argumate:

based on historical precedent you might have expected the Floyd murder to be one of those tragic incidents that creates a lot of anger and controversy that slowly dissipates in squabbling over contradictory narratives of what happened and whether he deserved it by virtue of being high or having a record or whatever and eventually the discourse moves on with yet another name added to the list of police victims and no structural change takes place.

but the scale of the protests changed the story completely so that it’s no longer about Floyd at all but about the frenzied police reaction to the reaction, hundreds of incidents of needless brutality across the country against protesters, against journalists, against lawyers, against children, the narrative one of police out of control and fearful local government unable to curb their excesses, holding communities hostage with disproportionate violence to the point that their threat of withdrawing entirely starts to sound like the more attractive option.

and this is so similar to what happened in Hong Kong a year ago when protests against the security laws were met with such unprecedented quantities of tear gas that it galvanised and even radicalised sections of society that might have considered themselves neutral before, suddenly it wasn’t even about the security laws but about an unrepresentative government completely out of touch with public opinion and a police department in cahoots with gangsters fighting a war against the people instead of performing their ostensible purpose of protecting them from crime.

you can burn decades of good will in a few minutes once the tear gas canisters start flying and police violence only “works” when it is backed to the hilt by a repressive government; I guess for the US that remains to be seen.

I think whats going on is more “the ability of government forces to escalate violence past any challengers is key to the ability of that government to make decisions final and govern”, no government can yield that and remain a government, the growing left-identitarian-scolds-collective finally made an existential demand that cannot be accommodated against a force capable of suppressing it by violence.

And that directly resolving every issue by violence is exhausting so you build hegemony out from that to be the cop in people’s head, and that comes in Machiavelli’s loved/feared varieties. And police forces did both, admixed and focused to different audiences. Loved is Officer Friendly, showing off gear at county fairs, cop TV shows. Feared is nightstick law and prison rape jokes.

And if people aren’t held back by the cop in their head, either the love or fear dissipates, hegemony has to be reinstalled in them for the regime and its ruled society to remain viable and fear is quickest. The violence isn’t a mistake, it’s an existential imperative of the regime, which even “progressive” elected executives grok.