The Creeping Police State

It's one of those tropes that the radicals (Left and Right) are always going on about - we're slowly but surely becoming a statist society in which the haves have and the have nots are controlled.

I was reminded of this when I read this post from a colleague and fellow blogger. I think our analyses are somewhat different, but the point is unmistakably clear and the conclusions, I believe, are ultimately parallel.

It also reminded me of the conversation I had with a student the other day about how the nature of schooling itself has changed. I can't speak with any real authority on the conditions of the schools in the city in which I teach from 20 years ago. I grew up in a liberal bastion and received all of the benefits of the education such a bastion might bestow - a liberal arts curriculum that encouraged thinking, a stable teaching core of qualified, competent teachers that cared about children and could make it happen. We had open campus, free periods, common spaces, and so forth. By the time I graduated, all that had begun to change. Open campus was restricted to Seniors (and for all I know, no longer exists), free periods had become study halls, commons spaces were walled off and became offices. Students were no longer asked to be responsible, students were walled in because the system no longer trusted them to be responsible - they were forced to "do the right thing", but since the students lost their agency, their ability to make their own decisions, they were no longer responsible, but rather were dependent on the school to make the decisions for them.

I'm not trying to compare this experience to police brutality, but only to point out that the police state is a creeping thing. After the Rodney King beating, police brutality was something that people I knew talked about. Why aren't we even talking about the killings? What I'm suggesting is that the fact that statist control is creeping into the bourgeois-bastions has made a situation where a constituency that might otherwise have been incensed by police violence against innocent people will only shrug their shoulders.

Which brings me to the right-wing anti-statists and why in some ways I think there is a similar analysis of the state, but that ultimately we are still standing on opposite sides of the spectrum. Firstly, I have a hard time believing that the bourgeois conservative anti-statists are really concerned about the rights, human or civil, of poor people.

Arthur C. Brooks recently argued that we face a culture war in the US - that this is really what the Tea Party is about. I think his analysis of the Tea Party folks is entirely too narrow, but I also think his argumentation misses something essential by those of us who see the socialist states of Europe as having something we don't have. Really, his argument isn't about culture, it's about power. Those who argue that the state should be smaller are in a position where they don't depend on the state - they are the beneficiaries of a society in which some win and many lose. They don't need the state for college tuition, or healthcare, or what have you. The state they are arguing against is the state that provides the proverbial safety net.

Ironically, well, not really, but . . . the state they support is the state that protects them from the rabble, the state that shoots innocent people, the state that controls, rather than the state that provides. They argue from a position of "freedom", but they only want a particular kind of freedom for a particular segment of the population.

And thus, while it would appear that right-wing anti-statists and left-wing anti-statists might be saying a lot of the same things, the implicit meanings of those things is quite different. The left wants a bigger state that is more responsible, the right wants a smaller state that uses power more efficiently.