The Liberty Dance

If They Don’t Dance, Well They’re No Friends of Mine

Jul 15, 2025

The Panic Reflex

Let’s be honest. Americans are great at freaking out and terrible at protecting liberty in the process. Somewhere along the way, we developed the habit of tolerating government overreach simply because it arrives with a clipboard and a security badge. That’s our constitutional Achilles' heel. The minute someone says “for your safety,” we start handing over rights like free samples at Costco.

In my piece on Federalist No. 8, I dropped one of Ben Franklin’s all-timers:

“Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.”

It’s the quote that ends up on T-shirts, protest signs, and internet arguments, but it’s not just a throwaway line. It’s Franklin shouting through the centuries: “Don’t be stupid.”

The “This Time Is Different” Excuse

After publishing The Federalists Reloaded No. 8, I got a fair bit of pushback. A few people argued that sometimes you have to trade a bit of liberty for order, especially in places like Los Angeles, where the National Guard was deployed in response to protests in June. But let’s stop pretending that’s a calculated trade. It’s not a trade. It’s a clearance sale, and liberty is what’s getting discounted.

And then there’s the other argument, the one that sounds urgent and dramatic:

“But this time is different. The violence is worse. It’s out of control.”

Really? Different how? Worse than Shay’s Rebellion? Worse than the New York Draft Riots of 1863, when mobs killed over 100 people and torched large parts of Manhattan? Worse than Detroit in 1967, when 43 people died, over 1,000 were injured, and thousands were arrested in five days of rioting? Worse than the wave of bombings in the 1970s? Or the Oklahoma City bombing that killed 168 people, including 19 children? Or the Capitol riot?

Or let’s talk about something even closer to home—1992. The Los Angeles riots following the Rodney King verdict left 63 dead, over 2,300 injured, and more than 12,000 arrested. Damages hit $1 billion. National Guardsmen, federal troops, and Marines were called in to restore order. But here’s what’s often forgotten: it was the explosion of decades of neglect, disinvestment, and policing that treated communities like threats instead of citizens. If the lesson of 1992 was that force can’t fix broken trust, why are we repeating it in 2025 and pretending it’s a new idea?

Every generation thinks its chaos is the worst because they’re living in it. But does the idea that this time justifies a different relationship with the Constitution? That’s not realism. It’s generational narcissism.

Blaming Liberty for the Fire

Let’s face it. Violence isn’t new. Unrest isn’t new. But what is new is how casually we’re willing to justify power grabs as the solution. That’s the real shift. We see a fire and blame the fireplace, not the arsonist. Liberty becomes the suspect, not the shield.

The Constitution wasn’t stitched together in some colonial yoga retreat. It emerged from war, economic collapse, and the constant fear that the republic might collapse before it even got off the ground. So when it includes stuff like habeas corpus, due process, and the separation of powers, it’s not ornamental. It’s structural.

These aren’t democratic mood rings we wear when things are going well. They’re the hard-wired protections meant to keep things going well when everything else is falling apart.

The Emergency Trap

Here’s the problem. Once you let the government start defining “emergency,” it won’t stop. And why would it? Power loves nothing more than a shortcut. And we, the panicked, tweet-scrolling public, keep handing out Waze routes to constitutional bypasses.

Take Los Angeles. Sure, bringing in the National Guard may have made things quieter. But at what cost? The military isn’t your city’s Plan B. The Posse Comitatus Act exists for a reason. When we reach for troops instead of accountability, we’re not fixing the system. We’re duct-taping it. And that duct tape comes with bayonets.

Local governance didn’t collapse because people suddenly forgot how to behave. It collapsed because the systems meant to uphold justice — schools, police, housing, and economic opportunity — were hollowed out long before the unrest hit. Sending in troops is an admission of failure, not a fix.

And no, this isn’t an anti-police rant. It’s a call for proportionality. When the government reaches for force instead of reform, it tells us something important. Liberty isn’t the goal. Control is.

Founders on Repeat

The Founders weren’t exactly cryptic about this. In Federalist No. 8, Hamilton warned about:

“The continual necessity of military establishments and the peril of liberty from a standing army.”

He didn’t say it might happen. He said it would happen if we weren’t careful. And Madison, ever the pessimist, laid it out cleanly:

“The means of defense against foreign danger have been always the instruments of tyranny at home.”

Franklin, never one to mince words, told us:

“Sell not liberty to purchase power.”

And yet, here we are, pawning off freedom for the illusion of safety.

The Messy Price of Liberty

And yes, liberty is messy. That’s not a bug. It’s the point. The Constitution isn’t supposed to be the cheat code you enter when society gets too rowdy. It’s supposed to be the one thing that doesn’t change when everything else does.

We’ve been down this road before. No-knock raids. Indefinite detention. Surveillance systems that make the Stasi look quaint. None of this happened in a vacuum. It happened because we let fear drive. And it doesn’t just erode liberty. It corrodes equality. Because let’s be real. Some people get the full Bill of Rights, while others don’t.

John Adams wasn’t being dramatic when he said:

“Liberty, once lost, is lost forever.”

He was being historical. And Jefferson wasn’t wrong when he said:

“The natural progress of things is for liberty to yield, and government to gain ground.”

Markets and Freedom: Same Fight

Now let’s talk markets. Free market folks like to preach about innovation, decentralization, and individual risk. Great. But here’s the deal. None of that happens under authoritarian rule. A government that can shut down your protest can also shut down your startup. When every economic decision gets filtered through what the state deems “safe,” you’re not running a business. You’re renting permission slips.

Security theater doesn’t just kill dissent. It chills investment, neutering innovation, and making entrepreneurship a bureaucratic obstacle course. That’s not the free market. It’s just an Americanized version of command and control.

Franklin again:

“Without freedom of thought there can be no such thing as wisdom; and no such thing as public liberty, without freedom of speech.”

If you want functioning capitalism, you need functioning liberty.

The Spectacle Machine

Violence has always existed in America, but now it comes with better camera angles and a panic soundtrack. The media doesn't just report the chaos anymore; it directs it like a Michael Bay film. Every broken window becomes a symbol of national collapse. Every fight on a city sidewalk is suddenly the opening salvo of civil war. And every politician worth their PAC money is waiting in the wings with a soundbite and a plan to make themselves the hero.

The problem? Too much of it’s theater. When you reduce complex social breakdowns into 30-second clips and breathless chyrons, nuance dies. So does any meaningful conversation about reform.

Back in 1992, when Los Angeles erupted, the coverage was horrifying but raw. It showed pain, anger, and desperation. Now? The 2025 riots have become content—algorithm-tested, high-drama, cut-to-commercial violence. Context gets stripped out, framing gets manipulated, and the story becomes less about what caused the fire and more about how loud it can be made to sound on your device.

The 24-hour news cycle is now the 24-hour fear cycle. Fear sells: ads, policy, and authoritarian overreach. Want to deploy federal troops in a major city? Just cut together a 90-second reel of burning cars, add dramatic music, and run it every hour on the hour. The public will be begging for someone to do something. Anything! And fast.

Here’s the catch: the coverage doesn’t just shape what people think. It shapes what the government thinks it can get away with. If enough headlines scream “out of control,” then guess what becomes acceptable? Surveillance drones. Curfews. Facial recognition at protests. All in the name of restoring peace.

But let’s not give ourselves a free pass either. At some point, the viewer becomes complicit. We scroll past a hundred headlines and pretend we understand the story. We see a 10-second clip of a man throwing a Molotov cocktail and decide the whole city must be on fire. We let fear rush in before facts can even show up.

Franklin wouldn’t have put up with this. He believed liberty required work. That freedom demanded discernment. His generation didn’t have TikTok, but they still had rumors, propaganda, and panic. And even then, he warned us:

“A nation of well-informed men, who have been taught to know and prize the rights which God has given them, cannot be enslaved. It is in the region of ignorance that tyranny begins.”

If you care about liberty, start acting like it. Read beyond the headline. Watch something that doesn’t agree with you. Look for context, not just confirmation. Stop outsourcing your critical thinking to cable news and your cousin's Facebook feed.

Violence is real. But coverage is curated. And if we can’t tell the difference, we’ll keep handing over liberty not because we were attacked, but because we were programmed to feel attacked, and were too lazy to check the source.

“The man who reads nothing at all is better educated than the man who reads nothing but newspapers.”

— Thomas Jefferson

So if you’re letting the feed shape your fear, you’re already behind. The Founders built a system that relies on an informed citizenry, not one that is emotionally manipulated. And in 2025, that means asking more questions, clicking past the reel, and remembering that the louder something is, the more it probably wants your rights.

The Rot of “Safety First”

Which brings us to the rot. The slow, creeping rot that comes from putting “safety first.” Every time someone says you can only protest in a certain spot, or that your phone can be scanned without a warrant, or that you should just comply and be quiet “for your own good,” a little piece of the republic dies. Not with a bang. With a shrug.

The system we built, imperfect as it is, was explicitly designed to prevent this kind of drift. You don’t get to suspend it for a news cycle. You don’t get to rewrite it for convenience. Because the moment you do, you’ve already answered Franklin’s challenge and not in your favor.

So yes, maybe the Guard restored order in LA. However, power rarely likes to give things back. And once you’ve told the government it can overrule rights in the name of calm, don’t act surprised when calm becomes mandatory. Maybe the next time by someone you didn’t vote for in the last election.

Choose the Harder Path

The harder path is local reform, building trust, and keeping institutions strong enough to weather real storms without sending in troops. But that’s what liberty demands. That’s what it has always demanded.

To remix Franklin one more time:

“They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.”

So go ahead. Dance. Speak. Question. Protest. That’s not chaos. That’s freedom. And if they don’t dance, well, they’re no friends of mine.