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I am a pretty law and order guy. But there is something untoward about running for office on the idea of prosecuting person X or persons Y for activity Z performed prior to becoming DA. It is side we prosecute crimes; not men. This seems the opposite.
The basic premise of 'rule of law' is that the law/justice is 'blind' and every person is therefore 'equal' before it.
Even if we carve out certain practical exceptions the general shared delusion is that anyone who breaks a law is prosecuted for it and given the same treatment as anyone else breaking the same or similar law.
Due process and all that.
Making the law an explicitly politically biased institution is... well it breaks that shared delusion to the point where law is just another cudgel for hitting the outgroup. And since the law is dependent on that shared delusion (that and men with guns) to actually operate, it's fair to say we cease to be a 'nation of laws' in the scenario where nobody actually believes law is blind and people aren't treated equally before it.
Anarcho-Tyranny is a useful term for this, but doesn't quite express how corrosive this is to some very fundamental assumptions undergirding our nation.
Making the law an explicitly politically biased institution isn't anarcho-tyranny; it's unadorned "tyranny".
Sort of?
Tyranny tends to assume that everyone is still equal under the law, they're just all equally oppressed by the tyrant. If littering is punished by summary execution, at least you know that EVERYONE who litters gets the same punishment.
Anarcho-Tyranny captures the part where the tyrant in question almost entirely relaxes the rules around certain groups that have, for some reason, attained favorable status in the tyrant's eyes, whilst still claiming to vigorously enforce them for everyone else.
The tyrant isn't equal to everyone else under the law, otherwise he's not a tyrant. I'd say the tyrant's ability to decide on a personal basis who to oppress and who to favor is what makes him a tyrant in the first place.
If littering is punished by summary execution, and the law is enforced in a fair manner, it would be a very harsh law but not necessarily tyranny. In principle a democracy could have such a law if the populace voted for it.
Yes yes there has to be a tyrant for any of this to make sense.
The littering example is just to suggest the disproportionality of punishment.
Real petty tyranny makes it illegal to, e.g. insult or otherwise demean the tyrant, or requires housing of the tyrant's soldiers in your personal home, or seizes private land for the tyrants personal use, all under color of law.
Where the law is unfair and unjust on it's face.
Anarcho-tyranny requires that the law appears fair and legitimate (e.g., you have guaranteed "freedom of speech' under the law) whilst in reality the tyrant declined to enforce whenever it would be inconvenient to do so.
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