edit: I'm framing this around the cop who got killed
like will police be less willing to let nazis and maga freaks do whatever they want because the police know they're targets now too, or will the police let them get away with everything now because they don't want to get beat to death with a fire extinguisher for getting in their way?
i know police have been cooperating with patriot prayer in Portland and proud boys in dc and in every other city where those groups show up. but if i was a cop and learned that a group I've helped and is full of cops killed another pig, or tried to crush one in a door, I'd probably be a lot more distrustful of them. i know a lot of cops get killed by "friendly fire" (which is hilarious) but this just looks and feels different to me. idk it's just something I've been thinking about
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i mean yeah that makes sense I'd bet that a lot of small town cops belong to a lot of those groups. and i know a lot of portland police live in the same part of washington that patriot prayer is from so they probably have a lot of cooperation and trust. i guess I'm thinking more about police in bigger cities where those out of town groups go to fight blm or whoever. like if pp go down to Salem, Oregon or up to Seattle will the police there trust them the same way? if the proud boys all go to nyc again will nypd let them run around with swords and attack people? if blm beat a cop to death they'd come down hard on them.
and i think i remember some boogaloos killing a few cops over the summer, so like how many cops have to get killed before they stop cooperating?
The rationalization here has been refined for a decade or two now: right-wing violence is done by loners with mental health issues, while left-wing violence is part of a dedicated, well-funded, explicitly-ideological project. Stuff like this allows cops (and other reactionaries) to write off whatever negative consequences flow from reactionary violence.
i want to say that i really appreciate your analysis throughout this post and you've really helped me grasp the situation better. but isn't the whole boog movement about bringing about a second civil war and being anti-government? it just seems like willful ignorance for police (acting on behalf of the government) to brush off that shit as just a "mentally ill loner". like is it similar to poc joining white nationalist groups and thinking they won't get killed when they've outlived their usefulness?
but then i remember that cops are dumb as shit and friendly fire happens all the time and they spin it as "dying in the line of duty" or whatever, so maybe they really can just brush it off and think it'll never happen to them as they continue to collaborate with those groups.
it's just really hard to understand that mind set. like there's "leftists" today who don't trust "tankies" because of stuff that happened last century but cops now don't care about the anti-cop violence committed by their "allies" because they're all on the same side. idk I'm just kinda thinking out loud now
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There's a definition of conservatism that applies to anti-government conservatism as well: "There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect." I'd bet that the vast majority of "anti-government" types really just want the government to do less things that bind them, and are either indifferent towards or supportive of government actions that bind others. You can see this in libertarian spaces, which are some of most well-established "anti-government" places out there. Most libertarians don't want to eradicate all government. They mostly want to cut out the parts that might at some point tell them what to do, and otherwise they subscribe to either a "minarchist/night watchmen" approach to government or a "stripped down but not to the point where any of the benefits I enjoy are cut" approach. There are also plenty in this crowd who view local governments as at least semi-legitimate, but who view the federal government as largely illegitimate. Is all of this unworkable and full of contradictions? You bet your ass it is, but it's what they believe.
So against this background of a fundamentally incoherent worldview, you can get police who harbor anti-government viewpoints (despite working for the government), and you can get anti-government conservatives who'll fly a "don't tread on me" flag right beside a "blue lives matter" flag. It's not any sort of principled philosophical stance; it's just treating different groups differently based on whatever set of prejudices they harbor.
I think this can be understood by (1) recognizing that propaganda works and (2) considering the propaganda that gives rise to each of these opinions. Left anticommunism ("leftists" not trusting "tankies") has been a significant part of U.S. anticommunist propaganda for most of a century now. On the other side, there's tons of propaganda portraying right-wing violence as "mentally ill loners" because multiple powerful interests simultaneously want to cater to the militia crowd but distance themselves from the inevitable, lethal results of that (think Republican politicians, gun manufacturers who want to sell more than just hunting rifles, the military wanting to glorify militarism, right-wing media ghouls who make careers being as incendiary as possible, etc.).