Gangsters in Blue

As I wrote in an essay a few months ago, the best way to view the imperial nature of the U.S. government is to view it as an empire controlled by the city-state of Washington instead of as a broadly American phenomenon. Indeed, the territorial U.S. differs from Iraq and Afghanistan only in the sense that our occupation is a less volatile one. This allows the resemblance of “civil society” that supports and approves of the occupation, and rules out the need for the frightening displays of force that other people around the world endure at the hands of U.S. armed forces. Generally speaking, we chalk this relative lack of open violence up to our status as a “free people”.

However, as we plunge deeper into financial crisis, that may change. Soldiers fresh from counterinsurgency operations in Iraq are deploying for missions within the U.S.. With the unrest likely upon full-blown collapse of the currency and the economy, Bush retains the prerogative to declare martial law and institute what is, in effect, military dictatorship. Essentially, the imperial managers of Earth in D.C. are deciding whether or not we need a surge - not in Iraq, but right here in the territorial United States.

Part of the process of taking back our freedom entails a sober analysis of our present political situation. There is no real difference between a free society under a government and a military occupation - each exists merely as different zones on a sliding scale of repression, which government dials up or down based on “conditions on the ground”. Until we understand that we live in occupied territory, we will always be able to say “well, we got it better than Iraq” without realizing that the same dynamics are at play, at home and abroad.

Recently I have discovered a renewed interest in left libertarian and anarchist concepts of community solidarity. My interests lie in finding ways to build community relationships and institutions that devolve important decisions to the interpersonal, neighborly level - rather than counting on government bureaucrats and politicians to fix all our problems. I believe that this reliance on an outside force to manage us - a top-down, progressive-era holdover - has damaged what was once a bottom-up, dynamic consensus. This breakdown in neighborliness is partially responsible for many of our present social ills, and reflects the dark side of the centralized, managerial State that so many Americans seem to want.

Inviting cops into our neighborhoods should be a last resort, because law enforcement professionals view everybody - not just the elements you find undesirable - as a potential criminal. They write traffic tickets; they harass citizens; they conduct reckless raids against innocent citizens; the list just goes on. Residents should be very careful when inviting outsiders - such as police officers - to make decisions on how the neighborhood’s business should be conducted. Ideally, cops should be called only as an alternative to a neighborhood resident employing force himself in self-defense, and only in reaction to a particular threat.

Maybe there was once a time when police officers lived in the neighborhoods they patrolled, knew everybody by name and whose kid was whose, and exercised a form of reasonable discretion (even if that discretion was poisoned by racism, classism, etc.). Maybe they policed on the basis of what was best for the community rather than maximizing their arrest statistics to secure federal funding. Those times, however, are no more: police are intervening in neighborhoods more and more, with less and less of a sense of statutory limitation, and a growing sense of entitlement to dictate to people the most mundane details of their lives. This dependence on such authoritarian elements is surely brought about by the increasing atomization and isolation of residents, who cannot look to the community to realize their values. When neighbors are strangers, there isn’t even the opportunity to establish an authentic sense of shared interests or common concerns, let alone the true security situation.

It occurs to me while reviewing the endless electronic reflection on the VT incident that the gun control crowd and their sympathizers don’t offer any rational, realistic arguments against allowing students to carry on campus. I have yet to see one person actually volunteer a concrete reason why it should be disallowed. What we get instead are appeals to emotion based on perceived feelings of vulnerability.

From an otherwise decent article by Lila Rajiva:

However much we may support the second amendment, do we really want students packing heat in their book bags, as filled with alcohol, drugs and partying as most campuses are today?

From a VT administrator:

The writer would have us believe that a university campus, with tens of thousands of young people, is safer with everyone packing heat. Imagine the continual fear of students in that scenario. We’ve seen that fear here, and we don’t want to see it again.

From a journalist:

Moreover, guns on campuses could turn smaller confrontations into major incidents. As drinking is a large part of university social life, a common drunken brawl could escalate into a deadly duel if firearms were present.

Many students don’t get to hand-pick their roommates in residence; imagine the discomfort of sharing a small room with a stranger who keeps a gun under his or her pillow.

If there are guns in residence and around campus, violence could spread beyond the university confines and into bars and other nearby places.

What do all of these opinions have in common? Simple: they are examples of disarming people on the grounds of vague fears. We just don’t like the idea of students carrying firearms. Students are unpredictable and potentially irresponsible, and that scares us, so let’s take that idea off the table. Let’s ignore the fact that guns are just as deadly to the bad guys as the good guys, and that shooting a bad guy is one very straightforward and undeniable approach to solving the problem.

Since the Patrick Henry Supper Club meeting, I’ve been thinking about a lot of the questions I’ve received on what left libertarianism is. I can’t answer for anybody but myself, but I figure this is as good a place as any to try.

First, I should address the term “left”, since many find it grating and statist. My use of the term rests on its original usage since the French revolutionary era, stemming from the seating arrangements of the French legislature. Those who supported the ancien régime - the status quo, the establishment, the ruling class - sat on the right side of the assembly. Those who opposed the old guard (for whatever reason) seated themselves on the Left. Of course, opposing the establishment is not an endeavor unique to the Left, strictly speaking; nevertheless, it has been the Left that throughout history has consistently worked against authority. The Left has not always been libertarian, but the farther left one goes, the freer one gets, until you end up on the so-called “infantile Left” that was far too anarchic for somebody like Lenin. The central theme of leftism, at its heart, has been resistance to the status quo. That is the sense in which I’m a leftist (and the sense in which somebody like Stalin or Clinton could hardly qualify when compared to other thinkers and activists on the Left).

My leftist principles would not be alien to other libertarians. Abolishing aggression and fraud is still the ultimate means to libertarian ends. Where I find I differ with more mainstream libertarians is on my speculative vision of what those ends look like if the principles or liberty are consistently followed to their natural conclusion. Yes, it is a cultural issue, but not just that - left libertarians extend the analysis of the State consistently to uncover those aspects of the economy, society, and environment which are affected by the pernicious influence of the State in some way. A world without institutionalized violence, they believe, will necessarily free humanity to organize in a variety of ways that will change the face of the planet.