Social Matter

In a move that’s sure to disappoint my legions of adoring fans, I’m switching gears in this Thursday’s post. Shaking things up. Instead of producing my customary, erudite commentary on something I know a little bit about, such as education or weightlifting or the deep antipathy that our social superiors feel towards red-staters, I’m going to produce erudite commentary on something I know even less about: law enforcement in America. The goal of this switch isn’t just to take myself out of my conceptual comfort zone. It’s also to raise some questions that I think are pertinent, especially in light of this latest round of “mostly peaceful protests” that is currently burning down buildings in Baltimore.

The language of this genre, online editorials, has been so abused by this point that I feel the need to clarify something here. I meant “raise questions” in the traditional sense of the phrase: I want to ask about something and I want to receive an answer in order to better understand my situation and order my conduct. I don’t want to “raise questions” in the contemporary sense, which always seems to imply that there’s already widespread agreement on a topic, at least among the aforementioned social superiors: “Twitter’s reaction to trainwreck freakshow Bruce Jenner raises questions about the persistence of transphobia in social media!”

I’ll further preface this post with a tactical note about the rhetoric surrounding law enforcement in America. I take it as a given that the US legal system and its various institutions are sick. They’re dysfunctional. I don’t know that the decaying empire we live in has an institution that isn’t sick. Its schools, its churches, its media outlets, its military, certainly its governing bodies—all of them are in various stages of senility and dissipation. They’re all in need of “reform.” (Preferably the type of reform that consists of cleansing fire from Almighty God, but that’s neither here nor there.) Folks on both sides of the aisle can agree with that to one extent or another.

The way liberals frame the dysfunction of law enforcement, however, makes any sort of cooperation or “dialogue” with them an absolute non starter. A dead end. They want to chalk up everything to institutional racism and the subtle white supremacy of shooting strong-armed robbers who assault police officers in the middle of the street. But that’s not the root issue. So any solutions that are premised on that analysis are going to be ineffective at best, exacerbatory at worst. There are any number of liberal talking points that follow this pattern. Violence against women is an issue that ought to be near and dear to the heart of any conservative, gender role traditionalists that we are. Violence against women is also an issue that figures prominently in liberal speechifying. But they insist on framing it as a byproduct of a heinous patriarchal conspiracy to keep women under the masculine thumb. They then propose legislation that tilts at the windmill of that conspiracy (and, purely incidentally of course, galvanizes young women who feel threatened by their overheated slogans to vote for them).

You can’t solve violence against women from a frame that misdiagnoses the problem as misogyny. You can’t effect reform in our legal system from a frame that misdiagnoses the problem as racism. And so you should never, under any circumstances, attempt to ally with the Left on these issues or issues like them where there’s an illusory common ground. Don’t give them the benefit of the doubt. Don’t give them an inch.

(Libertarians, as my Social Matter colleague Dampier pointed out earlier this week, are fond of the tack I just described, to which I say fine. Signal how much you hate “the thugs in blue” and score your points with the nominally anti-authoritarian Left. Have fun going down the rabbit hole with your fellow travelers. Tell Cathy Reisenwitz hello for us.)

At any rate, the real question that keeps occuring to me, especially having watched the race riots that have been flaring up intermittently since last August, is how ought the Right to relate to police officers? It seems like a fraught question, but a pertinent one. There several thinkers on the Right, thinkers whom I generally respect, that take a hardline stance against the current crop of law enforcement officers in our country, a stance that I think transcends the superficial “Fuck that police!” posturing that often issues from libertarian camps.

And it’s hard to deny that they have a point. Central to the concept of anarcho-tyranny, a critique that I take as accurate in the main, is the role that law enforcement plays in constricting the freedoms of the social middle. How effectively have American police departments been co-opted into that scheme? When I hear stories, like the recent one out of Wisconsin, of SWAT teams executing no-knock raids on innocent families, out of nothing but sheer political ill-will, it’s difficult to say that they haven’t been. And then there is the issue of militarization, and the us-versus-them mindset that it promotes. I know that when I hold a sixteen pound sledgehammer, I really want to put it through a wall, necessary or not. I can’t imagine how I would feel driving a sixteen-ton MRAP down Main Street. Can we arm our police officers like soldiers and expect them to not act like an occupying army? Even more questions remain. Is police work too politicized for our own good? Are our cities too large and crowded for there to be any sort of legitimate community bonds between the patrols and those patrolled? A lot of these are above my paygrade.

My take on the issue is that hardline anti-cop attitudes, even of the more sophisticated variety, overstate the point. The one fundamental political reality that I believe in is that there will always be an “us” and a “them.” (Your “us” and my “us” might not perfectly align, admittedly.) And I also happen to believe that some of us, perhaps many of us, are on the force, that they joined for more or less honorable reasons, and that they’re incapacitated from doing their work because America as a whole cannot or will not square with a lot of the ugly truths that necessitate that work in the first place. In this analysis, the police don’t differ all that much from public school teachers. Yes, there are any number of bad apples in that bunch. But not all of them are, and many of them have become so because of the impossible tasks our society at large has given to them to accomplish. (I.e. “Figure out why we have a persistent achievement gap between these different groups. Your answer cannot be ‘group differences.’”)

If my instincts are right the question then becomes one of coordination. How ought conservatives go about coordinating resistance with their fellow conservatives in uniform? What would that look like on an individual level? Do recent federal power plays to exert more control over state and local police departments help or hurt us in this regard?

If my instincts are wrong, the situation is even bleaker than I’ve given it credit for. But I’d be willing to give a hearing to anyone who wants to explain how I am wrong and how it is, in fact, even bleaker than I’m giving it credit for.

So sound off, if you will, on the PQ. Feel free to bring in perspectives and insights that I haven’t even alluded to. Like I said, I’m a little out of my depth on this one. I just think it’s a relevant field of inquiry right now.