A U.S. Senator Thrown to the Ground: Security on Steroids

A U.S. Senator being thrown to the ground and handcuffed rather than escorted out of the building because he asked a difficult question for the speaker holding a news conference illustrates not only the bias towards using excessive force that having police power lavishes on human nature, but also a proclivity toward excessiveness without any internal mental check that is entwined in virtually any human brain. That the primary arresting FBI employee was the only person in the room wearing a bulletproof vest inside the federal (government) building may also reveal his penchant for exaggeration—or, going too far without realizing it. The prescription in terms of public policy is a strengthening of checks on law-enforcement employees even, if possible, by embedding other municipal (or federal) employees whose sole function it is to evaluate police conduct either by listening in or observing even in real time. A U.S. senator being thrown to the ground and handcuffed in a federal building in California rather than escorted out of the building evinces a power-trip more base, violent, and primitive than the typical power-trips that occur on the “floor” of the U.S. Senate. It must have been a shock to U.S. Sen. Alex Padilla on June 12, 2025 to be physically shoved to the ground, especially if the rationale for his removal from the press conference was itself an exaggeration.

U.S. Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem was holding a news conference in early June, 2025 as protests against the arrests of illegal aliens were going on outside in downtown Los Angeles in California, when U.S. Sen. Alex Padilla said, “I have questions for the secretary!”[1] Even if the senator was trying to visibly score political points with his constituents by interjecting, which, by the way, would be in the realm of the sort of power-trip that is quite common in politics, the reaction of the Trump Administration may point to a trumped up political reason for the violent way in which the senator was manhandled by Secret Service employees and then the FBI agent. The White House accused Padilla of “disrespectful political theatre” and Noem herself accused the senator of having ‘made a scene.”[2] If these opinions were behind the manhandling of the senator, then “criminalizing politics” steeped to a new low: instant violence against the elected representative for being political. The violence itself is much worse than merely charging someone for being political in a way that offends someone else in power.

For its part, the Secret Service lied that Padilla had “lunged at Secretary Noem,” and furthermore that the agents there “thought he was an attacker.”[3] Reviewing the video of the event shows the willingness of people with guns to lie to protect themselves, which I contend is reason enough for additional checks on law-enforcement employees, whether federal or state. That the senator, the most senior Democrat on the U.S. Senate’s Border Security and Immigration subcommittee, announced repeatedly that he was a U.S. Senator belies the credibility of the claim that he was thought to be an attacker.

California’s Gavin Newsom, head of state, chief executive, and commander-in-chief of California’s National Guard (i.e., army) wrote online a poignant point worthy of our consideration: “If they can handcuff a US Senator for asking a question, imagine what they will do to you.”[4] Unfortunately, it doesn’t take much imagining to consider the actuality of employees of a government in law enforcement presuming that the law is theirs to make in real time—casting a blind eye intentionally on the actual law—and lying and threatening even victims of a crime with arrest should they object. Enforcing existing law does not give a government employee the discretion with which to ignore the law and even come up with one’s own law and yet how easy it is simply to ignore this vital point in the carrying out of one’s “duties.” I have witnessed this mentality enough to know that it is too common to ignore, and thus I contend that more checks are needed on law-enforcement employees on the non-supervisory level locally, at the member-state level, and at the federal level in the United States. The problem is worse “on the ground” than has reached the public air-waves.

Even if Abigail Jackson, a White House spokesperson, was right in opining, “Padilla embarrassed himself and his constituents with this immature, theatre-kid stunt” because “he wanted attention,”[5] treating the senator as if he were an attacker rather than simply escorting him out of the building—or even letting him remain and treat the altercation between him and Noem as political—reveals an emotionally jejune, hyper-“trigger-happy” mentality among the Secret Service and FBI employees in that federal building. Such a mentality among government employees who have been given the legal right to use force is, I submit, dangerous, and thus should be exculpated from the ranks of law enforcement in any jurisdiction, lest the trend eventuate in people being surrounded by security simply for being angry and even raising one’s voice at a political event. Treating such as a threat is itself passive-aggressive, which as we have seen can turn outright aggressive given the human, all too human proclivity to go to far. 

Put more plainly, assuming that lies used to cover-up the underlying mental ailment, Secret Service employees who perceived the senator lunge at Noem and thought Padilla was an attacker should be put on mental-health leave so they can relax and untighten, and be subjected to psychological tests on latent aggression, for their sort of power-trip is much more dangerous than that which goes on in the U.S. Senate—and the White House, for this incident is but a glimpse toward a realization that not enough had been done even in multiple jurisdictions to root out the sordid pathology from the field of law-enforcement. De facto absolute power “on the ground” loves a vacuum of accountability, and is even willing to lie to keep it at bay.

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1. Ali Abbas Ahmadi and Kwasi G. Asiedu, “US Senator Dragged Out of LA News Conference and Handcuffed,” BBC.com, June 13, 2025.
2. Ibid.
3. Ibid.
4. Ibid.
5. Ibid.

Democracy Breached: Georgia Unfit for E.U. Statehood

On December 14, 2024, Mikheil Kavelashvili became the president of Georgia, further cementing the Georgian Dream Party’s grip on power at the expense of the sovereign state’s accession as a semi-sovereign E.U. state. From the standpoint of representative democracy, what a contrast with the U.S. state of Georgia. The Georgian Dream Party implicitly conflated the qualitative difference between the U.S. and state-scale polities by misappropriating the term, Electoral College, which elects the U.S. President. There is a reason why that College does not apply at the state level, yet in its haste to consolidate power in 2017, the Georgian Dream Party replaced direct presidential elections with an Electoral College, which the party could control. Sure enough, Kavelashvili was the only candidate in 2024, and he got the votes of 224 of the 225 electors who were present for the vote.

Of “the 300-seat electoral college that replaced direct presidential elections in 2017,” the electors were “made up of MPs [i.e., members of the parliament] and representatives of local government.”[1] In contrast, the Electoral College of the U.S. consists not of the existing governments, but, rather, of people appointed by political parties, which in turn are given slots based on the popular votes for U.S. president in the member states. The drafters of the U.S. Constitution believed that the electors should not represent the legislatures, but should be selected only for the task of electing the federal president. That the inordinate dominance of political parties in filling the elector-slots has eliminated the electors’ independence doomed the efficacy of the U.S.’s Electoral College, which was supposed to be a check not only on the government officials, but also the people. The reason for the latter check is that the U.S., as an empire-scale union of states, is too big for much of the American people to know the candidates—the territories are too large and the population too large as contrasted with the territories and populations of states.

The Electoral College of the sovereign state of Georgia in Eurasia was created without any link to popular sovereignty (i.e., an election by the people), and without being independent of the existing government. Rather, the Electoral College is the government, just for a special purpose. Nor was the population or territory of Georgia large enough that electors would be necessary because so few of the electorate had the proximity to know of the candidates enough to be able to cast votes using good, informed judgment. In short, the federal justifications for the U.S.’s Electoral College were missing.

Therefore, in its haste to gain control over the presidency, the Georgian Dream Party misappropriated an element of American political theory, ignoring both the link to popular election and the qualitative rather than just quantitative difference between a state and a union of states. Of course, with raw power in politics/government, might can be declared to be right, but with a knowledge of comparative politics, the sheer might of the Georgian Dream Party can be castrated ideationally. With the democratic legitimacy of Georgia’s government in tatters, the E.U. would act wisely in saying no on Georgia’s accession unless or until drastic changes are made to Georgia’s basic law. In the U.S., it is a requirement that every state be a republic, which means that representative democracy is the basis of a given polity. In the E.U., the case is likewise. Accordingly, rather than protesting at the time to get their government to continue with accession talks with the E.U., the Georgian people should have been oriented to undoing the damage done to the Georgian political system by walking the Georgian Dream Party to the exits.  

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1. Orestes G. Daniel, “Ex-Football Player Kavelashvili Becomes Georgia’s President as Ruling Party Consolidates Power,” Euronews.com, December 14, 2024.

An Analysis of the 2024 U.S. Presidential Election: On a Party's Self-Serving Elite

The 2024 U.S. Presidential election warrants a post-partem analysis, not so much to affix blame, but primarily so the electorate might grasp the perils when the elite of a political party refuses to apply self-restraint in order to keep the party-wide platform and campaign speeches from reducing to the elite’s own favorite ideology even though it is not held by a significant number of the “rank and file” members (i.e., voters), not to mention independents. In other words, running a massive political party to serve the ideological agenda of what Bertrand Russell calls “the inner ring” can cost a party dearly on election day. I contend that this applied to the Democratic Party, which had become a center-left party still dependent on its non-college, working-class, members, whose cultural values were not necessarily progressive. To be sure, substituting managerially-oriented political calculation for visionary leadership and broad policy proposals that are based on principles rather than particular political interests can easily be perceived generally as small, especially in the context of the horrific military attacks against civilians in Ukraine and Gaza. It is paradoxical that Harris lost working-class voters who were socially conservative, and thus “anti-woke” (e.g., against men in women’s bathrooms and playing in women’s sports) even as she lost some liberals who believed that Harris, in explicitly stating on The View that she would not deviate from Biden, was too timid in standing up to Russia’s Putin (e.g., by withholding long-range missiles) and Israel’s Netanyahu rather than enabling the horrific military crimes against humanity with continued shipments of weapons as if the UN’s court were irrelevant to international law.

I begin with the immediate historical context of center-left parties. The parties on the left in the U.S. and E.U. shifted to the center in the 1990s and 2000s. The parties were able to pick up moderate voters, but at the risk of losing ideological distinctiveness (from the center-right parties), and thus their raison d’etre in terms of broad principles and policies.  The 2024 U.S. Presidential election can be fit within the broader shifts since the 2000s that have rendered center-left (rather than far-left, or even socialist) parties less successful in elections. Bill Clinton brought the Democratic Party closer to the center in part due to the losses of Edward Kennedy in challenging the center-left Jimmy Carter in 1980 and of Walter Mondale in challenging Ronald Reagan in 1984. The party’s political elite paid attention to these losses, which went down like lead balloons, and Bill Clinton was a result of the ensuing effort to move the party closer to the political center. Crucially, both he and Barak Obama were able to win with support from the middle class (i.e., labor), which was still primarily voting on the basis of economic interest, including redistribution.

Then, two shifts began that caused the Democratic Party’s working-class, relatively conservative, faction to gradually peel off. The first shift can be described as a negative reaction to the increasingly business-friendly aspect of the party moving to the center. Historically, center-left parties in North America and Europe were critical of capitalism and wanted to constrain it. In reaction to the financial crisis of 2008, however, center-left parties let go of the even more important role of constraining capitalism that had frozen up from within due to uncorrected increased market volatility.

In the E.U. state of Greece, for example, the Syriza Party campaigned against austerity measures during the state’s legislative election in 2015 by promising to renegotiate the state’s bailout agreements. However, just after winning the election, the party’s head, Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras, accepted the existing austerity conditions in spite of there having recently been a referendum in which the Greek citizens overwhelmingly rejected those very conditions. Considering that the austerity resulting from the government’s required budget-cuts was especially harsh on the working class, Tsipras’ betrayal in going along with the creditor-beholden E.U. state of Germany doubtlessly cost the center-left party votes and Tsipras was ultimately defeated (though strangely, after being reelected again).  

In the U.S., Barak Obama entered the office of federal president in 2008 at the worst of the financial crisis, and he stocked his administration with plenty of folks from Wall Street. It is no coincidence that Obama went along with financial bailouts for the banks without conditions, even in terms of putting ceilings on the bonuses of the banks’ executives. Considering that they had displayed incredibly bad judgment in over-leveraging their respective banks by packaging and even buying bonds based on risky sub-prime residential mortgages, the bankers not only did not deserve bonuses, but arguably should have been fired as a condition of getting the funds appropriated by Congress and those created by the Federal Reserve Bank. Instead, the culpable bankers received hefty bonuses out of the TARP money provided by the U.S. Treasury—money that was supposed to be lent out to stimulate the economy so the working class would not suffer from traumatic unemployment. It was not lost on the Democratic Party’s non-college working-class segment that the incompetent but wealthy bank executives got bonuses in the political elite and the financial elite being cozy. Ironically, it was not until the first Trump administration that Treasury issued checks to every American.

Unfortunately, the trajectory of the partial unraveling of the Democratic Party is not so simple, for it was not only the growing perception that the party had joined de facto with the Republican Party in siding with corporate America at the expense of workers that caused the latter to gradually but steadily peel off from the center-left party—after having asked, perhaps, what was still left about the Democratic Party.

Firstly, structural changes in the economy also had an impact. Economic inequality was increasing, and workers could see that the Democratic Party had done nothing substantial to stop even the increase. That the party had missed an opportunity to come up with its own, alternative economic policies with which to differentiate itself from the Republican Party was especially important because the Democratic Party had moved closer to the center, and away from the wing associated with U.S. senators Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren.  

Secondly, another structural change, not economic in nature, also had an impact. Since 2000, a shift towards identity/cultural grievances had been occurring in the middle class wherein a gradually increasing number of voters have been less interested in economic redistribution than in opposing the “woke” ideology, which is centered on legalizing rights of certain groups of Americans based on group-identity. Historically, religious wars in Europe had been based on the premise that group-identity is primary in human consciousness; race riots share that assumption. The failure of the Democratic Party to constrain the excesses of capitalism during the financial crisis may be a factor in this shift away from economic distribution, as increasing numbers of working-classed voters came to realize that both major parties had become bought and paid for by the business sector through its political campaign contributions and promises of executive jobs. Regulatory capture of the regulator agencies by the regulated companies is but one result of the inordinate influence of business in government.

The shift in the American working-class voting increasingly on social issues affected the Democratic as a wedge. The “woke” ideology in favor of defunding the police, transsexual rights (i.e., men in women’s bathrooms and sports), reparations for Black Americans, sanctuary cities wherein illegal immigrants are legally protected, university “cancel culture,” such as in mislabeling pro-human-rights protests as antisemitic, and diversity programs gripped the political elite of the party and its left-wing more generally even though Kamala Harris did not emphasize “woke” planks in her speeches. Meanwhile, the “anti-work” political reaction had been gaining speed since at least 2015 among the non-college-educated working folks. This reaction viewed the gay “rainbow” flag as a cult symbol that was being imposed seemingly everywhere, and was viscerally opposed to transsexual men being able to play in women’s sports and use women’s locker rooms, the notion that illegal immigrants somehow had a right to be in the U.S. even though they had committed a crime in entering the country illegally, the proposal that even people living paycheck to paycheck should be taxed more to pay for reparations to Black people, and that certain words could no longer be spoken or written in college courses and even in political protests. Indeed, protests against Israel had practically been banned at many universities, including Yale, where 47 pro-human-rights students were arrested by private university police employees, and Harvard, which had turned Harvard Yard into a preemptive police presence by September, 2024. So much for academic atmosphere and academic freedom; non-academic employees with guns were in charge as scared academic administrators looked on as if proud mice.  My point is that Harris didn’t have to say anything “woke” on the campaign trail; non-college educated workers in the Democratic Party had by then viewed their party’s elite as very “woke” indeed. 

It can be argued that in having no internal check or self-restraint, the party's political elite had pushed the “woke” ideology too hard and too far (and perhaps, most importantly, too fast), and thus naturally had prompted a political reaction against both the elite itself and its favored ideology. That is, the political elite of the Democratic Party refused to constrain itself from pushing its mandatory ideology even though it was clear, or should have been clear without the blocking self-centeredness, that non-college-educated workers, especially in small towns, would bolt. Even with the mistaken assumption that the working class would still vote on an economic basis, the fact that the anti-woke movement was gaining steam should not have been missed or so easily dismissed for being illegitimate. Presumptuousness can indeed be blinding or distortive, as can the underlying self-centeredness and primitive desire to use power to enact one’s own ideology. This is ultimately why Donald Trump was able to win in spite of his own voters acknowledging that he was admittedly a flawed man.

The elite of a political party does its party a disservice by stubbornly pushing whatever ideology that elite loves, as if it were a fact of reason and thus should be imposed on detractors whether they like it or not, rather than applying self-discipline and a little humility to back off the ideology so as to retain the socially-conservative workers for the sake of governing to constrain capitalism. The ancient Confucian scholar, Xunzi, points to “a degree of self-restraint and even virtue, namely trustworthiness ,” as one reason why a hegemon, a ruler who is not as virtuous as is a sage (i.e., a wise and virtuous person) but is more virtuous than is a vicious tyrant, can be “a strong and successful ruler.”[1] Even though a hegemon “is not committed to moral cultivation of himself or those he rules,” applying the virtue of self-restraint, such as channeling away one’s instinctual urge to promote one’s own preferred ideology over others in a political party, can make a ruler successful (and not tyrannical) anyway.[2] The political elite of the Democratic Party could have benefited from this ancient lesson. That an increasing number of voters in the working class were more interested in voting against the societally interlarding “woke” ideology and especially its demands than in voting for economic redistribution means that the self-centered and haughty ideological stubbornness of the Democratic political elite really costed Harris votes.

Thirdly, even given the ongoing shift among working-class Democrats toward voting on the basis of cultural issues, economic pressure from the price increases, especially in gas and groceries, even after the temporary bump from supply shocks and higher transportation costs during the pandemic, prompted a significant number of voters in the middle class (and poor), which is especially vulnerable to price increases on necessities such as food and transportation, to vote on the basic of their bank accounts.

Harris’s promise to reduce grocery-store prices rung hollow because Biden had failed to do it and she said she would not differ from Biden on policies. Even given the trend in the working class to vote on the basis of social over economic issues, the center-left party erred in failing to recharge its historic mission to constrain the excesses of capitalism. Pledges to use federal anti-trust law to break up the meat-producer and grocery-chain concentrated rather than competitive industries would have differentiated the party from Trump’s rightward shift of the Republican Party. Even the Democratic Party, in accepting so much corporate money from lobbyists, was susceptible to enabling rather than lessening the tendency of markets to consolidate—to go from competition, by which food prices would have gone down after the supply shocks during the pandemic, to just a few giant companies with enough market-power to hold prices high and even convince consumers to expect even higher prices in the expectation of inflation as inevitable. As my academic advisor at Yale, who was an Episcopalian priest, once said, “If you must sin, then sin boldly!” Andrew Jackson and Teddy Roosevelt would not have lost much time translating that advice into political terms in terms of bold policy in place of political calculation and capitulation to even the private powers behind the proverbial throne. Unfortunately, neither Biden nor Harris was a Jackson or Roosevelt.

Fourthly, as for the shock that many “far-left” Democrats and even some independents had after the election that a convicted felon and narcissist had just won the popular vote (as well as the Electoral College), the explanation for Trump’s success with labor is not only due to the reasons I have just discussed, but also because Trump was very wealthy and bold in a way that vote-maximizer politicians usually are not. That these personal attributes could possibly “trump” the man’s flaws, such as admitting that he could get away with touching women sexually without their consent, allegedly pressuring Georgia to come up with more votes for him, and allegedly prompting a mob to riot through Capitol Hill as electoral votes were being counted by Congress on January 6, 2021, would shatter the ideological view held by the Democratic Party’s elite on what matters in a presidential character. Indeed, the nature of the alleged crimes may actually have augmented or strengthened Trump’s stature to working-class voters, given that their paradigmatic criteria for leadership differed so from those of the political elite (of both parties!).

Whereas America’s political elite and the left-wing of the Democratic party believed that voters should vote at least in part based on whichever candidate is most wise and virtuous, Trump himself might counter that the masses vote instead on the basis of wealth and being bold even in speech as well as action, rather unlike the typical people-pleasing politician, such as Bill Clinton and Barak Obama. Taking into consideration the fact that the level of education (college versus no-college) had been the single best indicator during the arduously long campaign “season” of which candidate a voter favored, it is likely that the criteria valued by the working class differed paradigmatically from the criteria valued by college-educated voters, including the political elite. Unconsciously, the elite of the Democratic Party projected its own paradigm of character-leadership onto how the non-college-educated laborers of the party’s “rank and file” see things. This can explain why even the criminal charges against Trump did not dint his base.

According to Adam Smith in his text, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, “the great mob of mankind are the admirers and the worshipers . . . of wealth and greatness.”[3] These two things are contrast to wisdom and virtue, which the masses “are perhaps incapable of even discerning.”[4] I don’t think Smith is being fair to the “masses” here, but his main point concerning the different criteria is important for college-educated Americans to grasp. Like people outside of a political (and economic) elite, Smith eschews “the proposition that people of superior wisdom and virtue possess a title to rule.”[5] He maintains that birth (family) and wealth are more visible and certain to the masses than are virtue and wisdom.[6] Wealth and greatness, Trump doubtlessly could have said during his 2024 campaign, “are my two middle names.” By “greatness,” even as he applied the adjective to the country itself in terms of its potential, consists not only of wealth, but also the kind of strength that is bold rather than timid, or limited to political calculation at home and abroad. Thinking that they too could someday be rich and admiring bold people, working-class voters could very well have loved him for being both. Again, the shift away from being concerned with redistribution to wanting to push back against the presumptuously encroaching, passive aggressive antagonistic “woke” advocates means that Trump’s “offensive” statements were viewed by the working-class as a plus rather than a minus in terms of character. In other words, few labor-union members would be likely to quote from Aristotle’s Ethics to insist that a virtuous person is necessary to put into effect Trump’s policies.

As for Trump’s pathological lying, the heads of the Democratic Party were hardly blameless in falsely claiming that Harris had been selected as the nominee in an “open, bottom-up” process. With a hundred days to go before election day, the party had time for a primary, which could have been set to take place forty days out, with the general election following after sixty more days. In the same year, the E.U. state of Germany set an election just sixty days after a scheduled no-confidence vote at a time in which that vote was just a month away. To claim that Harris’ chances were diminished by having only a hundred days fails to recognize that the year-plus long campaign season for U.S. president was excessively long. Lacking in boldness in terms of proposed policies was more of a hindrance than just having a hundred days. In other words, she had more than enough time to distinguish herself by departing from Biden’s policies, especially given his unpopularity for not going far enough in terms of a variety of areas. In fact, Harris’ lack of boldness took votes away even from the left-wing of the Democratic Party!

Going on the basis of political calculation, or “the political reality,” based on the presumed power of AIPAC (American Israeli Political Action Committee) in U.S. politics, produced political timidity just as cowering to corporate interests, even of the oil and food industries, presented Harris as a politician rather than as a leader. Leadership does not operate by calculation, but by broad principles. Whether those principles are standing up to an aggressor ravaging through Gaza rather than enabling him by being in favor of continuing to supply weapons to his military, or enforcing market competition (and a windfall-profits tax) rather than suggesting that the government give Americans money to spend in the oligarchic grocery chains that would feel free to raise prices even more rather than cut prices to compete for buyers, boldness of policy can be appreciated even more when it involves standing up to entrenched political and economic interests that have turned squalid in part because of the U.S. Government.

Management differs from leadership in part because management is narrowly focused and incremental rather than being oriented to formulating and promoting a vision of society in ideal, paradigmatic terms. I submit that both Biden and Harris were managerial in nature, whereas Ronald Reagan can be studied in terms of providing a vision (e.g., “Government is the problem.”). To be sure, not every vision that a political leader espouses is ethical. Hitler, for example, provided a vision of a strong Germany without weakness enervating the country from within. That vision can be challenged ethically both in regard to how Hitler conceptualized strength and weakness, and his government officials could be challenged for how they implemented Hitler’s vision by literally exterminating what they saw as weakness from the country and even in trying to free up living space for Germans from the U.S.S.R.—Hitler having promised Hindenburg that Communists would be eliminated within Germany, which in turn could mean going after the source further east.

What to a working-class Trump voter was boldness was viewed by some Harris voters and the Democracy Party’s elite as fascist. The claims that democracy was in the balance may have been fueled in part by the fact that Trump working-class voters tended to value wealth and political boldness over wisdom and virtue. To people who value or follow political calculation to minimize political risk, a candidate not speaking as a politician and advocating bold policies would of course be viewed with fear.

It is possible, even ironic in this case, that representative democracy can be put at risk by a cleft or division existing between a party’s elite and a significant part of its “rank-and-file” base. To be effective electorally and in sync with democracy itself, the elite of a party needs to remember that its perspective is not necessarily that of the whole of the party, and if the respective perspectives do indeed differ, the elite needs to exercise some self-constraint in place of self-centeredness and a self-assumed mandate to impose, ideologically, even on the party’s membership. In short, a party’s elite needs to put that membership first if electoral success is desired as a means to being in power.  The refusal to exercise self-restraint deserves to be voted against. Trump’s lack of self-restraint in his use of vitriol against his “enemies,” which included anyone who criticized him publicly, and even in his use of lying habitually to get out of trouble was in line with the boldness atypical of politicians that the working-class valued in a leader, whereas Harris’ lack of self-restraint regarding highlighting aspects of “wokeness” and in not standing up to big business and Israel worked against her. Not that Trump would stand up to big business, for he himself was a part of it, and not that he would stand up to Netanyahu (or Putin), but all that Trump too may have appealed to greatness-as-strength as construed and valued by enough of the the non-college-educated working-class voters.

1. Eric L. Hutton, “Introduction,” in Xunzi: The Complete Text, Eric L. Hutton, trans. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2014), p. xxviii.
2. Ibid.
3. Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, Ed. D. D. Raphael and A. L. Macfie (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976), I. iii.3.2.
4. Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, Ed. D. D. Raphael and A. L. Macfie (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976), VI.ii.I.20, quoted by Peter Minowitz, Profits, Priests, and Princes: Adam Smith’s Emancipation of Economics from Politics and Religion (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1993), p. 42.
5. Peter Minowitz, Profits, Priests, and Princes: Adam Smith’s Emancipation of Economics from Politics and Religion (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1993), p. 44.
6. Ibid., p. 45.

Exfoliating a Hero: On Lincoln's Unconstitutional Overreaching

Lest we get carried away and inadvertantly enshrine our leaders with mythic laurals, it is worthwhile to peel back our societal "remembering" of past figures, such as Abraham Lincoln, who have become larger than life.

Lincoln was a moderate, promising merely not to spread slavery. In his address after being sworn in, he promised not to go after slavery where it existed. Accordingly, radical abolitionists complained. Even so, the 1860 campaign had been viewed, at least in the south, as a referendum on the southern way of life. Lincoln received only 40% of the vote; he was not even on the ballot in ten states.  There were just 33 states in the union at the time. Lincoln's victory suffered from a deficit of legitimacy in some quarters. In fact,he was burned in effigy at a state capitol in the south. With free Kansas becoming a state, the slave states felt that their respective abilities to defend their way of life in the general councils of the union would become even more truncated or dilute. Berift of a sense of influence on general matters that concerned themselves, the confederating republics felt they had no alternative other than secession.

On Feb 18, 1861, Jefferson Davis became President of the Confederate States of America. At his swearing in, Dixie, which had been composed by a northerner, was played. The two sides in the continental dispute were closer than they perhaps realized. Both Lincoln and Davis, for example, were from Kentucky originally.  According to the Confederate constitution, Davis had a line item veto and would have had a six year term had the confederacy lasted that long. Astonishingly, international slave trading was outlawed. Even so, there were fundamental differences involved in the dispute. Ironically, had the southern states freed the slaves before firing on Fort Sumpter--depriving Lincoln of his motivational tactic midway through the way--perhaps something resembling the southern way of life in a loose confederacy would have prevailed. The United States would have been left to consolidate to its heart's content.

On the way to his inauguration, Lincoln declared that he would rather be assassinated than to see even one star removed from the flag. Such a stance reflects the "all or none" mentality that accompanies political consolidation. In spite of Lincoln's line in the sand, the War between the Confederated States and the United States began at 4:30am on April 12, 1861.  Technically, it was a war between a federated alliance and a federal government. The opening act was bloodless, even as the war to come was the bloodiest in American history. Siloh alone matched the casualties at Waterloo, and there would be 27 more to come. 51,000 men lost their lives in the three days at Gettysburg alone. The contest between the old and new federal forms exacted a heavy toll in human loss and suffering. Who would have thought that contending distinctions in political theory could be so bloody. Of course, might does not in itself make right, although the passion of the unjustly oppressed can bring about victories disproportionate to the relative lack in number. Furthermore, in this particular case, the respective populations in the federations and the industrialization of several of the union's states gave the forces of modern federalism an advantage not necessarily sourced in the nature of the type.

At the time, the union states had a combined population of 21 million while the confederacy had only 9 million, 4 million of which were slaves and thus not in the fight. In spite of the fact that so many southerners volunteered to enlist that a third of them had to be sent back home, the confederacy was perhaps destined to lose the bellum given the tremendous disadvantage in terms of population. That the conflict lasted until 1865 may point to the extent of resentment that had been allowed to build up throughout the slave states against what was viewed there as an “intrusive” federal government. For example, the devisive tarriff that had nearly caused South Carolina to secede in 1832 was reimposed by the U.S. Government in 1858. As in 1832, the tax was to finance northern industrialization. The states producing cotton and/or rice were left not being able to defend their interests in Washington. Accordingly, that distant government was viewed as encroaching and increasingly foreign. The root of the festering dispute went far beyond the issue of slavery.

To the confederate citizens, the cause involved the rights of their republics as well as their property rights. Slaves, being viewed as property by their "masters"--a decadent conception of slavery unknown to ancient understandings--were thus in play as part of the wider and deeper southern concern with self-determination, which the southerners identified with their respective countries and associated ways of life. Even Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation, which took effect on January 1, 1863 (almost two years into the war), applied only to slaves in the states that had already left the union (rather than to the five slave states that had remained).

The confederate states were not subject to U.S. law as long as they were part of the confederacy rather than the union. Lincoln's proclamation was thus extra-constitutional, and thus without immediate effect other than to motivate an increasingly weary northern citizenry and armed forces. To be sure, Sherman freed slaves as he blazed a trail to the sea. However, even without the proclamation, he would have deprived the confederates of their "property" along with their other means until they surrendered. Slavery was not outlawed in the United States until 1865, when the thirteenth amendment was ratified by the states (the former confederate states excluded even though they had been re-afixed to the union).  There was some duplicity involved in, "Welcome back to the union! But unfortunately your vote doesn't count yet because you don't agree."

Fundamentally, the "north" and "south" interpreted the United States differently. This is what the war was really about, and the issue went all the way back to the contentious debates in the constitutional convention in 1787. The delegates had hotly debated whether the proposed General Government would consolidate power via "general welfare" spending and the potentially unlimited taxation, irrespective of the question of slavery. The people who wanted to secede viewed the U.S. as more like a confederation than a modern federal government. That is, confederates viewed their states as countries and the U.S. more as an alliance having only strictly defined enumerated powers that a national government. Robert E. Lee, for example, was offered command of the union army. He refused and went with Virginia. He could not draw his sword, he said, against his native country. Virginia had to come first; there was never any question about that. Such a view of Virginia and the other republics was to fade even as they still retained residual sovereignty at least into the twenty-first century.

In general, the southerners feared that the federal government would usurp more and more power from their countries; as things turned out, the fear was not without foundation. Even then, Lincoln declared war against the confederated states even though the U.S. constitution clearly stipulates that Congress is the governmental body in the U.S. Government that declares war.  As the president is the commander in chief, there is a conflict of interest in that office also declaring war. So technically speaking, the war was not constitutional, and thus legal.  Lincoln also suspended habeus corpus, though the constitution allows for this in time of rebellion.  To keep the Maryland from seceding, he locked up thirteen of the state's legislators without trial. 

Chief Justice Taney, who had four years earlier concurred with the Dred Scott decision, said that Lincoln had gone too far beyond the constitution in the powers he was exercising. Taney was on firm ground on the declaration of war. Even so, astonishingly, the president simply ignored the chief justice. From the standpoint of an independent judiciary with teeth, Lincoln was laying a precedent very dangerous to the republic.

Because the judiciary has no means of enforcing its decisions by force, the branch depends on the other branches, and, indeed, the people, resisting the temptation to contravene a judicial decision. The basis of the resisted temptation rests on the court's legitimacy, for the judiciary has no troops of its own. In fact, Bickel refers to the court as the “least dangerous branch” for this reason. Lincoln’s precedent in simply ignoring the court put at risk the system of checks and balances that resides in the separation of powers in the federal government. Fortunately for us, Lincoln’s treatment of the Chief Justice's effort to hold the executive branch within its proper constitutional sphere, as though Taney were a mere bystander, has largely been forgotten.  Yet the expediency of an imperial presidency has indeed been on display since Lincoln as Congress has gradually lost power to the commander in chief. The danger is real, and Lincoln's precedent could yet be used by an ambitious commander in chief who has his or her eye on another country to invade. 

Ironically, Lincoln’s unconstitutional actions at the beginning of the war ironically to save the union could be viewed as confirming the charges made by the confederates against the encroaching nature of the federal government.  Lest we miss the lesson as we remember the bloody war 150 years later in 2011-2015 from the standpoint of the victors, we might take note of the susceptibility of power itself to consolidate, ultimately in one person—indeed, even in a hero. The consolidating proclivity is as much a danger in the modern American empire today as it was in ancient Rome.  

Source: Ken Burns’ The Civil War (PBS)

Police Brutality: A Symptom of a Brain Sickness Stimulated by Large Doses of Power

Behind the ornate rooms and regalia of a head of state, the stately appearance of legislative chambers, and even revered democratic constitutions, the basis of a government is its power—even if beyond authorized limits—to use lethal force against even its electorate peacefully protesting. As the results of the Stanford Prison Experiment in 1971 show, human beings who have police power—even beyond the authorized—have at the very least a proclivity to abuse people without countervailing power. The students who were assigned as prison guards in the experiment because so abusive toward the students assigned as prisoners that the experiment had to be terminated after only 6 days in a two-week period. Even the experimenter, who took on the role of prison superintendent during the experiment, “had become indifferent to the suffering” of the students who were in the role of prisoners.[1] Lest it be concluded that college students are simply too immature to assume even what seems to be absolute power over other students, such behavior is arguably common among actual police employees. Lest it be further concluded that such behavior is part of an autocratic regime, even the known instances in republics suggest that human nature itself cannot handle such discretion as police departments and their employees have. Incredibly, even with the result of the Stanford study, no one seems to go to this conclusion; rather, primitive human nature may be poised to jump from incident to incident as if doing so enough would end the abuse of such power.

The presumptuousness that police departments and individual employees have in abusing their powers to harm even nonviolent protesters was on display to the world on June 4, 2020 as police in Buffalo, New York, pushed down a 75 year-old man who ironically had stood for peace and justice for decades. The violent act itself by two police employees was telling. Video shows Martin Gugino approaching an oncoming police employee in a nonviolent manner to talk—perhaps to ask a question. Another police employee immediately speeds up his pace—the first indication of possible aggression. Then he and another employee pushed Martin backwards. Incredibly, one of the employees who pushed Martin then shock his head back and forth as if the incident had been Martin’s fault, when the fault lied with the employee. Such shirking of responsibility is a convenient mental tactic by which the abusive mind seeks to justify/protect itself—the delusion being hidden to such a mind by the mind itself.

That the other police employees kept walking past Martin as he lied on the cement with blood coming from his right ear suggests the presence of a group-think dehumanizing even a victim of police aggression. A man off-camera then scolds the police employees for walking past Martin and not even bothering to call an ambulance. Instead of respecting the man for his compassion for Martin and justified reproach of the tax-payer salaried employees, they push the man forward and handcuff him. Perhaps that man and other people in the vicinity should have acted on an instinct to remain silent and offer a NAZI salute. I’m sure the police employees would have felt especially emboldened to exploit the personal conflict of interest out of anger. Were he alive, Gandhi might have recommended that the people in the vicinity stay silently in place and take the blows to show the employees’ moral sickness to the employees themselves and the world.  

At the very least, the moral sickness could include exploiting a personal conflict of interest out of anger, and taking non-threats as threats—that is, being over-sensitive and over-reactive. Out of arrogance, the employees may even have presumed, how dare the old man come to us to ask a question! As for the man—the anonymous Christian—who attempted to shame the Roman police into at least stopping to tend for Martin, how dare anyone talk to us that way.

In short, the mentality of the police employees on the scene may have been too used to abusing their power even and especially when its exercise goes beyond their delegated authority. This implies that accountability from and on police departments in general—and not just in New York—had been practically non-existent. In other words, police employees are routinely given too much discretion (i.e., power) relative to what the human brain can handle, and a system has been set up that protects this dysfunctional sickness such that it is no longer viewed by the aggressors as a sickness.

The implications for public policy are not merely to fix the system of broken accountability; a reduction of discretion is also called for both in terms of what authority governments give their respective police departments and what authority they in turn give to their managers and non-supervisory employees. Incident-specific responses to police brutality do not do justice even to the first task.

How police departments, police unions, and the police employees themselves react to accusations of can say a lot about the dysfunctional sickness that protects abuse manifests in a “clean up” capacity. The sickness itself may convince the infected brains, but the denial makes it possible that people without the vested interest get to glimpse the disease through its symptoms. That is to say, the sickness may cause the infected brains to unwittingly reveal too much.

In trying to defend the two abusive police employees, John Evans, president of the local police union, said, “Our position is these officers were simply following orders from Deputy Police Commissioner Joseph Gramaglia to clear the square. It doesn’t specify clear the square of men, 50 and under or 15 to 40. They were simply doing their job. I don’t know how much conflict was made. He did slip in my estimation. He fell backwards.”[2] Evans’ statement is revealing in ways that he did not likely intend. Firstly, general orders, such as to clear an area because of a curfew, have plenty of room for discretion, which the head of the labor union ignores. For example, the police could simply have stood at one end of the public square and fired on anyone in it. Alternatively, the police could have walked through the square, arresting people who refuse to leave. Both approaches are consistent with the general order to clear the square. Secondly, in asserting that Martin fell backwards from slipping, which is clearly not the case in the video, the police union’s position was that lying to protect abusive police employees is acceptable—perhaps even laudable.

Moreover, that 57 police employees in that riot squad quit because the two abusive employees were suspended allows us access into the sordid mentality of entitlement even to push over an old man and walk past him with apparent indifference. A squad’s solidarity can thus effectively enable the presumption to over-react to non-threats by committing violent acts. Such a squad, and police department, moreover, would have no moral objection to covering up episodic eruptions of the sickness within. In short, the law doesn’t apply to the departments and employees tasked ironically with enforcing the law. In conveniently excluding themselves, such departments and employees therein reveal their criminal mentality under the ripped cloak of public decency.

In spite of living in democratic republics, Americans were at the time especially vulnerable. “In recent decades, police [there] have amassed power through laws that grant them a high level of immunity, a lack of oversight, big budgets and a focus on reforms that [have brought] little change.”[3] Even though police departments are responsible to democratically-elected officers of cities in a given republic, such as New York, the International Association of Chiefs of Police has been involved in modifying anti-crime legislation and “trying to make elected officials accountable to police, rather than the other way around.”[4] An institutional conflict of interest has been exploited here at the expense of legitimate democratic governance.[5]

To be sure, electorates in some of the American republics have willing ceded to the police a lot of power. In Phoenix, Arizona, for instance, the dominant political ideology assumes that a visibly-heavy police presence is justified and even necessary as a deterrent against crime. That ideology falsely assumes that innocent citizens would not be uncomfortable seeing so many police cars and helicopters on a regular basis—in what can be called the emergencization of the status quo. That fly-through helicopters fly regularly in one area outside of the FAA-mandated corridor with impunity points to how much power the police department has and what its mentality is. That even the campus police department at a local university, Arizona State University, presumes (over academic culture) to park regularly on campus sidewalks and in the middle of academic courtyards suggests that perspective can be warped by the brain sickness of power and little accountability on that sickness would be very unlikely from a pro-police “academic” administration (and student government!), which in turn is not democratically elected. The explicitness by inconsiderate shows of the dominance by force impedes the free exchange of ideas and an atmosphere conducive to thinking. Rather than enhancing the feeling of security, especially during school days, the culture of dominance puts everyone there, especially students from more balanced States on edge. That is not an academic culture, and in fact eclipses it on its own turf. 

Given the weaknesses of the human mind, the decisions or captures of governments and especially non-governments such that they succumb to their own police departments are dangerous, and in fact can easily enable police over-reaches, whether aggressive or passive-aggressive (e.g., pensive presences) with the presumption of impunity. In 2020 with protests taking place in the U.S., E.U., Australia, and Brazil (and other countries), the world may have been awakening to just how lapse-prone the brain can be with de facto absolute physical power. 
To be sure, that those protests were blind to a likely-increasing sordid, deeply selfish disrespect for the law and inconsiderateness of strangers and even neighbors does nothing to reduce that problem (if indeed such respect and considerateness can be treated, much less forced). Although that mentality can easily spark anger, police employees who act on the basis of personal emotion are themselves disrespecting law. In other words, even if incidents of police brutality had been increasing to meet another mentality that refuses to respect the law and thus its enforcers (even apart from their abuses of power), one primitive mentality need not match another, that is naturally anger-provoking. Perhaps the flash point is disrespect being naturally met with disrespect. In the end, anti-social criminals can expect to be dealt with, but within measures that are compatible with the human brain.

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1. Stanford Prison Experiment.

2. “Buffalo Police Riot Squad Quit to Back Officers Who Shoved Man,” BBC.com, June 5, 2020 (accessed June 6, 2020).

3. Julia Mahncke, “Why Police in the US Are So Powerful,” DW.com, June 6, 2020 (accessed same day).

4. Ibid.

5. For more on institutional conflicts of interest, see Skip Worden, Institutional Conflicts of Interest.

Police/Security Over-Reaches: A Mentality Unfit for the Job

Absolute authority corrupts absolutely. On an organization or even a local scale, people with authority can play considerably on the ignorance of individuals to over-reach at their expense. As a consequence, surveillance and actions can be horribly excessive without there being recognition of it. Seeing an off-duty police employee wearing a bullet-proof vest and standing next to a store security guard in the entry-way of a grocery store in Phoenix, Arizona, for instance, can give at least new-comers an immediate sense of the excessive use of authority to intimidate even the innocent shoppers. As if seeing a policeman and security employee "greet" customers entering the store was not enough, I also saw a young mother with her young daughter in one of the aisles “freeze up” at the sight of the policeman (wearing a bullet-proof vest) staring at them in a confrontational posture from the end of the aisle. I could not believe my eyes. As the front doors opened as I left the store, I looked up only to see a security guard with his feet pointed right and left, respectively, in a confrontational posture. 

A security guard stands in a confrontational posture at an Albertsons (Frys) grocery store in Phoenix.

Could such practices ever be accepted as the default in the "land of the free"? It depends on the State. Furthermore, how does such ill-fitting excessiveness, which would only fit were someone reported to be shooting in the store, shift from inappropriateness to become the default—the status quo? Typically the underlying mentality is one of stubborn ignorance that cannot be wrong, backed up by an excessive and microscopic grip on real or invented authority. How is it that the more educated and broad-minded perspective in upper-echelon management comes to doubt even its common sense by being hoodwinked by the lower mentality? Excessive delegation to middle-and-lower levels of management, where the wider perspective can easily be lacking, may be part of the answer. Playing a supporting role, the value-system in the local culture may actually support the excess or look the other way in blind obedience to an ideology. Finally, if a practice beyond the pale gets its toehold in the status quo, then people can become blind to the excessiveness and treat it instead as normal. Excessiveness as the new normal. Dislodging an invasive or encroaching unquestioned trend can be very difficult given the nature of the status-quo default to act like cement. Two case studies demonstrate that an absurd over-reach by someone in the security field can occur. The first took place in Orlando, Florida. Accountability did occur, so the absurd was not allowed to become ensconced. The second was in Phoenix, Arizona. Such accountability is much more difficult there, so the aggressive over-reach of authority would likely become further ensconced in the conducive or enabling local culture. 

In September, 2019, an elementary school “resource officer” arrested two 6-year-olds at school in Orlando, Florida. At least one of the kids had committed the high crime of kicking another student. The “resource officer,” a misleading term for what was actually a policeman capable of making arrests (a resource for whom?), was subsequently fired for not having obtained permission from a “watch commander.” The militaristic term, commander, in having anything to do with first-graders, makes clear just how far the Orlando police department had overreached. Indeed, I submit that the cloak of being a resource is just as dishonest, and overreaching, as is the appropriation of military terms. A police employee is neither a security guard nor a military commando.

Of course, arresting a first-grader is such an obvious overreach that the judgment involved in the overreaching itself is arguably incompatible with the legal right to use lethal force. At least one of the first-graders was arrested for battery, fingerprinted, and had mugshots taken. That a police employee (or department) would even suppose that with a commander’s permission is appropriate or sufficient to arrest a first-grader for kicking another kid is so far-fetched that a lack of perspective, not to mention common sense, was also in the mix. Even Florida State Attorney Aramis Ayala chastised the Orlando police department when she said, “These very young children ought to be protected, nurtured, and disciplined in a manner that does not rely on the criminal justice system to do it.”[1] That a police employee (and department) would interlard that system indicates a basic lack of understanding regarding that system and the fact that it has boundaries. People who have problems with boundaries should not be wielding power, for such people love power too much to exercise it realistically. For a child to make being a child a crime suggests that that child should not be allowed to play with guns, much less to be lawfully entitled to use them. 

Such an obvious overreaching mentality can also exist “under” the police, such as in security guards. In Phoenix, Arizona, for instance, the security guards on the light-rail trains have regularly over-reached beyond their authority. This reflects the culture, as the same tendency can be observe in other domains there. 

For example, some of the employees of the security subcontractor have turned on passengers simply for taking pictures inside the train. Guards have aggressively threatened to kick such passengers off the trains, using the flimsy excuse that the guards had been photographed and the erroneous claim that picture-taking on the trains was illegal. Such ignorance that could not be wrong backed up by authority that simply did not exist is inherently toxic and utterly incompatible with (i.e., a danger to) wielding even the authority that has been authorized. Beyond even the ignorance is the sheer aggressive nature that looks for any opening in which to bully another person. In fact, the dismissiveness of other people’s natural boundaries may itself be sociopathic. The aggression unleashed by efforts to hold such people accountable points to a demented perspective in which the victim rather than the aggressor is actually the aggressive party. 
It is interesting, or telling, that security employees would be so preoccupied with passengers taking pictures and yet actually refuse to do anything, whether on a platform or on a train, about a passenger known to have walked across the tracks even in front of an oncoming train. 

This man rushed across the tracks so fast his baby's carriage back wheels caught on a rail.  

Once I witnessed a man run across a street (amid oncoming cars) and across the tracks before entering the train-car that I entered. The security employee told me that he too had seen this, but could do nothing. "The street is not our property," he explained. "Aren't the tracks your property?" I countered. He did not reply. Being so reluctant to even confront such a passenger (or people smoking on the platforms) is quite a contrast to the excessive presence of the employees on a train car. 

Three security employees are clustered together in one half of a rail car. Typically none of them would be checking tickets. Imagine being a passenger surrounded by security guards! 

Looking at me leaving the train and then at the three security employees, the man in the foreground asked me if he could enter the train! When I was on the train standing next to the door, the security employee shown on the right walked over and stood in the middle between the doors, blocking the entry-way to the rest of the car. He was too big to be standing in that space, but I suppose he felt that he could do whatever he wanted as he had a badge.

That the security company put as many as six guards at a time in a car (typically not during commuter times, as office workers could be expected to complain) suggests a proclivity toward and enabling blind-spot concerning excessiveness itself. At the very least, the employees don't care whether passengers feel uncomfortable as a result. Sometimes the excessiveness is so obvious on a rail platform that customers may stand at a distance until a train comes.

Four or five security employees were on this platform. 

Twice I witnessed around fourteen police and security employees enter a rail car to check tickets. In both instances, three or four passengers were taken to the platform to be surrounded by the police and security employees as the latter wrote municipal citations! Imagine if so much attention were directed to a motorist pulled over for speeding! In effect, the passengers were being treated as criminals likely to become violent. 
Tellingly, at least one supervisor of bus drivers at a bus-transfer hub in Tempe decided to have his new van's yellow lights flashing continuously, as if the default were to treat the routine as a constant state of emergency just because one might be possible. 

Even during daylight hours, on a Sunday when the hub was virtually empty, a supervisor still felt the need to have his flashers on!

The flashing yellow lights on top of the white van are barely visible, and yet presumably someone thought they were fitting. 

People who are not willing or able to perceive when they have gone too far should not be permitted to wield power over other people. 

The relationship between excessiveness and over-reaching is an interesting one. Perhaps the former connotes being oblivious while the latter stresses the underlying motive. In both of the cases of Orlando and Phoenix, the excessiveness in the over-reaching itself was of such an extent as to be utterly transparent to the naked eye. It is perhaps a easily overlooked truism that going beyond authorized authority is itself an over-reach.

Typically when an over-reach or excessiveness is treated as part of the legitimate status-quo, or societal default, the culprits eventually go so far that they come to be viewed as a problem. For example, the decision of Allied Security in Phoenix to have the ticket-checkers/security-guards wear police-color uniforms and even separate silver badges could eventually lead to the company being charged with intentionally impersonating police. 

One of six security employees (not the one who became aggressive concerning picture-taking of half of the car)  watching passengers (rather than checking tickets) on a routine basis rather than because of an incident suspected or in progress on one car of a light-rail train in Phoenix. The obvious police impersonation, with its (intended) implications of additional authority, is no accident. Even though the employee pictured here was not belligerent, she and another employee blocked the conduit between the two sides of the car (and thus were "front and center" for any general picture-shot).

I submit that the impersonation to look like police employees was geared to intimidating customers beyond that which a security guard as such could muster. On account of the low pay, minimal qualifications (a High School diploma), and the bad (hiring) management (as reported by former employees online), it should be no surprise that the attitude toward customers has been more like that of the local police to the citizens than customer service in a company. The allure of power taken can be too much, especially if that elixir is not ideally in a customer-service attitude.
In the Phoenix Public Library, the security employees also wore silver detachable badges, at least as of 2019.  

The security employees are so numerous that a patron could easily sense that the library's management had gone too far. That the security employees intermingle with the police stationed at the library renders the impersonation problem more of problem because patrons could more easily assume that the employees also have police powers. 

The policewoman is at the left-back, next to one of the security employees. 

That the police and security employees are constantly making the rounds passing by patrons who are reading or studying does not render the library a place conducive to studying. 

At the Tempe Public Library, armed security employees with badges stood at the entrance at least by 2019. A volunteer told me that a manager had insisted that the "Welcome" desk be relabeled "Security" just in case patrons miss the point even in seeing two armed guards in front. 

Those security guards, each having a gun and taser, also made rounds through areas where patrons were reading or studying, as the video below testifies. 

At one of the pot dispensaries in Phoenix, a security guard could be seen sitting at a close proximity to the customers on whom he was keeping a direct eye. I doubt it made any difference to him whether they felt uncomfortable with his excessiveness. To him, he may not even have been excessive. 

The security guard is seated on the right, positioned to face the three customers seated against the side wall. Was the guard worried that one of the customers would suddenly explode in reefer madness? Such over-blown assumptions, while ludicrous, have existed in Arizona even as marijuana was legal in some of the other States. 

In the television series, Downton Abbey, the Dowager Countess, played by Maggie Smith, remarks that power goes to the head of a common person like strong drink. She is referring to the village physician whom the British military put in charge of the military hospital during World War I at the Downton residence. If that could be said from her perspective of a physician, the hiring of (in many cases) inner-city youth to wear badges on trains can be expected to lead to a host of problems.  

The dynamic can be explained by appropriating Nietzsche’s philosophy in which some people are weak internally and so they cannot resist their instinctual urge to dominate even and especially the strong. The weak resent the strong for their self-confidence and surfeit of strength. Whereas the strong do not feel a need to use more power than necessary because they have more than enough strength anyway, the weak will stoop to even cruelty to exact even a bit of pleasure from the exercise of power externally; exerting power internally, as in mastering an intractable urge, requires more strength than the weak have.

If a hiring budget is inadequate to attract a certain maturity- and knowledge-level, then fine-tuning the hiring criteria will not be adequate. Unfortunately, if, as Nietzsche says, the weak cannot but be weak and the strong cannot but be strong, then training too can be expected to have limited usefulness. Organizational, governmental, and even societal accountability may have to be called on to supply the needed check on the power-overreaches. Unfortunately, in such a law-and-order culture as has existed in Arizona at least through the first two decades of the twenty-first century, security guards as well as the local police could be expected to get away with a lot. Even the state's major universities, including ASU and UA, were not immune from over-reaches by security guards given police status (a police department is reports to a city, rather than an organization), and yet students passively took it while the "academic" administrators compromised academic ways to make way for other values such as intimidation (i.e., of students). 

It was not uncommon, at least by 2019, for campus "police" to park their cars on a routine basis on sidewalks used by students to get from class to class. The assumption that they would not be concerned passing such a car belongs in a fantasy movie rather than on at an institution of higher learning (at least in principle). 

It was not uncommon for campus police to "patrol" in one place on an ongoing basis out in front where students walk. The obvious need to stick out carries with it a certain amount of ego and lack of concern for how the young students may be affected emotionally. Few, I submit, would feel that such a presence during a school day is necessary to feel safe. 

In fact, in addition to the campus police, ASU hires student security guards. The result is a sense of constantly being watched on that campus, which obviously must have had cameras too. 
Once while talking to two students representing a cause at a table, I noticed that a student security guard was taking his job too seriously, or was told to do so, by how he was so obviously watching us. I was reminded of the secret police of the Communist states in the last century. 

Notice how needlessly confrontational the security employee's posture is in this picture. 

To the extent that a local culture enables the over-reaches by casting a blind or even permissive eye, as in Arizona, the imposition of checks on authority are especially important. That Florida's authorities, in contrast, came out against the child-cop who tried to criminalize being a child suggests that not every state is as dire in this respect as is Arizona. 

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1. A. Willingham, Artemis Moshtaghian, and Amir Vera, “A School Resource Officer Is Fired after Arresting Two 6-year-old Children,” CNN.com, September 23, 2019 (accessed same day).