But in framing the case for disobedience as a matter of fighting regulations gone wild, Murray runs up against a difficult challenge. The illegitimate government Murray presents is a creation of the left, through and through. By his logic, to oppose it by breaking its laws is to be a conservative. Regardless of how many are swayed on the right by that intellectual sales pitch, it will fail as a social movement if it is seen as a merely conservative undertaking. Civil disobedience cannot succeed if it is regarded by the broader public as the ideological act of a minority.

For conservatives, therefore, successful civil disobedience demands that they step outside their conservative skin—just as whites engaging in civil disobedience must reach beyond their whiteness, and Christians their Christianity. Yet none of these markers of identity can be, or should be, abandoned or wiped away. That is why civil disobedience is such tricky business. It must somehow appeal to a public sense that our government has gone wrong—not just in the aggregate, but so holistically and comprehensively that neither experts, attorneys, nor activists can break it down into distinct problems that policy, or money, can fix.

“Conservative civil disobedience” fails this test. Opposing perceived oppression in the name of humanity might not. Americans are deeply divided on the question of what even counts as oppression. Civil disobedience depends on invoking a legitimate form of freedom that the law cannot supply but only safeguard—from those who govern as well as from those who are goverened. In that sense, conservatives’ anxious predicament reflects one that confronts all Americans. Without a shared understanding of the nature of American freedom, any attempt to use civil disobedience to resist a particular set of policies will come off as just another expression of the thirst for political rule.