The Metaphysics of Law and Order
Probing beneath the surface right-wing appeals to law and order
“Law and order!” is a mantra that has magnetic appeal for many people. There are some obvious reasons why it is so compelling. When people feel endangered, they want safety. When people feel exposed, they seek protection. And when the world around them seems chaotic, they hanker after stability.
The rhetoric of law-and-order is a powerful tool for authoritarian politics because it taps into basic human needs. To exploit this tool to its full potential, though, the would-be leader must paint a picture of lawlessness and disorder spiraling out of control. Then, when the audience are feeling maximally vulnerable, he can offer himself as a savior who is uniquely able to put things right.
Donald Trump has used this strategy since the start of his political career, and he is doubling down on it in the run-up to the 2024 presidential election. As Michael Gold recently observed in the New York Times:
Mr. Trump presents a dark, often dystopian, vision of an America that is ravaged by crime, building on his message in 2020 that the nation’s cities were decaying. He is again trying to present himself as a “law-and-order” candidate, vaguely alluding to crime in cities led by Democrats, for which he blames progressive politicians, activists and policies.
This analysis is true as far as it goes. But it doesn’t go very far. Many political commentators have been struck by the contrast between Trump’s emphasis law and order and his celebration of the January 6th insurgents (Trump calls them “hostages” rather than “prisoners”), who were neither law-abiding nor orderly. Add to this the fact that the former president is currently facing ninety-one criminal charges, and the seeming dissonance between the talk that he talks and the walk that he walks could not be more glaring. Trump and his supporters are untroubled by this contradiction, which suggests that we need to excavate what’s going on more meticulously.
Leaving aside “law” for the moment, and concentrating on “order,” it’s clear that the MAGA crowd are not concerned with order per se. They don’t want just any old order. They’re aiming at a certain kind of order.
But what kind?
The conception of order at work is both normative, and backward-looking. It’s normative because it’s supposed to be the order that the social world should conform to. And it’s backwards-looking because it’s conceived of as the restoration of a golden age (recall that Trump wants to make America great again). There was a time, at some usually unspecified point in the past, when our society was organized in just the way that it should be. But alas, there was a serpent lurking in Eden that spoiled paradise. The serpent is and was those those whom Trump castigates as “vermin.”
This is a familiar fascist trope. As Jason Stanley writes in How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them, “Depending on how the nation is defined, the mythic past may be religiously pure, racially pure, culturally pure, or all of the above.”
The mythic past gets its normative heft from the belief that it instantiated a transcendent order. Sometimes, this is religiously toned. The mythic past—the order to be restored—is the social order that God intended. In more secular versions, the idea is that the social order should mirror the order of nature. Sometimes the two go together: the natural order was ordained by the will of God.
When society is as it should be, everything is in its proper place. This is determined by two axes, one horizontal and the other vertical. The horizontal axis is all about what kinds of people there are. This consists of various rigidly-demarcated (in fact, essentialized) kinds—most importantly, but not exclusively, gendered kinds and racial kinds. The vertical axis sets out the relations that are supposed to obtain between these kinds—those that are higher and those that are lower, those who are dominant and those who are subordinate to them.
There are two sorts of transgressions of this order. One is when the horizontal dimension is violated. If men are men and women are women, essentially, then the very existence of trans people is deemed a disturbing affront to God or nature. Similarly, “race” mixing (what the Nazis called rassenshande) may be seen as a disruptive merging of things that should kept separate. When violation occurs on the vertical dimension, the relations between these kinds of people are deemed to be deformed. If women are supposed to be subordinate to men, then a man being subordinate to a woman is an affront to the cosmic order. If so-called people of color are supposed to be subordinate to “White” people, the inverse is a grotesque perversion, and should be rectified.
The “law” component of “law and order” concerns the policing of this framework. On the horizontal dimension, its job is to enforce the boundaries between essentialized social kinds. On the vertical dimension, its job is making sure that those who do not occupy their proper place are put in their place. So, “law” does not correspond to enforcing what Congress has legislated. Instead, its task is to bring a deviant society into line.
The general framework of a horizontal ontology (an account of the kinds of things that exist) intersecting a vertical axiology (an account of the relative value of these things) is not unique to authoritarian politics. I have argued elsewhere that virtually all of us are disposed to think of the world as an array of essentialized natural kinds, and virtually all of us are disposed to conceive of this array as organized on a hierarchy of intrinsic value. What is peculiar to authoritarian politics is the manner in which the folk-metaphysics gets filled out with damaging and retrograde conceptions of race, gender, and other socially significant categories.