Social Matter

In the context of the riots in the greater St. Louis area, many people are asking what happened to the friendly police officers that were celebrated in the propaganda reels of the mid 20th century.

The first thing that happened is that they never really existed, because characters on film are not real people. Although it’s a little facetious to state it, it could use re-stating, because people tend to confuse real characters with fictional ones.

The second thing that happened is that rounds of riots and terrorism, blotted out in history with Martin Luther King-worship, ended the legal regime of segregation and attempted to integrate formerly uniform communities. The Federal government banned racial discrimination and encouraged businesses, informal clubs, and other organizations to develop an internal commissar system to encourage representative racial distributions on their staffs.

The third thing that happened, really beginning under Nixon, was a legal and police reaction to the increase in public disorder under the corrupt pretext of ‘drug enforcement.’ Police rhetorically and strategically positioned themselves as front line soldiers in a ‘war on drugs,’ with drugs used as  a pretext for sidestepping the traditional Anglo legal norms restricting police actions.

Next, when a few squads of Saudi suicide soldiers blew up a skyscraper and blew a hole in the Pentagon, police gained a second front ‘war’ to fight in the form of terrorism and the a new bureaucracy intended to unify local police with different Federal law enforcement agencies, the military, and the intelligence agencies. Many local police forces were able to expand their armories and gain access to new military training to help them execute their (popularly acclaimed) new responsibilities.

The debate around ‘police militarization’ is usually disingenuous from several different directions. The first, most important distinction, is that this militarization was somehow politically unpopular.

It was overwhelmingly popular. Enabling laws like the PATRIOT act polled very well when they were signed. Politicians of both parties universally supported the development. Local politicians in particular clamored for grants and new funding from the Federal treasury. At no point have the facts supported the narrative of people power opposed to state power. In this particular case, ‘people power’ unified in an ecstasy of internal war build-up with the state.

Because Americans spend more time watching TV than they do almost anything else, it’s easy for them to mistake the world as it appears in fictional shows as it really is. In the real world, despite anti-segregation laws, de facto segregation is ordinary for the same reasons as was understood at the time that the state undertook its grand desegregation project — namely that, if  most people have at least a slight preference for people of their own kind and cultural background, the ‘Schelling segregation’ effect will play out over time. You can use this argument either as a justification for state desegregation (because market effects will lead to segregation predictably due to assertion of individual preferences), or as one against it (because it means the anti-segregation struggle must be a permanent mission and drain on the treasury unless it can change human nature).

Much as Marshal Tito used a combination of brutality and brainwashing to hold together multicultural Yugoslavia, America, too, requires both tools to hold together its multicultural state construct. While ‘proposition nation’ is a lofty term in the American mind, pathetic, detestable Yugoslavia was also a ‘proposition nation’ — a Soviet one. Arguably, Serbs, Croats, and Albanians have much more in common than the various mutually opposed American tribes.

Obama is merely an imitation Tito of the same poor make as Yugoslavian cars used to be poor copies of American models.

It makes no sense to mourn the loss of English freedoms while simultaneously cheering the dilution of the English stock in America. The legal  freedoms came from the uniquely English culture, and were only supportable when that culture was dominant. Whenever you have multiple cultures and competing systems of morality, it is not possible to maintain a coherent and simple legal system, because the cost of enforcing compliance becomes higher the less naturally obedient people are to the behavioral norms that support the law.

You can dance around this point all you like, but in cold light, there is no evading it permanently. Automatic rifles, APCs, tanks, gas, drones, helicopters, and ceramic plate armor are all necessary to maintain order in a society that is disorderly, culturally chaotic, and ridden by internal political conflict. Tyranny is the natural end point of the choices that Americans have made, and it ought not to be celebrated. Commanding the police to disarm while also demanding that they continue their impossible missions on behalf of the state is just as ill-fated a proposal.

Politicians, on behalf of their addled constituents, pile  impossible mission on top of impossible mission and then feign moral outrage when the men that we demand perform the impossible missions we asked of them turn to steroid abuse and perform SWAT raids on grandmothers. That a piecemeal fix is possible without causing more damaging consequences is a delusion.

To end the tyranny, you must go after the original causes: chiefly, that the country is no longer governable as a single unit.