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Culture War Roundup for the week of January 15, 2024

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The truckers won. They took a few licks, but as Kulak convincingly argues, they won.

The truckers were utterly defeated and their leaders are still being prosecuted.

And it’s worth asking ourselves who the cops and soldiers are.

They're those selected for both a penchant for violence and willingness to obey the regime.

But the difference between ‘the opinions of cops and soldiers’ and ‘the opinions of housewives, janitors, shopkeepers, truckers, factory workers, bus drivers and all the rest’ is very small

No, they aren't. Cops are different; you've perhaps of the "us vs. them" dynamic among police officers? To police, police are "us". Sometimes a few other groups of public service workers such as EMTs are at least us-adjacent. Those other people, the janitors and truckers and factory workers and such? Those are the people the cops consider it their job to keep in line, they're "them". Soldiers are a different "us"; the military makes them into a breed apart, and so they remain.

ETA: You said

That's the Leviathan shaped hole; someone is going to keep order even if it's not the government

Yes, someone is keeping order. The Leviathan is the cops and the soldiers who are keeping the people in line. But it is also the schizos and petty criminals who have free reign. The prison gangs who impart harsh injustice to those who fall afoul the state's rules. The bevy of lesser officers who harass shopowners and other basically-decent citizens for violations real and imagined. Your "Mr. Patel" and the truckers and the Daniel Penny's of this world are kept in line by all those powers. The sort of order where a man may run a store and not fear to be robbed is one sort, and Hobbes would approve. But the order of Gotham City, where the criminals are given wide reign and the ordinary people are kept in line through fear of them on the one hand and the state on the other, is just as valid by Hobbes's philosophy. Who said the sovereign must rule on behalf of the decent man to suppress the scum? No, if the sovereign prefers the scum... well, he's still the sovereign.