In the long arc of the American experiment, from Lexington Green to the iron rails that bound a continent, a covenant was formed not of class nor crown, but of principle and promise. That covenant proclaimed that liberty must be yoked to law, and that the governed would grant their consent only to those who served the common peace. At its heart stood the sentinel: the Constitution, a charter not of license, but of liberty forged in structure.

In the twenty-first century, that covenant trembles.

The election of a president upon a platform of law and order was not, as his enemies howled, the march of despotism, but rather the plaintive cry of a republic longing for restoration. He stood not as a Caesar, but as a steward, recalling the nation to the solemn oaths of its founding. He declared that the law was not a cudgel to be wielded against those who stood their ground, nor a shield for those who preyed upon the land, but a bond of justice between citizen and state.

Yet his ascent was met with derision. Not merely by rivals in party, but by those who claimed dominion over thought, word, and memory: the great engines of media and education, the appointed custodians of public virtue. They branded him an enemy of progress, for daring to protect the border that defines the republic, for restoring the right of women to walk unafraid, for insisting that those who break the law must answer to it.

Why this fury? Why such frenzied defamation of those who enforce the law?

Those who seek to unravel America do not charge the ramparts; they first whisper at the gates. They do not demolish from without, but corrode from within. Their first quarry is always the watchman: the constable, the soldier, the magistrate, the keeper of public trust. For they understand that when the guardians are mocked, when they are no longer seen as sentinels of civil peace but as enemies of "progress," their authority becomes brittle. A society that learns to sneer at its own protectors is not enlightened, it is unguarded.

And when the law is not revered but ridiculed, it is no longer the scaffolding of liberty, but the object of satire. Disorder, once a threat, is rebranded as a virtue, an act of expression, a reckoning, a liberation. But liberty, properly understood, is not the absence of restraint, it is the triumph of order governed by conscience and law. Remove the law, and what remains is not freedom, but confusion, weaponised by the cunning, exploited by the ruthless.

In such confusion, there emerges not the robust independence of the free citizen, but his pale counterfeit: the managed man. His life is regulated, his speech administered, his choices pre-approved by bureaucratic overseers. He is permitted to live, but not trusted to choose. His rights are no longer enshrined; they are doled out like ration cards. He is told he is free, but his every word is surveyed, his every conviction tested against a state-approved index of morality. This is not liberty; it is a velvet-lined cage.

This pattern is not speculative; it is historical. One need only read the elegy of fallen civilisations to hear its grim refrain. In Rome, once the beacon of republican virtue and legal order, the erosion of civic authority began when the tribunes became demagogues and the legions swore allegiance not to the Senate, but to ambitious generals. The Praetorian Guard, meant to defend the state, became the auctioneers of power. Rome did not fall in a day; she was hollowed from within by the rot of lawlessness disguised as justice.

In Weimar Germany, the rule of law was undermined by extremists from both the left and right. Police were undermined, the courts politicised, and mobs allowed to rule in the streets. It was in the ruins of that chaos that a strongman promised order, not through liberty, but through submission. The law, once a shield, became a sword.

In revolutionary France, the overthrow of the ancien régime gave way not to stable liberty, but to a guillotine’s reign. The guardians of the old order were swept away, and in their place rose committees of public safety who declared enemies at whim and ruled by terror under the banner of virtue.

And now, in quieter fashion, we see modern democracies tolerating the same corrosion. When protest becomes riot and is still called noble, when lawmen are judged by ideology rather than conduct, when punishment is determined not by crime but by category, these are not reforms. They are rehearsals for collapse.

If America, or any free nation, allows its guardians to be discredited without cause, if it lets the mockers drown out the magistrates, then it is not reforming itself, but sabotaging its own pillars. Those who replace rights with permissions, and virtues with slogans, may cloak themselves in the language of compassion. But behind their words lies the old ambition of all tyrants: not to lead free men, but to manage obedient ones.

This is not the republic the Founders envisioned. They did not pledge their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honour to craft a machine of managed equality or a spectacle of ideological fashion. They risked all for the right to speak, to worship, to protect their homes, and to raise their children in a land where law was the servant of the people, not their master.

Yet all is not lost. The soil of the republic still remembers. The flame of ordered liberty still burns in many hearts. And as long as one man stands in the square and says "no" to lawlessness, "yes" to justice, and "always" to truth, then the republic yet endures.

Let us then recall what civilisation requires: not just food, not just art, but peace under law, safeguarded by honourable men and women who stand the watch. To mock them is not enlightenment. It is an invitation to the abyss.

Let it be written: The watchman has returned. The covenant may yet hold.