Why Are Our Political Elites Always Such Patsies For Authoritarianism?

My grandfather, a Socialist, always warned me to never trust the Democratic Party as a real alternative to the fascists (which is how he referred to Nazis, Republicans, Southern Democrats and any other parties on the right). In the last week, we've been looking at how the Democratic Establishment and the Republican Establishment banded together to defeat Alan Grayson's amendment against militarization of local police departments. As it turns out, the Democratic floor manager of the bill was Military Industrial Complex shill Pete Visclosky, who represents a heavily Democratic district in northwest Indiana (Gary and Hammond). But more than the folks in Gary and Hammond, Visclosky represents the makers of arms and the consultants of death-- the war machine that has helped finance his career. The only Member of Congress who is still in office (and not retiring) and who has taken over a million dollars from the war machine is… Visclosky ($1,025,000). Steny Hoyer is #2 ($992,040) and Republican Rodney Frelinghuysen is #3 ($948,606). Those are the 3… and those are the 3 who stopped the Grayson amendment. Frelinghuysen tried with a parliamentary procedure that forced Grayson to rewrite the amendment. Hoyer assigned Vislosky to manage the bill on the floor and then "accepted" his recommendation that Democrats vote against it.

Grayson had lined up enough Republicans-- 19-- to pass the amendment if the Democrats were on board. He even got a handful of cross-over Democrats who usually got with the GOP-- particularly Blue Dogs Jim Matheson (UT) and John Barrow (GA)-- to vote for the amendment. But once Visclosky and Hoyer (the # 1 and #2 congressional bribe takers from the war machine) gave it the thumbs down, dull-minded, knee-jerk Democrats deserted in droves. 145 Democrats voted with 210 Republicans against the amendment-- not just the usual militaristic shitheads like Adam Schiff (CA), Kyrsten Sinema (AZ), Steve Israel (NY), Colleen Hanabusa (HI), Patrick Murphy (FL), Debbie Wasserman Schultz (FL), Sean Patrick Maloney (NY) and Joe Crowley (NY), but even including both Missouri Democrats, Emanuel Cleaver and William Lacy Clay (who represents Ferguson) and usually dependable liberals like Mike Capuano (MA), Jared Huffman (CA), Hakeem Jeffries (NY), and Yvette Clarke (NY).

Murtha passed the secret of getting the Military Industrial Complex to underwrite your career to Pete Visclosky

Why? One of my friends explained, when I asked him, that it's because politicians find it expedient to always side with the police. Yesterday, Conor Friedersdorf looked into why so many Americans no longer share this mentality with our political elites. Personal experience and video is what he asserts has changed it, especially for people under 40.

Until I was 11, I trusted police officers, for reasons that Hans Fiene captures in The Federalist. "For many conservatives, especially those of us living in nice, comfy suburbs, it’s hard to apply the 'power corrupts' doctrine to law enforcement because we’ve never seen corrupted enforcers of the law," he writes. "We’ve never been wrongly arrested. We’ve never witnessed our children put in jail based on the false reports of police officers. We’ve never seen our neighbors beaten or tased without cause. And in the extremely unlikely scenario that a police officer drove into our neighborhood and murdered our unarmed friend in cold blood, we cannot possibly fathom a scenario where the justice system wouldn’t be on our side and where that police officer wouldn’t spend the rest of his life in jail."

…As events in Ferguson, Missouri unfold, several observers have noticed that "this time is different." Unlike during past instances of police officers killing or assaulting young black men in suspicious though not yet demonstrably criminal circumstances, some prominent conservatives are doubting the official police narrative or criticizing their militarized response to protesters. Some attribute this to a growing libertarian influence in the GOP, and it's no accident that Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky has offered one of the strongest calls for police reform.

My colleagues Peter Beinart and Ross Douthat persuasively argue that falling crime has made the American public less inclined to reflexively side with police, which has changed political incentives. Douthat posits that this is a generational shift.

But when it comes to how reflexively or instinctively cops are presumed to be truthful and honorable, the importance of video shouldn't be discounted. A generation ago, footage of police officers in the Deep South turning snarling dogs and firehoses on Civil Rights protesters made a deep impression on my parents, even though they grew up a continent away in an overwhelmingly white suburb where their personal experiences would've made police behaving that way seem unfathomable. Watching Jim Crow's enforcers with their own eyes couldn't be ignored. If anyone thought in 1991 that such brutality was a vestige of the past, or something that could only happen among racist cops in the South, the Rodney King tape disabused them of that notion, kicking off an era of cheap, increasingly ubiquitous recording equipment that was bound to capture more police misbehavior.

Of course young people growing up with YouTube will trust police officers less. The many videos of brutality don't lie-- and they confirm that, sometimes, cops do lie.

…Yet they're often afforded a presumption that their version of events is true, no matter how many times individual cops are caught falsifying reports or lying on the stand.

In that item from The Federalist quoted at the beginning of this article, Hans Fiene urges conservatives who reflexively trust the police to show a bit more skepticism. "Police brutality is not the Bogeyman," he writes. "It’s not an urban legend witnessed by none but told by many. It’s not a myth created by a primitive tribe that is too simple to understand the true source of the brokenness in its communities. Black people believe in police brutality for the same reason they believe in rain-- because they’ve felt it ... For those of us who have never experienced law enforcement corrupted by power, basic human decency should require that we try to understand and consider the perspective of those who have..."

That's true. But trusting that minority groups aren't fabricating police misconduct isn't even as necessary as it was for, say, the white suburbanite of 1985, limited by what he'd seen with his eyes, read in the local paper, or watched on CBS. Any doubt that excessive force by law enforcement is a widespread problem can now be laid to rest in a single hour with nothing more than access to YouTube.

Start here or here or here. Or here. Or here. Or here. If you keep searching, you'll come to the conclusion that this sort of violence is epidemic long before you run out of video confirmation. Then remember the vast majority of these incidents are never videotaped. 

Not completely unrelated, what do you think would happen if a cop pumped six bullets into an actual dangerous criminal, say Jamie Dimon, Vikram Pandit, Tim Geithner, Brian Moynihan, Lloyd Blankfein, Robert Ruben, or John Mack? Would he get public adulation for protecting society and saving the taxpayers tens of millions in trial courts and appeals? Is that not law and order? What do you think?