Like the American Founders and the Declaration of Independence, King didn’t seek to abolish the rule of law, but to appeal to it. King saw, as Thomas Jefferson did, that it wasn’t enough to define law as whatever the sovereign power declared it to be. He saw, as did the Founders, that law defined as such provides no constraint on tyrants who want to reduce it to a matter of their own will and power. //

So what distinguishes a just law from an unjust one?

In addressing this question, both King and the Declaration of Independence drew on a classical tradition that perceives law as rooted in objective reality, in the way that things are. It’s a tradition at least as old as Aristotle. King cited St. Augustine as stating the principle that “an unjust law is no law at all.” He cited St. Thomas Aquinas as teaching that “an unjust law is a human law that is not rooted in eternal law and natural law.” //

Communism and Nazism both accept a relativism that reduces “truth” to a matter of will and power, while seeking to impose their own truth on others. They’re obviously tyrannical, if not totalitarian. But we see the same tendencies in ideologies and movements promoted by Western elites that deny objective truth and seek to suppress free speech, open debate, and democratic decision-making.

The tyranny of radical relativism is one of its paradoxes. It denies the very existence of objective reality while insisting on its own truth. //

The point is simply that justice depends on recognizing the real, objective nature of truth (beyond what the state or party or leaders says it is at the moment), establishing the truth of the matter, and then telling it (or at least not lying about it), even when the cost of truth-telling is high in terms of job security or, in these days of doxxing, in terms of the risk to one’s family.