Been looking for a hot take to just copy, but there isn’t one with sufficient complexity, so here’s a custom job. There are two problems with today’s legal outcome for Hushpuppy. One is practical, and one is a matter of principle.
On the practical side, he’s gonna get a fine. Or he’s gonna raise money off of it, which he is already artfully doing, playing into the narrative of victimization which is the bread and butter of fascist movements everywhere. It’s not really about him, it’s about the money and ideas behind him for which he is, however corruptly, an avatar. He’s not gone, he is branded ‘unlawful’ by people and a system that his supporters already plan on dismantling. So don’t break out your champagne just yet.
As a matter of principle, it’s another Democratic ‘gotcha’ move, which is the basis of nearly all neoliberal law and policy (please see domestic and foreign policy for the last hundred years). It’s a loophole to thread through in a given sociopolitical moment to achieve a short-term goal, in this case getting Biden elected, but little more than that. If it was about holding power accountable under ‘the law’ then Biden would be on trial for abetting genocide. Democrats aren’t clean, just cunning.
It’s a real catch 22, isn’t it? The purple MAGA crowd would have me say ‘yes, of course, this evil person should be held accountable for his crimes and punished for the good of the system,’ even though those ‘crimes’ are largely petty business offenses that are commonplace under neoliberalism and many of the genuinely harmful, heinous acts that occurred aren’t even actionable under the law.
The anarchists and abolitionists would have me say that prison is simply torture (it is) for the poor and the undesirable (it is) and that this is a shit show to legitimize a system that will only be used to further the goals and whims of oligarchic control tomorrow, once the dust from this anomaly settles (and that’s exactly what’s going on and what will happen).
So we’re back to, essentially, some within the system used the only tool at their disposal to carve out a kind of rough justice from a bad situation. And that’s the problem. The system cannot consistently create or ensure justice because it primarily exists to preserve its unjust hierarchical order. Trump’s not in trouble because he broke the law. He’s in trouble because he broke ranks with the powerful and made them and their system look bad. If he is ever punished, that will be the reason why.
Under a hierarchical system of ‘gotchas,’ what we think of as the ‘law,’ you have four (above board) options for imposing consequences: fines, imprisonment / torture, exile, or death. If this were some sort of horizontal anarchist utopia we could assign him a minder to make him behave and simply decide that he wouldn’t be involved in politics anymore for everyone’s best interests.
We don’t live under such a system, unfortunately. I don’t have a good answer to it, in the here and now, other than to say that he should have been handled sooner, and with a resolution that wouldn’t have left everyone with a choice between rallying around an unjust legal and political system or fighting his supporters in six months when he retakes power.
What it comes down to is that people, all people, seem to be more concerned with rhetoric and idealizations rather than with principles and systems that function in reality. That’s not where justice lives. That’s not where safety lives. That’s not where dignity and tranquility live. It’s way bigger than one bad guy or one election, as it always is. And we do need a good, solid answer to the question of how to control malevolent social actors that isn’t just group talk therapy.