Nihilism

Radley Balko wrote an article on the limits and abuse of police powers as well as a subsequent blog post in which he found Renowned Conservative Homunculus Jonah Goldberg chewing on his own deference to authority "nom nom nom give cops the benefit of the doubt for a host of reasons nom nom nom." Radley concludes:

The only explanation I can come up with for the contradiction is that conservatives are more sympathetic to the targets of regulators (businesses, mostly) than they are to the targets of police and prosecutors (people accused of committing crimes). But that doesn’t change the fact that police and prosecutors are subject to the same trappings of power as other government employees, and so ought to be viewed with the same amount of skepticism. Moreso, actually, given that your average bureaucrat isn’t empowered to arrest you or put a bullet in your chest.

Yes, well, the only conclusion that I can come up with is that Jonah Goldberg is a Big Fat Idiot, the Federalist Society is a front organization preparing for a fascist putsch, and Ted Olson is a Nazi. Are we gonna split hairs?

For decades now (How long, Joe Biden? Literally decades, literally), reasonable and intelligent people of all political and philosophical stripes have mused the old imponderable: how do soi-disant American conservatives reconcile their enormous hard-on for an expansive police and military establishment with their rhetorical commitment to "limited government"? Like campus wits who delight in calling out Christians on their salad-bar interpretation of Leviticus, they miss the point entirely. Reconciliation is not the point; the ideology is demonstrably incoherent. It isn't that conservatives like Goldberg have some gaping intellectual blind spot, not as if they've simply failed to notice the contradiction. It's that they don't give a fuck because they are For Real Too Stupid. The principle targets of police ire are poor people, black people, bad people, people Not Like Us, hippies getting tazed at John Kerry rallies . . . The typical targets of military aggression are Abroad and Other. Try to tell Jonah Goldberg that the police exist as an enforcing agency of state power, an institution through which the state monopoly on "legitimate" force and violence is exercised against its citizen-subjects, and his eyes will glaze as quickly as a teenage girl whose DVR of The Hills was secretly switcherooed with I, Claudius. How dumb is he, Joe Biden? He is literally as dumb as a rock, literally.

The desire to extend the benefit of intellectual doubt and to locate in America's various and sundry political clubs some iron-nickel core of principles from which the exigencies of real world behaviors and commitments can be extrapolated is either admirable in its generosity or idiotic in its overestimation of human beings. Needless to say, I lean toward the latter. In a nation where a plurality of Americans do not accept evolution, cognitive coherency, sound reasoning, and analytical consistency are hardly universal traits. Yes, it is wholly ridiculous to imagine that the EPA represents an unbearable exemplar of coercive government force while universal police prerogatives and a vast military complex are merely tolerable, even desirable norms. Yes, we have no bananas. These men believe in nothing. Nothing.