There’s a big difference between “having rights” and “having power”. As I’ve mentioned before, liberals are people who believe in having rights, but not power; they are comfortable with a ruling class (be they royalty, capitalists, or a ruling party) having all the power as long as the people have a laundry list of rights. The problem is that if you have rights, but not power, you are dependent on the people who have power to honor your rights. If they don’t honor your rights, then you are stuck — you’ve got to either find the power to make those people honor your rights, or they won’t be honored.
The American system is specifically designed to give you rights that imply power while granting real power to a select few. For example, we have the right to vote, but the ruling class typically pre-selects the candidates that we may choose from (we can debate whether Trump was an exception); both HRC and Biden were great examples of that, having been chosen before the public portion of the primary process began. We have the right to free speech, which can certainly be powerful, but the ruling class has the resources available to make sure their speech is heard (and that ours is buried); the Facebook purge is a great example of that. We have the right to bear arms, but the ruling class has the power to convince the people to point those guns at each other rather than at their shared enemy; for example, the armed people who show up at protests to intimidate BLM, antifa, or Democrats.
We have that most sacred right of all — the right to buy stuff — but if we don’t have the money required, we don’t have the power to actually get that stuff. I’m being sarcastic, but for many Americans, the right to buy is the most important right there is. That includes our right to healthcare, which does not come with the power to get healthcare. Commonly, politicians won’t even promise us a right to healthcare — they’ll only promise “access” which is code for letting capital do whatever it wants in the realm of healthcare. Capital will always provide us with “access” to everything under the sun, but always prices things in a way that advantages the wealthy (sometimes pricing people out of life itself).
In short, rights are meaningless without power. Unfortunately, liberals don’t seem to understand that. Republicans do, though. They understand that the right to vote means nothing if they can find a way to use their power to invalidate the election, for example, or stop people from actually voting. They understand that the laws regarding where you can have a gun mean nothing if the police aren’t going to stop your militia from storming the state house. They understand that their enemies will not get their way if they have the power to stop them and can organize themselves to use that power.
There are different types of power.
Electoral power (voting) is supposed to be the power to participate in determining what society as a whole does. We’ve watered that down to the power to select who represents us in government, and then we’ve watered that down to choosing between the offerings of two parties that are both controlled by the rich. Liberals support this ineffectual version of electoral power because they don’t want to have power. Conservatives support this ineffectual version of electoral power because they are terrified of “the mob” — they think that if we had real democracy, people would be too free and would make immoral, destructive decisions. Honestly, I think that Democrats might have this same fear, or at least a belief that real democracy isn’t possible.
Economic power exists, but Americans falsely believe that it is inherently democratic. More than half of Americans believe if we only had a “truly free market” then that would be the maximum freedom possible. However, the American experiment has proven over and over again that economic freedom just means freedom of the rich to rule us all. That same economic freedom creates consumerism through the constant barrage of propaganda from capitalists. Consumerism is the idea that consuming is a moral good — a lie that makes the consumer into a servant of capital and an enemy to their self. In reality, economic power is like any other kind of power — without effort, it will not be granted to people democratically.
Violence is the ultimate type of power. All other types of power reduce down to violence upon closer inspection. If you use your electoral power to make a law, the enforcement of that law will ultimately come down to violence. The law itself is meaningless without the implied violence that accompanies it. Similarly, economic power is ultimately enforced with violence; for example, if you own a piece of property, your control of that property comes down to violence (usually outsourced to the state). This is a natural consequence of physical reality. If you support economic power or electoral power, but claim to be nonviolent, then you have an insincere relationship with reality.
Related: Enforcing the Law is Inherently Violent by Conor Friedersdorf — A Yale law professor suggests that oft-ignored truth should inform debates about what statutes and regulations to codify.
If we are to support democracy in a way that is sincere and effective, then we must support democratizing all types of power, including electoral and economic power — but especially violence. If democratic control of violence has been undermined, then all other types of power have been undermined.
Is your local law enforcement agency democratically controlled? Is it publicly accountable, subject to the rule of law, respectful of human dignity, and does it intrude into citizens’ lives only under certain limited circumstances? It’s very unlikely. In most places, law enforcement is protected by statutes that prevent even elected officials from having meaningful control. Even in places that have some kind of community oversight, that oversight lacks any kind of enforcement authority, making it an obfuscation of the truth — that the police can still do whatever they want. At the national level, law enforcement has become a gestapo that runs concentration camps, spies on our own citizens, and performs political kidnappings.
Related: Democratic policing: what it says about America today by Beth Daley
This is why policing is such an important issue in America today. As long as violence is not democratically controlled, we do not have any rights from a practical perspective. Police reform is a good first step, but ultimately the only way to truly democratize violence is to take the left’s interpretation of the Second Amendment seriously. This would be identical to the interpretation conservatives claim to have as well — specifically, that the American people, generally, should have the right to be armed and avail themselves of that right responsibly.
In contrast, refusing to take power — and believing that having a list of rights is sufficient — results in the people having neither power nor rights.