Nonilex
#America Is Watching the Rise of a #DualState
For most people, the #courts will continue to operate as usual—until they don’t.
On Sept 20, 1938, a man who had witnessed the rise of #fascism packed his suitcases & fled his home in Berlin. He arranged to have smuggled separately a manuscript that he had drafted in secret over the previous 2 yrs. This book was a remarkable one. It clarified what was unfolding in Berlin…, the catalyst for its author’s flight.
Darnell Clayton :verified:
@Nonilex Thanks for the lengthy summary, as it was quite informative! I will look at the article from @TheAtlantic later on, but the dual state seems to be the most accurate interpretation for what is going on.
I wonder if something similar has happened to Hungary 🇭🇺 & even Turkey 🇹🇷‽
Nonilex
…Today, we are witnessing the birth of a new #DualState. The #US has long had a normative state. That system was always imperfect. Our #criminal #justice system, for example, sweeps in far too many people, for far too little security in exchange. Even so, it is recognizably part of the normative state.
What the #Trump administration & its allies are trying to build now, however, is not.
#law #PerogativePower #ForTheeButNotForMe #tyranny #Dictatorship #autocracy #MafiaState #NaziState
Nonilex
In July 1936, for example, Fraenkel won a case for employees of an association taken over by the #Nazis. A few days later, he learned that the #Gestapo had seized the money owed to his clients & deposited it in the government’s coffers. Over time, the prerogative state would distort & slowly unravel the #legal procedures of the normative state, leaving a smaller & smaller domain for ordinary #law.
Nonilex
…it was a mistake to think that even the #Nazis would entirely dispense w/normal #laws.…They had a complex, broadly #capitalist economy to maintain. “A nation of 80M people,”…needs stable rules. The trick was to find a way to keep the #law going for #Christian Germans who supported or…tolerated the Nazis, while ruthlessly executing the #führer’s directives against the state’s enemies, real & perceived. #Capitalism could jog nicely alongside the brutal suppression of #democracy, & even #genocide.
Nonilex
In this prerogative state, #judges & other legal actors deferred to the #racist hierarchies & ruthless expediencies of the #Nazi regime.
The key here is that this prerogative state does not immediately & completely overrun the normative state. Rather, Fraenkel argued, #dictatorships create a #lawless zone that runs alongside the normative state. The 2 states cohabit uneasily & unstably. On any given day, people or cases could be jerked out of the normative state & into the prerogative one.
Nonilex
Rather than completely eliminating the normative state, the #Nazi regime slowly created a parallel zone in which “unlimited arbitrariness & #violence unchecked by any legal guarantees” reigned freely. In this domain, which Fraenkel called the “prerogative state,” ordinary #law didn’t apply. (A #PrerogativePower is one that allows a person such as a monarch to act without regard to the laws on the books; theorists from #JohnLocke onward have offered various formulations of the idea.)
Nonilex
Fraenkel offered a simple, yet powerful, picture of how the #constitutional & #legal foundations of the Weimar Republic eroded, & were replaced by #strongman-style rule in which the commands of the #Nazi Party & its leader became paramount. His perspective was not grounded in abstract political theory; it grew instead from his experience as a Jewish lawyer in Nazi Berlin representing #dissidents & other disfavored clients.
Nonilex
Academic in tone, The #DualState sketches a template of emerging #tyranny distilled from bloody & horrifying experience.
As Fraenkel explained it, a #lawless #dictatorship does not arise simply by snuffing out the ordinary #legal system of rules, procedures, & precedents. To the contrary, that system—which he called the “normative state”—remains in place while dictatorial power spreads across society. What happens, Fraenkel explained, is insidious.
Nonilex
The man…was a Jewish labor lawyer named Ernst Fraenkel.He completed his manuscript…at UC, publishing it as The #DualState, w/the modest subtitle A Contribution to the Theory of #Dictatorship.The book explains how the #Nazi regime managed to keep on track a #capitalist economy governed by stable #laws—& maintain a day-to-day normalcy for many of its citizens—while at the same time establishing a domain of #lawlessness & state #violence in order to realize its terrible vision of #EthnoNationalism.
GNU social JP is a social network, courtesy of GNU social JP管理人. It runs on GNU social, version 2.0.2-dev, available under the GNU Affero General Public License.
All GNU social JP content and data are available under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license.