In the GOP’s New Surveillance State, Everyone’s a Snitch
From abortion to schools, conservatives are depending on everyday citizens to spy on one another.
https://www.motherjones.com/politics/20 ... -a-snitch/
[snip]
That early morning knock on the door, the ominous legal papers, and the knowledge that someone out there is looking for a chance to sue you are the features of a dystopian new trend:
The rise of vigilante enforcement to reverse progress and entrench physical and psychological control over women, LGBTQ people, and people of color. It’s not just pregnant people whose bodily autonomy has succumbed to the mob in Texas. Laws like SB8 now reach into school bathrooms, classrooms, and sports, targeting both the rights of transgender and LGBTQ people and what is taught. Following Texas’ lead, two states passed SB-8 style abortion bans; around a dozen more have considered doing so. Several more states have brought SB8’s vigilante enforcement mechanism into schools: 192 bills across 40 states have sought to limit classroom instruction on gender, sexual orientation, race, and American history since January 2021, according to running data gathered by PEN America. Forty-six of those would be enforced by private citizens if passed. There is also no telling how this playbook might be expanded. Under the same legal logic, laws could be passed to empower citizens to harass voters at the polls, or to incentivize neighbors to report undocumented immigrants.
These laws do not stop at targeting society’s most vulnerable. They also attack the legal and social norms that underpin our system of government. They turn citizens into spies in a surveillance scheme more reminiscent of a totalitarian state, and shred the vital principle that the laws are applied equally to all people.
These laws “allow you to stalk, surveil, harass, impede upon individual’s constitutional rights,” says Michele Goodwin, a specialist in constitutional law at the University of California, Irvine School of Law. “And that is why this is so dangerous to democracy.”
[snip]
Sutton’s scholarship on the intersection of abortion and democracy is informed by her experience growing up under a military dictatorship in Argentina. After the violent regime ended in 1983, the country transitioned to a democratic government, yet it still took decades of sustained activism to legalize abortion in 2021. “To have abortion rights, you need all the mechanisms of democracy to be working properly,” Sutton says. If abortion rights herald the success of a new democracy like Argentina’s, then they’re also the canary in the coal mine for democratic backsliding: A blinking alert that other rights for marginalized people will fall next.
[snip]
As these Republican-backed bills using private enforcement to block abortion and marginalize minorities proliferated, constitutional scholar Jon Michaels took note. A professor at the UCLA School of Law, he began to see this trend as part of Trumpism’s growing authoritarian strain. Last September, he and David Noll of Rutgers Law School predicted in a New York Times op-ed that SB8 was just the “tip of the iceberg” in the conservative movement’s war on vulnerable groups.
In January, after the Supreme Court virtually invited more states to mimic SB8’s civil enforcement mechanism when it declined to block the law, Michaels warned, this time in the Washington Post, that such laws were both a symptom and accelerant of “democratic decline.” Some colleagues told him to calm down, but the more he examined SB8 and its progeny, the more alarmed he became.
[snip]
The fact that lawmakers have repeatedly chosen to include this mechanism anyway points to vigilante laws’ more sweeping purpose. In a forthcoming Cornell Law Review article, Michaels and Noll argue that by deputizing the faithful of the conservative movement to attack the communities they dislike, these laws not only control and marginalize, but also realign power in American society. Rather than protect minority rights, the courts become a tool of mob rule, the sheltering protection of the law shrinks, and the social fabric of democracy gives way to surveillance and fear. These laws “draw upon and reinforce anti-democratic and authoritarian tendencies that are central to Trumpist politics,” they write.
[snip]
The comparison to today’s growing body of vigilante enforcement laws is eerie. Like the Fugitive Slave Law, SB8 ignores state borders. Anyone anywhere can sue those who aid an illegal abortion in Texas. Proceedings in court are stacked in favor of the vigilante: whoever they accuse must prove that they didn’t break the law, rather than the accuser proving that the law was violated, as is typical in the US legal system. Like the Fugitive Slave Law, SB8 uses a bounty system to incentivize enforcement: vigilantes are promised a minimum of $10,000 in damages for each abortion they sue over, as well as attorney’s fees paid by the accused. In Missouri, a proposed law would take this analogy even further by bringing liability to anyone who helped a Missouri resident obtain an abortion outside of Missouri. As in 1850, the carrot is money and the stick is fear. For more than a century after the Fugitive Slave Law, vigilantes enforced racial hierarchy through violence while lawmakers looked the other way. With rules like SB8, vigilantes are now again officially welcomed in the letter of the law.
[snip][end]
Michel Foucault often wrote about the Panopticon in his writings, as I've discussed. Essentially, the Panopticon is the Big Brother model, where a centralized state surveils everybody from a giant watchtower (in the original account, it was in a prison.)
But he claimed under the postmodern condition, increasingly the state will maximize its efficiency, getting citizens to spy on each other and themselves. No Panopticon needed when you deputize vigilantes to do surveillance for you. (This is also basically the theme of Philip K. Dick's Scanner Darkly, too, where Bob Arctor is actually spying on ... himself ... though he doesn't realize it.)
I like how this article contextualizes this growing move by the GOP toward vigilante surveillance within the basic authoritarian tendencies of Trumpism....
There are sometimes ordinances about cutting down trees illegally, but they do not punish you for stepping on & crushing an acorn. 
And so is “I don’t permit a woman to have authority over a man.” 
