Bad news has a way of traveling fast, but every once in a while a dispatch crosses the wire that stops you dead in your tracks. The word out of Australia this week is the kind of thing that makes a man set down his morning coffee and stare out the window in quiet disbelief. An elected lawmaker, a woman who put her name on a ballot to serve her neighbors, was struck by a vehicle in an alleged targeted assault. Her husband shared the devastating outcome: doctors had to amputate both of her legs. The accused, a 43-year-old named Brendan Nugent, has now faced a magistrate, but the damage inflicted upon that family, and upon the body politic, will linger for generations.
Out here in the country between the coasts, people still believe in a few basic propositions. You can disagree with a politician until you are red in the face. You can vote them out, run against them, or give them an earful when you bump into them at the county fair. But the moment violence replaces persuasion, the entire experiment in self-government collapses into savagery. Edmund Burke famously wrote that good order is the foundation of all good things. He was right. Before you can debate tax rates, school boards, or infrastructure spending, you have to possess the simple, unglamorous guarantee that a citizen can walk down the sidewalk without being slaughtered.
Too often, our chattering classes treat political unrest like an academic seminar, parsing theories about polarization from television studios in Washington and Sydney while ignoring the physical breakdown of common decency on the street. They fret over hurt feelings on social media while ordinary people watch the basic guardrails of civilized life rot away. When an elected representative is struck down in broad daylight, it is not merely a tragedy for one household. It is an act of political desecration that strikes at the invisible compact holding our communities together.
Representative democracy is, at its root, an astonishingly fragile thing. It relies on the premise that ordinary men and women will leave their farms, their law practices, and their small businesses to represent their neighbors in the halls of power. If serving your community carries the risk of physical mutilation, then good, honest people simply will not step forward. The public square will be abandoned to the fanatics and the ruthless, precisely the outcome our forebears fought so hard to prevent.
We have seen this creeping menace across the Western world for years now, a rising tide of rage directed at public servants, police officers, judges, and poll workers. Some folks want to blame this solely on partisan rhetoric, but the rot goes deeper than that. It stems from a spiritual and cultural unraveling, an abandonment of institutional restraint and a contempt for the rule of law that has been indulged for far too long by institutions that ought to know better. When the criminal justice system hesitates to punish the lawless swiftly and decisively, it sends a clear message that civilization is up for grabs.
The alleged attacker in Australia now sits in custody, facing the formal machinery of the state. One can only hope that justice is meted out without hesitation or mercy. The legal system must send an unmistakable signal that any attempt to terrorize those who govern under the consent of the governed will be met with the full, unyielding weight of the law. There is no room for therapeutic excuses or sociological hand-wringing when blood is spilled on the pavement.
Right now, in a hospital halfway around the world, a husband is sitting beside his wife’s bed, trying to comprehend a reality that was stolen from them in an instant. Her life is irrevocably altered, not because she picked a fight, but because she stood up to serve. Those of us who believe in the Burkean inheritance of ordered liberty owe that family our prayers, but we also owe our own communities a renewed resolve. If we do not actively protect the peace and defend the magistrates of our towns, we will find that the thin veneer separating us from barbarism is much thinner than we ever cared to admit.