The institutions of this state stand now like the police in Charlottesville: heavily armed, well staffed, hierarchically organized, yet paralyzed in the face of the foul temper of a mutinous public.
Spoken like his father. Read the whole essay. And of course, read The Revolt of the Public, which is now available.
Coincidentally, one year when I taught at GMU, Adam was in my class on year. Had there been more students like him, I would have stuck it out there longer.
I don’t think that’s the right interpretation of the reasons behind early law enforcement passivity in the Charlottesville incident.
In addition to the Hunton & Williams Independent Review, we now have enough independent bits of testimony and reports from officials and observers on the scene to put together a good picture of what actually transpired. The bottom line is that Chief Thomas in particular comes out looking both incompetent and unethical in pursuit of what might otherwise have been a reasonable strategy.
From the Review:
That where the Review’s “failure to intervene in violent disorders” came from.
To make a long story short, it now seems clear that the plan was to force the whole event to terminate as soon as possible, and command everyone present to disperse on penalty of arrest, by using the power to declare an unlawful assembly. The one hitch is that, well, they had no legal cause to make any such declaration.
Stopping the events requires a declaration, and the declaration required actual violence, and so the plan was not to try and keep everything safe and secure for the duration of the event (i.e., their mission and duty), but to create the circumstances where some violence was most likely to occur as soon as possible and knowingly and consciously put anyone in attendance for any reason at some non-negligible amount of risk. Pretty irresponsible. Talk about playing with fire.
That’s why no law enforcement experts who took a look at how resources were distributed and positioned, and at the orders they were given, could reconcile those decisions with ordinary standard tactics and procedures for potentially contentious gatherings. Furthermore, despite Charlottesville having only permitted counter-protesters to assemble blocks away – a typical and responsible measure – there was zero enforcement. On the contrary, judging from the pictures and videos of the events, the pathway and placement of personnel was designed to funnel the marchers into opposition groups, practically guaranteeing an early scuffle.
It looks like that’s exactly what they were hoping for. Some scuffling, maybe some masked antifa guys getting a little carried away with the baseball bats and the bike locks and so forth. Now Charlottesville had every right to prohibit the possession of these and other potential weapons, but didn’t do so, which they (and the review) claimed to be a “mistake as to the law,” which, in light of previous enforcements of that prohibition, strains credulity. As the Review says, “Areas where conflict predictably occurred were not occupied by officers.”
Even after knowing it has been a mistake to allow press into a law enforcement zone in the KKK event two months prior, they did so again. One suspects so the press would be later be able to rifle through all the pictures later to select the ones that really made those marchers look like the bloodlusting, lynch mobbing, street thug fascist terrorists everyone already believed they were, which would seem to corroborate the need for a declaration later should anyone try to challenge it. It was also perhaps why, per the Review, “Upon the declaration of an unlawful assembly, protesters were pushed directly toward counter-protesters, without separation.”
Top men. The very best of hands.
The point being, a strong, serious state cracks down whenever it wants to. When it seems ‘paralyzed’, it’s usually because it doesn’t.
Of course, this is just what one would expect from law enforcement in a university town anywhere in the country these days.
A good example of your last sentence: the British police allow grooming gangs to operate freely for years, ruining the lives of thousands of young girls, but jump with alacrity to punish the publication of any statement deemed “Islamophobic” (i.e., critical of Islam or Muslims).
Right. The problem is ideologically-motivated legal favoritism: hyper-vigilance in one direction, for some groups of people, but passivity (or worse) for others. It is a form of anarcho-tyranny. “Paralysis” is a misdiagnosis.
The question, then, is how to avoid a state in which the only effective authority comes from the barrel of a gun. And how to do that in the face of (1) a public increasingly skeptical of authority it sees as corrupt, biased, and self-interested; (2) a left that rejects as illegitimate any institution that does not give power to the left; and (3) an increasingly militant far right that has adopted the left’s identity politics and its claimed right to violently suppress any opposition.
an increasingly militant far right that has adopted the left’s identity politics and its claimed right to violently suppress any opposition.
I don’t see this particular thing from the Right, except what’s always been there if you look hard enough.
I see the Right clumsily trying to position themselves as an alternative to the increasing excesses of the Left, which all gets washed away by smiling images giving the Nazi salute.
At least the Right is honest in promising patriarchy and economic austerity, unlike the Left which, basically, cries out in pain as it strikes you.
Called the City of Portand to mind. For which I would modify the quote:
“The institutions of this city stand now heavily armed, well staffed, hierarchically organized, yet paralyzed in the face of the timidity and/or complicity of feckless “public servants.””