What does “Order” really mean?

This week Joe Biden gave a brief talk about the campus protests in solidarity with Gaza that have swept the country. He said a whole lot in a short period of time, but the sentiment that leapt out to me was encapsulated by two lines, “Dissent must never lead to disorder” and “We are a civil society, and order must prevail.” At almost the exact same time Republican Senator Marco Rubio released a statement saying that the pro-Palestine protests on college campuses represent a “complete breakdown of law and order.”

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Now, these sentiments weren’t shocking. In many ways this narrative feels as American as worrying about whether or not you can afford a medical procedure. Lying about student protesters, grossly exaggerating or even fabricating the level of violence that they’re engaged in, has been happening for decades and probably longer. Similarly, shifting the conversation from the actual atrocities that students are protesting, in this case both Israel’s genocide and the U.S. government and U.S. universities’ complicity in the genocide, to the behavior of the students themselves is not a new tactic. It has, in some ways, already been effective for those who don’t wish to actually reckon with Israel’s atrocities and America’s participation in them. We see article after article, conversation after conversation, about what chants college kids are using, or the one window broken on one college campus, instead of the eradication of hospitals and universities and human life in Gaza.

But then university administrators decided to make the decisive misstep – they decided to call the police on students sitting in tents. Now the world has seen hundreds and hundreds of NYPD officers invade Columbia University in response to student protesters merely occupying a building. Now the world has seen the LAPD relentlessly attack the Gaza solidarity encampment for hours, the night after doing nothing as a Zionist mob attacked the students. Now the world has seen that the “order” being discussed in Washington and in the media isn’t what we might have thought. After all, the students sitting in tents on college greens are actually far more orderly than cops swinging batons, and spraying mace, and firing a range of weapons, from rubber-coated steel bullets at UCLA to actually discharging a firearm at Columbia.

So what is this vaunted and cherished “order” that is so often discussed, if not simply orderly behavior, or behavior within the law? We got a good glimpse in the summer of 2020, as the George Floyd protests rose up across the country and the world. That summer Donald Trump would regularly tweet something along the lines of “LAW AND ORDER!!!” Sometimes it would just be those words alone, so potent was the message they conveyed. The emotional grip these words have on a good portion of this country is powerful, shockingly powerful at times. Even as police assaulted people across the United States that summer, illegally slashing tires, illegally kidnapping protesters, illegally aiming ‘less lethal’ munitions at the heads and eyes of protesters who were simply asking them to stop murdering, the words “Law and Order” still evoked something that supported police and denigrated protesters, for a wide swath of this country.

It didn’t actually mean “the laws of this country should be followed” that much is clear. The cop who murdered George Floyd was convicted of murder, after all, so the protesters appear to have been on the side of the law, on the key issue of police murdering people. We all know that was never what the declaration of ‘law and order’ was about. It was never really about adhering to the order of our legal system. Instead there’s an emotional, semi-covert meaning to the phrase. It means business as usual, it means keep it down, it means stop rocking the boat. It means the status quo, which can be immensely comforting for some people. It means, in truth, the overarching order of things — the order wherein the loud people must be quiet so others can quietly continue to profit.

Now, it doesn’t mean that to everyone. You, reader, might value order as well. After all, who doesn’t want stability in life? No one wants a world where we don’t know where our next meal will come from, or if our kids will be safe in our neighborhood, or if the fire department will show up when we call. It’s immensely reasonable to want these things – we all do. And that is part of why this rhetoric has historically been so effective. But is the stable, healthy society we all seek what is meant when people in Washington throw around “law and order” in response to student protests? No, very clearly not. While they intentionally use this phrase that can be so widely interpreted, this phrase that can mean what the listener wants it to mean, history tells a different story.

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From the very beginning the phrase ‘law and order’ was used as a weak facade over naked white supremacy. The first prominent politician to use the term in the modern era was Alabama governor George Wallace, who used the phrase as a political slogan and racist dog whistle in his 1968 presidential campaign. As Julia Azari describes, “Wallace supporters were concerned with the ‘erosion of the cultural values that underlay the social system’” most notably integration. Michael Kazin also explains how “slovenly and unpatriotic protesters” were a target of this rhetoric in the 1960s and ’70s, and the similarities to Trump speaking about Black Lives Matter protesters, or the way Palestine protesters are spoken about today, aren’t hard to see.

Richard Nixon also used the notion of law and order, and invoked it alongside the idea of the “silent majority” to draw a contrast “between counter-culture protesters and the mass of ‘ordinary’ Americans still leading orderly and traditional lives” according to Azari. We see, again and again, that what politicians want to tap into with their invocation of these words is those living within acceptable norms vs. those existing outside them, those going with the flow vs. those going against it. Nixon helps us to see that ‘order’ is perhaps more about being ordinary than about the law; it’s certainly not about what is right and good.

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In thinking about Nixon’s usage of the phrase, which I believe is what many people take “order” to mean, consciously or not—namely the ordinary operation and feel of society—the question becomes, what is ordinary? Today’s protests help us see that, while many people simply don’t want their daily lives disrupted, the ordinary routine of society conceals immense violence. Universities investing in bombs is more normal than students protesting said investments. The military-industrial complex making investors and some politicians rich is more normal than politicians voting against funding genocide. The order of society is more threatened by college kids protesting genocide than it is by the U.S. government repeatedly sending billions of dollars to the government perpetrating the genocide. That should indicate what is normal to the power structure here, and what underlies the order of things.

Of course that is not what most people think of when we think of order, or normalcy. A lot of folks very naturally worry or get perturbed when some group of people is disrupting our personal peaceful existence, our personal sense of order and routine. The problem here is that any meaningful change in this world requires disrupting a system premised on mundane violence. Meaningful change requires disrupting a system where spending a trillion dollars on war is just business as usual, where exploiting workers is just how our economy functions, where sending police after protesters is more normal than listening to people’s grievances. If we want a better society, there is no getting around the need to challenge the status quo, there is no getting around the fact that the current “order” of things conceals immense violence. Just because that violence is often conducted in offices, by health insurance executives and politicians and investors, and university boards, doesn’t make it less violent. In fact the harm done by people in suits is conducted on such a massive scale that it boggles the mind, and is rendered normal.

And this is why students are being met with such an immense and disproportionate police response. Their protests do threaten the order of things. They aren’t disrupting their universities nearly as much as the repeated police invasions are, but they are tearing an ideological hole in the fabric that holds the power structure together. Each student, each protest, reveals that the order, the ordinary functioning of our society, not only condones violence but relies upon it on a huge, horrifying scale. Each act of resistance reveals the truth that scares the ruling class – the truth that we can reject, disavow, and change how society is ordered. And, most dangerously, these students are making specific and concrete demands. They are demanding that money be removed from death-dealing. That demand cannot be obscured or wiggled around. And if that demand were to take hold more broadly, what might ensue? Might we, all of us, begin to see that we could divest from violence and instead invest in a world that is very different, a world where we are taken care of? Might we reject the current “order,” and replace it with something better?