What Happens If We Lose?
It's something I've been thinking about a lot in the five days since the murder of Renee Good. Because it has become clear that the reaction to her killing, the protests, the government response, has all become a fight with broader significance. This started to become apparent when, a couple of days after the shooting, the cell phone video that ICE agent Jonathan Ross took while he was killing her – yeah, really – was made public. To normal humans, this video showed a cold-blooded murder, a hate crime, even, given the way Ross said "fucking bitch" after he killed her. But apparently, to Ross and his supporters, and also to Donald Trump and his supporters (a largely overlapping group), the video was meant to vindicate Ross, to show that he did nothing wrong. This seems weird, because Good clearly posed no threat whatsoever, to Ross or to anyone. She was being perfectly calm, perfectly pleasant. What, then, do Ross and his partisans think justified shooting her?
Well, I think we have our answer. It comes from Texas Congressman (and disgrace to his name) Roger Williams, who said on Friday:
People need to quit demonstrating, quit yelling at law enforcement, challenging law enforcement, and begin to get civil. And until we do that, I guess we're gonna have it this way. And the people that are staying in their homes, are doing the right thing, need to be protected.
Emphasis mine. The answer comes from Trump himself, who, when asked if deadly force was necessary, said:
It was highly disrespectful of law enforcement. The woman and her friend were highly disrespectful of law enforcement. You saw that. They were harassing, they were following for days, for hours. And I think frankly they're professional agitators. ... These are professional agitators, and law enforcement should not be in a position where they have to put up with this stuff. What that woman and what her friend, and what their other friends were doing to law enforcement – and law enforcement, not just ICE – is outrageous.
Again, emphasis mine. And we have it from a whole assortment of other ICE officers, who have been filmed in the last few days saying, to those who are recording them, "Have you not learned anything from what just happened?"
Put it all together and you get a pretty clear picture of the principle that these people all understand to be at stake. Renee Good was killed because was one of the hundreds, if not thousands, of people in Minneapolis who have made it their business to follow ICE around the city, watching what they do, watching them hunt for people to kidnap. Trump and his supporters believe that this counts as "interfering" with ICE's operations.
And in a sense they're right! The point is indeed to impede them, to make them back down, to stop the kidnappings. But not with force of arms, not with literal physical obstruction, no. These citizen-observers "obstruct" the government only by exposing it to scrutiny, to public shame and disfavor. That this has the potential to influence what armed agents of the state do is, well, kind of the whole point of democracy. It's what democracy is for.
This, by the way, is very much the existing law of this country. In 1987, the Supreme Court struck down as overbroad a Houston ordinance making it illegal to "interrupt" the police at work. "The freedom of individuals verbally to oppose or challenge police action without thereby risking arrest," Justice Brennan wrote, "is one of the principal characteristics by which we distinguish a free nation from a police state." Indeed. The Court went on to note that it had "repeatedly invalidated laws that provide the police with unfettered discretion to arrest individuals for words or conduct that annoy or offend them."
Of course what Trump and his government are claiming is not just discretion to arrest those who annoy them, but to kill them. (There's a whole separate body of law about when police are allowed to use deadly force; see e.g. Tennessee v. Garner (1985) (merely apprehending a fleeing suspect is not enough of a justification)) Hell, today it seems that ICE in Minneapolis has started harassing their enemies at their homes. To borrow a phrase, the citizen-observer, in their view, has no rights that the secret police is bound to respect.
A certain kind of person has liked to say, over the last few years, and in particularly over the last one year, that comparisons between contemporary America and Nazi Germany are absurd. And that's true: things are nowhere near as bad here, even as they were in the early years of Hitler's reign. But, you know, that could change. Our government wants it to change. They're not really very subtle about that. We keep having fights about whether they get to move things a little bit in that direction; I find myself wondering, again and again, how many of those fights we have to lose before things get really, really bad.
And lose this fight? The fight we're having as a nation about Renee Good's Murder, about whether our shiny new secret police are allowed to kill those who seek to shine a light on their conduct with impunity? If we lose this fight, we don't move a little bit in the direction of a fascist society. We move a lot in that direction. We would cover, I think, a huge portion of the distance between where we are now and something like Nazi Germany, in a single step.
Of course I don't mean to say that I think we will lose this fight. To the contrary: I think that people recognize the enormity of the stakes, and that is why we're seeing this level of response, this level of opposition to what the regime is doing. But we could lose it. It's not unthinkable, it's not beyond the realm of possibility. We could, as a society, collectively decide that we're all a little too afraid of being killed by government thugs to go out there and protest. That's what they explicitly want, and there have been times and places where that sort of thing has worked.
And if that were to happen, the result would be, I think, utterly catastrophic for American public life. There are fights you can afford to lose; this is not one of them.
