“One of my favorite quotes from Dr. King was, ‘Now is the time to make real the promises of democracy.’ You think of how he changed America. He inspired us to change through the legislative process to become a more perfect union. That’s exactly what President Trump is calling on the Congress to do.”
— Mike Pence, 1/20/19
Mike Pence’s loathsome and cynical attempt to frame Donald Trump’s wall demands in the context of MLK needs to be unpacked a little bit.
In Pence’s extreme (to say the least) revisionist history, MLK is transformed into a simple advocate of legislation as such. “He inspired us to change through the legislative process,” said Pence. So reducing King’s message to simply “work within the system, use the legislative process,” implies “obey all those laws as well” since somehow the legislative process itself is the a kind of guarantee of justice and righteousness.
But of course, the essence of King’s message and practice was that “Man made laws” are not necessarily just; in fact, as he argues in “Letter From a Birmingham Jail” and elsewhere, under an apartheid system which systematically denies political participation to a portion of the population, these “man made laws” are manifestly unjust and fail to square with the “eternal law and natural law.” They must be challenged, even with civil disobedience and painful political pressure. “Separate but equal” laws were passed via “the legislative process”; poll taxes, anti-miscegeny laws, and laws which criminalized political speech as “parading without a permit” were all passed by “the legislative process.” And yet all were, in King’s views, unjust and in need of reform via extra-legal efforts (civil disobedience).
An unjust law is a human law that is not rooted in eternal law and natural law. Any law that uplifts human personality is just. Any law that degrades human personality is unjust. All segregation statutes are unjust because segregation distorts the soul and damages the personality. It gives the segregator a false sense of superiority and the segregated a false sense of inferiority. (Martin Luther King, Jr. “Letter From a Birmingham Jail”
Donald Trump ran on a coded platform of apartheid: He concentrated his appeal on a minority of white in key states; his path to power was via the old and new gerrymanders built into the system which lavish sparsely populated rural states and white districts with outsized political power in the Senate, House, and Electoral College. He lost the popular vote by 2.9 million votes, yet he has proclaimed his victory historic and indicative of a massive mandate.
He has governed with a very specific apartheid formula: only some people are “the people.” His base of white identity voters are the only citizens of the nation and all others are rightly ignored if not mocked, abused, threatened, terrorized. Citizens of Puerto Rico, citizens of the Virgin Islands, citizens of states like California that rejected him by large margins, citizens of blue states and blue urban areas, groups of citizens who voted against him in overwhelming numbers. In Trump’s formula, these are not citizens at all and they have no claims on representation or participation.
Under such a system, the legislative process and the executive administration (and eventually the judiciary) are not only not representative of the people’s will, they are designed to thwart it and produced laws, regulations, policies, rulings that uphold apartheid rule. In other words, they produce unjust laws.
Nothing could possibly be farther from the truth than Mike Pence’s statement linking MKL’s legacy to support for the mere “legislative process” --— especially when it is undertaken to protect the politics of apartheid and racism.
Update: Chris Hayes covered some of the same ground at the end of his show on MSNBC today. He helpfully reminded viewers that King’s “Letter” was in response to a letter signed by a large group of Birmingham clergy decrying his strategy of civil disobedience and social activism. In other words, Hayes argues, these men were calling King to “come to the table” and “work within the system” to achieve his goals, just as Pence is doing. King was not having it. In one of the most significant passages in the Letter he writes:
I must confess that over the past few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro's great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen's Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to "order" than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: "I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action"; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man's freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a "more convenient season." Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection.
In other words, King mic dropped 55 years ago on Mike Pence’s weak sauce, his laughable and insulting attempt to talk like a white moderate “more devoted to ‘order’ than to justice.”