Andrew Christopher Baker asks: What's your political philosophy?

Perhaps consider "Bring forth the body". A message for Easter weekend.

Chicago’s Andrew Christopher Baker is one of my oldest and dearest friends. Over the years we have worked together with various professional services clients, including KPMG. Baker is a communications consultant in Chicago who earned his M.A. and Ph.D. in Communications at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois. Early in his career, he worked in academia, then in marketing and communications for Arthur Andersen and Ernst & Young. For the past 25+ years he has advised professional firms in law, accounting, engineering, financial services and private equity, and IT, on communications strategy and branding, public relations, litigation communications, and crisis communications.

Born in the UK, Baker is proud to have become a naturalized US citizen in 1986.

Yesterday Baker shared with me a letter that he sent his family for Good Friday. I felt his sentiments were highly aligned with mine, in particular with regard to standing up for others and for what’s right, even when it may leave you vulnerable and alone. I teach ethics to accountants, many of whom have and will face ethical challenges much less profound and life-threatening than whether to kowtow to authoritarianism and injustices. As citizens and residents of the United States and many other countries where my readers reside, we all now face significant tests of our will to say and do what’s right. I hope this essay serves as an inspiration.

For more ideas on how to react to these times, I also suggest Timothy Snyder’s On Tyranny: 20 Lessons From the Twentieth Century.

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DOWNEY: I don't understand... Colonel Jessup said he ordered the Code Red.

GALLOWAY: I know, but...

DOWNEY: Colonel Jessup said he ordered the Code Red! What did we do wrong?

GALLOWAY: It's not that simple...

DOWNEY: What did we do wrong? We did nothing wrong!

DAWSON: Yeah, we did. We were supposed to fight for people who couldn't fight for themselves. We were supposed to fight for Willy.

I suspect I don’t need to tell you where the above quote is from. Any movie lover remembers the exchange between PFC Louden Downey and JAG Lt. Commander Joanne Galloway at the end of A Few Good Men.

Adapted from Aaron Sorkin’s Broadway play, the film presents the conflict between individual agency as embodied in Colonel Jessup, commander of the US Marine base at Guantanamo Bay, who arrogates to himself absolute power over the lives and conduct of the men in his command, and the principles of military and civil justice. In the balance: Redress for the death of a Marine, and judgment on the lives and future of two others.

A Few Good Men is inevitably about conflict under law. But it’s likely audiences don’t immediately think about how Lance Corporal Harold Dawson’s answer to Downey’s cry, “What did we do wrong?” implicates a political philosophy and a first principle of ethics.

Suggesting we don’t link A Few Good Men to political philosophy is no indictment of our intellect. I didn’t make a connection from it to our current political situation until yesterday: Good Friday.

I recognized the role of government in my life. I appreciated that government, in aggregate, helped me and my fellow citizens live and thrive in a world that was largely safe, and protected me from dangers overseas and here at home. As was its duty.

Government would protect others, too—with emphasis on those who need more protection: the weak, the frail and the sick, the disadvantaged, the elderly. This implied a system of providing security and social services. To those at the end of their working lives. To the physically disabled or mentally impaired. To those seeking to make a life for themselves who might need a hand up, before they can turn around and give something back.

Government meant vaccines, research to find new cures, funding to hospitals in poor areas and for drug treatment programs. It meant investing tax dollars in retraining programs in communities damaged by an altered economic landscape, and providing seed money to entrepreneurs with a commitment to helping improve our country and the world. It meant providing for public defense: a military and municipal police and prison guards and firefighters. Those who stand on walls, as Sorkin has Col. Jessup say in the film.

And I appreciated the purpose of a system of justice—our government’s intent to protect, serve, and enforce laws democratically passed, and to refine or correct those which do not serve justice or the public or were judged unconstitutional. It meant a system of laws, and courts to enforce those laws.

I supported all this without qualm. I walked my taxes to the Post Office this past Tuesday, and I pay them willingly, believing alongside legendary Supreme Court Associate Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes that taxes are the price of a civil society.

I pay willingly despite knowing that our political and social system has flaws, and makes errors, and embeds within it certain prejudices. Government is not perfect—and likely is not perfectible. But I have hitherto believed that as a populace of like-thinking democratic people we strive to make things better though we ought not assume our work will ever be done.

Political philosophy, simply stated, would mean a shared sense in the community that laws passed by elected legislators sent to Washington or to their state house or to the meeting rooms of their municipal governments, however grand or humble, uphold a principle of achieving the greater good of the greatest number of people, circumscribing individual freedom with the guardrail of ensuring fairness for all.

Of course, that gets messy. Think of politics as a “garden art.” In tending a garden, we have a goal and a work plan and tools, a willingness to work, and hope. Things spring up we do not like. Periods of riotous growth arrive with slugs and bugs and dirt and decay. We get down on our knees with a trowel and make our way through the garden, doing our best to keep things in order.

It isn't perfect, but is any garden? In dry late summer when the work feels hard, when flowers are drooping and dying and the grass turns sere, when we’ve been at it since the spring and accept our garden has pressed too hard on us this year, we do not set our flowerbeds, our grass, our trees and bushes on fire.

We. Do. Not.

Easter means more to many than to me, and to some, perhaps less than it might. It symbolizes the advent of spring, and brings with it hope. Rebirth. Perhaps we hold in mind a flourishing garden, a world we can enjoy and feel comfort in, and that others can admire. And Easter calls to mind self-sacrifice and devotion to a higher calling.

We do not abandon our garden when the days get shorter and flowers fade. We tend it and look to next year. We work and hope. Plant bulbs and lay down fertilizer. Muddy-kneed and with cracked fingernails, stretching our back, aching for a cup of tea and a shower, we try to keep things in line. Double down and wait for spring.

If you think a garden doesn’t work for you, by gosh, you are right. If you think government does not work for you, by golly, you are largely right. Get over it.

Government does not work all the time, every day, for you. It has a lot of folks to think about: A country of 400 million people 3,200 miles wide by about half as much high, incorporating fifty independent states with diverse social and economic makeup, their legislatures granted significant autonomy under the US Constitution, with populations of varying needs.

I’ve listened to people who say, “All politicians are the same.” Or “All politicians are corrupt.” Or “Politicians are self-interested.” Or who complain politicians do not work for them. Or that the government taxes them, then wastes the money. Or that the government only gets in their way. I’ve heard people claim our justice system does not work as it should—inasmuch as some who could be criminals, who we think are criminals, are set free or released too soon, perhaps for lack of evidence, or due to incorrect legal procedures, or because our sentencing laws are too lax, or because the laws aren’t strict enough.

These arguments ignore the plain fact that no work of the hands of human beings is perfect. As communities, we seek what at the time we assume is the right end as best we can, based on what we know and have learned and have seen. We approach that right end haltingly—as in physics, perhaps asymptotically—as in, we’re always getting only halfway there. Assume by such rough calculus that whatever solution we propose, whatever program we adopt, whatever plan we agree on, there will be noise in the system.

Engineers perhaps know best that friction is an inalienable part of the process of movement. There is always waste heat. We cannot control but can only allow for Brownian motion. With the tools we have, we do the best we can.

Friction? There will always be people we disagree with. Even those we felt we agreed with when we voted may not do what we want all the time. Waste? Sigh. What company manager can tell us they successfully eliminated waste for their entire career? Even reducing it to a minimum, it never goes away.

We live with imperfection. At times we become convinced government doesn’t work for us. This does not mean government does not work. Politicians will decide things we don’t like; that is no reason to disparage government or politicians, no cause for abandoning a project or throwing our hands in the air thinking the work of politicians and the government is not relevant to us, that we can do without them.

Politics is not the problem. Politics is the process. If you believe government doesn’t work for you, maybe work for it and try to make it better. Make room in your thinking for a world that is not perfect but striving toward a goal. Put another way: Decide if you’re better off bitching, or pitching in to help.

American government is not all about you, though it certainly is for you. Government is not about individual feelings or interests or desires. It’s the awkward slow process of balancing multiple conflicting viewpoints and interests, holding in mind the ethical injunction to attend to the good of as many people as it can, abiding by the principles of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution and our Federal and state and local laws.

Our system is imperfect, but this is no reason to throw out the baby with the dirty sudsy water. It is not a solution to burn the garden down. To forsake belief in the purpose of democratic self-governance leads to dictatorship. Acceding to the will of a single individual who does not believe in the purpose of government—who wants to break the government because his self-interest, infantile narcissism, and desire for retribution mean more to him than our democracy and system of laws—is not throwing out the baby. It is killing it.

The right end of government—of the people, by the people, for the people—is based on a shared commitment to justice and fairness. The United States expressed in its founding documents an ethical principle of an obligation to our fellow man. Whatever you believe of government, whatever power you cede to the Executive branch in this flawed and muddy garden, might does not make right. America is a nation of laws, not kings.

Until now.

On a Friday we call Good, on a weekend of Easter, on any day of any year, there can be no condoning the deportation of Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, an individual living legally in the US who has been charged with no crime. There is no argument for breaking up a family, arresting Abrego Garcia on no charge, rendering him without due process to a foreign prison called a death house.

It is repugnant. It is morally wrong. It is so manifestly unconstitutional that all our voices should rise to condemn it.

Everyone who lives in this country needs to acknowledge and accept the principle of due process under the law, including the slender but vital 600-year-old common law notion of habeas corpus, which enjoins our justice system to “Bring forth and let stand before me the accused, that he may be judged.”

Even if Abrego Garcia had committed a crime on American soil (there is no evidence he did), he deserves due process, rather than to rot and despair in a foul, fatal prison in El Salvador, where he can no more get a cup of tea and a shower than I can win the lottery or a man can arise from the dead.

Under American law, a citizen or legal resident cannot be held and charged on the presumption of guilt by association: We operate on the presumption of innocence. This is not hard. It is the Constitution that our elected officials—including President Trump—swore to uphold.

Perhaps Abrego Garcia’s rendition was an honest mistake. If so, why not correct it? It leaves open the question of the legality of any rendition of anyone living in the US and abiding by its laws. It allows no excuse for this violation of due process. Might anyone the current government suspects of a crime, however trivial or tenuous, be arrested and deported on no presentation of evidence in an Article III court? On the basis of their country of birth, style of dress, accent, skin color, or tattoos, for crying out loud? How might any person be consigned to a 21st century gulag? Overseas?

There is no excuse for the President’s and the Department of Justice’s intransigency with respect to reversing the error they themselves admit. A man innocent of any crime could die, as a result of unlawful and criminal persecution. A man whose sole fault appears to have been an immigrant allowed safe harbor in the US on grounds of his likely persecution in his home country. If Abrego Garcia dies, the President and the Department of Justice are complicit in his death.

What day does Easter celebrate, remind me? Retell the story of a man persecuted and scourged with flails, forced to carry a wooden cross on his back to the Hill of Golgotha, there to have nails driven through his hands and feet and have the cross raised to the sky? To die, to be buried, then as is reported, to rise from the dead?

What might I make of a story that makes example of this so-called child of god? Who of us can turn a blind eye to such persecution, and reck not of what such an offering or sacrifice means? Judge that any measure of torture, of any human being, is acceptable? Can be ignored or cast aside?

I am an immigrant, from a family of immigrants who by happy accident of birth are Caucasian and speak English as our mother tongue. We moved here in a different time, fifty years ago. I had opportunities others did not have and may never have. I grew up, one may say, girded by the walls of a garden of privilege.

I remain an immigrant and I am a human being. I stand opposed. I will not be silent while our Executive branch abrogates the very laws that have hitherto made myself, my brothers, my parents, and my friends safe in our adopted country, while our President and our Department of Justice lie to the American people and willfully defy the US Constitution and the rule of law.

If I disagree with the actions of the federal government, and I say so out loud, are they to come for me, too? On what perjured pretext might they come for you or your children? Who will stand up?

Make no mistake. They are coming. Out of carelessness, or ignorance, out of loathing or fear, spurred by lies and calumny, from a sense of revenge because they feel wronged or disregarded, they are coming. Spurred by spite, with disregard for our institutions, they come for universities I attended, arts organizations we support, newspapers we subscribe to, public programming we watch.

They are coming for the rights of my friends’ children, for the rights of women to make decisions about their own bodies, for gay men and women I grew up with to decide how and where they might live and work, for our libraries and our health care systems. With the word freedom in their mouths, they come to take away the freedom of others and ourselves, come for freedom of the press and for freedom of speech, for freedom to act and where to give money.

When they act, they do so with impunity, in defiance of courts they blithely ignore, waved on by a majority-Republican Congress that has not the spine to act as a brake and, instead, simply follows orders.

Americans are supposed to fight for people who cannot fight for themselves. This has been our honor and duty, if at times a burden, since the end of fighting in World War II. We have upheld human rights and civil rights, not sought to tear them down. We have fought tyranny, resisted prejudice, and prosecuted mass murder.

We have watched other films in our lives, too. Black-and-white films in which living skeletons walk out of Auschwitz and Buchenwald and Dachau and Bergen-Belsen and Sobibor, burning into our minds a knowledge of brutal, bureaucratic savagery and indifference to appalling human suffering.

How did America become a country in which starving prisoners in an El Salvador prison are the backdrop for a preening Secretary of Homeland Security to get a soundbite on national TV? At what point did we start marking human beings on a scale of worth, judging without trial, deciding whether they lived free or were imprisoned and could die just because they have tattoos?

I call not for a few good men. I call for all brave and sensible women and men. We all need to be asking our representatives to support due process for Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, and for others unjustly accused and illegally deported. Lest we forsake due process under law. Lest we become one of them, and no one stands for us.

© 2025 Andrew Christopher Baker. All rights reserved. Contact acbaker01@mac.com.