosion of honest character.
We do not have to look far to see this barbaric internal decline. Underneath the rubric of the coronavirus pandemic, for the last year and a half, practically every state across the country has been subjected to arbitrary one-man rule, whereby nearly all state governments throughout the union — red or blue — have been wholly subsumed beneath apparent wannabe dictatorships.
Even in my own backyard of West Virginia, where mountaineers are supposedly always free, the current governor’s administration — whose proper job is restricted to merely enforcing the law — illicitly usurped this very limited authority.
Seemingly taking their cue from one another, governors across the country took it upon themselves to systematically reshape the very underpinnings of American government. Going far beyond slight violations like small alterations to the laws by their own accord, this abuse of power was so pervasive it extended to the creation of entire new laws on a whim, decreeing them at will, and repealing any of them altogether. To restate the fundamental transgression: In state by state throughout this country, all these radical actions have been carried out — and continue to be threatened — solely at the haphazard discretion of one solitary person. With few exceptions, the chief executive of your state has become the law. Even the most fixed and longstanding protections from the Bill of Rights have not fully withstood these messy tirades of one-man rule.
This is no tiny problem, for in our own era, one of the key means to reference the classic principle of justice that Saint Augustine described can be found within our written Constitution. This document, which all our elected leaders swear to uphold, expresses immutable ideals — first principles that demand fidelity, which in turn, help to serve as an objective standard that can determine the just from the unjust. Although the full-fledged departure from instantiating the form of justice within American government began many years ago, today, the brazen effort of forsaking this essential virtue is shamelessly paraded on full display through the blatant rejection of the spirit of constitutional law.
For starters, anyone who can recall their basic lessons from eighth-grade civics class knows that only the legislative branch has the rightful ability to make the laws — not the executive. What’s more, these new-fangled illicit executive commands are not harmless prescriptions that tweak minor regulations. To the contrary, these wide-sweeping edicts are more reflective of totalitarian decrees that are not merely different by degree, but different entirely by kind.
Of these come the inability to leave your own home, the total prohibition of engaging in commerce under the roof of your very own business, sanctions against working and producing — if only to earn enough to put food on your table — along with severe restrictions against the most rudimentary means of travel and the constant disruption of your children’s education.
Perhaps most staggering, in direct violation of the First Amendment, last year these newly-styled regimes, occupying state capitals throughout the nation, shuttered the most basic American rights to peacefully assemble, directly restricting — and even outright banning — the ability to worship as you see fit. In a majority of states, many of these unlawful orders were carried out, while some were implied. But almost as important to note — even in my home of rural West Virginia — no hard limits to these newfound powers have been conceded by the novel regimes headed by these would-be despots.
Of course, with the COVID-19 pandemic acting as a sort of catalyst behind this continued perversion of power, the reasons for the rejection of Saint Augustine’s justice — or what Thomas Aquinas would later call the natural law — can, at best, be reduced to the worn-out utilitarian maxim of “the greatest good for the greatest number”—an intellectually bankrupt ethic which can typically attack the dignity of the individual, leading towards a view where individuals have no intrinsic value in themselves. Once this is accepted, people can be used as mere instruments toward the accomplishment of some vague and undefinable value whereby the ends will always tend to justify the means.
Because of the highly subjective nature of the utilitarian creed, it should come as no surprise that such an ambiguous idea has been very useful to validate the actions of virtually every tyrant throughout history.
But charges of grounding judgment within a utilitarian approach is rather charitable treatment, because at worst, the regimes that have overtaken so many states may have no real ethical framework driving their actions at all. In this regard — which I suspect could be the case — all that is really considered amounts to what Friedrich Nietzsche termed The Will to Power — a fanatical understanding that denies the existence of ethical universals altogether.
In fact, under this Nietzschean method, morality itself is seen as a measly human invention. Therefore, if moral codes flimsily stand as only manmade constructs, then ethical obligations can be dismissed, while all of morality can be wholly dismantled — so long as it’s convenient and self-serving to do so.
Underneath this dark light, the only thing left to discuss then is the sustained realization of raw power for its own sake. Insofar as they are successful in assisting with this unadulterated pursuit of power, all political actions, however atrocious they may be, can easily earn vindication from regimes which quietly cling to such brute beliefs.
Irrespective of this, many of these governors, who seem to care more about their appearance on television than the duty to uphold the rule of law, are not the only office-holders responsible for this systematic abuse of power. In fact, my own experience in the Statehouse has demonstrated that while some lawmakers have genuinely pushed back against this depravity, they are the exception to the rule. Many delegates and senators who have served for years in the state Legislature — all the while preaching against the overreach of government and the dire need for strict limitations — have stood idly by and tolerated this defilement of constitutional order.
Even worse, in direct opposition to their solemn oaths of office, many state legislators have also actively aided and abetted the decay of proper law — and in so doing, reaped the rewards of political patronage with appointments to new cabinet positions and the six-figure salaries that typically accompany them. These legislators too then must also share in the blame for the gross violations of lawful political authority, for this pattern is likely not limited to my home in West Virginia.
The decadence of these regimes overtaking our states have brought back the radical idea of one-man rule — and now stand more akin to monarchy than anything which might resemble the republican check-and-balance system once conceived by the Baron de Montesquieu. If we are to curtail the social damage, strong efforts must be undertaken to avert this warped notion from becoming more legitimized. After all, one-man rule has been so foreign and egregious to the American way of life that our ancestors once fought and died to eradicate it.
Little logic is required to realize the outright danger that such “new world orders” can bring to our present society. That they have continued for so long though stands as a menace to the future of our traditional political system. In the end, the maintenance of a free republic can often rest on the virtue of its citizens. It is with hope then that many Americans can find solace by remembering they are not descended from men and women who were lacking in character.
