“Sovereign citizens”
Are they assholes? At first blush, it seems so. Rejecting the legitimacy of legal authority, especially federal legal authority, the apparently 100,000 person-strong movement is known for mouthing off to police officers, filing frivolous law-suits, engaging in “paper terrorism,” paying fines in photos of silver coins (instead of US currency, which they reject as illegitimate), and, in some cases, violently lashing out in ways that have caused several police officer deaths. (See here and here.)
All of this is clearly motivated by a moral belief, however implausible, in the illegitimacy of US legal authority (or at least most of it, beyond some common law rules). It *would* amount to blatant assholery if the movement’s followers thought they had an exceptional claim to be free from legal authority, with expectations that others will uphold the law while they don’t. But, apparently, their view is that other people simply haven’t realized that their rights have been usurped, and that everyone is entitled to take their various measures of non-cooperation and protest.
It is fair to say that this is a pretty confused perspective, as the oxymoronic name, “sovereign citizens,” suggests. Citizenship almost by definition comes with rights and responsibilities. The movement claims “sovereignty” in a way that rejects the responsibility side of the equation.
And then there’s Hobbesian point that, without general subjection to common authority of some sort, we’ll be thrown into a war of all against all in which the “citizen” side of the equation will become meaningless as well. So the movement has to assume people will generally uphold the law, so that its members can make exceptions of themselves, without society coming apart entirely.
But are they assholes? I’m not sure. They mainly seem confused, and otherwise seek to protest what they see as a general violation of everyone’s right to be free from federal rule. In principle at least, you can protest an injustice by breaking or skirting the law, but without supposing that everyone can or should do likewise, in hopes that civil disobedience spur political awareness and action.
But then you’ve then got responsibilities to do that carefully, in good faith, in a well-targeted manner. It doesn’t sound like the movement appreciates the finer points of those obligations, and perhaps that disregard puts them in asshole territory. You can in principle be an asshole for protesting recklessly if you’re telling yourself some story about why you’ve got special rights not protest conscientiously.
Maybe that’s true of many in the movement. But I’m still inclined, at the moment, to see a lot of them as misguidedly angry and in may other ways just pretty confused.
But maybe I”m being too generous? Here’s a different test: How many are willing to listen to a reasoned argument, even if they must finally and regrettably disagree? It is hard to say, though it may depend a lot on who is doing the talking.
