On Perceiving the People and the Army as One Hand in America, Too

Why do people, according to this survey, separate so neatly that which the view of the system we’re commonly taught says is incorrect? Why do Americans ascribe such confidence to pigs & soldiers while withholding confidence from who tells pigs and soldiers what indeed to do?

First, they don’t see police as “pigs”: They see them as fellow citizens doing difficult jobs that need to be done.

Police forces and the military are “democratic” in the Tocquevillian sense, not exclusively because of particular relationships to majoritarian democratic processes, forms, events, and personalities, but perhaps primarily because they are constituted of and by the people, for no other purpose than to serve and protect the people, altogether and individual by individual, without regard for color, creed, class, etc. The last part especially is obviously not the view of a blogger like B-Psycho, but the people rather evidently do not require perfection in such matters, and the general tendency is hardly a uniquely American tendency: “The people and the army are one hand” was, of course, an Egyptian slogan, and maintained ardently despite an I believe widespread awareness of the Egyptian army’s corruption and other defects at the highest levels.

Tolerance of the apparent contradiction, or the maintenance of a good reputation despite imperfections and contradictions, will be possible for as long as the institutions of law enforcement, order, and national power are seen to operate on behalf of the whole state, serving an entirety of the law and the requirements for civic life in a non-partisan manner, only at most marginally affected by this year’s latest additions to the statutes or today’s “orders” from any particular officeholder. The army isn’t seen as Barack Obama’s or George Bush’s army, but as “our” army – and “we” are not simply a registration of transitory majority opinion on whatever particular issue. On this matter we are a trans-generational culture-state with responsibilities to and warrants from the dead and the not yet born. A police force isn’t seen as a Democratic or Republican police force just because a mayor or district attorney or legislature or council happens to be Democratic or Republican, or dominated this season, year, decade, or generation by the left or the right. If this perception changes for whatever reasons, if and when the military or police forces generally are seen to be corrupted by power or profit, or to be putting their own separate institutional interests ahead of their responsibility to the public interest as a whole, then public opinion would likely begin to change – though the Egyptian example among many others suggests that such perceptions may be, rightly or wrongly, difficult to alter.

What this all would also mean is that it is quite possible for police and/or army – or for that matter the DMV or the planning and code enforcement division of your city government – to be seen as maintaining an objectively democratic character, and to receive the reflexive sympathies that go with it, whether or not we’re happy with the functioning of elected officials or with what B-Psycho derogates as “oligarchical pluralist” tendencies . It is unclear to me how in theory any mass society could function except as something resembling a pluralist oligarchy: Even a totalitarian dictatorship under a charismatic leader still requires coordination of “plural” factions, and to be heard at all a faction will have to produce a leadership empowered to decide on behalf of the mass. “Oligarchy” means government by the few, and as a technical matter all government is government by a relative few. What we intend to express with the term is government by the few on behalf of their own interests against or irrespective of the interests of the many, but whether a particular oligarchy is in this sense “oligarchical” will be debatable, as will the general position on the ability of broadly speaking or technically oligarchical forms of mass governance (i.e., almost all government) best serving the interests of human beings, or even of producing the greatest actually attainable and sustainable space for “radical democratist-anarchist freedom” or, if you prefer, for life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness.