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A friend asked me why so many conservatives reflexively back the police while fearing the state. Aren’t the police armed representatives of the state? I’m gonna work this into something fuller, but here are my preliminary thoughts:
As a subculture and an ideology, conservatives show a clear deference to the police and law and order politics. Where the state represents tyranny, police represent the authority of the law.
See for instance these remarks William F. Buckley made to a police society in 1965. The quote begins "You cannot, protesting the enormities of your critics..."
Or Garry Wills in National Review melodramatically but self-reflectively defending the police, even when corrupt, as part of Western civilization against critique by James Baldwin.
What’s at play is a worldview that sees the federal state as a distant, abstract and the road to serfdom. By contrast cops are local defenders of (largely white) communities and property.
The structure of the police system in the US is relevant - since it's state, city and county based rather than federal (with obvious exceptions). In different localities, police reflect the interests of the politically, economically and historically dominant groups.
We can kind of see this dynamic at work in an article from National Review on state police power v. federal action over segregation at Little Rock in 1957.
The police are enmeshed in those white working- and middle-class communities and have their trust. Conservatives generally come from social groups that have positive traditions of police engagement. For example,...
in @TimLombard0's excellent Blue-Collar Conservatism, he locates law and order politics in Philadelphia in urban decay, deindustrialization and crime, but also partly in the traditions where the city’s white ethnic working class were the police. https://www.amazon.com/Blue-Collar-Conservatism-Philadelphia-Populist-Politics/dp/0812250540/ref=sr_1_1?dchild=1&keywords=lombardo+philadelphia&qid=1590700921&sr=8-1
For white in the Jim Crow South, the police maintained the white supremacist racial hierarchy. As the south suburbanized, the police protected private property and maintained the boundaries of privatized spaces. https://www.amazon.com/White-Flight-Atlanta-Conservatism-Politics/dp/0691133867/ref=sr_1_1?crid=1TWQIX98INLGP&dchild=1&keywords=white+flight+atlanta+and+the+making+of+modern+conservatism&qid=1590742114&sprefix=white+flight%2Caps%2C327&sr=8-1
Particularly through the controversial work of Heather Mac Donald, conservatives have emphasized their hard-headedness toward police maintaining the thin blue line.
Often middle class white conservatives universalize their experience with the police. They rarely have negative experiences with the police and treat this as normal. If something goes wrong, it suggests the victims must have done something. See this from Broken Windows -
Finally, historically and today, there is an assumption that police working in predominately poor and black or brown neighborhoods are effectively in a warzone. It follows that violent actions are therefore almost always justified. See these from National Review, 1992 -
This plays into long-term narratives of predominately white police officers policing urban “jungles” or “rough” parts of town, again protecting (white) property, space and communities from perceived threats.
Conservatives and conservative voters' experience is being the police and being protected by the police, not of being policed. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/true-crime/wp/2016/09/16/fraternal-order-of-police-union-endorses-trump/
In the conservative view, unlike the (federal) state, which represents tyranny and liberalism, the police represent law and order against liberal permissiveness and often racialized visions of crime.
Some brief caveats: there are plenty of libertarian critics of police, especially the “Warrior Cop.” There is also elite conservative criticism of the War on Drugs. Nevertheless, the difference between fearing the state and deferring to the police is real.
