ACAB and AFTER

Mucho ink has been spilled – or whatever we want to call the spillage of pixels across a screen – about legitimation. Generally under the heading of the State’s legitimacy. The State is a great thing to talk about because it is one of those hulking abstract categories that make intellectual history such a fun game. But like many fun games, one has to ask if it is being played wrong. Is this a chess game or monopoly or hide and seek?

Still, legitimacy is one of the great legacies of the era of restauration. In Calasso’s The Ruins of Kasch, Tallyrand is the odd hero, the architect and demon of legitimacy. Legitimacy is sorta the tooth implant after the old “organic” ruling class, the family derived royal and aristocratic families, no longer obtain automatic respect for being born.

And so the term is generally used for the rulers. But how about the rulers’ instruments?

For the last decade, at least, we have experienced throughout the world a crisis in the legitimacy of the police.

The reference point is usually the American experience, starting with the riots that spread in the wake of the police murder of George Floyd. But it is not merely an American story.

The story in France goes way back in time, but I think the operant reference point is really the now forgotten scandal of Macron’s body guard and weird buddy, Alexandre Benalla, who beat up some protestors in 2018. Benalla was a member of the ambiguous new set of policing instruments that were not fully public functionaries nor private cops. The borderline position was symptomatic of that symptomatic president, Emmanuel Macron, whose reign is coming to an inglorious end after years of using inglorious means to attack France’s public sector. He’s succeeded in indebting the country to an unprecedented extent periodically bribing a restive population, as after the Gilets Jaunes, while at the same time roasting wienies at the cannibal’s feast of the very richest. The fly in the ointment is that the police are, technically, public functionaries, and thus have to be treated like the rest – underpaid, under-equipped, and in general treated with contempt. But at the same time, they are the only functionaries that the government ever praises. It has been coplove for the last ten years, officially.

This has made the police both the authors of oppression, the tampon between the government and the people, and the target of a rage that really is oriented towards the diffuse governing elite. As in so many countries, the upper 20 percent of the wealth percentile has done well while the rest have stagnated. The legitimacy of the police – something that is assumed to be one with the legitimacy of the State – has been put into question among the populace in a way that no government official has even noticed. Yesterday evening, walking in the streets of the pretty rich quarter we live in, the Marais, I saw that the battle initiated with a barrage of tear gas by the cops before the demonstration even started was going to go badly for those cops. This morning the papers and social media are full of pictures of what happens when a state tries to rule with an iron fist without having the resources to really suppress its own people. The message has still not been received in that pinbrain that is the French government. But I think the upper 20 percent are waking up and realizing: France is fucked. Something any lyceen from Seine Saint-Denis could have told them years ago.

Now, onto unfucking the country. I’m no doomscroller. I think the resources are there, have long been there, to make France, as well as any country in France’s league, a happy and more just place.