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Which Do You Prefer: Jack Bauer or the Rule of Law?

Over at Polemics, I wrote about 24 and the sort of executive power-worshipping propaganda it put forward as the only sane approach to national security. The domestic opposition to the interventionist security state is caricatured in season 4 as a buffoonish, self-absorbed son of the Secretary of Defense, and the alternative kind of leadership and […]

Over at Polemics, I wrote about 24 and the sort of executive power-worshipping propaganda it put forward as the only sane approach to national security. The domestic opposition to the interventionist security state is caricatured in season 4 as a buffoonish, self-absorbed son of the Secretary of Defense, and the alternative kind of leadership and law enforcement to the routine trampling of law upheld each week by 24 is the gutless, ridiculous Charles Logan, a man so weak-willed and feeble that he would make Michael Dukakis seem like Alexander the Great by comparison. This is not a very artful depiction of the alternatives.

So what would a small-government, constitutionalist, noninterventionist conservative have to say about 24? Not much good, you would think. Yet here is Pat Buchanan joining in the idolisation of the character of Jack Bauer as the great and admirable patriot.

Mr. Buchanan continues:

“24” satisfies the innate demand in all of us that, the law aside, evil should be punished and justice done.

That the audience for “24” is so loyal and large should tell us something about America and our divisions over the war we are in.

Okay, you’re saying, so what? Surely we can disagree about some silly television show. There are, it could easily be argued, a lot worse things on television than a show that centers on a man who will do literally anything to prevent terrorists from attacking America. It’s not as if applauding 24 would dovetail into support for manifestly illegal government activities…oh, wait, never mind.

There seems to be the suggestion, and more than the suggestion, in this article that the Jack Bauer way is the realist’s way and the American way. Sorry, no thanks. Jack Bauer is a perfect symbol of what the interventionist security state requires to survive: a completely amoral, ruthless man who believes ends always justify means. Jack Bauer is the sort of moral monster this kind of government creates. He is one of the best arguments against that state. The rule of law has whatever value it has because it does not give way to the Jack Bauers of the world or, in theory, to any arbitrary will. This is why executives are subordinate to the law, and why in republics everyone is subject to the same laws.

The sort of man who believes he is allowed to overstep those bounds, to transgress laws for the greater good already has a fictional character to represent him: Rodya Raskolnikov. It is Raskolnikov that most men will become when they believe that justice is reached more quickly by subverting or sidestepping the law (after all, what’s an old, nasty pawnbroker here or there?). The point of that story is not simply that Raskolnikov is not such a “Napoleon” or a “Mohammed” (interesting choice, that), but that Napoleon and Muhammad were also not justified in their crimes.

I have enjoyed 24 as “escapist entertainment,” but it is becoming a totem of those who are willing to give the government an unreasonable benefit of the doubt when it invokes necessity to exceed the rule of law not once, not twice, but repeatedly and, it seems, routinely. The trouble with Jack Bauer is not simply that he is a “thug with a badge” (to take a line from the show), but that all men are perfectly capable of becoming self-justifying thugs acting under the colour of authority but without any adherence to a strict rule of law. The rule of law is one of the things that keeps our semi-barbarity from becoming full-blown barbarism that will finish us more quickly than any Islamist extremist. We don’t need to praise Jack Bauer. We need to remember what kind of country we were like before we needed goons like him to protect us against the disasters our government has brought down upon us through its reckless and senseless policies.

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