Justice & Law Quote by James Bovard

Bovard’s line is a polite sentence with an impolite accusation tucked inside it: the Bill of Rights has become less a shared civic foundation than a prop one party grabs when it’s losing. The opener, “Some of the folks on both sides might be sincere,” reads like throat-clearing moderation, but it functions as a trapdoor. Having granted good faith in the abstract, he pivots to a harsher empirical claim: sincerity is not the point; behavior is. The phrase “does seem as if” is strategically lawyerly, a hedge that signals restraint while still landing the indictment.

The real bite is in “only the opposition.” Bovard isn’t praising a particular ideology so much as indicting the psychology of power. Rights talk, in this framing, is often grievance talk: the First, Second, Fourth, and Fifth Amendments become urgent when you’re the one being surveilled, censored, disarmed, or prosecuted. When you’re governing, the temptations flip. Security, order, public health, party discipline, “the greater good” - each offers a respectable reason to shave a liberty here, expand a mandate there, and call it pragmatism.

Context matters because Bovard’s broader career is a civil-liberties warning system, skeptical of state expansion regardless of which logo is on the podium. The subtext is that constitutional devotion is frequently performative: a language of principle used tactically, not a principle that constrains tactics. It’s a cynic’s observation, but also a test: if your love for the Bill of Rights doesn’t survive your side winning, it wasn’t love - it was leverage.