Thursday, August 14, 2025

Part I

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Order Precedes Liberty: President Trump Cracks Down on Crime and Homelessness in D.C.

Well, Donald Trump has decided to federalize, at least for 30 days, the police force in Washington D.C. The president made the announcement indicating what he declared would be a liberation day in D.C. And almost immediately you had people on the left and in the Democratic Party claiming that this is another autocratic move, another sign of the end of democracy, but the president of the United States has the authority to do exactly what President Trump has now done. The takeover of local law enforcement, or at least the supervisory role, the federal intervention is date-stamped about 30 days, but it all comes under a federal act that goes back to 1973, having to do with home rule in the District of Columbia.

Now, there are some very interesting things to unwind here. There’s some massive issues of worldview significance at stake. Is this likely to be a turning point in American history? No, probably not. Is it an important sign of an urgently important issue? Yes, it precisely is. And this is where I think many people on the Left and in particular in the Democratic Party just don’t have a clue about what’s going on, and their response to the president’s action is just making that point very clear. So what should we be seeing? Well, at the most basic worldview level, what we need to understand is that the first responsibility of government is to maintain peace and order. That’s the very first responsibility of government, and that means that a government that doesn’t do that is a government that is, in one sense, illegitimate.

At least it’s failing, it’s failing and it’s first essential task. And this is another biblical insight, and that is that order precedes liberty. The exercise of liberty can only take place in a context of regulated and respected order. You have to have the order in place, you have to have say, the entire regime of law in place to some extent before you can then exercise liberty because liberty has to be exercised within a certain context, and that context requires order. And so you look at the fact throughout world history, you can make all kinds of claims about rights, let’s just say freedom of assembly or the freedom of speech or whatever. And of course those were not clearly articulated as we know them until the modern age. But the fact is you can assure those rights, you can declare those rights, but if people cannot safely go into the streets, you don’t really have any freedom of assembly.

And if someone is afraid of being killed just for saying something that someone else doesn’t like, you don’t have any freedom of speech. It requires order. And by the way, this is one of the earliest things that is revealed in Scripture. Genesis 1 reveals the differentiation between the waters and the land, the sky and the surface of the earth. It makes very clear the creation of the moon and the sun, and thus you have a cosmological reality coming into being. And then here on planet earth, here where God’s creation of beings has taken place, you have the creation of plants, and then you have the creation of animals, and then you have ultimately the creation of human beings as the one creature made in God’s image, in the Creator’s image. That is order, and disorder is the enemy of order.

And that’s something else that shows up in the book of Genesis. And in particular where we read of Noah, and again, the flood is a return to chaos. The reordering that comes even with the a new covenant after the waters are seeded from the flood, then again you have order out of disorder. The worst curse upon a people upon a nation would be disorder because disorder means the dissolution of the entire project of the entire people. So order precedes liberty. Now, we affirm liberty, but it’s ordered liberty, where you don’t have order, you really don’t have that liberty. 

And so one of the things we see here is that when President Trump makes the announcement of law and order, so to speak, in Washington D.C., he’s doing so over against a background of chaos and crime. And even though you have people saying, look, some of the violent crime statistics have been going down, Washington is still in most lists on the top five when it comes to so many of these crimes. It is a complete embarrassment to the United States of America that our capital city, indeed the federal district, is marked by so much disorder, so much criminality. Indeed, one of the things the President went on to talk about was the disorder, as evidenced on people on the street and the encampments of homeless people. And of course right now that’s politicized the “unhoused,” some want to say. But the point is that in a lot of the major cities in the world, but let’s just come to the United States and a lot of America’s largest cities, you have huge encampments of people who are really, they’ve pulled themselves out of the normal society and they are now living in these encampments in such a way that it’s very much like in historical terms what you had say on the frontiers of Europe where you had different groups that simply had no home, they had no place, they just went from place to place, and they’re a symbol of disorder in this situation.

And you have a disordered society in which you could have this many people just living in these encampments. And by the way, here you do have a liberal conservative fault line. The liberal conservative fault line comes down over crime and law enforcement, the civil liberties movement, which after all, let’s be clear, conservatives and liberals believe in civil liberties. The point is that you have a liberal ideology that from the middle point of the 20th century basically wants the liberties without the order, and often actually makes the very clear argument that order infringes upon those liberties. And so you take groups like the American Civil Liberties Union, and their arguments are often liberty at the obvious direct self-conscious expense of order, but that doesn’t last for long.

And so one of the things you see in history is that where social disorder appears over time, eventually there’s a call for order. And for one thing, that’s how you ended up with some of the worst tragedies of the 20th century. You had liberal regimes that let disorder go on, and then the order that comes is sometimes a pretty horrifying order. It’s exactly what happened in the transition from the liberal Weimar Republic in Germany to the government by Nazi rule and Adolf Hitler in the 1930s in particular in Germany. What you have right now is that you have so many American cities where this is just now the norm and there’s something behind it in terms of the entire constellation of major American cities, a lot of arguments that if there is an ethnic or racial disparity, say, in arrest rates, then that’s a form of racism.

Well, that is just the kind of logic that, by the way, can have some truth in it. Let’s admit, it can have some truth in it. Injustice can apply sometimes to law enforcement. But the fact is that if you buy into that argument in toto, then you actually don’t have law enforcement simply because of the say even imbalance of statistics when it comes to population and ethnic groups, et cetera. And so that’s a big deal in Washington D.C., but it’s also a big deal in many other places as well. Back at the period of the 1970s where there’s just a lot of chaos in American cities, you had the rise among conservatives, a group in particular of social scientists known as neoconservatives. And they were called Neoconservatives because many of them had actually been ideological liberals, but they were, as one of them said, “mugged by reality.”

And so they switched to pretty tough on crime policies and it was based upon an understanding of human social order. And so you had things like the broken windows theory, which is that if you allow broken windows in a neighborhood that sends the signal that we are marked by disorder, we will tolerate disorder, we won’t even fix the windows in our neighborhood, and the next thing you know the crime rates go up as well. And so you had people like James Q. Wilson, very prominent social scientists who were documenting exactly how this works. You look at how the neighborhood allows things to happen, pretty soon you’ll find the pathologies showing up as well. 

So by the way, you had figures such as Rudolph Giuliani, who was the mayor of New York City who applied some of these theories. And of course you had a difference in the crime statistics. But then you have the accusation that this is too repressive, and the next thing you know, you’re back to where you were before. 

But it is really significant that we are talking here about the nation’s capital, the capital city of the United States of America, the capital district, the District of Columbia. Let’s just remind ourselves this is constitutionally created. The framers of the Constitution created a federal district, which is not a state, and it’s not in a state, but instead is the domain of the federal government. And it is intended to avoid the concentration of, say, government and a vote. Wherever you had the nation’s capital, even the framers of the Constitution understood that could create a political imbalance.

So there was a very clear reason why the framers of the Constitution said, “We’re not going to put the capital in any state. We’re going to create this special federal district.” And that gives the president of the United States very unusual powers. The president of the United States can’t appoint judges in Alabama. He can appoint federal judges, by the way, but he can’t appoint local judges. But the president can appoint many officials in Washington. However, in the early 1970s, partly because of the civil rights movement and other things, and frankly the age of big government, in one sense, the idea was that Washington deserved some sort of local government, under local control with local voters making these decisions. And so in 1973, you had home rule declared by legislation.

By the way, that’s the legislation that gives President Trump legally the right for 30 days to intervene in a situation like this when it comes to law enforcement. Here’s the deal. President Trump almost assuredly has the support of the American people by instinct on this kind of cause. It’s really interesting. I think this is where people on the Left, frankly, if they were taking my advice, they wouldn’t make the arguments they’re making, but I’m not giving them the advice and they wouldn’t take it. But the fact is that opposing this the way they are opposing this, crying out autocracy, no, this is actually the exercise of the law. And then also crying out that the people in Washington shouldn’t be so concerned about crime pointing to this statistic or that statistic.

The fact is that by any measure, crime is a very real threat In Washington D.C., and members of Congress know it, senators know it. Certainly the people who work for the federal government know it. It’s going to be very interesting to see where this goes. In one sense, the risk on the part of President Trump is that once you intervene in this way, you kind of bought what comes out on the other side. On the other hand, this is a clear wake-up call, not only in Washington D.C., but elsewhere. By the way, The Economist, major British newspaper, it’s published in what we would call a magazine form, The Economist, very establishment, offered some advice to Democrats, and that was, “You better look like you’re more serious about the problems in the cities, because if you’re not, you are pretty much ignoring the problems where you actually are in a place to do something,” because in so many of America’s major cities, you have democratic leadership.

And so The Economist called for them to get tough on crime and to crack down on homelessness and all the rest. Well, here’s my prediction. They won’t do it, because they bought into ideologies that prevent them from doing it, and well, that’s their quandary. But our situation is to recognize that this is a very profound affirmation of the fact that without order you can’t have liberty. That doesn’t mean that where you do have order, you always have liberty. No, that’s the other issue. But it is true that without order, no liberty

Part II

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Gerrymandering and the Red-Blue Divide: The Gerrymandering Fight in Texas is Just the Tip of the Iceberg

Another big issue of national conversation right now has to do with something of a political soap opera that’s based on real politics going on in the state of Texas, albeit it’s not just in the state of Texas right now because a significant number of Democrats in the Texas legislature have gone to other states to avoid arrests for not showing up in order to create a quorum for the Texas legislature to be able to move forward.

President Trump had called upon the Texas legislature to redistrict, and there have been arguments that the Republicans could gain a net of five additional seats with this redistricting inside Texas. And at the same time, the Texas legislature also very much needs to deal with state aid, particularly to areas around Kerrville, Texas affected by the floods and looking at defensive mechanisms and support structures to avoid the kind of flash flood tragedy that took place just weeks ago in Texas. Well, this is something that’s happened before. It has to do with Texas, its legal context, which requires this kind of quorum, in which you have people in the minority party who will sometimes just leave the state. Democrats did this again just a matter of years ago in order to try to prevent the legislature from having a quorum so that it would be able to vote and move forward.

This is a stunt of sorts. It’s one that of course gets a lot of political attention. You have Democrats who have gone to places. For instance, like Illinois, where governor JB Pritzker, very much a figure in democratic politics and who clearly sees himself as a potential democratic presidential candidate giving aid and comfort to these Texas legislators, treating them as if they’re moral heroes and going away. Now, the reality is however, that it’s very hard to keep this going, and it’s very hard to keep this going particularly when the majority still has the power, especially with a Republican governor there in Texas to have another session called. And that’s immediately the signal that was sent yesterday. There will be another legislative session. In other words, you really can’t wait this out. And I think most Democrats at the national level recognize that this is a short-term project.

They want to milk it for as much as it is worth, and frankly, it’s a big publicity issue. So no doubt they’re gaining something in politics by doing it this way. But let’s just remind ourselves what’s really going on here. So for instance, it is important that in our constitutional order, especially when it comes to the house, the house is the big issue here, not the Senate in terms of the United States Senate, every state has two senators. The senators represent each of them the entire state. And since the constitutional amendment for the direct election of senators, that is something most Americans just clearly understand. Big states have two, larger states have two, that’s a part of the genius of our constitutional system. House of Representatives is apportioned 435 members distributed by the designated population of the states.

And so you have states that lose population. You have states that gain population. The states that gain population over time get more seats in the United States House of Representatives. But it’s also a part of our federal system, our constitutional system that the states determine the districts. Now, this has become a matter of federal legislation. It’s become a matter of certainly intervention by the federal judiciary with voting rights issues, and legislation acts behind all of that. But still, the constitutional authority is given to the states and the states have the right to establish these districts. Now, this has been highly political for a very long time. And by the way, the fact that this will be a political process ought to be clear to everyone because it’s in a political context.

So honestly, or dishonestly, it’s going to be political. Now, some states have tried to go to an independent commission model whereby the commission would look at demographic factors, population factors, and try to come up with what is considered or at least presented to be a just understanding. But either way, it can be to the advantage of a party to have control of this process. Now, here’s the thing. The state of Texas’s frontline news on this, no doubt about it, but the state of Texas is not alone in this situation. And one of the most interesting things going on right now is that you have many Democrats howling that if you do it in Texas, we’re going to be forced to do it in our states. Well, the reality is they already did it in their states.

Here’s where a little honesty would go a very, very long way. So I thought it might be interesting just to look at a little math, and the math tells the story. So in Texas, you had a breakdown of about 42% Democrats, 56% Republicans when it comes to party registration. In the presidential election, 47% of Texas voters went for Trump, 38% went for Kamala Harris. You look at that, well, in the congressional delegation the Texas sends to the House of Representatives, there are 27 Republicans and 12 Democrats. And the Republicans are looking at the numbers and saying, “We should have a greater percentage than that.” That’s what’s behind this effort.

President Trump called for it, the governor of Texas called the Special Session, and Republican leaders in Texas are moving forward with that plan. And then you have Democrats saying, “That’s absolutely foul, that’s autocracy at work again.” And one of the most hypocritical of all these is Governor Pritzker of Illinois, because he actually signed legislation doing the very same thing, perhaps an even more radical form in Illinois. So in Illinois, 43.8% of the voters voted for Donald Trump. So again, 43.8, but the congressional map in Illinois is 17 Democrats and three Republicans. So again, you don’t have to be great at math. 17 Democrats, three Republicans, not by accident. This is Governor Gerrymander, gerrymander referring to the process of districting for political advantage.

A state like California in registration, 45% Democrats, 25% Republicans. So let’s just kind of round the numbers up. Let’s just give the Democrats 50%. So if they have 50% and the Republicans have 25% of the registered voters, how do you explain the fact that in the state of California, the congressional delegation is 45 Democrats and nine Republicans, Governor Gavin Newsom of California says, “If Texas does it, we’re going to have to do the same.” Governor Newsom, you did that a long time ago. As a matter of fact, it’s hard to imagine how you could could possibly create a situation even more to your advantage. So that’s just another affirmation. Looking at a long-term pattern, a little honesty will help. In the state of New Jersey, voter registration, 39% Democrat, 25% Republicans, but Democrats have 11 seats to three Republican seats. In New York, 47% Democrat, 28% Republicans, but the Democrats have 21 congressional seats in New York, and the Republicans have seven. Now, I know you can’t look at these numbers and take the elections out of it. That’s to say that you have districts where this is the pattern of the election. 21 Democrats, seven Republicans in New York, 45 Democrats, nine Republicans in California, 11 Democrats, three Republicans in New Jersey. 

But I think it’s important for us to recognize there are big worldview issues at stake here because the politics is actually produced by the worldview. The distinction in worldview, the distinction in understanding of reality and political principles, even in moral judgment, that’s all reflected in the chasm between the two parties. And so the fight over redistricting is really the fight over who’s going to gain advantage, which worldview, which set of commitments, which political party’s going to gain advantage here.

But one of the things we need to know is that America’s been sorting out this way for a long time. So for instance, a very important article by Aaron Zitner that appeared at The Wall Street Journal just over the weekend, and the headline gets it right, “Gerrymandering Deepens U.S.’s Political Divide.” Get this: in 40 states, we have 50 states, remember? So in 40 of them, four out of five, “a single party controls the House, Senate and governor’s office, a so-called trifecta or else has enough power to block vetoes from a governor of the other party. That leaves fewer than 20% of Americans living in a state where the minority party has a meaningful voice in Governance.” So you have Democrats complaining in the state of Texas, you also have Republicans, let’s just say, complaining loudly in a state like California, but the Democrats aren’t going to compromise in any meaningful sense in California.

It’s very unlikely that Republicans will compromise in any meaningful sense in the state of Texas. And it is because the way our constitutional system looks at the designation of congressional districts, frankly, it is by population. But you look at the map and both parties have come up with ways to come up with the most contorted districting you could imagine. You’ve got congressional districts that are just a little sliver here connected to another sliver here, coming down to a little ball of population here. The reality is that redistricting and gerrymandering are a part of the political process, which is why politics matters at every level. And that means your state government actually has a huge influence, a huge determining factor, as a matter of fact, in who will be going to Congress from your state.

That’s something I think a lot of people don’t think about. If you live in a state like California, guess what, you’re going to be as sending not just more Democrats than Republicans when it comes to state government in California going all the way up to certainly statewide races, but even in congressional races, the vast majority, it’s going to be a Democrat. The question is, which Democrat? In Texas, for a lot of the state, it’s a question of “which Republican?” Now, I think the interesting thing is that there are political scientists and others who are saying this great divide. It’s a great danger to the United States, to our constitutional form of government. Well, yes it is, but you know what?

I have to come back to the fact that there are deeper worldview divides than the political divide here. We’re talking about massive issues. Can biological males play on girls’ volleyball teams? You just go down the list. We’re talking about big issues, and Americans are divided, and that divide is going to show up. It’s also showing up in what’s called clustering. And thus you have people who have moved to a state like Texas, and there are others who might move to a state like California where they want to live with people who have similar political preferences.

And that is to say, we as Christians understand, they share a common worldview. Now, of course, our entire experience in constitutional self-government requires a certain amount of unity, a certain commonality, certainly a common commitment to a political system, to a constitutional order. And if that’s threatened, we really are in big, big trouble. In the meantime, when someone cries politics in a situation like this, well, just remember, check the facts. This is a political process. It is being conducted by politicians, and is so often the case when someone says the politicians are involved, but it’s not political, yeah, watch your wallet. 

It is interesting that the Wall Street Journal makes the point red and blue states have moved in sharply different directions on employment law, gun regulation, immigration enforcement, and other policies. So there you go. These issues sometimes don’t even appear to be related, except of course, in the larger analysis. It turns out they are.

Part III

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Lifestyle Priorities: One of the Hottest Items in Los Angeles is a $33 Smoothie — Yes, You Read That Right

All right. In conclusion, you’re looking at differences, worldview differences, political differences, political partisan differences. Well, how about smoothie differences? This also comes from The Wall Street Journal. Here’s the headline: : “LA is Going Nuts for a $33 Smoothie.” Yeah, a $33 smoothie. Evidently, it comes in some very interesting varieties here. And this article is about the fact that people are now paying $33 for a smoothie, and it makes sense. And of course, it’s sold with all kinds of nutrients and all kinds of superpowers that it is supposed to have. And it’s very cool, and obviously you are very cool if you’re walking around with one of these smoothies that everyone’s going to know you paid more than $30 for.

The Wall Street Journal report tells us this interesting bit, “Smoothies, once a staple of the organic hippie diet, have become a luxury good in cities like Los Angeles with prices rivaling sit-down meals. The high-end grocer,” one of them mentioned here, “has created Nationwide fever for its brightly colored drinks. Some made in collaboration with brands and celebrities.” Okay, that’s how this works. And well, I guess if you’re the kind of person who would buy one of these, well, you’re just the kind of person who would buy one of these. I guess you could divide some Americans between those who would buy a $33 smoothie and those who would expect a T-bone steak for that $33 bill. And it’s just another reflection of the fact that, yeah, when you see a headline like this, what are you thinking?

You’re thinking coastal city, you’re thinking more liberal place, you’re thinking lifestyle issues, you’re thinking probably, I don’t know, California, which happens to be where this is happening. And you look at it and you say, “Well, that’s not exactly by accident.” And the answer is no, it’s not exactly by accident. And I guess I’ve just given them a commercial. If you want to go to buy a $33 smoothie, well, The Wall Street Journal will tell you where to get it.