Conservatives are supposed to be all about keeping the government out of your business, right? Limited state power? Ambition checking ambition? If this is so, then why is the reflexive conservative response to police brutality generally to defend police officers who have killed innocent people? If we hold to Lord Acton’s dictum, that “power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely,” then we should probably be a little bit more wary of the boys in blue. They’re human, just as we are, and they are just as capable of evil as anyone else.
I think the reason for the generally pro-police attitude among conservatives is that their thinking is grounded less in the principles of limited government than in a pre-existing belief that a certain subset of people are good and the rest are bad. The good people should be free from government interference, but the bad people should not. Moreover, the good people should be free from the effects of the bad people. Predisposition to such a belief would be linked to high orderliness and disgust-sensitivity, which are aspects of the big five trait conscientiousness.
We can offer a similar explanation for why radical SJW-types, who are ostensibly concerned that our institutions are tools of the white cishet patriarchy used to subjugate minorities, are often eager to use bureaucracy and courts to crush their opponents. They don’t have a problem with power per se, they just want to make sure that power is being used for their desired ends. As long as power is used against the bad people (white cishet Christian men), there is no problem.
What the radical SJWs and reflexive police-apologists have in common is a highly black-and-white moral worldview. In this worldview, there isn’t much doubt about who is good and who is bad, and therefore, there isn’t need for checks and balances against power, as long as it is exercised only by the good people. This is authoritarianism. It is bad, and it exists happily on both sides of the political spectrum.
If small-government conservatives want to be consistent with the principles they claim to uphold, then they should stop excusing police brutality, which constitutes abuse of governmental power in its purest form. The state is a monster that needs to be restrained if we are to be safe from it. It doesn’t make sense that we’d apply this to healthcare and taxation, but not to life itself.
Socrates and Friends 