IS JUSTICE POSSIBLE WITHOUT AUTHORITARIAN VIOLENCE?
The pridefulness that bolsters our modern society is no greater a guarantee of safety or security from violence or abuse like financial destitution. We do have a punishment infrastructure, which works for some things everyone agrees on, like murder, and which does not work for other things, like lobbying and money in politics, the massive expense and political framing around what a military is, the continuing policing and jailing of free people, educational resources, resource sharing writ large, etc. Are there any grievances we could not address if each person had the self-governance to choose freely without violating others with force? Is such a world possible that does not implicate anarchy, chaos, or even anti-federalism? It has been before.
A family without authoritarian institution or unhealthy unfair fascist action does not have classes. No son or daughter is tiered above or below the other, parents don’t insist on impossible standards with each other or the kids. Requirements for survival are known and agreed on, and imposition is based on reality, not on historical precedent. Is the answer to authoritarianism in the family a transactional relationship and equal exchange, dollar for dollar? Or are the standards set by a measure without monetary value, considering the people and where they are in their lives?
Disputes between strangers would certainly come from differences in standards. Disputes between family usually comes from the same. Disputes in American history related to authority are robust; slavery, suffrage, discrimination, dog-eat-dog business, military involvement. Ideologically the difference between democratic and republican parties are two sides of a Darwinian interpretation of power — that an animal has the capacity to eat something and survive in nature “justifies” its’ survival. That is not foundational. It is absurd, but it is the logical ground both parties stand on.
Republicans postulate freedom and the good is to be found in individual responsibility for not being eaten by each other. Democrats postulate freedom and the good is in our fair responsibility to each other as a rule, and to not participate is to become faithless and to become food to validate the authority. Each party is incentivized to create laws based on these requirements, and the laws express that. Property rights in relation to evicting people from generational homes, government’s right to collect and spend taxes without individual choice, the right of police and the justice system to kill and punish by precedent, and privileged access to elected representatives have to impose precedents universally over supposedly free people. Each is an example of the authority winning in the balance between Order and personal Freedom.
