It's a funny thing that I see sometimes-- often-- coming from lawyers: the notion of law and order as the only viable way of doing ... much of anything. We, of all people in our society, arguably some of the most individually powerful in our society, refuse to see the limits on the exercise of our power. We represent the avenues, the channels, through which legal change (or stasis) tends to flow, and we like to think of ourselves as necessary, indispensable, for the advancement of ...
... most anything.
It's foolishness, of course. Law-abiding behavior is not the only way to bring about change; it's just the form that we hope change will take, because that involves the least upset to our lives. In the past, change has worn the face of chaos, many, many times. Power does not come only, or even mostly, from the law, and it is only through great effort that we keep power flowing mostly through lawful channels. In some sense, it is more natural for power to be wielded and abused freely by those who possess it than for that power to be limited by, say, constitutional principles. Our "great experiment," our constitutional, representative democracy, is a system operating forever under pressure. Too much pressure overall, or too much in the wrong place, and it can break-- and the greatest foolishness of all is to think that our nation is in any way immune from that kind of event.
The words "American exceptionalism" are getting brandished about by the right wing with enthusiasm, these days-- suggesting, essentially, that American leadership is ordained and demanded by God or destiny. These same people tend to cast the "Occupy Wall Street" movement as a pack of vicious scofflaws incapable of getting anything done.
I think that the first of these attitudes will be seen by history as a horrendous, ironic mistake: America can be strong through care and balance, through careful guardianship of our government and our role in the world. For us to act the part of the Blues Brothers, on a happy-go-lucky "mission from God," is to throw away the exact carefulness that our system demands of us.
I think that ignoring the second, much like ignoring or dismissing the "Tea Party," is a similarly dire mistake, a failure to recognize the signs of internal strain. And the more lawless the protests become, the stronger the challenge they pose to civil authorities, the more they should be recognized for the warning they represent.
What is coming, precisely, I do not know, but rather than sneering that the OWS activists need to learn that the way to "get things done" is "through the courts and legislature," we need to make sure that those routes are a viable method of bringing change about. Law and order need not collapse entirely for the next page of history to be written in a fair few buckets of blood, but it does need to fail on some level. Rather than declare confidently that it can't or won't, the more productive course seems to be making sure that it doesn't.
