Jack Bauerism
Bill Scher presents what I gather is going to be the conventional liberal case, going forward for a year or so, for more vigorous anti domestic terror laws:
https://washingtonmonthly.com/2021/01/14/its-time-for-a-domestic-terrorism-law/
Scher’s case lacks any kind of response to the argument (tweet-sized, but an argument) presented days beforehand by social democrat Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez:
I guess Scher, in publishing in Washington Monthly, is not speaking to social democrats, but to rather mainstream liberals. But if he and other liberal pundits really want new, beefed-up anti domestic terror laws, they’ll probably have to figure out how to make the case to people like AOC. Otherwise they’ll actually wind up inadvertently creating the “panpopulist” coalition (pro relief checks! anti-Patriot III!) I’d hoped for a few months ago, but which seemed rendered totally impossible last week.
AOC has suggested to interviewers that she was nearly killed during the 1/6/21 riot — and yet she still won’t support what Scher is proposing.
Another thought about the Scher/AOC disconnect vis-a-vis the whole “terror thing.” Oftentimes, when radical left wingers do try to articulate why civil liberties are good, even including civil liberties to protect right wingers, they’ll make some case like “eventually the new ‘crackdown’ machinery will be used on us, on the left”— figures like Noam Chomsky, Glenn Greenwald, Freddie DeBoer and others have expressed something like this idea.
I would put it a bit differently. If you’re a radical leftist and a Scherian “Patriot III” is eventually used to put you on a no-fly list (because, for example, you retweeted something about a viral video of a nerve gas attack possibly being staged), that’s obviously bad — you don’t want that. But if you’re a radical leftist and “Patriot III” is being used on all the radicals except you, that’s ALSO bad, because it simultaneously reveals and creates a dynamic where you’re deemed harmless. You’ve lost your power (if you ever had it)! The subtle thing here is that, prior to the enshrinement of “terror vs antiterror” as the central dynamic in how the state and its institutional appendages (in media, business, etc) draw a red line around themselves, you might not have been so “harmless” at all, but rather a powerful Bernie Sanders (or bigger)-sized threat to the system. Whereas, Bernie Sanders has no power in a surrounding societal situation where everybody is begging for Jack Bauer to save them from the “extremists.” AOC’s own considerable, but highly specialized, fighting skills are also rendered devoid of value on that particular kind of battlefield; like sending a master of archery (an archer of tweets) into a melee-style fight where you need to wear 60 pounds of armor.
I would suggest to anyone whose “specialized fighting skill” will be rendered valueless in the “Scherian” (which is actually the Bauerian) kind of fight to be extremely cautious around the terminology with which the 1/6/21 event is, increasingly, being described. Was this an event which cries out for a militarized, Baueristic response—or not? If so, then be prepared for the extent to which this yanks the carpet out from under your extremely non-Bauer-like political bloc. But, if not, if the event doesn’t really cry out for that, then why use event-descriptors which entail the connotation “…and we all know what the state has to do in response to that kind of thing”?