This piece is a comment, by Purple Library Guy, elevated from the comments with their permission.
You know, it occurs to me that the cops, both in France and North America, are headed for a problem similar to Israel’s. That is, they’ve gradually shifted from being bipartisan supporters of the establishment in general to partisan supporters of the hard right, and other parts of the establishment are gradually noticing.
So like, time was Israel had massive and unbreakable bipartisan support in the US from both Republicans and Democrats alike. And Israel was generally fairly nonpartisan in how it interacted with the US. As Israel’s own politics shifted right, the Labour party died and so on, while in the US there was a rise of the religious far right with their massive enthusiasm for Israel, Israel’s politics have increasingly shifted to outright support of the Republicans, and this is one of the sources of Democratic politicians’ support for Israel fracturing. Not that there is now zero support for Israel among Democratic politicians, but it’s weaker; some continue with status quo strong Israel support, some have weaker and more critical support, and some get away with being basically anti-Israel in a way that would have killed their political careers once upon a time. And this is an ongoing process which has not seen its end point, and which seems likely to end up causing Israel significant political trouble.
A similar thing is happening with the cops; as significant sections of the establishment and middle class feel the cops do not have their backs but are instead standing with the politics of the far right not just in terms of racism but in various other ways such as opposition to “wokeness”, sections of the centre-left and even centrist establishment are ceasing to take the police for granted and starting to see them as a problem. The police are narrowing the societal base they depend on. It could come back to bite them.
Sure, nobody’s going to “defund the police” in the sense of totally get rid of them. But there seem to be quite a few options floating around for handling most things that currently involve police in other ways; once you start doing those pilot projects and then expanding them and then you do a study saying cops are only called out a quarter as much as before because so much is handled by social workers and mental health experts, the political cover for cutting them way back gets a lot more solid, and if everyone knows they’re a bunch of alt-right bastards who cannot be trusted by the centrist establishment (let alone progressives of any stripe), there’s gonna be motive to do it.
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NR
It’s important to realize that MAGA is working to make the kind of police reform discussed in the last paragraph impossible. For example, in 2021 Texas Republicans passed a law that essentially allows the state to seize control of a city’s finances if they try to cut police budgets. MAGA is a fascist movement, and they know that the cops are their foot soldiers (at least in many places), so reform is not going to be possible in places they control.
Ironically, Texas got a clear lesson in just how bad the cops are at doing their ostensible jobs not too long after that law was passed. In 2022, with the Uvalde school shooting, the cops were either too scared, or too incompetent and disorganized, to go after the shooter, and he was allowed to remain in the school for over an hour until a Border Patrol agent showed up and shot him.
Of course MAGA Republicans still refused to entertain any discussion of police reform after this incident, which should be all the proof anyone needs that the job of the police isn’t to protect and serve the public anymore, and MAGA is more than okay with that.
Feral Finster
Duh.
The Powers That Be are fine with this, as long as the bullyboys do not question the Empire or the National Security State.
By the same token, nobody in the Biden Administration will raise a peep if open fascist nostalgics are in office in Italy, or if Macron makes an alliance with the far right, so long as the fusion does not question the Atlanticist orientation in general or the war on Ukraine in particular.
StewartM
I think PLG is being hopeful, perhaps more hopeful than is warranted.
Me, I fear we’re in a situation akin to that of the Weimar Republic, and we simply can’t solve our problems internally due to institutional reasons (the police, now the courts, the ‘Deep’ surveillance and security state, the rigged economy,, the corporate media, and more. To fix things requires wholesale reform and replacement of several of our flawed institutions simultaneously*, while we struggle to get even a half-assed solution (like the ACA) in-place. We really need an external force, some “Allies”, to come in, conquer our country, put our leadership class on trial, and clean out large swaths of the membership of current institutions, which is how Weimar Germany had its problems fixed.
*For instance, while I’m all in favor of a higher minimum wage, doing this by itself won’t better the lives of most people, for as long as we have a rentier-based oligarchic economy, where our oligarchs are not restrained by a truly free market, the reaction will just be to raise prices in accord with any wage increases. And they can get away with it because they have no real competition (or even worse, they have connived to make their non-essential services ‘essential’).
Likewise, you can’t rein in and regulate the markets without improving (really doubling) Social Security, as our current system makes retirees dependent on stock-buybacks and other paper manipulations to keep asset prices high. We have so many things that need to be done and need to be done in tandem with everything else.
Mark Level
I’m with Feral, the MAGAts of course are open in crushing “socialism”, the “Left” etc. & other barely existent phantoms of their fevered “There’s a Red under my Bed” imagination. Cops allied with them strongly. However, Naked Capitalism today reminds us of their “Friendly Fascism” Lite partner, the Globalist corporate cabal–
https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2023/07/the-european-unions-global-mass-censorship-regime-will-soon-be-fully-operationalthe-natu.html
Telling the truth & not worshiping the utterly discredited TPTB will soon be crimes in the U.S., just as in EUrope!! We have to “combat authoritarianism” with censorship, surveillance, and authoritarianism of the correct type I guess. Seems like P.K. Dick’s warning is true, the permanent Black Iron Prison for all is nigh.
Michael Levine
The ADL is heavily integrated with many police departments in the United States, including in most of the big cities. This has been the case for over a century, going back to when “labor” had more sway in Israel.
I think it’s important to remember that “labor” was largely on board with the genocidal policies of the Zionist movement – the ethnic cleansing that Palestinians now refer to as the Nakba.
I think it’s important to remember that Israel is committing unadulterated apartheid the likes of which even brutal South Africa never applied – this according to Desmond Tutu and Nelson Mandela, among many, many others who have experienced South Africa’s machinations and then gone on to witness Israel’s.
Palestinians are marked in Israel. They are not second-class citizens; rather they are subhuman.
I think it’s important to remember that Israel was founded and is run by genocidal war criminals.
Israel bombed the USS Liberty, knowing it had people in key positions to cover it up: https://israelpalestinenews.org/bob-scarborough-uss-liberty-hero-rip/
This the best primer on obvious Israeli culpability in the 911 deep event: https://wikispooks.com/wiki/Israel_did_it
JFK wanted Israeli orgs to register as agents of a foreign power and wanted Dimona inspected. He supported UN Res 194 both publicly and privately: https://www.voltairenet.org/article178401.html
I’ll wrap up where I started: All Zionist orgs should have to register as agents of a foreign power, the ADL included, as it is first and foremost a spy and influence organization operating on behalf of Israel.
GlassHammer
Institutions will change to address new challenges and the frequency of those challenges because the first goal of any institution is “persist no matter what”.
And like people, institutions will take the path of least resistance first. That path is almost always cheating the current limitations on action imposed by outside authority. Such a path is authoritarian to those outside of the institution because it is taking that which hasn’t been explicitly given by consent.
So if we want our institutions to avoid cheating the limitations of their authority (and the authoritarian imposition to those outside of them) then we must change, enhance , and reset the goals of our institutions much more frequently than we currently do.
mago
Is there any end to the torment, can there be no peace?
Of course not.
That’s a wistful song lyric.
Toxic ideologies raining down, reigning. Buena focking suerte a cada.