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I'm starting a new top-level regarding trigger happy Iceman meets wine mom in Minneapolis because, rather than debating the videos, I'd like to focus more on a compare and contrast to get a true culture war angle. People have made an analogy to the woman who died on Jan 6th but I don't think it lands strongly enough. Permit me to cut closer to the bone, friends.
The only fatality on Jan 6th was an unarmed woman being shot by a federal agent[1] because she was opposing what she considered an illegitimate government action. Liberals tearlessly argued this is what happens when you Fuck Around while conservatives argued she was righteously Resisting (TM).
Today the players are the same but the jerseys are flipped. Liberals cry with so, so many tears of empathy for the dead woman in the car while conservatives argue they were obstructing a legitimate state function and put the officer in danger and this is what happens when you Fuck Around.
In broad strokes it's clear neither side cares about democracy or rule of law per se. Conservative faith in rule of law evaporates when it says no to Trump and liberal empathy for the scrappy civil disobedients dries up when it's a Chud. Both sides are happy with mob violence when it's their side doing it and cry tyranny whenever they Find Out.
Identifying arguments as structurally similar is useful if you're studying how people argue, but it's not an especially insightful regarding object level disagreement. Certain patterns of argument frequently recur, but you can't substitute that observation for actually resolving the disagreement, because the substance of the disagreement is in the object level. The question of whether or not Ashli Babbitt was a traitor or a martyr depends almost entirely on whether or not you think the 2020 election was stolen*, not on whether or not you think it is legitimate to resist the government under at least some circumstances.
To put it another way: liberals and conservatives both generally agree that you are obligated to obey legitimate laws and you are not obligated to obey illegitimate laws** (and, indeed, may be obligated not to obey - 'orders are orders' not being considered a good excuse for bad behavior). Observing this doesn't help you adjudicate the differences between cases, because you still need to make judgments about the specific details of the case.
I don't think you can infer that from their actions. If you ask them, they will generally argue that their actions are upholding rule of law and democracy, and for the most part they mean it.
*one could conceivably argue that the shooting was unjustified and the insurrection was unjustified, but that seems to be a marginal position
**In reality, people ignore all sorts of laws all the time, including laws they don't really question the validity of (e.g. traffic laws), which also raises the secondary question of which laws are important enough to care about violations. One could think a law is legitimate, but the measures taken to enforce it are not
How does that not boil down to simply "the mob is right when it agrees with me over what laws are illegitimate"?
I think people generally feel like they're obligated to follow laws even if they disagree with them, and our opportunity to change them if we think they're unjust is through the ballot box. Of course, they feel this, but don't really mean it when it comes to some deeply tribal issues.
It can amount to that under sufficient dire circumstances. It doesn't have to boil down to that because no every instance of disobedience will take the form of mob violence.
I think the mistake you're making is thinking of support for "rule of law" as absolutist adherence to the letter of the law. This is a position that virtually no one holds and which is not practical in any event because laws are not code and require interpretation. When people say they support rule of law, it means they support an approach to governing that operates according to rules/procedures rather than the arbitrary judgment of individual leaders. It does not mean that they think any output of such a system is inherently legitimate.
Disagreeing with a law is not the same thing as believing it is illegitimate. I disagree with my local zoning laws, but I accept that they're a legitimate extension the county government's authority (which in turn is legitimate because blah blah blah...). On the other hand, if the county government passed a law making it legal to sell your children's organs, I'd consider that illegitimate. Which is to say, I don't just disagree with it, I don't consider it morally valid or valid manifestation of governmental authority. That in turn justifies more extreme measures to oppose it than zoning laws.
Settling disagreements via voting is preferred, but for sufficiently high salience disagreements it's not going to be enough (especially if - as is the case in the US - the electoral system has contested legitimacy). Also, as I alluded up above and in the edit I made after you commented, this is often resolve in a different way: simply ignoring laws you don't like and trusting they won't be enforced or loudly complaining when they are.
Which basically amounts to “red tribe can never enforce one of their key goals of reducing immigration.” And if that’s the case, why should red tribe be in a political alliance with the blue tribe?
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