The Regime v. America
12th March 2024
The American legal system was a thing of beauty. Refined across centuries and emerging from the precedence of millions of common law cases, by the end of the last millennium it had become the envy of the world. Serving both a dispute resolution and truth-seeking function, it channeled the violent passions of human nature into a controlled medium. It then subjected those passions to standardized procedures (the rules of evidence and civil or criminal procedure) to yield judgments that commanded the respect of the parties and the public.
The American rule of law sustained our capacity for self-governance. The legal system midwifed the most sophisticated property rights regime in the world, improved our collective reasoning faculties, balanced the imperative of change with the demands of tradition, and settled disputes of trivial insignificance as well as controversies of monumental importance. The system functioned so well that most Americans never even thought about it. And it commanded such astonishing respect that virtually everyone obeyed its commands in even the most partisan contests.
But today, sophisticated regime mandarins in Big Law, government, and non-profit activist organizations seek to pervert our legal system by hacking it. They warp its dispute resolution and truth-seeking function to one that advances and sustains their grip on power, delegitimizing that grip in the process. This is known as lawfare. Its variants include access denial, weaponized defamation law, weaponized criminal law, misuse of federal and state agencies, subversive professional licensing requirements, and “adversarial inversion.”