“Arms Race On The Streets”: It’s Clear, Something Has Gone Terribly Wrong
To read a lot of the post-Ferguson discussion about the “militarization of the police,” you’d think the whole phenomenon was the product of the Pentagon or the Department of Homeland Security. But as Peter Mancuso argues convincingly at Ten Miles Square today, there’s another angle that libertarian folk like Rand Paul do not want to pursue: cops bulking up with military hardware as part of an arms race created by Second Amendment absolutism:
[The] larger story begins many years before our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. It involves a tit-for-tat escalation of armaments between criminals, citizens, and police departments that has been egged on by America’s arms manufacturers and gun rights groups. That escalation has led to a breakdown of essential republican understandings among ordinary citizens and government officials alike, and it will continue even if Washington manages to turn off the spigot of surplus weaponry from the Pentagon. As a former Marine combatant, weapons instructor, and career law enforcement official, I am hardly gun-shy, but it’s clear to me that something has gone terribly wrong.
By the early 1980s, there was a growing perception among law enforcement officers and portions of the public that America’s police were being out-gunned in encounters with criminals…. [R]outine arrests for illegal gun possessions were increasingly turning up weapons more powerful than those carried by the officers making those arrests. As law enforcement officers, their families, and police unions began naturally voicing their concerns, the call became louder to increase police officers’ “firepower” (a military term). It was argued strenuously then that this would require replacing the highly reliable revolver, which had been carried by most departments for over a half-century, with a rapid fire, more powerful, semi-automatic side arm.
Of course, this call to increase police officer fire power was further exacerbated by the fact that state legislatures failed miserably in the face of the gun lobby to curb the sale of some of the most powerful and lethal firearms that posed threats to police officers across the country in the first place. As this dichotomy, of the availability of more powerful weapons in the face of police officer safety took hold weapons manufacturers finally broke through and hit real pay dirt. The true irony in all of this is that the huge fortunes realized by their marketing more powerful weapons to American law enforcement, was actually the result of them having already made a fortune selling these more powerful weapons, easily acquired by criminals, to the public to begin with.
It’s actually a bit worse than Mancuso suggests. The arms race between police departments and lawbreakers created an atmosphere of spectacularly lethal violence (even as violent crime rates actually went down) that made it easy for the gun lobby and its paymasters to argue that every single citizen needed to become his or her own police force, as heavily armed as the cops and robbers. “Army of One” indeed.
So we aren’t just witnessing the consequences of the “militarization of the police.” It’s the militarization of America, which happens when you deliberately destroy the state monopoly on means of lethal violence. But again, the Second Amendment fanatics of libertarianism, for whom the only violence worth deploring is state violence, just won’t go there.
By: Ed Kilgore, Contributing Editor, Washington Monthly Political Animal, August 25, 2014
“Overturning Elections Has Consequences”: Perry v. Lehmberg And The Veto That Illuminated An Unsettling Trend
A truism: Almost nobody looks good in his booking photo.
That said, the 47th governor of Texas, one James Richard Perry, certainly gave it his best shot when he faced the camera at the Travis County Courthouse last week. The resultant image is … not terrible. Perry is caught somewhere between a tight smile and an outright grimace, his mien taut with confidence and seriousness of purpose.
Gazing on that photo, one cannot help but suspect that a transparently political indictment designed by his Democratic opponents to cripple this presumed presidential aspirant might actually help him instead. One is not usually disposed to think of Texas’ swaggering governor as a victim, but darn if this indictment hasn’t turned the trick.
Of course, if Democrats in Texas have done the Republican governor an inadvertent favor, they sure haven’t done the country one. What is this thing lately of political parties using the courts as weapons of political destruction, trying to win judicially what they could not win at the ballot box?
A few words of definition before we proceed. The reference here is not simply to lawsuits and prosecutions with political import. Obviously there has been no shortage of those. But the sins and alleged sins of Rod Blagojevich, William Jefferson, Larry Craig, Bob McDonnell, Tom DeLay and others — money-laundering, corruption, disorderly conduct — are at least recognizable as crimes.
By contrast, Republican Speaker of the House John Boehner is suing President Obama for issuing an executive order. Faced with mulish obstructionism from the GOP, Obama chose that route to make a technical change in a law — the Affordable Care Act — Boehner’s party hates. Now here’s Perry, indicted on felony abuse of power charges that could theoretically send him to prison for over a century. His crime? He issued a veto.
Here is the backstory: The district attorney of Travis County, Democrat Rosemary Lehmberg, was arrested last year for drunk driving. Video captured her being belligerent toward police. Perry called on Lehmberg, who oversees the state public integrity unit, to resign, perhaps so that he might appoint a friendly Republican successor to head an agency that has been a thorn in his backside. Lehmberg refused, so Perry vetoed $7.5 million in state funding for the integrity unit.
Neither principal in this sordid episode emerges covered with glory. Lehmberg’s behavior suggests the opposite of public integrity; she should have resigned. And Perry’s veto smacks of scorched earth, bully-boy politics, which is not pretty. It is also not a crime.
Things were not always thus. Once upon a time, the losing party felt itself bound to accept the will of the electorate with some modicum of grace. You weren’t happy about it, but you embraced the role of loyal opposition and bided your time until the next election in hopes your fortunes might change.
But that’s so 20th century.
For six years, the GOP has been trying to undo the election of 2008; Boehner’s lawsuit is only the latest of their many loopy schemes. Now, if Travis County is any bellwether, at least some Democrats are doing the selfsame thing.
It is behavior that should give all fair-minded Americans pause, regardless of party affiliation, for it illustrates with stark clarity the sheer brokenness of our political system. Flooded with corporate money, gerrymandered beyond any semblance of reason, it limps along prodded by those whose devotion to the “game” far outweighs any devotion they might have to that quaint relic we once called the public good. Now there is this misuse of the courts for political payback, this attempt to criminalize ordinary political activity.
The public should take note. Elections have consequences, folks used to say.
Overturning them does, too.
By: Leonard Pitts, Jr., Columnist, The Miami Herald; The National Memo, August 25, 2014
“Compassionate Paleolibertarianism”: Rand Paul Offers Free Eye Exam With Deportation
Not long ago, Rand Paul appeared at a fund-raiser for full-time immigration hawk and occasional racist Steve King, where he found himself uncomfortably close to a young Mexican immigrant, causing him to panic and flee. Now Paul tells Breitbart News he supports the House bill that would end President Obama’s policy of granting relief from deportation to undocumented immigrants who were brought here as children.
As Sam Stein points out, Paul has been telling Republicans they need to reach out to nonwhite voters and show them they care. In an odd bit of timing, Paul’s endorsement of draconian immigration policy coincides with his trip to Guatemala to perform free eye surgery. It was just Rand Paul and some Guatemalans who need medical care. Plus a wee entourage consisting of “three television cameras, three photographers, six reporters, a political aide, two press secretaries, [and] conservative activist David Bossie.” Basically, your standard medical crew, in other words. You could risk getting medical treatment without the director of such films as Battle for America (starring Dick Morris) standing by, but why risk it?
One might detect a dissonance between Paul’s warm-and-fuzzy medical mission and his hard-line stance toward Dreamers. But it actually fits together quite sensibly. The 2016 hopeful opposes universal health insurance, and he wants to deport half a million people who grew up in America. But Rand Paul will personally provide every deported immigrant with a free eye exam. Call it compassionate paleolibertarianism.
By: Jonathan Chait, Daily Intelligencer, New York Magazine, August 22, 2014
“Please Shoot Me”: Police Are Entirely Committed To The Logic Of Deterrence, While Ignoring The Costs Of Escalation
In the first part of VICE News’s extraordinary five-part documentary on ISIS, released earlier this month, a bearded and strangely innocent-looking young press officer who goes by the name Abu Mosa invites America to attack his movement. “I say to America that the Islamic Caliphate has been established, and we will not stop,” Abu Mosa says with a shy smile, a Kalashnikov leaning easily in his right hand. “Don’t be cowards and attack us with drones. Instead send your soldiers, the ones we humiliated in Iraq. We will humiliate them everywhere, God willing, and we will raise the flag of Allah in the White House.”
America has since begun attacking ISIS with air and drone strikes, and on Wednesday, in response to the beheading of James Foley, a photojournalist, Barack Obama reiterated his commitment to the fight. But the president has not obliged Abu Mosa’s wish for America to send in ground forces. For one thing, the airstrikes seem to have been reasonably successful in attaining the limited American goal of aiding Kurdish forces to recapture territory from ISIS. Inserting ground troops risks subjecting American forces to casualties and mission creep. In the video of Mr Foley’s death, his ISIS executioner threatens to kill another hostage unless America ceases its airstrikes. Mr Obama shows no signs of letting any of this affect his decisions. As a rule, it is a bad idea to let your actions in a confrontation be guided by the other guy’s provocations.
Not everyone understands this rule, though. In St Louis on Monday, two police officers responded to a report that a distraught man had stolen two cans of soda from a convenience store, and was carrying a steak knife. The officers stepped out of the car and immediately drew their guns on the man, 25-year-old Kajieme Powell, ordering him to drop the knife. Mr Powell refused, and instead began vaguely walking towards them, saying “Shoot me!” The officers opened fire, killing Mr Powell just seconds after they had arrived—nine shots in all, pop-pop-pop, some fired after Mr Powell had fallen to the ground. All of this can be clearly seen on the video of the confrontation that a bystander recorded on his smartphone, released Wednesday by the St Louis police department in the apparent belief that it exonerates the officers involved.
To my eye, the notion that this video is exculpatory evidence seems absurd. A report of a disturbed man waving around a steak knife and making angry pronouncements is supposed to end with a team of police officers surrounding the offender, trying to talk him down, and, if persuasion fails, eventually subduing him and sending him in for psychiatric evaluation. Nothing suggests police officers faced an emergency requiring them to use their guns. The video convinced me only that the officers should be prosecuted, and that the St Louis police department needs to be completely overhauled, starting with its rules on the use of deadly force. Missouri should also revise its justifiable-homicide laws, which, as Yishai Schwartz explains in the New Republic, make it “almost impossible” to convict police officers who claim they acted in self-defence.
But there’s an interesting similarity here. In both of these cases, someone is provoking an attack from a more powerful actor. Why would anyone do that?
When force is used, it is often to influence or change the behaviour of a foe. The logic is that of deterrence: stop misbehaving, or we will attack you. Yet adversaries often understand that the deployment of force is not cost-free. The risk of escalation may ultimately make a conflict more costly than the initial deterrence was worth. This trade-off is a characteristic of many classic confrontations: the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Vietnam War, and so on.
In the case of ISIS, at least some elements apparently believe that luring America into a ground conflict will help them achieve their aims. For Islamic radical groups, fighting America is also great for recruitment, particularly if there is an opportunity to kill American soldiers. And if ISIS can escalate the conflict to the point where America no longer wants to bear the costs and pulls out, it will have scored a tremendous victory.
It is a bit hard to figure out what Mr Powell was trying to accomplish in St Louis, as he appears to have been mentally off-kilter, at least on that afternoon. (In a tragic moment in the video, before police arrive, a passerby advises him to back down: “That’s not the way you do it, man.”) But he was clearly trying to provoke police to shoot him, perhaps in the belief that this would illustrate the inequities of police brutality. More importantly, the police who confronted him, like police throughout the confrontations in Missouri, seem to be entirely committed to the logic of deterrence, while ignoring the costs of escalation. This is a problem of culture, of attitude, of legal impunity, and above all else of the pervasive use of firearms, which rapidly escalate minor disputes into potentially deadly confrontations. The police’s deployment of force have left two dead and a town overwhelmed by protests and riots.
In Iraq, America seems to be weighing the risks of escalation very carefully before deploying force. In Missouri, however, the police seem to be deploying force without thinking about the consequences at all. And the cost of attacking the city’s poorest and most beleaguered people is proving very high indeed.
By: Matt Steinglass, Democracy in America, August 22, 2014
“The GOP’s Libertarian Time Bomb”: Why ‘Going Rand’ Would Be An Electoral Disaster
The time has come again for a perennial theme in politics: the idea that Republicans should “go libertarian.” The questionable premise, forwarded most recently by Robert Draper and Emily Ekins, is that the Republican Party could sweep up millennials, who are “socially liberal” and “economically conservative,” by adopting a more libertarian message. The ascent of popular startups like Uber and Airbnb — which have about them a decidedly libertarian flavor — has only strengthened this supposedly conventional wisdom.
Here’s the thing, though. The data show that this is an unlikely possibility, but more problematically, doing so would actually decimate the Republican base. The truth is, libertarianism is antithetical to conservatism.
The Republican base, broadly speaking, is made up of five often-overlapping coalitions: business conservatives who seek low taxes and low regulation; foreign policy hawks who seek a strong defense budget; social conservatives who fear moral anarchy; racists and nativists worried about immigration and affirmative action; and elderly retirees who rely on Social Security and Medicare. This coalition is already difficult enough to maintain, but in the future it will become more difficult.
And a “libertarian” message would only further erode the base.
Business conservatives seem like they would be the most open to a libertarian message. After all, lower taxes and less regulation are amenable to both groups. But Republicans are already very pro-business and anti-regulation; to go further in order to pull in a few more libertarians would entail (1) decreased fiscal or monetary intervention, or (2) the elimination of corporate subsidies. Both of these moves would alienate business conservatives, who, after all, rely significantly on government support (to the tune of $92 billion in 2006) and accept the need for countercyclical spending policies. Libertarians might struggle to support Republicans doling out farm subsidies year after year, subsidizing exports and bailing out big businesses and banks, but business conservatives demand it.
Foreign policy hawks would also find many of the core tenets of libertarianism — skepticism of foreign interventionism, opposition to the NSA and a healthy loathing of the military-industrial complex — to be problematic. Republicans could try to peel off support among libertarians by opposing torture, closing Guantanamo and investigating the NSA, but it’s tough to believe that the party of Bush, Cheney, Wolfowitz and Rumsfeld would be able to garner much trust. The swift turn of Rand Paul from libertarian anti-interventionist to foreign policy hawk attests to the difficulty in going this route.
Social conservatives would likely be the most difficult challenge to libertarians. Libertarians tend to support individual liberty:the right to gamble, drink, smoke, watch pornography, take one’s own life, participate in any form of sexual activity and use drugs. Needless to say, these views would be incredibly problematic for the moral majority coalition, which still forms an incredibly important part of the Republican base. It was Hayek who wrote in “Why I’m Not A Conservative”: “The conservative does not object to coercion or arbitrary power so long as it is used for what he regards as the right purposes… like the socialist he regards himself as entitled to force the values he holds onto other people.”
While it’s often considered impolite to note in public, a rather significant base of Republican power is still nativism. Witness the hysterical response to Central American refugees, the baseless claims against Obama’s citizenship, and the opposition to any immigration reform that doesn’t include a moat full of crocodiles across the border. But most libertarians are strongly supportive of open borders. Libertarian economist Bryan Caplan calls it, “The Efficient, Egalitarian, Libertarian, Utilitarian Way to Double World GDP.” In a world when even the “reasonable” Republicans are still spouting xenophobic drivel, witness Ross Douthat’s column worrying that “the bills under discussion almost always offer some form of legal status before enforcement takes effect, which promises a replay of the Reagan-era amnesty’s failure to ever deliver the limits on future immigration that it promised.”
Finally, there are the elderly retirees, whose support Republicans maintain by making sure that any spending cuts fall on the backs of the poor – not the old. One wonders how they would receive the Cato Institute plan to turn Social Security into private savings accounts subject to market forces. Many would balk if a politician called Social Security “federally mandated generational theft,” but this is how Nick Gillespie regards it. Social Security and Medicare are sacrosanct and any attempt to reform them is likely a “third rail” that would lead to electoral death for the politician that tried.
The problem with libertarianism is mainly that few people agree with its ideological assumptions — but will often come to the same political answer. But this means that most people will be “libertarian” on some issues, rather than use a libertarian mode of thinking to get there. So people may be programmatically libertarian, but ideologically disagree with fundamental assumptions. As political scientist Seth Masket writes, “Basically everyone agrees with libertarians on something, but they tend to get freaked out just as quickly by the ideology’s other stances.”
These contradictions are obvious, and Draper’s widely discussed piece touches on some of them. For instance, there is Mollie Hemingway, who claims to be a libertarian, but is anti-choice and rejects gay marriage. She argued that although “‘people should be free to organize their own lifestyle,’ the state had a unique interest in protecting heterosexual marriage, because it was ‘the relationship that’s ordered to producing children.’” She might want to turn to Ayn Rand, who argued that, “but it is improper for the law to interfere with a relationship between consenting adults” and noted that “abortion is a moral right — which should be left to the sole discretion of the woman involved; morally, nothing other than her wish in the matter is to be considered. Who can conceivably have the right to dictate to her what disposition she is to make of the functions of her own body?”
Or what of Murray Rothbard’s claim that “the parent should not have a legal obligation to feed, clothe, or educate his children, since such obligations would entail positive acts coerced upon the parent and depriving the parent of his rights. The parent therefore may not murder or mutilate his child, and the law properly outlaws a parent from doing so. But the parent should have the legal right not to feed the child, i.e., to allow it to die.” Hemingway is a programmatic libertarian — she likes some proposals, but rejects the radical individualism libertarianism truly entails.
And those are on the issues where Republicans are supposed to agree with Libertarians. Nick Gillespie touches on the minor contradictions in an interview for Draper’s piece:
Republicans always saw libertarians as nice to have around in case they wanted to score some weed, and we always knew where there was a party. And for a while it made sense to bunk up with them. But after a while, it would be like, ‘So if we agree on limited government, how about opening the borders?’ No, that’s crazy. ‘How about legalizing drugs? How about giving gays equal rights?’ No, come on, be serious. And so I thought, There’s nothing in this for me.
He leaves some equally problematic things out: legalized prostitution, restrained foreign policy, massive defense cuts, abolishing social security and Austrian economics. None of these will curry favor with the Republican establishment. The question is not whether there are a large number of Americans who would be excited by libertarianism; the question is whether the Republicans could maintain their current coalition and also court these voters — this seems unlikely.
Then there’s the fact that Rand Paul, once an ardent libertarian, has had to step back on numerous positions. There’s the fact that Gary Johnson alienated the base and Ron Paul looked loony in 2012, opposing the Iraq War, calling for an end to the federal reserve and arguing that the government should legalize all drugs. Ronald Reagan, who successfully used libertarian rhetoric (see: A Time for Choosing) eschewed it when governing. The Republican Party has long used libertarian rhetoric while pursuing statist policies. The Mercatus Center, a libertarian think tank, ranks the 50 states based on “freedom,” but weights “tax burden” as 28.6% of the metric and “freedom from tort abuse” as 11.5%, while “civil liberties” only account for 0.6% of a state’s score and “education policy” 1.9%. In Mercatus-land, alcohol, gun and cigarette freedom rank above marriage freedom, and abortion goes unmentioned. A libertarian turn for conservatives would be nice — libertarians actually hold the free market views conservatives claim and actually accept the importance of reason and individual liberty. But this is the reason it will never happen: True libertarianism would decimate the Republican base, so instead a half-hearted libertarianism prevails — stripped of policies, it subsists on empty rhetoric. But then again, the last few Republican rebranding efforts have been empty rhetoric, and so will this one.
By: Sean McElwee, Salon, August 23, 2014
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