The best definition of conservativism is: The belief that there must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect (Wilhoit’s Law). You might expect that a conservative society would have two sets of laws — one set for the ingroups and a different set for the outgroups — but this would make the injustice of conservativism plain to be seen. While extremely conservative societies will generally have some targeted laws (e.g., men in Iran are never stoned to death for their clothing choices), the more common situation is for the law to be written in a way that is objectively neutral, but then conservatives weaponize the law using selective enforcement.
Selective enforcement is when the law applies differently to ingroups versus outgroups based on how authorities choose to enforce it. For example, in Columbia, MO, there is an open container law, but the enforcement of that law varies in ways that are intentionally hard to confirm. What is clear is that on the day of a big MU sporting event, people who are clearly older sports fans who have come to Columbia for that event are much less likely to experience the enforcement of the open container law. This makes sense from a cynical point of view: Columbia needs the money that those sports fans bring to town and Columbia (collectively) doesn’t want to alienate them by charging them with a crime; Columbia doesn’t even want to interrupt their fun by confiscating their open containers of liquor.
In a neo-liberal/capitalist society, it is always inconvenient/disadvantageous to use the law to control the behavior of relatively wealthy/powerful people, and it is always relatively convenient/advantageous to control the behavior of relatively marginalized people. The result is that neo-liberal societies tend to selectively enforce the law, so there ends up being one set of rules for the rich and another set for the poor — or even multiple layers of enforcement based on wealth. This is the most important mechanism by which neo-liberal conservativism is enforced.
Obviously, Republican conservatives (i.e., fascists) hate neo-liberal conservativism because they themselves sometimes end up having the law enforced against them. They do not, however, want anything resembling justice. Rather, they want a different form of conservativism where white, nominally Christian, straight men are the ingroup (which would include better access to wealth), and everyone else either serves that ingroup or is removed from society through execution, deportation, or imprisonment. Unlike neoliberal conservatives, racial/religious conservatives favor explicitly targeting outgroups with laws rather than favoring selective enforcement — but they will still use selective enforcement when they can.
Selective enforcement is very interesting in terms of firearm law. The reason racial/religious conservatives (fascists) are so strident about the Second Amendment is because they believe it will be selectively enforced against them in the context of a racial/religious war that pits the government-controlled forces of neoliberalism against the less organized and more poorly equipped forces of racial/religious conservativism (fascism). Thanks to Ronald Reagan, we know that when these same conservatives are faced with their enemies bearing effective small arms, they will immediately reverse their position on the Second Amendment and demand limitations.
Reagan demonstrated this twice. The first time was when Reagan was the governor of California. The Black Panthers made a legal show of force and Reagan (and the rest of the government) responded by limiting the Second Amendment rights of all Californians with the Mulford Act in 1967. Even the National Rifle Association supported this law because the NRA is a tool of racial/religious conservativism (fascism) first, and a proponent of civil rights second. The second time was after an assassin tried to kill Reagan based on the belief that killing any president (regardless of political party) would impress Jodie Foster; the result was the Brady Handgun Violence Prevention Act which limits the Second Amendment rights of all Americans. (This law was passed after Reagan was out of office, but explicitly supported by him.)
Selective enforcement is certainly a case of poor enforcement of the law (and is mostly perpetrated by the police), but that really isn’t the biggest problem with it.
You might expect me to say that the ingroup/outgroup distinction is the problem, but it really isn’t if we keep in mind Popper’s Paradox of Tolerance which says that, “in order to maintain a tolerant society, the society must be intolerant of intolerance.” In other words, there is exactly one valid outgroup, and it is intolerant people — i.e., fascists. It is called a paradox for a reason. Frank Wilhoit (of Wilhoit’s Law) specifically pointed out that the only remedy for conservativism is anti-conservativism. “The law cannot protect anyone unless it binds everyone; and it cannot bind anyone unless it protects everyone” except that conservatives must be bound from doing fascism or changing the law to support their conservative principles (fascism being the actions that follow from believing in conservativism).
We should, however, minimize selective enforcement and the legal basis of anti-fascism should focus on making fascist actions illegal rather than creating laws that we hope will not be enforced against non-fascists. This is an important point, so let me put it another way: If we are making a law meant to target fascists, we must always ask, “If this law were being enforced by agents of fascism, could it be used to further the goals of fascism?”
Historically, in the US, selective enforcement has been used to uphold white supremacy, specifically. Even now, when neo-liberalism has supplanted racial/religious conservativism (fascism) as the dominant ideology, street-level law enforcement (the cops) still tend to enforce the law in a way that disadvantages people of color, and neoliberals are lukewarm regarding racism due to their cynical belief that everyone in America deserves their economic situation. We — as a society — could have chosen to selectively enforce the law against fascists and we could, as a result, be nearly fascist-free at this point. America has chosen — over and over again — to allow fascism to continue while at the same time viciously attacking the left and people of color — mostly with selective enforcement.
To end fascism (and ensure that selective enforcement is not being used to further the goals of fascism), fascists must be removed from positions of power at every level. As much as neoliberals claim to use data-driven policy making, they still refuse to do anything about the fact that the data shows that police officers are very likely to be white supremacists and domestic abusers (i.e., misogynists). While this might make a horrifying kind of sense in a conservative community (since it reflects the will of the far-right people that live in it), it doesn’t make sense at all in most American cities where the bulk of police officers work.
Municipal governments should be systematically removing police officers who are white supremacists or domestic abusers. Moreover, they should be removing officers who believe that police officers are an ingroup that should be protected and not bound and that normal citizens are an outgroup that should be bound and not protected. Optimally, we would have national policies to prevent fascists from becoming police in the first place, or from becoming a cop in a different community after they lose their job (much like a pedophile priest moving to a different Catholic church after he gets caught).
If the police are to be a legitimate institution in America and if we are to believe the Democratic Party’s position that police are a necessity that requires even more money (despite already receiving an obscene portion of municipal budgets), then the fascists working as police must be removed. No one who has organized as a fascist or who has been confirmed to have committed domestic abuse should be allowed to work as a police officer. It is our belief that the Democratic Party — while being substantially better than the Republicans — still holds onto a kernel of white supremacy and that it does not want fascism to be extinguished; i.e., the Democratic Party’s elites represent the softer side of American white supremacy. You can prove us wrong by getting rid of all those racist cops.