With news and controversy coming so quickly during this administration, some of this administration’s strategic choices pass without comment. We often see hear the president and his surrogates repeating the claim that they are just enforcing the laws of the land. We have seen this most recently with the zero tolerance policy at the border and the policy of family separation. They claim that this kind of enforcement is a matter of longstanding law and cede responsibility to previous administrations. This is a STRATEGY, undertaken in part because of limits upon the executive branch, but also, perhaps primarily, it is done for the purpose of undercutting dissent.

Imagine you live in a small town in Indiana. You’re between Indianapolis and Chicago and your town has a reputation as something of a speed trap. On your little segment of the highways, the speed limit drops 10mph and folks traveling through get tickets. It’s unpleasant, but it’s a fact of life. You’ve gotten used to it. You live around there and you know to drive exactly 55mph and you rarely get tickets.  Now imagine that the factory in the next town over closed – moved overseas. It employed a lot of people and contributed a lot in taxes. There’s a big hole in the budget and your town is falling into disrepair.

But the new mayor has a solution: get all those out-of-towners who drive through your nice little town to fill out the budget. Now, it would be a big undertaking to pass new laws, but it’s trivial to order the local police to enforce the current laws even more strictly. It’s also trivial to raise the standard fine to the maximum allowed by the state. If someone is driving 11mph over the limit, the police start hitting them with a $300 fine instead of $150, adding on a reckless op charge when possible.

They start making arrests on people with expired tags or multiple offenses. They search the cars of anyone they stop. The more people they put in jail, the more money they make for the community. At first it seems okay. You’re a local. You always drive the speed limit. No one bothers you. But pretty soon it starts to affect you anyway. Your brother-in-law gets arrested coming to visit. Your son was drag racing, and gets nailed with a $1200 fine. How are you going to pay that?

Now, people start to get angry. They start to organize and you show up to complain at the town council meeting, but the mayor has a ready made excuse: “It’s always been this way. We’ve always enforced the traffic laws here. I didn’t make the law. Take it up with the state government.” And suddenly, people coming out of the woodwork to defend this process. “The old mayor did the same thing. My son got a ticket ten years ago and no one complained then. I don’t even go that fast and I got tickets!”

This is exactly what we see going on in Washington. As a conscious strategy, this administration takes an existing policy or procedure and increases enforcement and punishment to an extreme degree. When people complain, the president’s mouthpieces say “We’re just enforcing the law. It’s always been this way. Obama did the same thing. The Democrats passed this law in 1997.”  They re-frame a matter of justice and morality as a question of tradition and of hypocrisy. Then they start asking why you weren’t complaining before. They ignore the difference in severity. If you were objecting before, they ignore that too. They call you a hypocrite for supporting previous governments but not this one. It’s a conscious tactic to undermine opposition. This is a tactic to make opponents feel foolish, doubt their own beliefs and silence their objections.

Taking away and imprisoning people’s children is wrong. Even if Obama did it. Don’t be side-tracked. Focus on the issues at hand. That the previous administration separated families at times, does not in ANY way mitigate the widespread abuse of the current president’s “zero tolerance” policy. Don’t allow the right wing to change the subject. Don’t get drawn into a debate over who did what when. You’re not going to change the mind of a true-believer, so focus on people who are not engaged, and of course, write and call your elected representatives.