Here’s a recent Facebook post by Seattle City Councilmember Kshama Sawant:

It’s time for politicians to move beyond platitudes to action. If Seattle is a sanctuary city, elected officials need to take radical measures to fight Trump’s attacks. The Mayor should not deploy police against peaceful protesters, but instead use police to shield immigrants from ICE raids! Sanctuary also means affordability: Tax big developers and fight for rent control to make our city affordable for all!

Here’s what I wrote right after the election at Forbes:

Seattle has been the scene lately of loud and noisy protests against the coming Trump administration, and this opposition is in no small part because of President-Elect Trump’s views on immigration. He wants to deport people and wall new people out of our country. However, the very people in the streets of Seattle who oppose this policy, usually, when it comes to housing and growth policy here, are part of an all too familiar pattern of insular and ingrown almost xennophobic protectionism that seems to run counter with the self-proclaimed leftist hegemony in the city. It’s a pattern sure to raise a barrier for new people who want to live in the city, a barrier of high housing prices that might as well be a wall (check out Saturday Night Live’s take on this effect they call “The Bubble“).

My comments were later mimicked by Councilmember Rob Johnson when he compared angry neighborhood opposition to Trump’s wall building. I had to point out all over social media that I had said this first, not because of my ego, but because I want to remind people I know what I’m talking about. More importantly, what I say is often discredited automatically until someone else says it. But it doesn’t make it any less true. I’ve called it the Cassandra effect.

So these are the two ways in which the Trump thing is going to play out locally. On the one hand, the somewhat inchoate mob of socialists and angry and mostly white and entitled single-family homeowners will crowd around Sawant in the street in front of various public buildings and shake their fists, grit their teeth, and stomp their feet. Local politicians suffering from chronic Sally Field Syndrome will jump in front of parades, file appeals, make declarations, and threaten to disobey the Federal government all to the cheers of the bitter mob. While this is what Trump himself might call, “Sad!” in a Tweet, it’s more concerning that meets the eye.

Politicians can express in what they do both the highest aspirations that people have; their speeches and actions can inspire and when they have vision they can assuage anger, ameliorate anxiety, and show people that what their own fears and prejudices make impossible can be done if they’d let go of those walls around themselves. It is physically painful to watch Robert Kennedy’s speech at the time of the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. Here’s a man who spoke from the heart to the heart, quoting Greek poetry, to a group of black people filled with legitimate rage and pain.

What we need in the United States is not division; what we need in the United States is not hatred; what we need in the United States is not violence and lawlessness, but is love, and wisdom, and compassion toward one another, and a feeling of justice toward those who still suffer within our country, whether they be white or whether they be black.

So I ask you tonight to return home, to say a prayer for the family of Martin Luther King — yeah, it’s true — but more importantly to say a prayer for our own country, which all of us love — a prayer for understanding and that compassion of which I spoke.

We can do well in this country. We will have difficult times. We’ve had difficult times in the past, but we — and we will have difficult times in the future. It is not the end of violence; it is not the end of lawlessness; and it’s not the end of disorder.

But the vast majority of white people and the vast majority of black people in this country want to live together, want to improve the quality of our life, and want justice for all human beings that abide in our land.

And let’s dedicate ourselves to what the Greeks wrote so many years ago: to tame the savageness of man and make gentle the life of this world. Let us dedicate ourselves to that, and say a prayer for our country and for our people.

It hurts because we are in one of “those difficult times,” and Kennedy himself was gunned down only months later. We never had a chance to see him as President. So today, instead of his steady but breaking voice, speaking from his own heartache and pain from the loss of his brother, to people that had lost their own leader, we have a smallness of mind and lack of vision from local leaders who are taking fear and anxiety and bending it to their own narrow and dangerous agenda.

All the marching and Trump obsession lately has me with the feeling of being trapped behind the lines. I see people casually talking about secession from the union and urging local law enforcement to get into altercations with federal law enforcement. It’s as if the people never learned about the Nullification Crisis or our Civil War in school. The bravado from local leaders, including even faith leaders, is truly disheartening.

I am an adherent to the sense of conservatism articulated by Edmund Burke by his actions in Parliament as well as his words, here from Reflections on the Revolution in France:

The constituent parts of a state are obliged to hold their public faith with each other and with all those who derive any serious interest under their engagements, as much as the whole state is bound to keep its faith with separate communities. Otherwise competence and power would soon be confounded and no law be left but the will of a prevailing force. On this principle the succession of the crown has always been what it now is, an hereditary succession by law; in the old line it was a succession by the common law; in the new, by the statute law operating on the principles of the common law, not changing the substance, but regulating the mode and describing the persons. Both these descriptions of law are of the same force and are derived from an equal authority emanating from the common agreement and original compact of the state, communi sponsione republican [(the assent of the commons)], and as such are equally binding on king and people, too, as long as the terms are observed and they continue the same body politic (page 18).

It is worth noting that Burke was a supporter of the American Revolution that uprising was a demand for what colonists felt they were due under the English Constitution and common law, not an abrogation of tradition and order for the sake of just making up something new. The French Revolution, on the other hand, of which Burke was critical, stoked class warfare and simply threw out everything out at once, leaving nothing standing. It’s tempting when one is frustrated with a creaky old system of government to long for cutting down all the old rules. One of the best articulations of why this is a bad idea are the words put into the mouth of Thomas More in the play A Man for All Seasons:

It can be a challenge to be calm during times of social disorder. It is easy to push back against a system producing results we don’t like. As a Hayekian, I feel the frustration with our fussy land use laws, an overgrown thicket of amendment by reference, confusing, contradictory, and harmful to the people of this city, laws without aspiration for what is good but only worried about stopping what might be bad. God, how I’d love to cut those down all those laws, every last one of them! With a chain saw. And the Council keeps adding more and more to the mess in the name of social justice and trying to help lower prices by adding costs, to increase access to affordable housing by imposing schemes that will make it less accessible. How sweet it would be to slice through all that to get to the “devil himself” hiding in the bushes of the code.

However, that would make me no better than Sawant, Trump, or the angry mob whether they are urging nullification or fighting microhousing or Detached Accessory Dwelling Units, or pushing for the sweeping away homeless people in their tents or their cars. Mobs like that always appeal to “the will of a prevailing force.”

It may take awhile, but those of us who are working for a better world can’t rely on revolution or abrogation of a system of laws that produce outcomes we may not like. And one election or candidate won’t undo the damage. But we have to play the long game, patiently and with intention. So I turn once again to the land from whence all blessings flow, England, and my fellow Burkian John Lennon. I have to believe it’s going to be all right. It will be.

The featured image is called, “Nullification crisis: John C. Calhoun reaching for Despotism,” and is a lithograph from Endicott and Sweet, lithographers in New York City, produced in about 1833.