The Libertarian Moment in Ferguson: Birth of New Politics?

My latest
Daily Beast column argues that one of the
key reasons events in Ferguson have started a tragically
delayed discussion on militarized policing is because “minority
outrage at police mistreatment has intersected with the libertarian
critique of state power in a way that has brought the concerns of
both groups to a national audience.”
Snippets: 

What has helped the story to go fully national, however, is that
the events surrounding it exemplify the concerns that libertarians
have been raising for decades about the militarization of police,
which has its roots both in the drug war and the post-9/11
terror-industrial complex. As my former colleague Radley Balko, now
at The Washington Post, has documented for years (first at The Cato
Institute, then at Reason, and most fully in last year’s
Rise of the Warrior Cop), “The buzz phrase in policing
today is officer safety. You’ll also hear lots of references to
preserving order, and fighting wars, be it on crime, drugs, or
terrorism. Those are all concepts that emphasize confrontation.
It’s a view that pits the officers as the enforcer, and the public
as the entity upon which laws and policies and procedures are to be
enforced.”

Balko is just one of many libertarians who worked to
highlight these issues long before Ferguson erupted. “Dress like a
soldier and you think you’re at war,” Glenn Reynolds, a law
professor at University of Tennessee and the proprietor of the
massively influential libertarian aggregator site Instapundit,
wrote  in 2006. “And, in wartime, civil liberties—or possible
innocence—of the people on ‘the other side’ don’t come up much. But
the police aren’t at war with the citizens they serve, or at least
they’re not supposed to be.”…

What Ferguson demonstrates is
how tightly related abstract concerns libertarians have about the
government’s power and the very real-life fears of police
harassment that many African Americans have really are. So too are
other issues of interest to both groups, ranging from school choice
to sentencing reform to occupational licensing. As these sorts of
newly recognized common causes filter through the culture, all
sorts of new coalitions and possibilities can come to fruition.
Glimpses of this are already visible in actions such as the
nearly successful effort by Republican Rep. Justin Amash and
Democratic Rep. John Conyers to defund National Security Agency
surveillance programs last summer.

Read the whole article.