Whether it’s Capitol rioters or campus occupiers, the rule of law must prevail

Taking over buildings is a popular revolutionary tactic. Since the storming of the Bastille, activists and their admirers have romanticized these “occupations” and placed them at the heart of their causes’ mythologies.

We have seen this recently in the left-wing takeover of public spaces at various universities, extending even to the occupation of administration buildings at Columbia. But we also saw it in the right-wing storming of the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. Both events unleashed extremist chaos on a staid edifice of civilization, an atavistic scream of defiance against a world spinning out of control.

As with most things in our politics, which event you find most sympathetic depends a lot on which side of the political spectrum you inhabit. But I think that in the political center is a large swath of people who think both occupations were wrong, and who wanted the fools involved in them to just go home so that serious people could get back to work.

Most people just want, as Calvin Coolidge once said, to “do the day’s work.” But it is impossible to do that when our institutions succumb to anarchy and the powers that be simply let it happen. We want our country to be a place where different ideas can circulate and contend, a place where we are not all forced to march to the beat of the same drummer. But when promoting an idea crosses over into seizing control of something meant for the use of an entire community (or nation), we have a problem. A few extremists cannot be allowed to grind everything to a halt for the rest of us.

» READ MORE: State Rep. Kevin Boyle is present and accounted for — at least in Harrisburg | Kyle Sammin

The Columbia radicals and the Jan. 6 rioters all, no doubt, would disagree. They believe fervently in their respective causes and do, in fact, think everything should stop and all should pay attention to them. They are entitled to their beliefs. They’re just not entitled to throw a tantrum about it that disrupts everyone else who believes differently. As President Joe Biden said on Thursday, “We are a civil society, and order must prevail.”

We have, perhaps understandably, developed an aversion to strict enforcement of the laws when these protests do move into trespass or riot. Police want to de-escalate, to avoid making things worse. On Jan. 6, that led the Capitol Police not to repulse the rioters as vigorously as they might have. Instead, they evacuated Congress and the vice president until the tumultuous crowd ran out of energy and left. In a way, it worked, but it set a terrible precedent: that there were no immediate consequences for breaching the security of our Capitol.

It was not that different from the riots of the year before, during protests over the killing of George Floyd, where many of those who overturned cars and lit buildings on fire were never brought to justice. Justice has caught up with a few of the Jan. 6 perpetrators, but the process is slow and scattershot.

So it must have come as a surprise to the occupiers of Columbia’s Hamilton Hall that the police showed up, after repeated warnings, and arrested the trespassers and vandals there. Students (and quite a few nonstudents) who spent the morning demanding that the university send them food while they occupied the hall then spent the night in police custody.

A police spokesperson said they would be charged with “burglary in the third degree, criminal mischief, and trespassing.” Will the local government pursue these charges as vigorously as the feds did for the Jan. 6 rioters? It is far from certain — Manhattan’s district attorney, Alvin Bragg, came to office promising not to prosecute many crimes, including trespassing. Time will tell whether he treats these charges with the tenacity of the ones he is pursuing against Donald Trump.

Paul Alivisatos, the president of the University of Chicago, struck the right balance when responding to his own school’s encampment: “The general principle we will abide by is to provide the greatest leeway possible for free expression, even expression of viewpoints that some find deeply offensive. We only will intervene when what might have been an exercise of free expression blocks the learning or expression of others or that substantially disrupts the functioning or safety of the university.”

The authorities — schools or governments — must intervene when the functioning of their institution is threatened. Because protests that turn into occupations neither advance their cause nor allow anyone else to advance a different one. All they lead to is more tribalism and more stagnation.

» READ MORE: Attempts to keep Trump off the ballot were ludicrous. So are his claims of unchecked immunity | Kyle Sammin

Why not let them be? Let the protesters tire themselves out and go home? Because people don’t learn unless they face consequences. The QAnon Shaman did time in federal prison for his crimes. So should other criminals.

Worse yet, lawlessness invites vigilantism. At UCLA, campus authorities failed to stop pro-Palestinian protesters from harassing other students, including alleged targeting of Jewish students. So the other side took matters into their own hands, forming a gang to attack the occupiers.

It’s darkly comic that the lefty way to protest colonialism is to occupy a piece of land they don’t own and impose their own rules there, but there’s nothing funny about the threat of Weimar-style battles between left- and right-wing street gangs. Yet wrong though it is, it is inevitable that when the government won’t protect people, the people will protect themselves.

In a pluralistic republic, we cannot allow that to happen.

There can be no progress in any direction without a society orderly enough to get things done. Capitol rioters and campus occupiers can demand our attention, but they cannot be allowed to pull down every institution in America just to make their point.