Those who have kept up with the legislative handiwork of Republican state lawmakers in recent years will find much of this forthcoming book’s subject matter familiar. In Vigilante Nation, legal scholars Jon Michaels and David Noll point to infamous legislation like Texas SB 8’s bounty hunter abortion ban and Florida’s “Don’t Say Gay” law as examples of a disquieting trend of red states deputizing citizen vigilantes to enforce MAGA Republican policies.
Michaels and Noll specify four approaches the right is using to bring about what they term “Vigilante Democracy.”
Vigilante Nation: How State-Sponsored Terror Threatens Our Democracy
By Jon Michaels and David Noll
Atria/One Signal Publishers, 352 pages
Release date: October 8, 2024
“Dissenter vigilantism,” observable in the “Don’t Say Gay” bill and similar laws governing public school instruction, goes beyond reasonable allowances for parents to opt their children out of lessons, instead granting lone or minority objectors a veto power over school curricula and library collections.
“Courthouse vigilantism” describes laws that incentivize private citizens to bring costly lawsuits against those who aid and abet transgressions of the right’s moral agenda—such as people or institutions that help facilitate abortions, or schools that allow transgender student-athletes to compete alongside their cisgender peers.
“Street vigilantism” encompasses increasingly permissive self-defense laws, legislation that imperils public protesters, and, more generally, a rightwing propensity for “do-it-yourself justice” that has seen violent vigilantes like Kyle Rittenhouse feted by the Republican Party.
The final approach, “electoral vigilantism,” covers a range of voter suppression tactics, from the MAGA-led intimidation of election officials to laws like Georgia’s SB 202, which allows individuals to challenge an unlimited number of voter registrations. (Vigilante voter suppression is also the subject of the new documentary Vigilantes, Inc. by investigative journalist Greg Palast, which is certainly complementary material.)
Michaels and Noll explain that, by farming out enforcement to culture warriors on the ground, red state regimes not only save themselves some of the work of morality policing; they also exert more social control as the ever-present threat of vigilantes lurking about looms over doctors, teachers, librarians, and election officials. Under Texas’s SB 8, for example, widespread compliance is ensured not by abortion providers’ fear of state officials kicking down their doors but by the threat of ruinous litigation initiated by fellow medical staff, patients, and others in their midst.
Atria/One Signal Publishers
Vigilante enforcement has further advantages for Republican lawmakers. For example, it grants them means to better enforce policies in progressive pockets of red states, despite local preferences, and to disclaim responsibility for the actions of individual vigilantes who overstep while doing their dirty work.
Heavy on history, Vigilante Nation traces shifts in mainstream attitudes toward vigilantism over time and troublingly pinpoints the antebellum and Jim Crow South as the clearest historical parallel for the recent surge of legal vigilantism. And the authors are not alone in hearing echoes of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 in abortion bans enforced by citizen bounty hunters.
To Michaels and Noll, the January 6 Capitol riot and vigilante laws that have surfaced in its wake are products of a Trumpist right propped up by our system’s counter-majoritarian mechanisms and inclined to subvert the popular will to enact its agenda. With MAGA Republicans’ grasp on the levers of power slipping, they’re looking to sabotage the whole machine—that is, to undermine the institutions of a pluralistic, inclusive democracy.
In the book’s final part, the authors dismiss the ballot box, international community, and private enterprise as sufficient solutions to “Vigilante Democracy.” Instead, they espouse “blue state counterstrikes” against it, enumerating various proposals—including model legislation—for Democratic states to aid those affected by legal vigilantism while countering and penalizing the states purveying it.
Michaels and Noll acknowledge that some readers might recoil at their more drastic suggestions. But whatever one thinks of its prescriptions, Vigilante Nation aptly diagnoses a pervasive affliction of today’s body politic.