It's the conservatism, stupid

#NotAllBlueWalls. Just saying. Photo by Bonnie Hull.

Monsignor Ross Douthat, Apostolic Nuncio to 42nd Street, writes:

Last December, my colleague David Brooks noted that police unions are resisting change on every issue where police reform might be contemplated, from body cameras for officers to reversing the militarization of local law enforcement.

Running the gamut from paragraph 7 to paragraph 8, as it were. Brooks wasn't "noting" anything. Everybody knows that Police Benevolent Associations and Fraternal Orders of Police are out-of-control, retrogressive monsters. What Brooks was actually doing in that column, of course, was taking advantage of our horror at the New York PBA treatment of Mayor De Blasio at the time of the Eric Garner and Akai Gurley killings to make the case that public sector unions such as the American Federation of Teachers and the American Federation of State, County & Municipal Employees are out-of-control, retrogressive monsters—by asserting that the police associations were a typical case (which they aren't) of the public sector union in general:

unions, and especially public-sector unions, have done a lot over the past decades to rigidify workplaces, especially government. Teachers’ unions have become the single biggest impediment to school reform. Police unions have become an impediment to police reform.

Sneaking, as Brooks always does, slipping the contentious thing he wants you to absorb in with the bland fact you already know; the column is strictly about the police, but only after an opening where he plants the thought of the teachers in your mind, leaving us with the unexpressed idea that allowing teachers to apply for tenure after only three years' service is exactly the same as allowing cops to get away with the murder of an unarmed black man.

That was too subtle for the Monsignor, who comes back in the wake of the murder of Freddie Gray to rewrite Brooks's old column in a more explicit fashion, while pretending the idea is his own (linking to Brooks's piece, under the fairly safe assumption that nobody will click the link, is a classically Brooksian maneuver to give the credit without acknowledging what the credit is for; Ross may be giving David religious instruction, but is learning some of that sharp practice in return):

the rise of public sector unions represents a decadent phase in the history of the welfare state, a case study in the warping influence of self-dealing and interest-group politics.

But as we’ve been reminded by the agony of Baltimore, this argument also applies to a unionized public work force that conservatives are often loath to criticize: the police.

On the other hand, he's also writing for a different audience: Brooks addressing the fattened ex-liberal looking for reasons to hate teachers, Douthat addressing the movement conservative looking for ways to sound less like an illiterate yahoo.

Shorter Douthat:

We have to admit, painful as it is, that those cops are being pretty bad sometimes, or at least twice, even though they are God's direct representatives of social order. How can that be? Unions, that's how! Their corruption extends even unto those sacred precincts!

I argued in response to the December Brooks column (link above) that PBAs and FOPs are not labor unions in the same sense as AFT or AFSCME or SEIU—that they're not part of the labor movement, but special-interest groups in the true sense of the term, with purely parochial agendas (mainly the totally legitimate agenda of serving as cops' bargaining agents in contract negotiations).

I mentioned then that it looked as if police unions that do belong to the labor movement in that sense don't represent murderous cops like the killers of Michael Brown and Eric Garner and Akai Gurley and Walter Scott and Freddie Gray, and I've found some corroboration since from the only police union affiliated with the AFL-CIO, the International Union of Police Associations:

“What we are doing is staying very, very close to all the reports that are coming in and gleaning through them,” IUPA spokesman Rich Roberts told BuzzFeed News. “Trying to bypass all the emotion that’s being generated.”

Roberts noted that none of the officers they represent have been directly involved in any of the recent high profile cases.

It occurs to me now, though, that this whole thing is a rhetorical trap to make the discussion about something irrelevant. That is, Brooks's December piece was actually about unions—the PBAs' shocking public disrespect for the mayor of New York—but Douthat's is about "the agony of Baltimore", in which the unions themselves don't have a primary role: as with the original crimes in Ferguson and Staten Island and so on, it's about the individual cops who killed Freddie, and the police force from which they came, and its relations with the community.

And what's wrong with the cops isn't that they belong to a union, which every employee has a right to do, but that they have a bad, hostile and disdainful, often racist attitude toward the community they serve, as if they were a counterinsurgency force building strategic hamlets in the hood and running them with the tactic of stomping out signs of rebelliousness. It's that they are, as an institution, conservative (which is why the union is too).

Douthat openly says as much, though it's not obvious he knows he's saying it:

Police unions do have critics on the right. But thanks to a mix of cultural affinity, conservative support for law-and-order policies and police union support for Republican politicians, there hasn’t been a strong right-of-center constituency for taking on their privileges. Instead, many Republican governors have deliberately exempted police unions from collective-bargaining reforms — and one who didn’t, John Kasich of Ohio, saw those reforms defeated.

In an irony typical of politics, then, the right’s intellectual critique of public-sector unions is illustrated by the ease with which police unions have bridled and ridden actual right-wing politicians. Which in turn has left those unions in a politically enviable position, insulated from any real pressure to reform.

The right's pseudo-intellectual critique of public sector unions is illustrated only by the police (and to a lesser extent the staffs of correctional institutions), because they're the only ones eagerly supported by conservative politicians and placated by terrorized liberal ones afraid of being stigmatized as pro-criminal. Teachers, health inspectors, tax assessors, even firefighters don't get this kind of backing from anybody, and the teachers in particular are under constant assault from conservatives and hedge-fund liberals piling on.

It's the conservatism that makes the police forces abusive, and nothing less. And the Monsignor sort of knows it, at some level, which is why he's throwing up this blind out of the shards of the old Brooks piece to hide it.