Rule of Law, Law and Order

     In 1984, the Ministry of Truth runs a project to reform language by introducing Newspeak, with fewer and fewer words so as to make it impossible to express complex or nuanced political ideas. But this isn't the only way to take away concepts. Another trick is to start misusing the word for one concept to refer to a different one, so that people will no longer know the older meaning.

     I don't know if it's a deliberate effort, because it's a fairly natural sort of mistake to make, but I see this happening with the phrase "rule of law". A few months ago, U.S. Vice President Mike Pence praised former sheriff Joe Arpaio as "a champion of [...] the rule of law". That only barely makes sense if Pence is using "rule of law" as a synonym for "law and order", because Arpaio could plausibly be described as a harsh disciplinarian with little tolerance for lawbreaking from certain segments of the population.
     But "law and order" and "rule of law" are absolutely not the same thing. "Law and order" is what you have when the people obey the law, and sometimes that may require government authorities to enforce the law. "Rule of law" is when those government authorities themselves obey the law.
     The two ideas are complementary, and having one makes it easier to have the other, but they are not at all the same. You can have a certain amount of law and order (or at least, order) without rule of law; we are all familiar with the archetype of the loose cannon cop who breaks the rules in order to catch the bad guy. But without rule of law, the best you can hope for is a benevolent dictatorship, and pray that the rule-breaking cops are acting for the right reasons.
     And you can have rule of law without (much) law and order, if you have a small government staffed by a few law-abiding people with limited resources trying to manage an uncooperative or indifferent populace. Ideally, of course, you'll have both, and the two do in fact reinforce one another.

     Joe Arpaio was an excellent example of law-and-order without rule-of-law. He billed himself as "America's Toughest Sheriff", and employed all sorts of extreme measures against illegal immigration in particular, with a particular emphasis on people who looked Mexican. In fact, a court granted an injunction against him and his department, ordering them to stop engaging in racial profiling. A rule-of-law sheriff would have obeyed a court order, but Arpaio kept right on at it, and was eventually charged and convicted with criminal contempt for defying that injunction (and then pardoned by the President before even being sentenced.)
     So it's troubling to me that Pence would have chosen to call this man a champion of the rule of law. Sure, call him a champion of law and order if you want, and I may disagree but it's at least a coherent thought. But calling him a champion of the rule of law is not just literally false, but subversive to the concept itself. Rule of law is not the same as law and order, and when you use the phrase that way, you weaken our ability to talk about actual rule of law, and hence, to demand it.

     Is this a deliberate effort, or just lexical laziness? I don't know, and I'm not sure it matters, but we should resist it in any event. Rule of law means that our government obeys the law, and we should not allow anyone, least of all members of that government, to tell us it means us obeying them.