With Liberty and Justice for Some Read Free Page B

political culture explicitly renounce the principle of legal equality itself. It is now quite common for American political discourse to include arguments expressly justifying the elites’ legal impunity and openly calling for radically different treatment under the law for various classes of people based on their power, status, and wealth.
    Historically, our collective insistence on the principle of equality under law has been principally responsible for our forward progress, our ability to identify and eliminate major and minor transgressions. Conversely, our abandonment of that principle precludes such progress and, worse, shields legal inequality from reform. A society that demands equality under the law will move inexorably toward it. A society that renounces this virtue will move in the opposite direction. We have, manifestly, become a society that no longer even rhetorically affirms the necessity for this equality, and the outcome is exactly as dangerous, oppressive, and antidemocratic as the American founders warned it would be.

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The Origin of Elite Immunity
     
    Wealth and power have always conferred substantial advantages, and it is thus unsurprising that throughout history the rich and well-connected have enjoyed superior treatment under the law. In the past, those advantages were broadly seen as failures of justice and ruefully acknowledged as shortcomings of the legal system. Today, however, in a radical and momentous shift, the American political class and its media increasingly repudiate the principle that the law must be equally applied to all. To hear our politicians and our press tell it, the conclusion is inescapable: we’re far better off when political and financial elites—and they alone—are shielded from criminal accountability.
    It has become a virtual consensus among the elites that their members are so indispensable to the running of American society that vesting them with immunity from prosecution—even for the most egregious crimes—is not only in their interest but in our interest, too. Prosecutions, courtrooms, and prisons, it’s hinted—and sometimes even explicitly stated—are for the rabble, like the street-side drug peddlers we occasionally glimpse from our car windows, not for the political and financial leaders who manage our nation and fuel our prosperity. It is simply too disruptive, distracting, and unjust, we are told, to subject them to the burden of legal consequences.
    This is no hyperbole. As multiple episodes demonstrate, a belief that elite immunity is both necessary and justified has indeed become the prevailing ethos in the nation’s most influential circles. In countless instances over recent years, prominent political and media figures have insisted that serious crimes by the most powerful should be overlooked—either in the name of the common good, or in the name of a warped conception of fairness according to which those with the greatest power are the most entitled to deference and understanding.
    This is what makes the contemporary form of American lawlessness new and unprecedented. It is now perfectly common, and perfectly acceptable, to openly advocate elite immunity. And this advocacy has had its intended effect: the United States has become a nation that does not apply the rule of law to its elite class, which is another way of saying that the United States does not apply the rule of law.
    The last decade in particular is full of examples. Consider the way our political class responded to the crimes committed by the Bush administration during the “war on terror.” Even as recently as 2007, allegations that the administration was breaking laws and committing felonies were dismissed as shrill, groundless rhetoric. But now it is understood even in the most mainstream opinion-making circles that numerous actions undertaken by top Bush officials—torture, warrantless eavesdropping, the Central Intelligence Agency’s black sites, politicized