In D.C., An Authoritarian Dress Rehearsal

Declarations of emergencies, demands for ​“law and order” and deploying concentrated state violence against poor and marginalized communities have long been primary tactics of authoritarianism in advanced capitalist societies. Under President Richard Nixon, as abolitionist scholar Ruth Wilson Gilmore observes, the ​“ascendant Right used the fact of [urban] disorder to persuade voters that [Democratic] incumbents failed to govern.” In the United Kingdom in the 1970s, as cultural theorist Stuart Hall explains, Margaret Thatcher’s neoliberalism rose on the back of racist narratives that scapegoated migrants of color and young Black men for widespread social complaints.

In both cases, hard turns to the Right relied on moral panics: episodes when real public anxieties are projected onto events and groups singled out as threats to social stability. In this way, moral panics provide what Hall calls a ​“vocabulary of discontent” that fosters popular legitimacy, and a mass base, for increasing authoritarianism.

While Trump’s declaration of an emergency in D.C. resembles previous moral panics around urban crime — including his own notorious intervention into the Central Park jogger case, when he clamored for innocent Black and Latino youths to receive the death penalty — his current campaign against disorder in major cities is more transparently manufactured than its precursors.