The Docile State

by National Review's editors

What's most disturbing about the Elián saga is what the raid and the reaction to it suggests about the American government. We may be seeing the lineaments of something new - the Docile State.

The Docile State prefers administrative procedure to law. Throughout the Elián crisis, Sen. Moynihan and other members of the better-educated wing of the send-him-back majority repeated, like a prayer, that "the law is clear." It was: The 11th Circuit Court of Appeals had ruled that Elián's application for asylum, filed on his behalf by his Miami relatives, should be adjudicated. Congress had declined to act, by (for example) granting Elián citizenship or permanent-resident status. Against the judgment of one branch and the silence of another, Janet Reno asserted her own judgment that Elián's father loved him and that he should have possession of him, even while the dispute over asylum was pending. So in went the INS.

The formal agencies of the Docile State operate with the help of an ostensibly private para-state. Consider the pilotfish who swam alongside Reno. Gregory Craig, whose salary is being paid by left-wing church groups, last surfaced as a lawyer for President Clinton during his impeachment. Irwin Redlener, the pediatrician who diagnosed Elián's Miami relatives at a distance of 1,100 miles as "psychologically abusive," has a long history of political flak-catching.

The Docile State, finally, expects docility of the people. So long as it gets it, they are flattered and cared for. When they object or become difficult, they are treated as enemies. Why else were antiterrorist break-and-enter techniques used on a family which had promised to surrender Elián, and which had no guns in the house? Why else were statues of the Virgin Mary gratuitously broken - was she guarding the closet door?

Garry Wills, who knows a lot of history and how to distort it, approvingly compared the show of force to Eisenhower's 1958 landing in Beirut, and to Washington's 1794 suppression of the Whiskey Rebellion. Prof. Wills does not pause to consider that Lebanon is a foreign country, and that Washington was dealing with armed rebels (it is not called the Whiskey Custody Fight). But difficult citizens of the Docile State are considered foreigners and rebels. New York Times columnist Thomas L. Friedman applauded the picture of the submachine gun at the closet door because it showed that the United States obeys "the rule of law." Yes, the law of a Docile State.

In the long view, we may be witnessing a tension in republican government. The republican ideal, as the Framers knew, had many problems: Ancient republics were small and turbulent. They hoped America's scale and diversity would compensate; so Hamilton and Madison wrote Federalist Numbers 9 and 10, and Washington spoke of the United States as a "rising empire." But the imperial remedy has its own tendency to excess.

Political scientists of the 22nd century will debate these fine points. Meanwhile, a tyrant won a victory, a boy lost freedom, and America lost honor.

END

National Review's editors

NATIONAL REVIEW
National Review Editorial on Elian
May 22, 2000 Issue

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