Replies

Civil disobedience, to be effective, has to be based on sound moral reasoning. That, and the commitment to disobey bad law, are contained in the Manhattan Declaration, found here:

http://www.manhattandeclaration.org/

This is really a contest between the positivists and the natural law folks. Positivists will tell you the law is binding simply because the legislator wrote it down and passed it. Natural law says a written law must resonate with universal moral truth or it loses its ability to bind the conscience, and is therefore exposed as bad law. And bad law must be disobeyed, although one must be very sure it violates essential moral principles before calling it bad law.

The signatories of the Manhattan Declaration are committed to disobeying bad law, as all reasonable people should be. If enough people make that commitment, it will make the law unenforceable, and that’s the big win for our side.

This already happened with RealID. It was an unfunded federal mandate on the states, just like healthcare would be, but so many states told the fed to pound sand (er, invoked the tenth amendment), the fed just walked away. The states won. This is doable.

As for the playbook of the left, some of it is usable, some is not. There is usually a relationship between tactics and philosophy. Stalin killed millions because his debased philosophy allowed him to do so. That is a technique of the left that I hope will never be in our playbook. In fact, nothing that detracts from the rule of law or diminishes respect for one’s fellow humans should ever be used by conservatives.

A nation-wide strike is interesting. There is a risk that just you and me will participate and no one in DC will notice. So it would have to be threshold contingent, i.e., it doesn’t launch until we get an assured number of participants. It needs a website. And a catchy name. Still got some thinking to do...