Who does not love an evening walk in the late spring and early summer?  The birds in the trees, a cool breeze against one’s face.  If you are fortunate to be with a loved one, you may be talking over your day or even your dreams, perhaps enjoying the silence together.  Or maybe you are a solitary walker lost in the reveries of the night.   Many of us in this time of pandemic have rediscovered the invigorating joys of an evening walk.  It’s the activity of a free man or woman in a free country to wander off wherever you want and think your thoughts.  No need to show your papers or identification, no one tracking your steps.  Maybe in times like these you might decide to walk out to one of the many demonstrations taking place across the nation.  No doubt a scene of anger, rage, and emotion, but also a place of hope; just being there amongst others, even in our masks, is a good thing.  There have been fewer cars on the roads these last few months; it’s a new thing to be able to walk in the actual streets.  The air seems cleaner; the sky bluer.

Our president likes to take evening walks too.  On June 1^st, Trump decided to take an evening walk through the park to church.  He does not like to walk alone; he travels with a mob of security guards and generals.  He has police clear a path before him.

He forewarned us before he did it.  Earlier in the day, Trump called for U.S. governors to dominate U.S. citizens exercising their first amendment rights.  On a June 1^st telephone call with governors, Trump told them, “You have to dominate, if you don’t dominate you’re wasting your time.”  In his first public address since the outbreak of protest around the nation for the murder of George Floyd, Trump devoted a couple sentences to Floyd’s death.  The rest of the speech was a quasi-declaration of martial law – military troops would enter the streets of Washington and cities across the country to quell opposition; curfews would be enforced.  Trump said, “Therefore, the following measures are going into effect immediately. First, we are ending the riots and lawlessness that has spread throughout our country. We will end it now.  Today I have strongly recommended to every governor to deploy the national guard in sufficient numbers that we dominate the streets.”

Trump even couched his words in nationalist symbols, decrying that the Lincoln Memorial and World War II Monument had been vandalized, a pretense for using force against his own citizens.  Never mind that Lincoln labored to end slavery and keep the nation together, neither of which Trump understands in the least.  Never mind that the soldiers of World War II fought to free the world from fascism and tyrannical autocrats; if ever there was an organized antifa, they were it. 

More recently at a rally at Mount Rushmore on July 3rd, Trump said, “Our nation is witnessing a merciless campaign to wipe out our history, defame our heroes, erase our values, and indoctrinate our children.”  He added, “Angry mobs are trying to tear down statues of our founders, deface our most sacred memorials, and unleash a wave of violent crime in our cities.”  The speech goes on like this, taking aim at “left-wing fascism” and those who want to end America.  If we did not know better, we would think Trump was talking about a foreign enemy trying to destroy the United States.   But no, Trump is talking about his fellow Americans.  It is the natural progression – first Trump set his target on immigrants, and now he has it on U.S. citizens exercising their constitutional rights. 

This is the way of tyrants.  Trump’s clearing of Lafayette park so he could stroll to St. John’s Church for a photo-op with a bible is the moment he crossed the line from being an authoritarian leaning leader to being a tyrant.  Leaders who attack their own people are tyrants.  Think of the crackdown in Tiananmen Square, the slaughter of Sulla’s enemies in the Campus Martius, the Bloody Sunday massacre in Nicholas II’s Russia.  No, Trump has not ordered the kinds of brutal attacks just listed, but breaking up a lawful demonstration with the use of force just to perform an act of propaganda is a step along the path.  Foreign enemies can be a good thing for a tyrant.  They’re a good distraction and a rallying cry for nationalism and adoration of the leader.  Domestic enemies are a nuisance at best, a legitimate threat at worst (Aristotle Politics 5.11.1313a34-1315b10).  A tyrant wages war on his people the way most nations wage war on a foreign enemy. 

Free citizens do not allow tyrants to remain in power.  We can either be free or we can be dominated.  We can’t be both.  We are fortunate to have an opportunity to peacefully elect a new president this fall.  Perhaps it is already time to envision what the walk to our polling station will be like on November 3rd.  We may also want to prepare for the walk to the protest on November 4th.

Resources

ACLU, Know Your Rights: Protesters’ Rights.

Mary Nyquist, Arbitrary Rule: Slavery, Tyranny, and the Power of Life and Death, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013.

Mark Bray, Antifa: The Anti-Fascist Handbook, New York: Melville House, 2017.