Tribal Justice – Marxists on the Far Right Tearing Down America

I. Totalitarians In Our Midst

In the summer of 2020, US Attorney General William Barr made what was a shocking statement to me at the time:

To tell you the truth, during my exposure to the law enforcement community, which goes back over 30 years, there’s one constant, which is that the police do their job. The police do – get the suspect and get the evidence. The system falls apart in the prosecution and trial and the sentencing stage. And what’s happening these days in the country is we’re going back to some of the old practices we followed in the ’60s and ’70s where there’s revolving-door justice and people are not being held. They’re not being held before trial when they’re dangerous. I think if you go to most of these big cities that are experiencing an increase in violent crime, and you go to the police departments, they will know who the shooters are. They will know exactly who the shooters are. And they’re not that many of them, relatively speaking. Two, three hundred, that if you took off the streets, you would more than halve violent crime.

It was shocking, because Barr suggested moving the locus of determination of guilt away from juries, and to political actors.

I already knew Republicans had come to see the criminal justice system not as a way to deter crime and get justice, but to gentrify society by removing undesirables, and achieve eugenics by incarceration. Barr was not talking about punishing people for specific crimes they were guilty of, but putting bad people in a concentration camp, to make the world a better place.

Mankind has hated juries forever, and Republicans have hated juries at least since Casey Anthony and OJ Simpson. Local elected officials – sheriffs, mayors, judges – are rewarded by the 51% majority, for overlooking police lying and faking evidence, to get around the jury and lock up whomever the mob wants locked up. So what Barr demanded – getting around the jury trial to lock up whomever police think is guilty, removing discretion with mandatory minimum sentences, using those sentences to coerce people in jail to point the finger at whomever the prosecution chooses – had already been achieved.

Barr seemed open to take the next step, and make it official.

What made Barr’s statement shocking, is his willingness to ignore history, in pursuit of an ideal. Our nation’s Founders knew well that when politicians and the mob could lock up whomever they wanted to lock up, it would not be criminals, but incompetents tortured for show, members of the minority faction – blasphemers who spoke against the establishment – and political opponents. Once created, this golem would turn against its creators, and most likely Barr himself would eventually be locked up. Meanwhile “the shooters” would be allowed to roam free, to maintain social discontent and demand for more government, Saul Alinsky style. And reactionaries would come up with new policies to let everyone out of prison, innocent and guilty alike, completing the dissolution.

Juries are not the smartest actors, or the most efficient, but the least corruptible.

I recognized that day, when Barr spoke, that the heart of a socialist was beating at the center of Trump administration justice policy. Socialists always create government power, with a utopian blindness to how the real world works and how it is corrupted. Because their minds are blind to the complex social processes, and knowledge and control limitations, elucidated by economists like Friedrich Hayek and Thomas Sowell.

Scientists are socialists, in how they perceive the world. They imagine the world as if seen from a single vantage point, by an actor who has total control, like a laboratory experiment. They focus on the outcome, not the process. They say “If I combine hydrogen and oxygen, it will burn.” They gloss over the problem of “What process will combine hydrogen and oxygen?” Just like Barr says “If I have perfect knowledge of who the shooters are, and total control to lock them up, I would.”

Imagine for a moment if you had no arms. Then how to combine hydrogen and oxygen would be a bigger problem. That is the problem society faces. Because only in totalitarian societies, do the arms of government exist to eliminate the problem of social process and autonomous actors, to achieve ideal ends.

The first impulse of someone who wants an ideal outcome, is therefore to create that absolute power. And bypass social processes and institutions which assemble free actors into beneficial patterns, in favor of a top-down ordering. But once that power is created, it is never used for the ideal ends, but for self preservation, through the manufacture of votes and nuclear weapons.

How do I combine hydrogen and oxygen, if the gas molecules are free to do what they want? You have to build a maze, and hope the mouse finds the cheese. Because if the mouse allows you to pick him up, and even though you can see the cheese, you are just as likely to throw him in the trashcan. When there a billion mice you have to provide for, you will have no choice but to pick just a few, and leave the rest to starve.

If I could centrally plan production and feed everyone I would. If I could just lock up the people I know are committing the crimes, I would. Everyone deserves a nice house!

They don’t realize that civilization is, as Hayek described in “The Use of Knowledge in Society”, a complex knowledge process. And you can’t just replace the process with the outcome we know everyone desires. No matter how many times socialists vote to try. Just give everyone healthcare! Just lock up the criminals! Just invent a new green energy source! Such a simple fix.

Hayek put it like this: “If we possess all the relevant information, if we can start out from a given system of preferences, and if we command complete knowledge of available means, the problem which remains is purely one of logic… This, however, is emphatically not the economic problem which society faces.”

The mind of man, originated in small collectives thousands of years ago. In such collectives, everyone’s actions are visible, everyone’s aims are synchronized, there is perfect knowledge and conscious control. Men like Barr whose hearts pine for such a utopia, invite totalitarian disaster and misery.