'Lock him up' part two

A day after I wrote about liberals lamenting the spectacle of baseball fans chanting "Lock him up!" at the President of the United States, a textbook example of this tendency appeared in the local paper. Jonathan Bernstein's piece exemplifies the slippery-slope thinking of those who reject the obvious when it doesn't fit their narrative, and shows an unhealthy condescension toward people who probably share many of his views. Bernstein and other concerned citizens are determined to hear "Lock him up" as a call for lawlessness. To be fair, Bernstein acknowledges what to most people would be the obvious meaning of the chant. Isn't it "Merely shorthand for saying [Trump] should be tried and held accountable for his crimes"? It can't be that, though, because another pundit thought the crowd wanted Trump "jailed without due process," which is "an authoritarian strategy, even when liberals do it," and another called the chant "an act of desperation that says that you don't believe in the rule of law." Bernstein himself rejects the implicit-due process reading because " we can't know everyone meant that. And the chant only encourages those who do not." He worries that people who say such things "can wind up valuing results over democratic processes." 

These pundits seem to be confusing "Lock him up" with "String him up." When crowds start chanting that, we can all start to worry. Until then, only a morbid fear of "mob rule" (the dark side of "people power") can explain these ideologues' refusal to accept the most straightforward interpretation of both the anti-Trump chant and its anti-Clinton precursor. All this shuddering over the heckling of the President betrays an unhealthy distrust of fellow citizens' commitment to the rule of law. Perhaps this is why some are so quick to describe today's angry movements as "populism." Maybe they don't trust anyone outside their own professional class to be a proper American citizen. And if they seem more worried lately, it may because they realize that the rest of us -- right, left or other -- know what they think.