Editor's Blog
A lesson on politics, crime and public service from the US
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- Parent Category: Editor
- Category: Editor's blog
- Last Updated: Wednesday, 03 June 2026 17:45
- Published: Tuesday, 12 January 2021 16:26
- Written by Colin Sumner
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The far right lunatics in the USA are teaching the world, including criminology, a remarkable set of lessons. They are, in my view, as follows:
1 These are the serious crimes - sedition, insurrection, conspiracy to overthrow an election result. To understand them, you need historical and qualitative methods and good theory. The abandonment of theory in mainstream criminology has left it exposed as a state research bureau, often staffed today by ex-police, albeit reformers.
2 There is a line to be drawn between politics and crime, even if at times it looks blurred in some contexts. The bottom line about crime is that it is defined by the nation-state and is fundamentally there to protect both the state and its citizenry. Those exact words are key. In jurisprudence, criminal law is not to be abused as a political weapon, nor should politics be used as an excuse to abuse major criminal laws. The onus to claim otherwise is heavy and always on the abuser.
So, those Republicans who say 'let's move on, enforcing the law will only produce more violence' are jurisprudentially anarchic - because that response could only apply to very minor criminal offences. Inciting and attempting a coup against the state, or an insurrection, is hardly minor; indeed it is one of the most serious crimes. It would normally be met with superior force, state violence and followed with executions. So far, even the estimable CNN, the beacon of liberal media, has correctly limited itself to describing, and reacting morally to, the violent failed insurrection.
If the uprising had been driven by blacks or Marxists or Mexicans, they would now be mostly dead, and a fundamental value of societies would be articulated, namely that the established political order must declare where it stands and reinforce its values with force. Erecting the moral barricades of society is to draw its moral and political boundaries. If America does not punish Trump and only prosecutes the lesser protagonists, it would be saying it has no political boundaries and anything goes. It would lose its international role as 'leader of the free world' and internally would become a free-for-all, which is very different from the 'land of the free'.
3 A President inciting revolt against his own state must be outside the purview of citizens in such an affluent country, almost a shock in a society that thinks it has moved beyond the class and dictatorship structures of old Europe. In the UK, where we know that class still very much structures our society, intersected with gender, region, age and ethnicity. Arguably, the last autocrat here who deemed he had a divine right to rule, Charles I, was publically beheaded in 1649; although some might say the UK is now being broken up by another autocrat who has no head to lose.
The USA has to catch up. especially since it executed the Rosenbergs for being communist spies, arguably a less consequential crime in practice and effect than inciting an insurrection causing 5 deaths. After all, Trump liaised with the Russians too and may well have stood aside knowingly whilst the US elections were undermined! Sometimes, re-unification and healing can only begin through drawing a line in the sand to define the core rules and values of the state or other authority, including parents, and that always means strong legal action. Unity cannot possibly be achieved by permitting serious violence to run amok without severe legal censure and punishment for all involved. Indeed, I hear no one saying that the other perpetrators should not be prosecuted wiithin the criminal law. Why should Trump avoid criminal law prosecution? He is not king nor has any divine right to legal immunity.
4 The USA must grasp the nettle, look the devil in the eyes, and take the criminal law route to dealing with its current crisis. Sure, politics is involved, at least on the insurrectionist side, and obviously the state law enforcement were largely asleep so hardly politically motivated. Incitement to revolt is a serious crime. Indeed invading and damaging government buildings, Trump's own legislation declared, should get a minimum of 10 years jail. But politics is regulated by the criminal law, in various ways, ranging from election laws to laws against corruption and to preventing the overthrow of the state. If the state does not defend itself, it opens the door to further insurrection and provides no principles whereby power is fought for, in other words a general chaos and the demise of even functional democracy.
5 Criminology, especially American, must now revisit Beccaria's Enlightenment principles of criminal justice articulated in his 1764 treatise On Crimes and Punishments. Punishment must come soon after the crime; it should defend the social contract and be in accordance with the popular will in form and severity; it should serve the public good; it should re roughly equal to the harm done. This must now mean a programme of strict policing of racist policing and the routine punishment of police violence against black people, since it is now clear the US police are even reluctant to police white violence against the US state itself. Beccaria also believed strongly in the value of education to create a culture of justice and fairness. His whole philosophy, Wikipedia claims, gained some approval from Thomas Jefferson and Catherine the Great, and criminologists have long based their ideas of criminal justice around this great early work of enlightenment. Revisiting Beccaria would mean an instant legal censure for President Trump as well as prosecutions for the insurrectionists. And US criminology must now begin new programmes on the abuse of power.
6 Regression into barbarism and a rich man's anarchy in the USA matters because it will have mirror reflections in other countries. This means it must also be met by a global re-education programme, preferably driven by the UN via the universities and local authorities everywhere, on the value, importance and necessity of public service. That programme is urgent after years of brainwashing by bad news, television crime dramas and selective press punitiveness; especially in the USA. People have forgotten that public service and public funding are vital to prevent the wasteland of death and devastation that will come about through putting everything into private hands. To maintain the strength of the public realm, the crimes and misdcemeanours of the billionaires and corporations absolutely have to be regulated and punished - otherwise the planet will collapse as an eco-system and millions will die from pandemics and poverty. Our social world is public and far too important to return to private subjugation. Both Trump, Johnson and Bolsonaro have pursued laissez-faire policies that have caused tens of thousands of premature deaths: for that alone they deserve to be stigmatized and removed from public office. Environmental collapse is the most important form of social implosion facing us but the roots of that social disaster lie in the undermining of the public sphere, the rule of law, the principles of good governance and the centrality of public service.
