Something troubling is happening in America. In recent weeks, we have seen violent mobs gather outside Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) facilities—vandalizing property, threatening law enforcement officers, and disrupting the work of federal agencies. Even more disturbing, these actions are being excused—and, in some cases, encouraged—by voices on the progressive left.
This wasn’t a protest. It was a riot. And the consequences of indulging in this spirit of lawlessness are dangerous and long-lasting.
When Abraham Lincoln was 28 years old, he gave a speech that reads today like a dispatch from our own cultural moment. In his Lyceum Address of 1838, Lincoln warned that the greatest threat to the American republic would not come from abroad but from within. “If destruction be our lot,” he said, “we must ourselves be its author and finisher.”
He was talking about lawlessness—the slow corrosion of our shared civic life when people lose respect for the law and those who enforce it. Lincoln was responding to acts of mob violence in his day, and he was clear: no cause is justified in turning to mob violence. Once mobs are permitted to act with impunity, he warned, “the lawless in spirit are encouraged to become lawless in practice.”
This is precisely what we are currently witnessing.
Too many progressive leaders today have allowed a “by-any-means-necessary” mindset to take hold in the culture. ICE officers, police, conservative justices, and even members of Congress have been targeted by activists who claim the mantle of justice while employing the tactics that undermine it. The emerging belief is that if you disagree with a policy or institution, you are entitled to destroy it.
This is a dangerous lie that reveals a deeper confusion about the nature of a free society.
Immigration reform should be debated. There is room for disagreement over policy, the role of federal agencies, and how to manage a broken immigration system. However, there is no moral high ground for breaking windows, setting fires, or threatening public servants. A nation that tolerates political violence, or shrugs when it happens, is a nation chipping away at its own foundation.
This is what Lincoln feared: He believed the future of the American experiment would hinge on whether citizens could cultivate and maintain a political and civic “religion”—a reverence for the rule of law and the Constitution. He did not refer to blind loyalty to the government or institutions. He meant fidelity to the process, to the idea that, in America, change comes through persuasion, not force. As stated in his July 4, 1861, address,"Ballots are the rightful and peaceful successors of bullets." We resolve our differences through debate and elections, not violence.
When we lose this shared commitment, everything else begins to fray.
Progressive politicians who refuse to condemn this kind of lawlessness—or who flirt by justifying it—are playing with fire. Once one side normalizes political violence, the other learns to do the same. That is how democracies collapse—not all at once, but one shattered norm at a time.
To be clear, Lincoln’s argument was not against protests. The First Amendment protects—and history demands—the right to assemble, dissent, and petition the government for the redress of grievances. However, there is a clear distinction between protests and riots. Between moral conviction and mob coercion. Moreover, too many activists and the politicians who enabled them have crossed it.
The answer is not tear gas or tougher policing. It is the return to civic virtue, cultivating a culture that prioritizes persuasion over force, process over power plays. This begins in our schools, churches, and families. It also requires leaders on the left and right to speak with moral clarity and civic courage.
The rule of law is the architecture of liberty. It does not demand that we agree. It demands that we settle our disagreements in a way that keeps the republic intact. That’s a bargain every generation must recommend, especially when it is hardest to do so.
Lincoln also understood this. In a time of rising tension, he reminded Americans that the durability of the republic would depend not only on what laws were passed or who held office, but also on whether we still believed in the peaceful, constitutional process of self-government. As he would later say in his House Divided speech: “If we could first know where we are, and whither we are tending, we could better judge what to do, and how to do it.” This wisdom still holds. If we are tending towards a spirit of lawlessness, it is to our peril.
Editor's Note: President Trump is leading America into the "Golden Age" as Democrats try desperately to stop it.
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