Liberals and the Police State

US Cities under Democratic Party political control have been building the infrastructure for a police state that will be quickly co-opted by MAGA as it continues to transform our open society into a cruel authoritarian dystopia. This, we are told, is a “centrist” approach to public safety because the electorate prefers “law and order” to paying for social programs. So the funds for an always increasing regiment of law enforcement and incarceration flow easily and endlessly in the hands of liberal “centrists”. The right, MAGA and otherwise, pays no attention to reality and paints the left as being soft on public safety despite liberals repeatedly pointing to declining crime statistics. Meanwhile both sides continue to build the police state. We have seen this happen with immigration.

The Obama administration deported a then record number of undocumented people; tacking right in the hopes of undermining Republican’s grasp on what they had claimed as their issue. The shift towards this record level deportations yielded us the first Trump administration and immigration officers who enjoyed their work and wanted more of it. Then in the early days of the Biden administration the same tactic was employed, with VP and eventual presidential candidate Kamala Harris telling migrants “Do not come,” to the US while she was on a trip to Guatemala. The message was unmistakable, as was the new record number of deportations that Biden oversaw, breaking the record set by Trump which had broken the one set by Obama. Once again the attempt to undermine the Republicans from the right yielded results; a second Trump administration, one that is ready and able to remove the final vestiges of an open democratic society. In short the centrism of the Democratic Party on immigration was a complete disaster and there is more to come.

Despite the uprising following the murder of George Floyd in 2020 and the calls to prioritize funding community needs like housing, health care, education, etc. over law enforcement (aka Defund the Police), local governments are increasing electronic surveillance of our communities and are expanding the size of police forces to deal with growing unhoused populations and what corporate PR operators call “organized retail theft.” The rhetoric from these so-called liberal politiicans may be softer and more polite than what comes from the mouths of MAGA demagogues, but the load bearing pillars of authoritarianism are there nonetheless; mainly that to deal with the cruelties of capitalism we need to increase the cruelty of the police state and dehumanize its victims. There are few that hold political office that are willing to assign the blame to the system they serve, so in order to serve their true constituencies they blame the poor for being poor and seek to dispose of them as quietly as possible.

The result is that liberals have cultivated an institution staffed by those who are trained in (and defer to) violence as a solution to any “problem” they happen are assigned to. I won’t go into the history of policing here, but I will say that cops have always been the protectors of the powerful and their wealth, and their role is openly and proudly acknowledged. Police forces are racist and queer-phobic institutions, often staffed by those who enjoy promoting these values in their professional lives. The 2020 uprising laid bare the ongoing reality of all this, with the behavior of the cops themselves at times exposing the problem in stark relief.

With the Trump administration openly implementing a fascist state, this is an exceedingly dangerous dynamic as many police are MAGA adherents. They may be leashed under the control of local officials who are (at least rhetorically) enemies of Trump, but it isn’t hard to imagine cops choosing usurp local control and join the growing ranks of American fascism regardless of what the rules say. Their unions are decidedly reactionary and right wing, and work to make sure that they remain above the law that they claim to uphold and that they are able to violently live out the bigotry they brought to the job.

The right as usual is painting liberals as being abolitionists regardless of the fact that Defund the Police policies were never really pursued and were quickly abandoned as rhetoric after the uprising died down. The response to this problem by liberal politicians is telling. They are seeking further expansion of police funding, surveillance, and powers. The threat of fascism is apparently not as big of a concern as unsightly camps of people dealing with being unhoused and the imagined effect that they have on the property values. Liberals wring their hands at the criticism from the right and resolve that the way to regain the moral high ground (that they never had) is by moving to a center that continues build a violent and well trained force that will inevitably be used against us and eventually against themselves. The Trump administration of course has its own plans for dealing with unhoused poverty, and it involves an expansion of the carceral state disguised as “treatment”.

Fascism is not a political movement of compromise, shifting political tides, or acknowledgement of commonalities, it is here to enforce its vision through violence and repression. The solution is that we recognize that liberal politics no longer (and arguably never did) offer us any protection from the far right or a system designed to oppress us. It didn’t in 2020. This was seen clearly by those with little property and position to protect and who could not afford the luxury of ideological doctrines and slogans used to justify the brutality that they lived under. So they took to the streets to fight back against a government that had built and maintained an institution that was murdering them. The uprising spread quickly across the country, outside the boundaries class and race. The powerful were thrown off balance and began scrambling to contain the problem. Promises were made for a reformation that would lead us toward a new era of accountability and equity. They were abandoned in favor maintaining the power of these elites whose system is creating the problem in the first place.

Liberal politicians succeeded in quelling the uprising and opened the door to the reactionary backlash against the few reforms and cultural shifts that remained. The backlash continued to build as life for most people became increasingly unaffordable, the climate continued to break down, and armed conflicts and genocides outside of our borders broke out and worsened. We all see that things aren’t going well and a change is needed. In a America the working class has always been controlled through a self-hatred that breaks down along economic, racial, and sexual identity lines; and so the reactionary simplicity of fascism once again rose up, seduced the electorate, and seized power. Unflinchingly liberals continue to build the infrastructure for an expanded police state.

We can rise up again, and this time we don’t have to take the bait of promised reform without doing away with the system causing the problems in the first place. We can continue to build solidarity that rejects the bigotry of those that see themselves as our masters. We can fight and we can win. Our lives depend on it.