Many years ago, I was in a conversation with someone who was defending the police violence against Rodney King. He said, “After all, King had broken the law, so he was guilty.” I pointed out that, in the first place, by US conceptions of law he was innocent until he’d been through a trial, and second, that, even were he guilty, the punishment for what he’d done was not being physically beaten. He wasn’t bothered by the first one at all, and only a little bothered by the second.
He was a self-identified Libertarian. A “Libertarian” who believed that a police officer could not only determine guilt or innocence on the stop, but enact whatever levels of punishment felt right. That is very much not what a “Libertarian” should not believe. It’s authoritarianism. It’s believing that judgment should be giving to authorities.
That conversation was another datapoint that led to my belief that it’s really, really important that we stop thinking our political world in terms of a binary or continuum of “left v. right.” The data for the left/right continuum is from polls about self-identification, or a circular argument about support for X policy meaning that you have Y identity.
What matters for a thriving democracy isn’t who people are, nor where people are on some fantastical binary or continuum. Among the thing that do matter is that we believe that “the law”—whatever it is—applies equally to in- and out-group. The Libertarian didn’t believe that; he wanted complete liberty for his in-group, but didn’t mind if the police violated the supposed principle of Libertarianism, since it was against an out-group member.
Briefly, what I’ve come to understand—by spending a lot of time arguing with people all over the political spectrum—is that there are several ways of thinking about what “the law” is supposed to do.
In this post, I want to mention two that have a shared premise: that “the law” is supposed to enable communities to get along in a reasonably ordered way.
One way that people imagine the law doing that is to see law as a series of compromises and conventions that are, at best, striving to help everyone get along while holding everyone to the same standards. Some of them are purely arbitrary, and yet necessary–we all have to agree as to whether we’ll drive on the left or right side of the road (and the fact that right side is more common probably should figure into our deliberations), but there’s nothing inherently better about one or the other. If most of the world drove on the left side, after all, then that should figure in our deliberations.
And the law can change. For instance, there was in the 19th century a general sense that the law shouldn’t interfere in private contracts. But, after a while, people started to think that child labor was appalling, but passing laws about it would violate that principle about contracts, so they decided they had to reconsider that principle. So, “the law” works as a series of decisions and arguments in which we’re trying to get a community of diverse people to function effectively within the constraints of principles about rights.
The second way of thinking about the law, an authoritarian one, assumes that the law should maintain order by holding in- and out-group to different standards—it should maintain order by letting good people (the in-group) do pretty much whatever they want, and controlling bad people (the out-group) through punishment.[1] Ann Coulter, ends her book Treason with this argument:
“Liberals promote the rights of Islamic fanatics for the same reason they promote the rights of adulterers, pornographers, abortionists, criminals, and communists. They instinctively root for anarchy and against civilization. The inevitable logic of the liberal position to to be for treason.” (202)
It’s an astonishing argument, even for Coulter. That rights are human rights–that is, granted to all people simply by virtue of their being human–is a principle of American law. So, yes, pornographers have rights; that isn’t treason–that’s how the law is supposed to work. But, for Coulter, bad people shouldn’t have rights.
In my experience, people who imagine the law functioning this way are also prone to claiming that their condemnation of out-group figures is grounded in principle, but it isn’t.
I recently had an argument with someone who claimed that he was opposed to Biden because Biden lies. He supports Trump. That Biden lies is, unfortunately, a fact, and I will be angry af if he’s the Dem candidate for President in 2024. But Trump also lies, and he lies even more than Biden, yet that Trump lies was not a reason for that person to oppose Trump. That person was engaged in strategic appeals to principle. His opposition to Biden wasn’t grounded in some principle about lying—his support of Trump showed that he doesn’t care about lying on principle. He was engaged in cultish levels of support for Trump, while pretending to himself that his opposition to Biden was principled.
Trump supporters are authoritarian to the extent that they refuse to hold him (or themselves) to the standards they hold others.
For instance, Trump supporters frequently condemn BLM protests, many of which got violent. If those protests should be condemned, then so should January 6. That is, a person who was, on principle, opposed to violent protests would condemn both. Like the Trump cultist member who only objected to Biden’s lies but justified or refused to consider Trump’s lies, Trump supporters who defend January 6 and condemn BLM protests are not, actually, reasoning from a principle they value. They’re just people who hold their in-group to lower standards (or no standards at all).
And yet they do believe in “the law.”
MLK argued that there is a higher law than the laws supporting segregation, and he appealed to the higher law of people being treated equally regardless of in- or out-group. He advocated that everyone be held to the same standards. I’ll say he had Jesus on his side.
Trump appeals to a different understanding of a “higher law.” His supporters don’t hold in- and out-groups to the same standards. They believe that order is about domination and submission.
They believe that they are justified in violence if they don’t get their way. That is, if they can’t dominate. And Trump believes the same. And that is not democracy. And it isn’t Christian.
[1] There’s a quote going around describing this principle as being the central tenet of “conservativism,” and, while I think it’s true that a lot of people who self-identify as conservative do believe this, I’ve also heard the same principle expressed by self-identified leftists. I think authoritarianism is more usefully seen as another axis in a political map rather than a point on a single-axis continuum of political affiliation.