Mere Anarchy is Loosed

This week I, much like—I hope—a surprisingly small number of other Americans—tuned in to watch both of the first two nights of the "Republican" National Convention. That is, the annual Convention of the Republican Party you might recall, except a Republican Party that now has no former presidents, no leaders of any previous Congress, no former nominees for high office, not even any significant members of prior Republican administrations (one of whom appeared last week instead over at the DNC). 

It is the "Republican" Party, that is, as hollowed out by a personalistic autocrat who has alienated everyone who still retained a shred of moral autonomy. A "Republican" convention with most of the headline speakers made up of members of Trump's immediate family, with the remaining slots filled by various bogus characters from MAGA-land (Pam Bondi, Matt Gaetz, etc.), right-wing culture war touchstones, and a handful of people (Nikki Haley, Tim Scott, e.g.) smart enough to know better and cynical enough not to care.

It's hard to know what to say about this toe-dip into alternative reality, but one theme of the convention that particularly jars—coming as it does while the nation is rocked yet again by a police shooting of an unarmed Black man, Jacob Blake—was the repeated references to this summer's protests against police violence. Time and again, it was hinted that these protests are bad, "Marxist," even that they spell the death of the country. But at no time, either, did anyone want to frontally challenge what these protests are calling for. 

We heard on night one from a couple that waved guns at a group of Black Lives Matter protesters on their front lawn. "We got a lot of unsolicited advice about what to do with [those guns]," said one of them with a chuckle—apparently making light of the suggestion that they ought to have shot the people in front of their home, unless there's some other way to read that remark that I'm missing. 

Nikki Haley gave us a stern look when she spoke into the camera: "America is not a racist country." Which... I mean, sure. Or at least, debatable. Depends what you mean by "racist." Depends what you mean by "America." Depends what you mean by "is." However we feel about that sentiment, though, why does it mean we shouldn't be on the streets demanding an end to qualified immunity for law enforcement officers who shoot people, a halt to transfers of military equipment to local police departments, and so forth?

That was, of course, not all. Eric Trump, last night, declared that under four more years of his father's reign, "freedom will never be a thing of the past." He then immediately pivoted to an explanation of how Donald Trump will "fight for" police officers who have been "attacked, betrayed[.]" Because plainly, unquestioning yielding to the authority of armed officers of the state is what we mean by "freedom." 

Because plainly, protests against extrajudicial killings committed by police, rather than those killings themselves, are the true threat to our civil liberties. 

Activist Bree Newsome Bass wrote strikingly on Twitter last night: "If we’re required to comply with police without question under any circumstances or face penalty of death, then we have no civil liberties, actually." She was responding to the sort of take that was penned in right-wing circles after the death of George Floyd, when some writers tried to argue that if Floyd had not been "resisting arrest" at the time of his murder, he would still be alive. 

As Matt Yglesias has pointed out in response before, this argument hideously misses the point—the point that Newsome Bass summed up so powerfully: people in a truly free society wouldn't face instant death without trial simply for failure to comply instantly with the commands of armed officers. In a truly free society, our lives would not be things we are granted with the grudging permission of police officers whose temper we did not—at least for one more day—arouse into fatal indignation. Our lives should be ours by right. 

In E.L. Doctorow's 2009 novel Homer & Langley—a sympathetic retelling of the lives of the eccentric Collyer brothers of New York—one of the two men remarks, apropos of Japanese internment: "We're not free if it's at someone else's sufferance." Just so: a person is not free if it's only because someone chose not to kill them that day. A right granted on sufferance is no right at all. In a country governed by Constitutional rights and the rule of law, we are supposed to have guarantees, not temporary privileges, of our right to life, to due process, etc.

Of course, no government can offer absolute protection against the possibility of being extrajudicially murdered by a police officer, just as no government can ensure with absolute certainty that no one will ever suffer from any other crime. A state can, however, respond to extrajudicial killings as it would to other violations of the law. It can apply sanctions that reduce the chances such events will occur in future. 

Even without seeing criminal prosecution as a particularly benign or effective instrument to wield against police shootings—given that the standard of proof for a criminal conviction is and must remain very high—we can work to open up the avenues for civil redress that have been closed off due to the doctrine of qualified immunity. We can create much stronger incentives for police departments to get serious about bringing their incidence of unlawful killings to zero.

The current version of the Republican party is of course doing everything they can to muddy this issue, as we have seen both nights thus far of the RNC. With their endless harpings on the grievances of police, their insinuation that Black Lives Matter protests are somehow illegitimate, their talk of "the rule of law" and Trump's own oft-repeated invocation of the phrase "law and order," the GOP in its Trumpian form plainly see themselves as the one with law on their side. The reality is just the opposite. 

Total submission to armed officers of the state is not the rule of law. In fact, this sort of autocracy is the antithesis of law. Joseph Conrad once wrote in the powerful political postscript to his novel Under Western Eyes: "The ferocity and imbecility of an autocratic rule rejecting all legality [...] in fact bas[es] itself upon complete moral anarchism[.]" This is the kind of lawlessness—"moral anarchy"—that Donald Trump defends when he speaks of "law and order." This is the sort of despotism that Eric Trump means he invokes the name of "freedom."