Are “sovereign citizens” a thing anymore? I’m not sure. But if you’ve heard of this phrase, then it was probably in the context of farcical internet videos featuring grown adults mutually harassing one another until the annoying one (the sovereign citizen) loses to the one with a gun (the cop).

Although it’s not really my style, I understand that there’s no small amount of schadenfreude to be derived from such videos. Sovereign citizens are undoubtedly goons, and watching goons get their goonuppance is virtually a genre in its own right.

But for a certain segment of the onlooking population — the politically/ideologically‐inclined — the sovereign citizen (henceforth sov‐cit) represents more than just the object of their schadenfreude. The citizen is also the target of ideological ridicule.

This particular ideology has its origins in the U.S., although it has spread somewhat to other Anglophone countries. Very basically, the sov‐cit holds an idiosyncratic interpretation of the law of their state that implies that the state is — covertly — a minarchy^[1], because the foundational legal basis for that state guarantees (unexpectedly) very strong inalienable rights to its subjects, and especially because the state’s governance is inextricably founded in the consent of its governed. The sov‐cit “knows” this, and so by a combination of exploiting supposèd legal loopholes, and simply not consenting to governance, they claim to be effectively immune to much of the law.

There’s a lot to be ridiculed here. For example, like most forms of libertarian‐liberalism^[2], sovereign citizenship has its roots in racism, white supremacy, etc. But more to the point, their attitude towards law is what’s described by Wikipedia as “pseudolaw”. The law just doesn’t work like that, and you can learn this “the hard way” by LARPing as a sov‐cit IRL.

But there’s a tinge of irony in that the “magical thinking” attributed to the sov‐cit is not really that far off from the corresponding magical thinking required by ordinary, run‐of‐the‐Mill liberalism. Because laws are ultimately just a bunch of words written by rulers in an attempt to help efficiently control particular geographic regions, the idea that they can really have “meaning” outside of their concretely material‐historic contexts is the lawyer’s game.

Obviously, this is greatly assisted by the fact that laws are written in plain language — or rather, the lawyer’s idea of “plain language”. But even putting philosophy of language concerns aside, jurisprudence is an expansive field in its own right: judicial interpretation, natural law, originalism, law & corpus linguistics, etc., etc. are all taken seriously even by those who may disagree with various such philosophies.

Magical thinking is necessary to take this realm of laws & interpretations seriously as a decidedly ahistoric “rule of law” (“rule” in both of its usual senses). The thinking is then doubly magical for those who take a more naturalist stance that law has something to do with morals/ethics (or worse, “human nature”). Rule of law, and the lawyer’s job, are thus a kind of political platonism^[3]; ahistoric by definition, and reifying the “ideal” form of a state’s power.

Furthermore, it goes without saying that the “consent of the governed” that the sov‐cit clings to so dearly really is a foundational principle of liberalism. Combined with liberalism’s similarly foundational focus on the liberty of the individual, it becomes clear that the sov‐cit’s pseudolaw interpretation of “consent of the governed” is really little more than the logical conclusion of liberalism itself — were it to take itself seriously.

The non‐sov‐cit liberal may choose to bite the bullet: “if you don’t consent to the laws of this state, then go somewhere else”. Although this may sound vaguely reasonable on the ideological level, the practical reality is that the person at whom this dismissal is aimed likely has no such choice — and they really have no choice if they don’t consent to the greatly similar laws of other modern states. With such practical realities in mind, the core opposition of “consent of the governed” to its supposèd archnemesis “the divine right of kings” is not actually an opposition at all.

And we’d expect the sov‐cit to protest even further: “what is ‘consent’ if it’s not informed consent?”. Your average John Q. Public has little to no legal understanding of the jurisdiction that claims them, much less have they ever set foot within a law school. If the sov‐cit firmly believes in a particular form of pseudolaw, then John Q. Public believes — albeit less firmly — in a more nebulous pseudolaw (“folk law”), out of sheer naïveté. No wonder the sov‐cit has delusional belief in some legal loopholes or other; after all, there really are legal loopholes out there that one or more legitimately‐practicing lawyers believe in the existence of, and from the sov‐cit’s perspective, those loopholes look pretty dang similar to the ones constituent of sov‐cit ideology.

Worse still, your run‐of‐the‐Mill liberal’s “consent” is even less informed than that: consent can be — and usually is — manufactured.

In reality, the law is what the law does. The sov‐cit will not get their way, because why would they? You can have the greatest legal interpretations of all time, and it won’t matter one bit when you get snatched up by a cop anyway.

Laws are historical artifacts of power dynamics, not ahistorical sacred texts. Laws & ideologies have no meaning outside of their abilities to be wielded in battle. Liberalism turns to fascism as soon as it’s politically necessary — or simply expedient — to do so, and so too does fascism turn to liberalism.

These truths are uncomfortable for various reasons, one of which is that the onlooker may be psychologically invested in a liberal ideology (or something very like one). This is where our sov‐cit really comes into play — not as an abstract ideologician, but as a real person from whose chagrin the onlooker can derive schadenfreude.

The necessity of ideological goonuppance is that, on some level, the onlooker really empathises with the goon. The sov‐cit is a goon exactly because their version of the onlooker’s ideology is too extreme; too socially inept. The onlooker can thus feel a gratifying sense of superiority. But perhaps more important is the goon’s role as a projection of the onlooker’s understanding: just as the onlooker must psychologically punish themself for the logical inconsistencies of their own ideology by disciplining trains of thought that go logically “too far”, so does the cop punish the goon for going socially “too far”.