Depending on the situation, people can either love the guy with the gun with the power to make the exception to the rule of law, or they can be terrified of him. I think both spirits are usually at war inside folks, & it's the role of politicians and other public figures to amplify one or the other.

"Dirty Harry" always struck me as a profoundly ambivalent kind of character. On one hand, many people watch and cheer on that hard man who's needed in hard times. But on the other, anyone who's had contact with the cops knows the Dirty Harry type and is rightfully scared by him.

This makes me think about the popular fascination with cowboy culture and vigilantes in the 1970s and 80s. One one hand this was about celebrating violent racists like Bernhard Goetz, but on the other such actions were framed as exceptional...as "the way the world is right now, but shouldn't be."

This is why I like historian Joseph Fronczak's formulation of fascism as "PARTICIPATORY anti-democracy" (or I might say "participatory illiberalism.") It's not that most rank and file citizens were principled & committed democrats or liberals, but they weren't fired up about state violence.

For sure. But also a lot of people thought that was horrible. Our political culture has always had liberal and illiberal threads that can be activated by events and movements. I think it’s inaccurate to say Americans are one or the other, it’s always both/and.

Yes, I’m thinking “people killed by the state.”

True. But not knowing about something due to the structure of the media and one’s circumscribed experiences is not the same thing as actively condoning and cheering for it. They are bad in different ways.

Perhaps. I feel like that's how I and my peers were socialized to think about the world in the fairly conservative PA small town I was raised in.

Here's a thread from a while back illustrating a dynamic that historian Jefferson Cowie has called "racialized anti-statism." The anti-statist feelings are very real...but the "principles" they rest upon are illiberal in that they are not universally applied to all. bsky.app/profile/seth...

Normal person in a liberal constitutional democracy: "The state should be judicious in how it uses physical force and these actions seem like overreaches."
MAGA: "Any state actions that constrain MY behavior or the behavior of people like me is tyranny, but it can do whatever it wants to THEM."

If we were allowed to talk about "white supremacy" in the US, then it would be pretty obvious why what happened in Chicago is acceptable to large numbers of people while Ruby Ridge & Waco (and my imagined scenario) are evidence of gubmint tyranny. The state can't do that to people who look like me!

Ruby Ridge & Waco were not easy situations for the feds to resolve. But they were at least *situations* that merited some sort of response. A bunch of non-criming, undocumented people living in an apartment building which was also occupied by many legal residents and citizens was not * a situation*.

The feds under Trump are doing "Black Helicopter" shit at a rate that exceeds the wildest fever dreams of the paranoid right wingers of the Tea Party era. We've got dozens of Ruby Ridges every day, and the body count will likely soon approach Waco. And most of Trump's victims did no crimes.

More flat circles. bsky.app/profile/seth...