'Lock him up!'

The President visited the World Series the other day to see the home team play. There's footage showing his smile collapse and his face harden as he first sees his image appear on the stadium's big screen and then hears many in the crowd chanting, "Lock him up! Lock him up!" The day after, it was interesting to learn that some liberals and anti-Trump types were unhappy with the crowd. Many in the opposition will see the incident simply as Donald Trump getting a taste of his own medicine, years after encouraging "Lock her up" chants about Hillary Clinton. Many of those experiencing qualms about the baseball crowd might have had no problem with the people simply booing the President, but hearing "Lock X up" directed at any politician really bugs them. It is a portent of the "criminalization of politics," by which is meant not the takeover of politics by criminals but an authoritarian or merely extremist tendency to treat political opponents as criminals, regardless of their actual conduct.  There's a good deal of bad faith behind the "criminalization of politics" concept, or at least a reluctance to believe that others actually might believe political candidates to be literal, statutory criminals. This defensiveness against the possibility of an illegitimate criminalization of politics has fostered a belief in what I call "partisan immunity," perhaps best described as the suspicion that any criminal charge against a candidate or elected official is motivated primarily if not exclusively by partisanship. One could believe that some people would rather let politicians get away with at least some corruption rather than risk law enforcement becoming a partisan tool. But the American political system should be able to survive even the sort of criminal scandal that could result in the dismantling of a major political party -- unless one believes that only the established institutional strength of the two main parties prevents the republic from becoming a one-party state. That's an open question for another time, but we shouldn't leave the ballpark without noting one more curious thing about the anxiety over the "Lock him up" chant. Had this been Russia, and had Vladimir Putin gone to a soccer match only to hear the fans chant zaperet' yevo, the same people who hate to see similar chants directed at either Trump or Clinton almost certainly would be applauding the Russian crowd for a brave and necessary display of "people power." Name any foreign authoritarian and the response from America most likely would be the same. What, then, is different about the United States? Do our classically liberal political institutions render "people power" of this sort unnecessary or even subversive? While other countries need more democracy, do we need not as much? These chants aren't literally "speaking truth to power," but they're at least part of what civil-society enthusiasts mean when they applaud that ideal. Rather than warn against the dire implications of such language, critics should concern themselves more productively with encouraging people to make such demands more consistently. But even when those demands aren't made consistently, that doesn't mean that all of them are wrong.