My country, ’tis of thee,
Sweet land of liberty,
Of thee I sing;
Land where my fathers died,
Land of the pilgrims’ pride,
From ev’ry mountainside
Let freedom ring! – Samuel Francis Smith
I’m always a little astonished when I encounter someone, online or off, who says something like “The United States is becoming a police state” or “may become a police state” or the like; I can only assume it’s because the realization that what was once called “The Land of the Free” has been a full-blown police state for over a decade now is too terrible for many people’s minds to accept. The term “police state” is not a well-defined one, but I think most people would agree that such regimes are characterized by extensive surveillance of the population; a huge number of arbitrary laws punishable by disproportionate penalties; a slow and arbitrary court system in which the outcome of important cases is essentially pre-ordained; a requirement that ordinary citizens carry identity documents everywhere and present them to officials on demand (“papers, please!”); a bloated police force whose powers are limited only by the imaginations of officials and whose members are able to inflict violence upon anyone they choose without any consequences whatsoever or recourse of any kind for the victims; and a powerful bureaucracy which regularly violates the laws which supposedly constrain it and ignores due process when it proves inconvenient. For good measure, let’s throw in worshipful reverence of officials and a media which largely parrots every press release those officials come out with, and I think you’d be hard-pressed to come up with some way in which the US isn’t a police state.
One might be tempted to be somewhat pessimistic about the US’s descent into naked fascism; after all, the country was founded on the right of the individual to be free of tyranny, and our present governmental system practices nearly every one of the abuses Jefferson and Company complained about in the Declaration of Independence. But this is nothing new; the Roman Republic was founded on anti-royalist principles, and yet the Roman Empire which replaced that republic was as bad as any monarchy. Nor was it obvious when the tyranny replaced the republic, except in retrospect; Romans went right on thinking of their country as the same one their ancestors had loved and died for. Many Americans who would recognize that another country had changed beyond recognition are blinded by the myth of “American exceptionalism”, the irrational belief that the United States is somehow magically different from any other country in history…you know, kind of like how kings ruled by Divine right because they were just so much better than other human beings. This is not fact or even politics; it’s religion, an irrational faith held in defiance of mountains of proof to the contrary. “Freedom” has become nothing but a worship word, and the flag is venerated like an idol; cops are the priests and politicians the bishops, and those who violate – or even question – the holy Laws are dealt with like heretics.
Good analysis Maggie, especially the last para, but as is always the case with libertarian diagnoses of political oppression you have ignored the elephant in the room (and I don’t mean the GOP).
As Adam Smith and numerous sci-fi authors have suggested (and post-Soviet Russia demonstrated) if state power is rolled back without dismantling corporate power the latter will simply take over the functions of the former and then some. You name-checked the media as accomplices to the bureaucrats and politicians without acknowledging that the former is a major vector of control over the latter (though far from the only means corporations use to ensure government does their bidding). Even state funded broadcasters have their agendas set more by ‘private enterprise think-tanks’ (i.e. corporate funded neoliberal propaganda organs) than by government fiat.
Fingering cops and politicians is what I would expect from someone committed to the corporate-promoted myth of individualism but the people are merely replaceable components in the structures that are the real problem. The corporations have adapted to the regular purge of office holders that is a feature of democracy and no longer care who the figurehead at the phoney helm is. That’s why it makes no difference whether the country is run by a Quaker crook, a senile B-grade actor or an African-American Uncle Tom. Policy (especially economic policy) remains steady-as-she-goes. The reason the facade of democracy remains important is not so much to placate the masses as to ensure that campaign donations (which are ultimately funneled back to the corporate media anyway) will compromise even the most idealistic politicians. Even police power is highly reliant on the ‘threats’ manufactured by the media and the simplistic Dirty Harry style solutions promoted by Hollywood.
You’re aiming at the puppets (as you are meant to do). Look at where the strings go instead.
Your observations are excellent and bring up things I had never thought about.
Dear Cabrogal, I’ve quit posting here for a long time but what you said here is so wonderful I want to at least say: THANK YOU! These things are complicated. There are many components to some things and this is one of them. Thank you again!
I think it’s a little sad that you can have read me for as long as you have and still believe I’m only talking about “visible power structures” and elected figureheads, when I mean the whole stinking fascist regime, meaning government, police-military AND big corporations. See yesterday’s column, for example; who’s to blame for that oppression, a two-bit sheriff with delusions of grandeur, or a morally-warped billionaire and immense credit card companies? Read that, then come back here & say with a straight face that I’m only aiming at puppets “as I’m meant to do”.
I read yesterday’s post Maggie. I read all your posts.
I’m not claiming that you don’t criticise corporations or billionaires whose actions you disapprove of. It’s your analysis of the nature of oppression that I think is missing something.
It’s not billionaires who can and do impose their obnoxious ideologies upon others that’s the problem. It’s that it’s possible for billionaires to exist in the first place. Given that amount of relative power it’s inevitable it will be abused. In their position you or I would do the same thing (though probably not targeting the same victims) and we’d find whatever rationalisations we’re comfortable with to justify it. Billionaires too are puppets of the institutions that create them.
The line “a media which largely parrots every press release those officials come out with” implies the corporate media is a mouthpiece of government power when in fact the opposite is much closer to the truth. The media don’t ‘parrot’ officials, they simply amplify the voices of those who promote the agenda of the corporate structures that own the media. Those who don’t are ignored or ridiculed and eventually broken to the yoke or forced out. This is something I saw time and time again when I worked in NSW parliament – media representatives making it clear to parliamentarians what they were allowed to say and even the most notionally radical ones complying.
BTW, I’ve gotta say I find the way you toss mental illness diagnoses (e.g. megalomania) at your ideological opponents to be pretty disconcerting Maggie. Even if you were qualified and psychiatric labels had any validity (which they don’t) that sort of thing has a long and very unsavoury history, from Samuel Cartwright’s ‘drapetomania’ to Soviet psychiatry’s ‘sluggish schizophrenia’ to the current widespread psychiatric oppression of anti-authoritarian young people in the US and elsewhere.
If you take away the very real and unaccountable power of psychiatry to imprison, forcibly medicate and otherwise abuse its patients then psychiatric labels are nothing more than schoolyard name-calling with pretensions.
Only the past decade? Maggie, I think some folks would argue you’re off by several decades. One could easily say we’ve been that way since the end of WWII (the Red Scare, CIA gone wild, etc.), since WWI (the Sedition Acts, ANOTHER Red Scare, etc.), since the beginning of the Civil War (Lincoln: history’s greatest monster!), maybe even before the ink was dry on the Constitution. After all, the founding fathers may have just broken with British monarchy, but they were still products of British institutions and customs.
Now, thats just ridiculous!. Next you will be saying the Presiental office is like some sort of god-king where families rule in named dynastic succession….err…right…yes…I’ll see myself out
As usual your observations are spot on. Your definition of a police state is striking and perfectly describes what is currently going on in the U.S. I know that although you focus on the oppression of prostitutes, your real interest is the oppression of women and we often get lost in that and forget that the real oppression is of EVERYONE so that the wealthy can maintain their position.
Very astute article Maggie, but am I the only person who correlates certain progressive presidents for setting this country’s bad direction? (To be fair, McCarthy, Nixon, Reagan, and the rest of the Conservative movement weren’t any better than the Communists who ran eastern Europe into the ground.) Oh, and here’s a couple of FreeDomain Radio videos worth watching:
https://board.freedomainradio.com/topic/44546-youtube-the-fall-of-puerto-rico-prepare-yourself-accordingly/
https://board.freedomainradio.com/topic/44288-youtube-an-introduction-to-capitalism/
Excellent analysis of the visible part. The invisible part is corporate and religious structures, as the behind-the-scenes power-mongers. Only if you include them do most of the utterly stupid policies in effect begin to make sense.
Here is another criterion for a police state: “Absence of the rule of law”, where rule-of-law means that the law applies to everybody. The US did not have rule-of-law at least since 9/11 and in some regards much longer.
The fascinating thing is of course that the last global fascist catastrophe was not so long ago. It seems the people that drive us towards the next one have understood exactly nothing. With the zero capability for reflection found in the typical authoritarian that is not very surprising though.
It’s an old trick: Tell people, they’re some sort of master race, and they’ll applaud, when you turn them into your slaves.
Every country in the world has the same political system: A handful of aristocrats controls and exploits everybody else. There are enormous differences in the details – I’d rather live in New Zealand, than in North Korea. But that’s the end result, no matter if you’ve started with theocracy, democracy, monarchy, communism, or whatever. Natural human behavior always gets you there. Since libertarianism is about letting people behave naturally, it will just get you there faster. Preventing natural behavior is enslavement. Which means, if you want to protect people from slavery, you have to enslave them. If there’s any solution to this problem, it’s certainly not a simple one. Maybe, the best option we have, is harm reduction.
You found a country, establish the political, social and economical system you deem best, press START. Instantly, people rush to work to make their lives a little better. With other words, each and every citizen sets out to corrupt the system, make it work a little bit more in their favor. Some are better at it than others. Some of the better ones are better than others of their kind, and the more they succeed, the easier it gets. Sooner or later, they create an efficient machinery to pump all the wealth and power to the top, and prevent it from flowing back down. Society separates into a small nobility and a lot of serfs, and stays like that, until some (most often terrible) circumstances press STOP, and the game starts all over again.
I guess, the strong side of capitalism is, it produces wealth faster, than the mighty can take it away. With the pump clogged, a lot of it stays with the serfs for a while, they’re happy and proud, and it makes more sense for the nobles to rule by the carrot, not by the stick. But the pump machinery gets improved, until production can’t keep pace anymore, and less carrot means more stick. And that’s usually the beginning of the end for your country, because the mighty never ever learn, that the hand that feeds them is not part of the meal.
[…] As Maggie McNeill writes, […]
My children, and maybe I myself, will see the bloodshed of another revolution. Not sure who will win…
You’ll probably think this flippant, but that answer is simple: no one will, because one side has nukes and the other doesn’t.
Further, the reason why that answer is so simple is thus: which side has already used the argument “we had to destroy the village in order to save it”?
Nah. Utter lack of hope and certain death doesn’t stop revolutions.
It just means the revolution will be the last thing LCB’s children will see.
You’re not contradicting me. I didn’t say it would stop revolution, I said no one would win.
My apologies. I read your comment as “no one will [see the bloodshed of another revolution]”.
No, I’m not being flippant. This argument, that one side has all of the superior firepower and the other side has only rifles and thus can’t win, ignores a lot of history. The VC in Viet Nam didn’t have an air force or much artillery and yet still managed to drag the world’s premier military through the mud of the jungle for years.
And talk to the soviets about Afghanistan. Or the US military about the Philippine’s or Afghanistan. Or the British against the Zulu. Or the Turks against the Arabs during WW1. I’m sure I’m forgetting some examples…
Finally, I don’t think the US military and police will completely go to war against their own families. Our military units are not made of 100% New Yorkers, for example, so that we could send a New York unit against Texas. The Chinese found out that to crush the Tiananmen Square protest they had to bring in troops that hated the students in Beijing…troops from Mongolia. The Chinese units ARE made up of soldiers from the regions where they’re stationed.
A revolution will be catastrophic. I’m fairly certain it will happen in my children’s lifetime because of the financial state of the world AND because I expect the feds to try to confiscate guns at some point, just as so many of the fascist countries that Maggie alludes to confiscated guns prior to their pogroms. Most gun owners in the “middle” of the country know enough history to resist.
I know this site focuses on sex work, but as Maggie has shown, it’s all pieces to a large puzzle.
I wasn’t saying you were being flippant, I thought perhaps you’d regard my response as flippant.
However, while you’re right that military and police won’t fight against their own families, that’s why I went straight to the subject of nuclear weapons. If the military refuses to fight, well, you don’t need a battalion of troops to launch several or even one missile. Dying slowly of radiation is a victory over instant vaporization, right? Right?
Further, while most gun owners may know history, do they know the tactics that would allow them to resist effectively? Further, would they be willing to follow someone who did? It seems to me one of the main reasons a revolution hasn’t broken out already (this country has been ripe for a libertarian movement since at least Nixon’s time, if not earlier) is because in order to be effective it would require subordination to another’s leadership and judgement. How many are willing to allow even that compromise to their “I can do everything myself” principles?
You make some good points, especially about who would lead. I really don’t know. It’ll start with people fighting back when “they” come for their guns or “they” come to search your house for food. After that it will snowball. And it will be terrible. And really, you’re right. No one will win because I don’t think they’ll be enough left to form a country. Maybe little city/states…with warlords in charge. Sounds like about 1000 novels I’ve seen on Amazon, doesn’t it. 🙂
I think you’re wrong about nukes. That radiation wouldn’t just affect the “resistance”…if the wind shifts it’ll blow back on DC too.
The decision to use nukes won’t be a rationally considered one. When you get to the point of revolution in the US it will have come after precipitous decline in the empire at home and abroad, resulting in a more extremist populist and paranoid leadership that will replicate it’s paranoia throughout the whole power structure. Regardless of who the ‘enemy’ are they’ll be characterised as an existential threat even greater than nuclear war and some people will believe it.
It’ll be more like Dr Strangelove than Fail Safe.
This is silly. If nukes are the weapons that cannot be used externally, they sure can’t be used internally. The ruling class is far too intelligent to use a tool that would completely delegitimize them instantly.
No they’re not. If they were really intelligent (and really pulling the strings), Barack Obama would not have been elected, or at least not re-elected. We’d have someone completely inoffensive, like an Eisenhower or Coolidge. Having half the country completely beside itself with rage and resentment for years on end increases the odds that someone is going to do something that’s not in the script, unless you think they’re so smart they’ve managed to plan for every possible contingency.
And if that off-script moment comes, who says anyone is going to care about their legitimacy?
I wouldn’t say Eisenhower always stuck inoffensively to the approved elite script.
I can’t imagine Obama saying something that inflammatory.
Okay, but when did he say that? In his farewell address. His day was done, he had no power to actually do anything about what he was warning about. You can credit him for perhaps seeing the light at last, maybe. He’s still the man who started the Bay of Pigs ball rolling and dumped it in his successor’s lap.
Message from the future. Obama (nostalgia already started) replaced with Trump (kiss any freedom you might have had goodbye. The man epitomises corporate america, and is now at the top of the politcal structure. With huge wealth that, essentially, bankrolled his own campaign to get there).
First acts : The travel ban (see how long the spirited legal & constitutional challenge to X-Order lasts) and the (For Real) wall.
The key questions : when do you run, and where will you be (able to be) going that’s far enough from this (powerful) idiot that less than half of you voted in?
Only one slight disagreement with you—and it’s VERY slight. Officials are open to ridicule. Indeed, ridicule or criticism of officials is encouraged to promote faith in the two-party system. The people who are venerated without question are the people who enforce the laws, and the system they uphold. If you are wondering whether by “people who enforce the laws” I mean the police or the military, the answer is “yes.”
With all the laws that prohibit messages that cause emotional harm, the opportunities for ridiculing are not going to be around much longer.
[…] would live in a police state where the government has unlimited authority to spy on us, arrest us, detain us and harass […]
“after all, the country was founded on the right of the individual to be free of tyranny, ”
My impression was that the USA was founded on the right of landowning individuals (needless to say: white, male, slaveholding individuals) to not pay taxes to the King of Great Britain.
I would say the ruling class would like a police state, but is short of getting there. Police states do not usually have heavily-armed peasants, nor are their rulers constantly berated in public. Police states do not usually have large groups of people who flout the law, like the gun owners of New York and Connecticut.
You know, I found myself quitely sad on the fourth this year. I went to a parade and watched fireworks, but it had the distinct feeling of a memorial service rather than a celebration.
[…] As Maggie McNeill writes, […]