The Oathbreakers and the Coming Fascist Farce

Grim Thoughts about a Very Sad Election

I don't want to write a lot about politics here. The topic has become unwholesome, like religion in the last days of paganism. It does not uplift, but corrupts. It does not feed hope, but fear. It does not elevate virtue, but vice. I prefer to direct my exhortations to individuals. Never mind politics. You, right now, be more virtuous and lead a better life!

But of course, people must be virtuous as citizens and voters, too.

My negativity is not an even-handed bipartisan critique of the political establishment. On the contrary. The blame is far more one-sided than that. The characters in the political scene right now may be divided into (1) the insurrectionist felon; (2) a lot of lackeys and toadies and grifters and nut jobs who serve the insurrectionist felon, who might be called the unpatriots; and (3) many people of honor, with a wide variety of partisan backstories and policy preferences, but who are now united in a desperate attempt to rescue the republic, who might be called the constitutionalists, or simply the patriots, and whose flag bearer is Kamala Harris. 

Of the insurrectionist felon, with whose accursed name I won't defile this post, and of the unpatriots, the less one can think, the better. 

The patriots, by contrast, deserve our esteem and ardent support, but even they are unedifying to listen to, because they have to talk constantly about a yucky topic, namely, the great defiler, the insurrectionist felon, the obscene threat to freedom. That's very unfortunate. He is particularly obsessed with fame, with forcing others to constantly think about him, which seems to have been his chief reason for running for president. To talk about him is to heighten the incentive. It would be nice if we could all keep silent about him. 

But we can't let the American republic go down without fighting for it a bit.

The insurrectionist felon is running on fascism. On murdering shoplifters without trial. On revenge fantasies against his opponents. On racism and racial hatred: immigrants are “poisoning the blood of our nation.” On censorship of media outlets. On extreme economic nationalism. On ethnic cleansing of illegal immigrants. On sending the US military to attack American cities. On being a “dictator on day one.” On denying his 2020 election loss, and not apologizing for trying to overturn it, but on the contrary, pardoning people jailed for participating in his 2021 attempted coup.

I don't think he'll do most of that, because he's too lazy and senseless. It would require being effective, and effectiveness requires some virtue.

It's not that the constitutional guardrails in the United States are all that strong. They're like an old tree that looks strong, but that has been rotted from within. And a lookback at why is instructive.

This country was founded on a theistic liberalism of natural law. Once, we held these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal, and endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, that among these rights are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, and that to secure these rights governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. In other words, first of all there were natural rights conferred by God. Government was secondary and derivative, and only just insofar as it limited itself to protecting natural rights. On these principles, the Constitution was erected, and the republic waxed great and filled a continent. 

But what did the principles mean, after all? Are they true? Is there even a God at all? If not, or if we now fear to say so in the public square, then where do those “inalienable rights” come from? There’s no good answer. And so skepticism and secularism long since gnawed away at America's political creed from within. 

Over time, a kind of democratic fideism crept in, as a substitute for the old theistic liberalism of natural law. If God wasn't the source of morality, then the inheritor of His old authority had to be the government, and behind the government, the people, or the democratic majority thereof, who, like God, were always right.

We may be about to discover that the will of the people can be very, very wrong.

The democratic fideist fallacy has an illusory continuity with the founding fathers. “We the people,” began the Constitution. And it is constantly encouraged by politicians, as they flatter the people in search of votes. “All power corrupts,” wrote Lord Acton, “and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” That doesn't just apply to kings. It applies to the people, too. Constant flattery by electioneering politicians has corrupted them. Many are so corrupt that they do not feel bound by any virtues or loyalties in the voting booth. If they feel like it, they can vote for the worst person they've ever heard of just to be jerks and annoy their betters. It's their vote, to do with as they please. 

No, it's not. Voters shouldn't just do what they like in the voting booth. They have duties. To this I'll return. 

But the eclipse of robust belief in natural rights and social contracts by mere democratic fideism is a key reason why America's institutional safeguards can't be trusted anymore. Are liberty and truth right even against the will of the people? Yes! But too few of those who staff the apparatus of power have a brave and robust belief in that now. 

There are lots of people in Congress, in the federal agencies, and above all, in the courts, who know better than to yield to the narcissistic and tyrannical impulses of the insurrectionist felon. They know how to uphold liberal rule of law. But they've also been deeply shaped by a system which treats the will of the majority, expressed through elections, as sacred. If the insurrectionist felon is able to regain the mantle of elected legitimacy, it may be difficult even for well-intentioned judges to stand against him in the name of free speech or due process of law. There are times when democratic fideism can be fatal to democracy. So if a resolute fascist attack on the republic were to enjoy clear majority support, the republic might fall pretty easily.

Nonetheless, I don't think the insurrectionist felon will work hard enough to achieve that. What then? If, despite his rhetoric, he is too neurotic, vain, unfocused and lazy-minded to do the hard thinking and focused, systematic work to actually establish a fascist dictatorship, what will happen instead?

I'm no fan of Marx, but I like his dictum that “history repeats itself, the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.” He was speaking of Napoleon III, as a farcical echo of the great tragedy of Napoleon I. But I think the proverb has broader applicability, because lazy-minded nostalgia gives the patterns of the past easy access to many minds, and makes people and societies revert to past episodes. Old patterns return, but without the same passion and conviction, and without the configuration of forces that once gave them such terrible strength. And so tragedies return as farces. 

That's how I think contemporary populism should be read: as the farcical return of the old fascist tragedy. 

Reelected, the insurrectionist felon will double down on his disgusting persona and his contempt for the rule of law. He'll blab lots of things that aren't true, or don't make sense, and journalists will sometimes point out that they don't. I don't think most of them will fall silent out of fear. But they'll get a little exhausted with fact-checking him, especially when even his supporters don't seem to take his utterances seriously. And the lies and tomfoolery will fool some rubes and affect public discourse like pollution, making it foul and foggy. The whole thing will seem more like a very, very tiresome sick joke than like a new system of government. Many of the old routines of the republic will keep ticking on, unperturbed.

Lots of nasty, scandalous people will get appointed to office. Some will be exposed by journalists and shock the public, but again, the sheer volume of filth that the regime will perpetrate will beggar the press’s industriousness and bore audiences. Some will be so bad that they'll get fired. The politically appointed part of the civil service will become a snake pit of sleaze, corruption, criminality, incompetence, and abuse of power. But the abuses of power will be fairly uncoordinated, and won't cohere into the implementation of a fascist program.

There will probably be some watered-down fascist abuses of power from the top. Some TV networks may lose their licenses. Some violence against dissidents and minorities (especially immigrants). Some private violence is likely to be condoned, or actively incited, by the insurrectionist felon president. His appetite for power may drive him to seek ways to cancel or overturn the 2028 election somehow if he lives long enough for it to seem likely he'll have to stand in it. But the Democratic Party and the opposition media will still exist, and will still be defiant, with an obvious epistemic superiority that everyone of sense and intelligence, including many conservatives, will fully appreciate. Good people will resist as they can, and wait for the ugly show, the fascist farce, to end. 

Others who follow politics more closely may foresee many of these details better than I can. Yet there's a sense in which I think everyone is out of their depth here. No one foresaw this bizarre tolerance of half the American electorate for a repugant insurrectionist. In a way, anyone's guess is as good as anyone else's. So I may as well offer my guess, which is that this is just an interlude, not a revolution. 

In support of my doubts about the immediate establishment of a fascist dictatorship, bear in mind that last time he ran, he not only didn't fulfill his main campaign promises, but he hardly tried. When he ran for office in 2016, he didn't have much of a platform, but he campaigned strongly on two things at least: 

1. Build the Wall and make Mexico pay for it. 

2. “Lock her up,” i.e., lock up Hilary Clinton for alleged crimes involving improper security procedures for email when she was Secretary of State.

Promise (1) wasn't really feasible, in that the US has no power to command Mexico, other than, conceivably, through a kind of military intimidation that would have been totally illegal and impractical. But the US could have built the Wall with its own money. It would have been hard to get that through Congress. But he didn't really even try. I haven't noticed him even talking about it this time around. Perhaps it's lost its shock value.

Promise (2) was physically feasible. Legally, it would have been a travesty, but he could have tested the willingness of his subordinates to obey illegal presidential orders. Again, he didn't even try. 

I figure his campaign rhetoric will as little map onto anything he tries to do in office this time around as it did after 2016. I don’t think we’ll see a fascist tragedy, but just a fascist farce. Still, in its aftermath, it will be hard to put the Humpty Dumpty of liberal democracy back together again. The failure to jail the insurrectionist swiftly and permanently after he incited the attempted coup of January 6, 2021 was a disastrous mistake. Electoral integrity is very important to democracies. Other celebrities crazed with narcissism may have learned a ruinous lesson from this epic failure of the republic to defend its institutions. 

Elections will continue to happen, but they'll be less fair and trusted than they were, and it will always be uncertain, at best, whether their results will be accepted. Cheating may spread to both sides. A cynical whataboutism, a resigned abandonment of cherished norms because all scruples seem quixotic in a degraded age, will set in. After all, if you play by the rules, but the other side doesn't, aren't you just a sucker? Isn't stealing an election, a price worth pay to maintain freedom and the rule of law, or whatever your cause happens to be? 

A terrible precedent is being set. The American people have proved far less faithful to their democratic constitutional order than I think almost anyone imagined. All sorts of ambitious people and movements will begin, or have already begun, to imaginatively adapt their long-term plans to that new fact. It changes all the incentives. It points to factionalist kleptocracy, punctuated by occasional tactical violence and random or manipulated mob violence, likely at some point to escalate into civil war. 

In an analogy to the Roman Republic, think not a Julius Caesar crossing the Rubicon, but of Sulla. 

The economy will probably weather the change just fine, for the most part. America will still be better governed than many other places for a while, just because it will take a while to break all the good habits we've formed in the course of generations of liberal democratic rule. And even if it does degenerate into a corrupt kleptocracy, I think America will remain rich, because I think the wealth and poverty of nations has a lot more to do with human capital than with institutions. I don't think even civil war would do much long-run damage to the economy. There are plausible contrarian possibilities where a chaotic smash-up of American institutions clears away a bunch of red tape and proves beneficial. 

But never mind. For me, the maintenance of the republic is not a subject for cost-benefit analysis. It's a matter of primal loyalties. For I have made a promise. And probably you have, too. The words are old and familiar:

I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America, and to the Republic for which it stands, one nation, under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.

The Pledge of Allegiance was composed in 1892, completed with the addition of the phrase “under God” in 1954, and said daily by generations of American schoolchildren and my adult sent various public events. I've said it. I think it's gone out of fashion somewhat, but most adults have said it at one time or another. 

And this must be borne in mind when political philosophers casually dismiss the idea of a social contract as a fiction, as even I have done, at times, over the years. Is it really a fiction at all? They say it's a fiction because you never actually signed a social contract. No, but most of us have pledged allegiance to the flag. And to the Republic for which it stands. And we know that at the heart of that republic is the Constitution. 

I have no idea how many times I've said the pledge of allegiance in my life. I couldn't estimate it even to within an order of magnitude. I remember, or I think I remember, that I once confronted a second-grade teacher with a conscientious objection to saying it. I had a notion that one wasn't supposed to say the word “God,” except in church or something, because that was “taking the Lord's name in vain.” But the second-grade teacher turned out to be a member of my church (I was Mormon at the time) and alleviated my concerns. From that memory, I assume that it must have been the custom in that second-grade classroom to say the pledge of allegiance daily. Otherwise, I have no memory of it. Where else does one say it, or did one say it? At ball games? At the 4th of July events, or Memorial Day parades? I don't remember. 

And yet I do remember, quite confidently, that I have said the Pledge of Allegiance. So it doesn't really matter how many times. 

It seems to me that the habit of saying the Pledge of Allegiance cast a wide enough net that almost all adult Americans must have done it at some point. 

So there is a social contract after all! There are mutual promises, our pledges of allegiance in return for all the rights and privileges of citizenship. It’s not an explicit quid pro quo exactly, but there’s meaningful mutuality of rights and duties, privileges and obligations, binding us together. And while the words of the pledge are few, we have lots of civic context to understand what is incorporated by allusion in the phrase “the republic for which it stands.” We know it means the Constitution and all that follows from that.

One thing I'm pretty sure of is that I never experienced the making of the Pledge of Allegiance as a decision point. I never said it with a feeling that I was binding myself to do anything. That's not because I wasn't taking it seriously. It's because I already took for granted that any duties I pledged myself to were mine already. It was not a promise but a reaffirmation. I had been told there was a social contract, rooted in the Mayflower Compact and the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. That, of course, was where the power of government came from. Thence the laws derived their force. I never thought of denying my allegiance, or denying the authority of the democratically constituted laws to judge me and give me obligations. I suppose my assumption, never articulated, was that I drank it in with my mother's milk. 

Later, when my critical intellect had awakened, I began to see through much of the body of civic assumptions that I learned in youth as a kind of myth. The reflections that led me to that discovery were prompted partly by conscientious disagreements with, or doubts about, some things that government did, such as making war, or deporting immigrants. Still, in general, to pull the rug out from under the republic, to overthrow or topple it, was the last thing I wanted. My motivated reasoning in political theory sought to affirm and uphold, not to overthrow, the Constitution and democratic legitimacy. 

And not until I began writing this post did I realize that my loyalty to the republic was not just a political preference or a national habit. It was locked in through a promise that I have made. For I have said the Pledge of Allegiance. 

Now, if I have, after all, sworn loyalty to the Republic and its Constitution, what duties follow from that? Of course, I shouldn't go sign up for the armed forces of a power at enmity with the United States. I shouldn't join a terrorist cell and try to blow up the White House. I shouldn't join the Communist Party. 

But also, when I'm in the voting booth, I have a duty to vote for elected officials and above all presidential candidates who will uphold the Constitution. 

In January of 2025, one of two people will take the presidential oath to uphold the Constitution. We know that one of them will not mean it. He already proved that, when he stirred up a mob to attack the Capitol on January 6, 2021, in order to try to overturn the results of a democratic election, so that he wouldn't have to surrender the presidential office as the Constitution requires. Of course, his words and passions have always been totally inimical to a constitutional republic with due process of law. It was totally clear to me in 2016 that he was unfit to be president. But perhaps there was a little more excuse then for people getting that wrong. Now we know. 

I have made the Pledge of Allegiance. Therefore, it is my duty to vote for the one candidate who will uphold the Constitution. If I failed to vote for Kamala Harris, knowing what I know, understanding what I understand, I would have broken my promise. My pledge of allegiance would have become a lie. 

And many others’ pledges of allegiance are about to become lies. 

It's a bit of a sacrifice for me to vote for Democrats, for I was always part of Tribe Republican, and the leaders I most admire are all Republicans: Abraham Lincoln, Barry Goldwater, Ronald Reagan, John McCain, and above all, George W. Bush. I've voted for all the Democratic opponents of the public enemy, but I used to vote for down-ticket Republicans along with Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden. 

But I've grown accustomed to it and now do it with patriotic joy, because my identity as an American is more important than my old identity as a Republican. I love Kamala Harris with great enthusiasm, I think she's wonderful, fabulous, a paragon of virtuous rule, for one reason: that I'm confident she'll take up the most powerful office in the world, and then lay it down again voluntarily in four years, if the people choose another president at that time, or in eight years at the most. That's amazing. What's even more amazing is that the great American people lived like that for over two hundred years. All their politicians either felt such loyalty to the Constitution as overrode all their personal ambition, or else they believed, and thought they knew for certain, that the American people were so loyal to their Constitution that they would never have any tolerance for a president who tried to stay in power unconstitutionally. Or both. 

All past American presidents were paragons of virtue compared to the insurrectionist felon. We Americans were very lucky, oh so lucky, to have them. And I knew it. I may have complained about presidents like Obama and Clinton, presidents of the other party, and I preferred Republican presidents, but I knew that even Democrats were a hundred times better than Hitler and Stalin and King George III and Pinochet and the shah of Iran and the rest of them, all the power hungry thugs who seized power, and all the complacent hereditary kings born to sovereign power without having earned popular consent and were generally lazy, clumsy, vicious and corrupt in varying degrees because power corrupted them, or simply because they had no talent for it has never learned how to wield it in the public interest. I knew America was better governed, more competently and more justly, than the countless human societies that came before or that continued down to the present without having benefited from our democratic enlightenment, because we were faithful to our Constitution. I thought then, and still think to some extent though less so, that America was so prosperous and powerful and innovative, and such a force for good in the world, because we were faithful to our Constitution. When I criticized presidents like Clinton and Obama, I knew that I was criticizing them compared to the Republican alternative that was on offer at the time, but that I would much prefer them to any foreign or undemocratic rulers.

And I felt confident that it would always continue thus, or at least for my lifetime. I didn't extrapolate out to centuries, and once, when I read in a book a casual phrase about the times when the American presidents should number to the three digits, it was rather an exhilarating new idea to imagine the American republic lasting that long. Perhaps it seemed unlikely that we should be so lucky. After all, many, many democracies have fallen. And yet I attributed to all my living fellow citizens the same loyalty to the Constitution that I felt myself. I assumed that none of them would ever condone a president simply retaining power after losing an election. I expected it no more than I expected a year without an Easter, or than I expected winter to follow spring, or the sun to set at noon. Presidential elections, and the gracious or grudging acceptance of them by the losing side, seemed almost as natural as the cycle of the seasons of the day. Was it irrational? I think I did have an odd feeling, which went too deep to be fully criticized, that Americans had more civic virtue than other peoples of the world by a kind of divine right. But then, we were so evidently such a fortunate nation that it made sense that we should be extremely loyal and faithful to the Constitution that made us so. 

And anyway, we had promised. We had said the Pledge of Allegiance. 

And yet a few days from now, tens of millions will have voted for an insurrectionist.

J.R.R. Tolkien, in The Return of the King, has a haunting passage about a people who broke a promise. Aragorn tells the tale:

‘The oath that they broke was to fight against Sauron, and they must fight therefore, if they are to fulfil it. For at Erech there stands yet a black stone that was brought, it was said, from Numenor by Isildur; and it was set upon a hill, and upon it the King of the Mountains swore allegiance to him in the beginning of the realm of Gondor. But when Suaron returned and grew in might again, Isildur summoned the Men of the Mountains to fulfil their oath, and they would not: for they had worshiped Sauron in the Dark Years.

‘Then Isildur said to their king: “Though shalt be the last king. And if the West prove mightier than thy Black Master, this curse I lay upon thee and thy folk: to rest never until your oath is fulfilled. For this war will last through years uncounted, and you shall be summoned once again ere the end.” And they fled before the wrath of Isildur, and did not dare to go forth to war on Sauron’s part; and they hid themselves in secret places in the mountains and had no dealings with other men, but slowly dwindled in the barren hills. And the terror of the Sleepless Dead lies about the Hill of Erech and all places where that people lingered.’ (Return of the King, chapter 2, page 59)

I wonder how Tolkien would have narrated the history of the nation of oathbreakers between Isildur and Aragorn.

What would it be like to live among a people shamed by treachery, and slowly falling under a curse? Would Tolkien have described them as recognizong the truth of Isildur's curse from the beginning? Or would they have disbelieved it, or simply forgotten it, for a while? Would they congratulate themselves, for a time, on having avoided participating in the war, and seeing sons and brothers and husbands die in it? Would they try to justify themselves, pretending that their pledge of allegiance to Gondor had been invalid somehow, or perhaps taking the general line that it's not necessary to keep any promises?

Did they find their faithlessness to Gondor had its echo in faithlessness amongst themselves, and that more of them stole and broke deals and cheated each other? Did they try to take refuge in innocent pleasures that they had once enjoyed, and find that they were spoiled? Did they indulge in them to excess, seeking to recapture some lost thrill that had been possible to them in their days of innocence? Did they realize gradually that even death would not, for them, provide a refuge from shame? Did they begin to guess, before they dare to say it aloud? And then, when some began to say it aloud, did some reluctantly acknowledge, while some angrily denied it? How would Tolkien have told the story? And was his imagination influenced by the experience of Vichy France? 

Let me hasten to recall the words of Jesus, who said “judge not that he be not judged,” and “forgive them, Father for they know not what they do.” There is also the popular saying, “They didn't know any better.” Likewise, I have no doubt there are many Americans who have said the Pledge of Allegiance and just never thought about what implications that might have for whether they can justly vote for a presidential candidate who has fomented an insurrection against the United States. Just possibly, someone planning to vote for the insurrectionist read this post, realize he or she has a promise to keep, and vote the right way.

Does that make a difference? Of course, if someone is mentally incapable of remembering or understanding a promise, that presumably does mitigate their guilt for not keeping it. But it is still a reason not to trust them. It still gives a kind of unreality to all their words, and cuts them off from certain possibilities of real friendship or community. 

We are about to become a nation of oathbreakers. Not all will have proven faithless, but tens of millions will have. It's an eerie feeling that I'll soon be interacting with the oathbreakers. People at the grocery store checkout lane, people in fast food restaurants, colleagues at work, will have voted for an insurrectionist. Usually, I won't know which are which. The honest Harris voters and the oathbreakers will look alike, talk alike, celebrate the same holidays, pay the same taxes. I've already, for many years, tried to either minimize social contact with MAGA loudmouths, or else intimidate them into silence by boldly standing for conscience and reason. I've been largely successful in this. As far as I recall, no one in my circle of acquaintance utters MAGA filth in my presence. But some may vote that way. And certainly many in the population with whom I casually deal must vote that way. It's weird for the externals of national community to still be present when the moral substance is absent.

Let this declaration ring down the decades: I for one will be faithful son of the American republic, whatever happens, for as long as I live. I have made a promise. And anyway, I owe too much to the American republic to betray it. Many others, I think, will also, stay faithful. We will never yield in our contempt for the new empire of lies. We will dream of getting the Constitution back, of a people bound together by promises that they hold sacrosanct, of honest government and the rule of law. Of a nation under God with liberty and justice for all. 

In case there is any misunderstanding, let me distance myself here from any proposals of violent resistance that may circulate in the next few months. There is a right of revolution in extremis. Sometimes there is even a duty of revolution. The Egyptians should have overthrown Pharaoh to prevent the murder of the Hebrew infants, and because they failed in that duty, all the plagues with which God afflicted them were justified. That time may yet come. But it was wisely said that he who lives by the sword dies by the sword, and violent revolution very rarely does net good. 

By contrast, civil disobedience has great power. To publicly disobey an unjust law and accept the punishment, letting your life be the witness of truth, is not only glorious, but effective. From Socrates to the Christian martyrs to Mahatma Gandhi to the draft card burners to the African American civil rights movement to the Polish Solidarity movement that brought down communism, civil disobedience has been the great liberator of the world. Victories in war and electoral politics come and go. But the victories of civil disobedience last. In civil disobedience, one loves one's enemies, and trusts in them to see the error of their ways. The victories of civil disobedience belong as much to those who let themselves be overcome by it, and who turn from the wrong to the right from a position of strength, as to the oppressed who, by their courage, turn victimhood into victory. Be on the lookout for every opportunity to sacrifice by disobeying unjust laws, in hopes of awakening the consciences of the onlookers. Such sacrifices, even amidst all the chances of life, have, I suspect, the most positive net impact, on average, of any action that human beings take.

American history features some great advances in liberty which were won by force of arms. Independence from Great Britain and the establishment of a republic. The freeing of the slaves. The liberation of Europe from Nazi rule. But even then, non-violent tactics were crucial to preparing the ground. The Western democracies tried to appease Hitler before they fought him. The abolitionists ran the underground railroad and freed slaves by sheltering them in their homes, before they ended slavery through war. And before the colonials launched their American Revolution, they boycotted the East India Company and refused to drink tea. Likewise, let the faithful citizens of the American Republic try all non-violent means before even thinking about launching a revolution. Maybe a good place to start is to boycott Elon Musk and other corporate executives who collaborate with the new thugocracy.

And above all, live in truth. Contradict the lies of the new regime whenever you hear them. Make people afraid to utter them in your presence. Say the things that most urgently need to be said, as I am doing in this post. I know there's some personal risk. Many of the organizations that I would be likeliest to work for will be tempted to silence and compromise, to accommodating the new regime. I just might hurt future job prospects by this bit of candor. Potential future employers may not like an outspoken advocate of truth on their payrolls. So be it. If we are on the verge of the fall of the great American republic which I love so much, then I want to have some skin in the game.

Federal bureaucrats, your job, if the wrong side wins, is to leak, leak, leak. Don't betray the republic by your silence. Evil things are done in shadow. It is sometimes appropriate for a democratic regime that enjoys the people's trust to keep some secrets, lest they fall into the wrong hands. But that trust is being shattered by the oathbreakers. Now, if you get an illegal order, don't just disobey it, but tell the press. 

One of the things I love about the knights is the way they were faithful to the dream of Rome centuries after it should have died. One of the early paragons of chivalry, Charlemagne, styled himself Roman emperor, and the aspiration is admirable even if the attempt was a bit absurd when so many cultural patterns crucial to Roman continuity had been lost. Later kings in the high age of chivalry brought back Roman laws. And the knights fought by rules and for lofty causes like soldiers of ancient Rome, and cared about law and honor. I hope, and to some extent I even foresee, that my class, the college-educated, computer-wielding professionals, will remain faithful to the American republic and its ideals which the mostly ill-educated oathbreakers have betrayed. The American republic may never be reconstituted in a form that is continuous with the American republic of my youth. But in one way or another, I believe that American ideals, the best template of law in civil society that the human race has ever drafted, will rise again.

In The Return of the King, the nation of oathbreakers finally got a chance to redeem themselves. In the Battle of the Pelennor Fields, they turned the tide of victory against the hosts of Sauron. I'm sorry to say it, but with the way things are going in the world, it seems rather likely that the American oathbreakers will soon have a chance, or be compelled, to join some Battle of the Pelennor Fields against the rising forces of darkness. We cannot know what the future holds, except that the promises of God will somehow be fulfilled. Things we couldn’t help but feel were practically eternal, like the Roman empire or the American republic, can fall.

But conscience remains. We can live in truth. That's always possible for those who are willing to pay the price. We can keep clear of lying. And we can remember and keep our promises.

Kamala Harris for president.