FBXL Social

@Hyolobrika is it, in practice? Israel has overwhelming might relative to the Palestinians in Israel/Palestine, yet they can’t engender internal legitimacy. one can compel conformity always at the point of a gun, but no army can constantly point guns at the whole of a population. or persuade those who see the army only as illegitimate (in the fuzzier sense) oppressors to resort to them to resolve disputes. i think it is less kraterocratic than you think.

@Hyolobrika in the United States, much, perhaps most, of the public claims to detest the government. i claim the Supreme Court is currently entirely illegitimate, in a subjective sense. but i still conform to the law in the US, much more than physical coercion can enforce, and would rely upon US courts rather than other means to resolve disputes. 2/

@Hyolobrika normative notions of legitimacy have very little predictive power i think. but that doesn’t mean legitimacy collapses into “might” alone. however the Supreme Court or the American state as a whole might be illegitimate from a variety of normative or subjective perspectives, that illegitimacy is of an entirely different character, evident in human behavior, than Israel’s illegitimacy as government to Palestinians. 3/

@Hyolobrika an interesting case is the Jim Crow South in the US. unlike the Palestinian case, i think the American state in 1950 had internal legitimacy, despite overt oppression of a self-conscious minority. so despite being profoundly immoral, i’d call that government “legitimate” in the senses i describe. 4/

@Hyolobrika why/how was it so? i don’t know. it’s an interesting question. what i do claim is it comes down to more than “might makes right”. blacks in the Jim Crow south faced a regime of pervasive brutality and coercion, but i think it hard to argue they faced that more than Palestinians have in I/P. 5/

@Hyolobrika yet they mostly conformed to law resorted to the US state to address disputes, and in that sense conferred internal legitimacy upon the state that oppressed them (and that arguably still does to a lesser degree). i don’t think a claim that US Blacks were inherently or culturally more pacifistic can be a sufficient explanation. 6/

@Hyolobrika legitimacy resides in and emerges from the relationship between states and publics. the factors that engender it are “soft” — situational, difficult to objectively characterize — rather than “hard” — things we might objectively observe and run regressions on. that’s why i suggest we judge it from the result, rather than from conditions about which we might have normative views or misleading hypotheses. /fin

@Hyolobrika (in any case, thanks a ton for reading and giving these issues some thought!)

@Hyolobrika I don’t want to say they “legitimised” the state in a plain-language normative sense. but i do claim that in a functional sense, their conformity did help legitimize the state.

@Hyolobrika and i wouldn’t characterize conformity of an oppressed group as necessarily being “too scared/weak/oppressed to rebel”. one might also say “too wise to rebel”. the choice to conform to a state so imperfect + unjust “oppressive” is an accurate modifier might well under some circumstances be wiser, not just in a narrow sense of avoiding pain but in a longer-view sense of working towards much more just, less oppressive outcomes, and comparing against actual alternatives.

@Hyolobrika yes! but in modern states, the law changes a lot. sure, i sometimes break laws i think are wrong, but the evolving sensibilities expressed by overt state action have a surprising sway over what i think right or wrong. 1/

@Hyolobrika as a kid, wearing a seatbelt in a car was for punishment. now i always wear a seatbelt. it’s the law, and there was a period when i had to remind myself, and i got ticketed for forgetting. but i now agree, and voluntarily buckle up. would i have done the same, knowing the same social science, if the law hadn’t changed? i don’t know. 2/

@Hyolobrika but i think much of what it means for a state to be legitimate has to do with an unobservable propensity for its publics to internalize state action in forming their own sense of right and wrong. /fin

@Hyolobrika (i’ll take what i can get!)

@Hyolobrika the seatbelt was just an example. my self perception is not “the nanny state changed its mind and ticketed me, so i conformed”, but “well, actually, it’s right on the merits” and so eventually i did conform. but i don’t know my behavioral shift ever would have happened if norms broadly hadn’t shifted, and i do attribute norms broadly shifting to a campaign by the state (which included the laws under which i was ticketed). 1/

@Hyolobrika smoking norms are a more “ethical” example, in the sense of affecting others. when i was a kid, people could smoke anywhere, and objecting (except apologetically, referring to some very personal special circumstance like asthma) seemed more like imposing on others’ legitimate rights than defending ones own. as laws changed, norms changed sharply. now even without overt objection, exposing others to second-hand smoke requires permission, or seems a violation. 2/

@Hyolobrika norm changes, of course, happen all the time, and can be independent of state action. but in that case, smoking was a pretty entrenched habit, and attempts to shift those norms without the state putting a thumb on the scale by regulating smoking out of most shared public spaces would i think have been unlikely. 3/

@Hyolobrika (during the transition in the US, there were lots of quotes by restauranteurs saying that they thought the non-smoking regime was better, but they would never have unilaterally shifted to it, because parties with a even one smoker would disprefer their restaurants in ways that parties with nonsmokers, then accustomed to tolerating smoke, would not insist.) /fin