America’s Road From Barbed Wire to Briefcases
An empty prison block awaiting new inmates at a detention center in Oklahoma. (Adobe Stock)
Upgraded Shackles: From Barbed Wire to Briefcases
J. Matthew Pierce
Ottawa University
Abstract
This paper argues that American state power has not fundamentally transformed since the era of Japanese American internment and the civil rights movement; it has simply refined its methods. Where the government once used barbed wire, mass incarceration, and open racial hysteria, it now deploys courtrooms, administrative codes, and sprawling regulatory systems to accomplish many of the same ends. Drawing on Martin Luther King Jr.’s Letter from Birmingham Jail, George Takei’s TED talk “Why I Love a Country That Once Betrayed Me,” Henry David Thoreau’s essay Civil Disobedience, and Justice Neil Gorsuch’s book Over Ruled: The Human Toll of Too Much Law, I connect those historical and philosophical perspectives to my own experience being dragged through the federal justice system for actions that began with other men who fled the scene. Across these texts and experiences runs a consistent pattern: when the state feels threatened or embarrassed, individual rights become negotiable, and “law and order” becomes the moral fig leaf for deeply political decisions. The machinery of injustice has not disappeared; it has upgraded its operating system, wrapped itself in legal formalities, and learned how to present coercion as neutral process.
Keywords: State power; civil disobedience; legal overreach; Japanese American internment; civil rights; Martin Luther King Jr.; George Takei; Henry David Thoreau; Neil Gorsuch; administrative state; law and order.
Introduction
We like to tell ourselves that America learns from its sins. We teach the internment of Japanese Americans as a cautionary tale, the Birmingham campaign as a hard-earned victory, and the civil rights movement as a permanent course correction. In that story, the country confronts its demons, passes new laws, and moves on, getting older and wiser.
But when you stack the record side by side with the rhetoric, a different pattern shows up. George Takei’s childhood behind barbed wire, Martin Luther King Jr. writing from a Birmingham jail cell, Henry David Thoreau insisting that conscience stands above unjust law, and Justice Neil Gorsuch warning that we may now suffer under “too much law” all point toward the same uncomfortable truth (Gorsuch & Nitze, 2024; King, 2018; Takei, 2014; Thoreau, 1997). The methods change. The justifications get slicker. The vocabulary graduates from slurs to statutes. The underlying reflex remains the same: when authority feels exposed, it reaches human beings it can sacrifice to restore its own sense of order.
My own experience as the one who stayed when others ran and then became the convenient defendant in a federal case, is a small, modern case study in that reflex. No camps. No dogs. Just a stack of federal charges, a public narrative that needed a face, and a system that talks like a neutral machine while behaving like a cornered animal.
This paper uses four key texts to make sense of that continuity. King’s Letter from Birmingham Jail dissects how respectable appeals to “law and order” can be weaponized against justice. Takei’s testimony shows how a supposedly enlightened nation can betray its own citizens and then ask them to love it anyway. Thoreau’s Civil Disobedience gives us a framework for resisting state overreach in the name of moral responsibility. Gorsuch, writing from inside the legal elite, describes a world where law has exploded in volume and severity, trapping ordinary people in a maze of rules they never consented to and cannot understand (Gorsuch & Nitze, 2024).
Put together, these voices and my experience tell one story: America has not abolished the machinery of injustice. It has professionalized it.
From Barbed Wire and Jail Cells to Moral Conscience
George Takei’s life begins with a lesson in what happens when a state panics. As a child, he watched his family be uprooted from Los Angeles and shipped to internment camps, first in the horse stables of Santa Anita and then behind the fences of Arkansas and California. The official explanation was “military necessity.” The real emotional fuel was fear and racial hysteria (Takei, 2014).
Years later, in his TED talk “Why I Love a Country That Once Betrayed Me,” Takei describes how he came to see that a democracy can be both inspiring and deeply flawed. He notes that American democracy “is also as fallible as people are,” a simple line that cuts right to the core of the problem (Takei, 2014). Democracies do not magically stop abusing power just because they hold elections. They simply become better at telling themselves that everything they do is necessary and legal.
Martin Luther King Jr. meets the same machinery in a different costume. In Letter from Birmingham Jail, he responds to white clergymen who criticize his protests as “unwise and untimely,” even though they claim to support his goals (King, Jr., 1963). From a cramped jail cell, King explains that he is in Birmingham because “injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere,” and because local leaders have repeatedly broken their promises to negotiate in good faith. He calls out what he sees: a “negative peace” preferred by moderates who are more devoted to order than to justice.
What matters here is how King reveals the moral psychology of respectable oppression. The people blocking him do not see themselves as villains. They see themselves as guardians of stability, defenders of law, the adults in the room. Their problem with King is not that he wants justice; it is that he refuses to wait for a timetable controlled by the very people who benefit from delay.
Thoreau, writing a century earlier in Civil Disobedience, recognizes the same problem in a more stripped-down way. He begins by saying he “heartily accept[s] the motto, ‘That government is best which governs least’” and goes so far as to suggest that when people are ready, “that government is best which governs not at all” (Thoreau, 1849).
He does not mean chaos. He means that a system of law which ignores conscience and treats individuals as raw material for policy cannot claim moral authority. The citizen, in his view, has a duty to resist laws that violate basic justice.
Takei’s internment, King’s jail cell, and Thoreau’s insistence on conscience all point the same direction. The American state, when pushed, prioritizes order over justice, and then demands that the people it harms respect the process as if it were a neutral force of nature.
The Modern Legal Operating System: “Too Much Law” and the Federal Maze
If the camps and the Birmingham jail were the hardware of an earlier era, today we are living inside the upgraded software. The fences are not always physical now. They are financial, bureaucratic, and procedural.
This is where Neil Gorsuch’s Over Ruled: The Human Toll of Too Much Law becomes important. Gorsuch and Janie Nitze argue that over the past few decades, American law has “exploded in number,” become increasingly complex, and carries punishments that are “increasingly severe,” often created not by legislators we elect but by agency officials insulated from ordinary democratic accountability (Gorsuch & Nitze, 2024). The book details the stories of fishermen, monks, small families, and entrepreneurs who find themselves unexpectedly trapped in this maze of rules.
What Gorsuch is describing is not some abstract constitutional theory. It is the same pattern Takei and King lived through, expressed through a different toolset. The modern state does not always need mass roundups when it has a thicket of criminal statutes, administrative regulations, and financial penalties that can be selectively enforced. It does not need to shout racial slurs when it can quietly use zoning rules, credit systems, plea bargains, and prosecutorial discretion to pressure the same kinds of people.
My own time in the federal system fits this template neatly. A bad night spiraled out of control. Other men lit the fuse, then bolted into the dark when things went sideways. I stayed. I had a real name, a real address, and a life already on file. That was all the system needed to decide whose neck the legal collar would fit most comfortably.
When federal agents and prosecutors get involved, you find out how much of “the law” is really about narrative control. The indictment is a story. The sentencing guidelines are a story with numbers attached. The press release after conviction is the final, official story. Along the way, the person sitting at the defense table is more symbol than human being. Somebody has to show the public that the state is in control. Somebody has to stand there while “law and order” is performed.
Gorsuch’s point is that there is now so much law, and it is so complex, that ordinary people can be crushed by it without ever intending to do anything monstrous. The more law you stack on the books, the easier it becomes for authorities to pick and choose when to enforce and when to “use discretion.” That is exactly how a modern democracy can reproduce the logic of internment and political jailing without the spectacle. The pattern survives. It just hides behind policy manuals and case law.
Patriotism, Conscience, and the Refusal to Look Away
There is a temptation, when you see all of this, to just give up on the country altogether. George Takei refuses to do that. In his talk, he does not come across as a bitter exile. He comes across as a man who has looked directly at betrayal and still chosen a deeper kind of loyalty. He loves the Constitution that failed him, not because it is inherently pure, but because it contains principles that can be used to challenge and restrain the state that locked him up (Takei, 2014).
King takes a similar stance in his letter. He writes as a Christian minister and an American citizen who believes his country has issued a promissory note and then bounced the check. He refuses to accept that “wait” is a neutral word, or that a court order is automatically just. His civil disobedience is not lawlessness; it is a demand that the law finally match the moral promises the nation makes about itself (King, 1963).
Thoreau, for his part, argues that if law and conscience collide, you do not get to hide behind the excuse that you were “just following orders.” For him, the moral responsibility of the individual stands above majority rule when that majority has become numb to injustice (Thoreau, 1849).
Taken together, these voices push back on two dangerous illusions. The first illusion is that patriotism means obedience. The second is that legality equals morality. Takei shows a version of patriotism that remembers betrayal and still fights for the country’s better self. King shows a kind of holy impatience that refuses to let “law and order” mask moral cowardice. Thoreau speaks for the part of the soul that knows you cannot outsource your conscience to a statute.
Gorsuch’s critique of “too much law” fits surprisingly well beside these older voices. He is not calling for anarchy. He is warning that when law multiplies beyond what ordinary citizens can navigate, it stops being an instrument of shared justice and becomes a field of traps that fall hardest on those “without wealth, power, and status” (Gorsuch & Nitze, 2024).
That is remarkably close, in spirit, to Thoreau’s worry that government becomes an “expedient” that can be used to do what individuals would never justify on their own.
My own story sits at the intersection of these ideas. I am not a hero and I am not a martyr. I am a man who watched the machinery of “law and order” look at a messy situation, count the available bodies, and decide that I was the most convenient symbol of accountability. That experience did not leave me with the clean, euphoric patriotism of a campaign ad. It left me with something closer to Takei’s complicated love and King’s stubborn insistence that you tell the truth about what the system is actually doing.
Conclusion: The Pattern, the Upgrade, and What It Demands
In the end, the hard truth is that America has not fundamentally changed so much as it has refined its methods. During World War II, it used camps, barbed wire, and executive orders to cage families like George Takei’s. In Birmingham, it used police, injunctions, and jail cells to silence Martin Luther King Jr. When Thoreau refused to fund a government he believed supported slavery and unjust war, it locked him up for a night to remind him who wrote the tax laws.
Today, the same nervous system of power works through criminal codes, administrative regulations, risk scores, financial penalties, and thick procedural handbooks. Justice Gorsuch’s warning about a nation flooded with complex laws and severe punishments is not some distant academic worry. It is a description of the environment where a person can wake up one morning and find that his missteps, or even merely his proximity to other people’s missteps, have turned him into a defendant in a federal morality play (Gorsuch & Nitze, 2024).
George Takei’s internment and my prosecution are not the same in scale, but they live on the same continuum. The targets shift. The language softens. The justifications become more polished and are written in legalese instead of shouted from a podium. The underlying reflex remains: when the state feels threatened or embarrassed, individual rights become negotiable, and “law and order” becomes the costume that power puts on to feel virtuous.
We like to say we have evolved. We point at the end of the camps and the victories of the civil rights movement as if history were a finished book instead of an ongoing argument. But the machinery of injustice has not disappeared. It has upgraded its operating system, moved to a more user-friendly interface, and learned how to call itself neutral.
The question, then, is not whether America is hopeless or whether law is inherently corrupt. The question is whether we will keep pretending that every act of power wrapped in legal procedure is automatically legitimate. Takei, King, Thoreau, and even Gorsuch in his careful judicial prose all suggest the same answer. You cannot afford that kind of naivety.
If there is any honest patriotism left in us, it will not be found in blind trust of institutions or sentimental stories about progress. It will be found in the willingness to look directly at how the system still behaves, to name the pattern even when it hides behind case citations and rulebooks, and to insist, again and again, that no government gets to trade away human dignity for its own convenience and still call that justice.
