It’s happening again. Violence in the streets. Protesters clashing with police. A president threatening to send in the troops.

And once again, America is being told to pick a side: Are you with “law and order” or “the resistance”? Tear gas or hashtags? Trump or chaos?

It’s a false choice — but it’s one we keep falling for.

That isn’t to say you shouldn’t pick sides in the larger culture war — or that we should fall prey to “both-sides-ism.” But when it comes specifically to what is happening right now in Los Angeles, we don’t have to choose between anarchy and authoritarianism.

A free society needs both liberty and order — rights, yes, but rights with responsibilities. Freedom with guardrails. That’s the spirit behind Edmund Burke’s idea of “ordered liberty.”

It’s a concept that demands balance. And yet here we are, again, in a moment that insists we pick one side or the other, no middle ground allowed. Today’s politics operates in binaries: for or against, red or blue, patriots or traitors.

Refusing to play this game, increasingly, is treated as moral weakness — as a cop-out. But that’s the brilliance of Burke’s formulation: It resists simplicity and mocks tribal reflexes.

Yes, the government must protect us from violent mobs. But just as surely, we must be........

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