Fascism and Democracy: The State Monopoly on Violence
You cannot legally commit murder. But the State can, and often does.
I’m in a philosophical mood today.
I’ve been watching The Good Place again, or more accurately binging it obsessively. Watching Team Cockroach wrestle with the ethics of punishment, morality, and existentialism is really fun.
If you haven’t watched it, go do that. Drop all the things and run. You won’t regret it. On top of being entertaining as fork, it’s also among the most thought-provoking series that I’ve ever seen. It’s practically a Philosophy 101 course wrapped in a wacky comedy coating.
At some point I plan to do a deep-dive on the show and the many layered, fascinating lessons it contains. Please watch it all the way through before I release that article — you’ll thank me for not spoiling it!
The show focuses mainly on morality and ethics, but there are many branches of philosophy and all are just as fascinating. I’m certainly not an expert, but I find it really interesting to study in my free time.
But thanks to my recent return to the zany world of Chidi’s personal hell, I’m sitting back in my chair pondering life’s big questions.
It just so happens that some of those questions are particularly poignant today.
Political philosophy is very relevant to the work I do. In a nutshell, political philosophy is the study of government and law. The goal is to argue, debate, and posit theories on the best way to structure relationships between people as a collective group.
It is especially concerned with matters of legitimacy, such as the legitimacy of authority figures and the powers they exercise. The nature of what constitutes a legal action versus an illegal action, and who gets to decide which is which.
Unfortunately, these questions aren’t as funny in real life as watching Chidi get an indecisive stomach ache. While he ponders the ethical implications of choosing strawberry frozen yogurt over vanilla, we have to tangle with real-world policies.
We get to wrestle with societal power dynamics and the nature of justice. And with international politics and world events being what they are, these questions are especially relevant.
There’s a term in political philosophy that has come to define our conception of the ‘modern state’. The state usually refers to a collection of regions that form a nation — one body ruled by one government. A community governed under common rules and laws.
We call world leaders ‘heads of state’ for a reason.
In the modern world, we define ‘the state’ by its authority. Specifically, the authority to commit legal acts of violence. This is called the ‘monopoly on violence’, a term coined by the sociologist Max Weber.
The idea is that we, as citizens of our respective countries, are not allowed to commit acts of violence. Harming other people or restricting their rights is not permitted.
If we kidnap someone at gunpoint and hold them against their will, we’re committing a crime. We’re breaking the law by harming them and restricting their freedom.
However, if we break the law — as written by those in positions of authority — then the state has the power to use violence against us. They have the power to force us to comply by sending law enforcement to arrest and detain us, and they can restrict our freedoms as punishment for our transgressions.
In the case of the United States, they can now send people to a foreign prison without due process.
In some countries, the state even has the legal authority to commit murder. Even mass murder, via acts of war like drone strikes or bombing campaigns.
The question I find particularly interesting is… who decides if the state’s use of violence is actually legitimate? If it’s simply a question of government and the law, then does a democratic system really ensure more legitimacy than a fascist one?
Now, to be clear: I am fully on the side of democracy. No question of that.
In my opinion, the power of the state exists only with the consent of the governed. The people have the power to declare the state’s legal use of violence illegitimate and rise up against it.
Humans do that all the time; revolution against a tyrannical state is kind of our thing. It’s how the United States was founded, it’s how Ireland won independence from the British, and it’s how the French keep their leaders thoroughly in line.
Everybody remembers the guillotine, and nobody wants to repeat that history. It was not a fun time for anybody.
But just for the sake of argument, let’s talk through it. After all, the definition of what is legal and what is just is not always the same.
We talked a little bit about this in my article about Luigi Mangioni and the concept of justice; bear with me as I repeat myself a bit.
We Need To Talk About Justice: What Does It Look Like, And What Do We Want?
"Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable."
If we’re going to base the legitimacy of the use of force solely on the letter of the law, then it doesn’t really matter what kind of government is in charge. An authoritarian, tyrannical government can alter the law to say whatever they want.
Defining justice and legitimacy as ‘the letter of the law’ has serious repercussions when it comes to human rights.
Take segregation as an example. The so-called Jim Crow laws were a set of legal rulings which were written to exclude Black Americans from taking part in public life. It created a racial apartheid in the United States, much like the one that was built in South Africa.
By law, people of colour were not allowed to use the same spaces as white people. Their children were not allowed to attend school together, they couldn’t use the same public bathrooms, and even the seats one could use on the bus were reserved by law.
If legality is the sole measure of justice and legitimacy, then there was nothing wrong with Jim Crow. It was a lawful system put in place by the judiciary. It was enforced legally, maintained legally, and the people who enacted it had the full authority to do so.
If you’re like me, however, you recognize that not all laws are legitimate.
The concept of justice goes further than legality. The Jim Crow laws were immoral, and they were unjust laws that needed to be broken. Likewise, there are certain powers that are considered legally legitimate that I do not believe the state should be able to exercise.
I do not believe the state should be allowed to commit premeditated murder, which is what the death penalty would be called if it were carried out by anybody else.
I also don’t believe that police officers should be blindly trusted as arbiters of justice simply because the state entrusts them with enforcing the law.
The Nazis were acting in accordance with the law when they rounded up minorities in Germany during the Holocaust, but I don’t think any of us would say that their actions were morally acceptable.
If you think they were, you don’t belong here.
Police brutality is something that comes into the news cycle with alarming regularity.
The role of law enforcement is supposed to embody the slogan that many officers proclaim: to protect and serve. Unfortunately, the truth doesn’t live up to the hype.
Quite apart from the frequent abuses of power carried out by uniformed officers — in the United States, it can range from civil asset forfeiture to racially motivated assault and murder — the idea that the police are there to protect you is simply a fantasy.
In the infamous case Warren v. District of Columbia, the Supreme Court of the United States made the ruling that the police have no duty nor obligation to provide protection to any individual citizen.
Warning: if you plan to read about that case, be prepared for mentions of sexual assault.
That’s not even the only case on the subject that reached the same conclusion.
Now, police forces don’t function the same way across all countries.
In the United States, criminal codes enforced by the police can differ from one state to the next. In Canada, our criminal code is federally based. That also means that police training is standardized across the entire country rather than being up to each province.
The money seized from fines and tickets in America might be used for funding the precinct, whereas in Canada it goes back to the jurisdiction and isn’t kept by the cops. The differences go deeper than that, but you get the picture.
But even with these differences, they have plenty in common. For example, racial bias is still a problem in the Canadian police force.
The same is true across the pond. In the United Kingdom, racial bias in policing is a massive concern. As are abuses of power, and even lawbreaking on the part of uniformed officers. The same is true in France.
Why is it that the same problem exists worldwide with law enforcement? There are a lot of reasons. Things like systemic racism, corruption, and poor training come to mind.
Even a simple lack of resources can lead to cops prioritizing cases based on which ones will garner more public attention. Missing White Woman Syndrome is a real phenomenon.
It isn’t even racism on its own. Any minority group can fall under threat, including disabled people, LGBTQ+ people, or people who speak a less common language. Anyone with a societal stigma can wind up being unduly targeted by the authorities.
Justice is not applied equally to all citizens under the law.
But honestly, when you give a group of people the authority to wield violence on the state’s behalf, maybe you set yourself up to see that authority abused. Bigotry is based on us vs them thinking, after all.
Perhaps elevating somebody’s power over others just compounds that problem, as theorized in the Stanford Prison Experiment.
I don’t have the answer. I don’t know what the truth is. But I do believe that with all of this kept in mind, the simple fact that a police officer is meant to enforce the law does not mean that we should view them as carriers of justice.
As I said, I don’t have all the answers. And when you’re wandering down the overgrown trails of philosophy, answers aren’t always the point.
What’s important is that we don’t allow ourselves to be boxed into one line of thought without considering different options. We don’t need to stick with the same system forever just because it’s the way things have always been done.
We always need to be willing to say “I don’t know,” or to listen to someone else’s point of view. Heck, even as I rant about the problems in policing, I have cops in my family. I don’t think they’re bad people, I think they’re doing their job, and their perspective on what they do is probably wildly different from mine.
And the same is true of politicians — I’m sure that many of the politicians I vehemently disagree with are perfectly kind to the people they love. But like with police officers, it’s how they exercise their authority at work that has an impact on everyone else.
Considering questions of authority, justice, the law, and how society wrestles with the conflicts between them is not easy, and it doesn’t leave you with clear-cut simple answers.
But if we feel any compassion for one another, we need to think about them anyway.
The state’s monopoly on violence is an issue we have to square with, especially right now. We’re looking at a powerful country that’s descending into fascism — the United States — and we’re deciding how to respond.
What’s worth fighting for, and what do we risk by going toe to toe with such a powerful institution as the U.S. government?
What do we stand to lose if we don’t?
Where do we draw the line between justice and the law, and how far do they need to go before we change our stance and withdraw support? How far back is that rubber band going to be pulled before it snaps?
The people of the United States have fought back and demanded that unjust laws be changed — Jim Crow is long gone, and that’s because ordinary citizens rose up and forced those in power to change their rulings and center justice instead.
I hope, for all of our sakes, it doesn’t take long before justice once again matters more than the letter of the law.
Solidarity wins.