“Force is the midwife of any old society pregnant with a new one.”
-Karl Marx
If you watch the news today, you’d think that Americans are living in one big stateless continental crimewave, stretching from sea to shining sea. Even on the crunchy granola liberal networks, every hour carries another newsflash about our nation’s perilous decent into utter lawlessness. The undocumented are swarming the border! The homeless are swarming the subways! Wayward gangs of sticky-fingered Black youths are coming to a Target near you! Rape, murder, it’s just a kiss away! You can practically hear every white liberal soccer mom in the burbs collectively dropping their morning coffee and screaming, “We never should have defunded the police!”
Bitch, relax. Take a deep breath and stop watching the fucking ‘news-today’ because it’s at least 90% bullshit on a good day. Don’t get me wrong, things are still getting pretty wild down in the streets and they’re likely to get even wilder, but nobody had to defund the police for them to get there and practically nobody has. When George Floyd was slowly lynched before a live studio audience and the nation exploded in an appropriately violent uprising the likes of which hadn’t been seen since the race riots of 1968, the Democrats were forced to dawn dashikis and take a knee just to keep their target demographic governably passive. Everybody promised police reform, even old racist crooks like Joe Biden, but nobody actually did it.
During those uprisings, every major city in the country saw these protests met with grossly disproportionate acts of police brutality and every single one of those police forces was being commanded by a Democratic mayor who then spoke eloquently about “reimagining” the police with fresh blood still wet on their jackboots. But these corporate shills didn’t so much reimagine the police as they did reimagine their funding. Cities like New York and Minneapolis simply moved the money around in circles without ever affecting police budgets.
So, why then are the streets getting wild like it’s nineteen-seventy-something? Because Americans are having an existential crisis like they did back in nineteen-seventy-something. This nation’s last big crime wave peaked somewhere between the early seventies and the early nineties after the American Empire lost the Vietnam War, the Civil Rights Movement failed to cure systemic racism, and Richard Nixon exposed the highest echelons of Babylonian power to be little more than an elaborate organized crime outfit. Long story short, America lost its faith in the system and sadly that faith was what passed for a moral center in this country. So, the shit got wild and here we go again after the War on Terror, the Great Recession, the Pandemic, and two consecutive presidencies defined by Nixonian grade dysfunction.
We’ve been here before but this time the damage is far worse, and it may be irreversible. But that isn’t stopping the mandarins of the two-party system and their devoted courtesans on ‘the-news-today’ from trying to fix this crisis the way they did with the last one back in nineteen-seventy-something. With our next sham election heating up, Joe Biden is tearing off his dashiki and pulling his white hood back out of the closet and while Trump warms up the MAGA set with promises of Christian Sharia Law and flaming border moats, Genocide Joe is flexing his muscles by attacking common sense reform to the District of Colombia’s ancient criminal code and pushing immigration deals that promise to dump napalm into the Rio Grande. Meanwhile, the media is chumming us all with sensational stories of a Mad Max-style dystopia.
It’s Law and Order Two: Electric Boogaloo. But here’s the rub; nobody is actually asking for a sequel. Even amidst this synergistic propaganda deluge, most major polls show crime trailing behind the shit that causes it, like inflation, recession, and shitty leadership, on the list of demands for both Democrats and Republicans. In other words, average Americans don’t want law and order. They would much rather watch the Temple of Emptiness burn like their savings. But American power desperately wants us to want law and order to save their hides from the fire the way they did the last time around.
The great crimewave of nineteen-seventy-something ended for reasons that continue to allude the experts but the powerful still believe that they cured that plague with a crimewave of their own called mass incarceration. The violence never ended, it just got monopolized by the police state. While burglary in the suburbs may have dropped, an entire generation of Black, brown, and Queer people were essentially kidnapped under the auspices of the War on Drugs and Broken Windows before being sold into virtual slavery to a modern-day gulag archipelago that would make Josef Stalin thick with envy.
In 1970, the state and federal prison population stood at 196,441. By 2020, the caged population had swelled to over two million with most of its indentured citizenry locked up for non-violent drug offenses. One out of every three Black males born American today can expect to serve hard time before he dies, along with one in six Latino males. Meanwhile, women have become the fastest growing incarcerated population in the country and Queer folk like me are incarcerated at three times the rate of the general population, with one in six trans people serving time, usually in prisons that don’t match our gender identity.
The US now incarcerates more people than any other nation on earth, including China, and dumps $80 billion taxpayer dollars into the coffers of a bustling prison industrial complex every year, but law and order doesn’t end at the prison gates. The spree in federal legislation that began with Nixon’s War on Drugs and peaked with the Clinton Crime Bill that Joe Biden midwifed back when he still had all his marbles, turned American law enforcement into a colossal army of heavily armored goons with near unlimited power and state-of-the-art battlefield technology. There is a word for this, for the wholesale militarization of every facet of civilian society for the purpose of preserving the glory of a failed state. That word is called fascism, and while it may seem like Donald Trump is the only man running for president who is proud of this slur, both parties are thoroughly invested in the American swastika known as law and order.
Democrats may use white supremacy and January 6 to spook their rubes, but the result is funding the exact same system that curb stomps migrants and Muslims. Fascism isn’t really an ideology, it’s just a very ceremonial list of excuses to put a collapsing power on life support by using the state to monopolize an unstoppable crimewave. The harsh reality is that whenever an old system collapses beneath the weight of its crimes, shit gets nuts, the streets get wild, but this is a stupid fucking reason to double down on the same system that brought us here.
This may be a little hard for the soccer moms of suburbia to grasp but the best way to fight crime, all crime, is to teach people that they don’t need laws to have order, they just need values. The reason for the wave of violent nihilism washing over the country right now is that generations of Americans have been raised to believe that they need powerful people to define their moral integrity. It’s a kind of spiritual learned helplessness invented by a powerful minority to infantilize the majority into a state of moral paralysis and once that powerful minority is exposed, there is nowhere left for the amoral majority to go but down. But just like law and order, this perception is nothing but an illusion. It can be broken. Not by voting or passing more laws but by building self-sufficient, autonomous communities that don’t require such silly rituals to be decent human beings.
This is how we win, dearest motherfuckers. This is how we kill American fascism without firing a single shot. Live free and let the tyrants shoot themselves.
The post Law and Order Is Republicrat for Fascism appeared first on CounterPunch.org.
