Insulated Brooklyn radlibs advocating Neolithic social structures for post-industrial societies: Hamilton Nolan’s defund the police essay

 

Hamilton Nolan’s piece on defunding the police is pure libtard temper tantrum and pathos with absolutely no empirical, social, or even theoretical backing. His sole moves in the entire essay are 1) blind moral outrage that tries to convince through offendedness and absurd analogies, 2) conflating regular police with ICE, and 3) an extremely tenuous and constantly used analogy that any kind of authority figure with a gun is equivalent to “a loaded gun left around your house.”

 

Well, Hamilton, if there was a real felon with a real house full of real loaded guns as frequently happens in America, what exactly would you do about it in your ideal world?

 

Send them more welfare payments?

 

A social worker with a clipboard?

 

I’m sure that’ll go over well.

 

And if you don’t like “militarized” police…

 

How exactly do you expect anybody to enforce anything against American gangs which have automatic assault rifles and machine guns and even grenades and rocket launchers sometimes?

 

Are the social workers going to handle it when those people seize power like they do in Brazilian favelas after you’ve fully defunded the police and de facto forfeited state monopoly on violence in America?

You really have to wonder what universe these people are living in, sometimes. I actually checked about Nolan—Brooklyn and New Hampshire, apparently.

The only time in human history when civilization existed without enforced state monopoly on violence was the Neolithic era, and that era was still insanely violent as lack of a coercive state and social hierarchy in no way dulls competition for resources and territory, and any kind of settlements and surplus create tempting targets for raids and even occupation. What inevitably happened, as has happened repeatedly throughout human history, is that the cultures which developed coercive states first outcompeted and conquered the cultures which didn’t.

No hierarchy or violent enforcers only works 1) if everyone is basically the same ethnicity with the same norms and beliefs, and 2) there’s no neighboring culture which does have a hierarchy and violent enforcers of it, as the former will inevitably lose to the latter, and quite easily at that.

In the 19th century, modern industrial states conquered the rest of the globe, forcing modernity onto the semi-feudal social arrangements which it cleanly and vastly outcompeted in terms of hard and soft power.

In the 40th century before Christ, the proto-state with a proto-army bested the anarchist commune towns every single time.

There are very good reasons why this type of social arrangement only existed once in human history at the very beginning of civilization when everyone in the town was related, and it has to do with 1) scalability, and 2) survivability. We have already covered the second, now let’s get into scalability.

The drastically revised latest estimates are that between 600 to 800 people lived in Çatal Hüyük at any given time. This is about half the size of the student population of my small town high school. It’s also small enough that literally everybody could conceivably be first or second cousins. It’s small enough that everyone can be the same ethnicity, speaking the same language, holding the same beliefs, and silently enforcing the same norms amongst kin and near-kin relations.

The reasons why you cannot scale this model up to a modern, continent-sized empire including over 340 million people of wildly differing ethnicities, beliefs, values, and norms should be fairly obvious. The second you have competing groups with competing norms which are inconsistently enforced across society you necessarily need some type of social referee. That referee is the state and its monopoly on violence.

What happens when you remove the state monopoly on violence from a modern capitalist society?

Brazilian favelas run by gangs who can shoot down police helicopters with black-market Stingers happen.

Mafia capitalism with extensive human trafficking in post-communist Europe happens.

Market incentives do not go away, commodities do not go away, racketeering and violence to enforce them do not go away, simply the closest thing to a fair referee goes away.

Gangs of armed men take over, one way or another. A monopoly on violence is enforced by somebody, one way or another.

You do not get some kind of Edenic paradise—you get gangster hell where you have to go through the local gang to get internet, electricity, plumbing, and even justice if someone wrongs you.

Instead of no state, you get the crudest, dumbest form of a state.

Now let’s consider some American specificities which make Nolan’s idea even more batshit than it already is.

At the absolute height of The Troubles in Northern Ireland, the murder rate was 31 per 100k. However, this was merely the peak in 1972, and most years had between 4.0 to 6.5 murders per 100k. The violence was seen as terrible enough to warrant the UK cycling over 200k men through the country across The Troubles to keep the peace, with combined police, military, and militias numbering over 30,000 against a total population of around 1.5 million.

Between 1991 and 2022, the US murder rate varied from 10 per 100k to “only” 4 or 5 per 100k. For comparison, the majority of European countries are at or below 1.5, and Canada’s is around 2. New Orleans, Memphis, St. Louis, Baltimore, Washington DC, and more American cities all have murder rates higher than the peak of The Troubles as a matter of course which Americans have just accepted as background noise. What is remembered as a horrific civil conflict causing severe intergenerational trauma in Europe is just Tuesday in a major American city, and a quiet Tuesday at that.