Rational people act according to the incentives they’re provided. If that incentive is “follow these new instructions/directives or you’ll lose your job” (or worse?) it takes an especially principled person to object.

It's less true every day, now that Trump is busy filling the ranks of the bureaucracy with people who respond to the loyalty-test question "Who won the 2020 election?" with "Donald Trump."

Well, no, but you could have the very rude awakening that the in-group that you thought you were part of is suddenly now more narrowly defined than you had deluded yourself into believing. “I’m one of the good ones” quickly receives the response “there are no good ones” once the dominoes start to fall. The curse of reactionary politics is that it always crumbles under its own weight of an ever-narrowing definition of the in-group.

Entities like the courts and law enforcement optimize for the retention of people who do what they're told and the turnover of those who have their own principals. And this is before you account for the fact that most people will do what they're told before they threaten their paycheck.

The police never but historically the military is less predictable. Militaries have their own cultures & norms, separate ideas of and sources of prestige & reward, commitment to the military as a valuable institution in its own right etc. Officers are also educated and high ranking ones are powerful political actors within their own domain in way almost no police are. This can really change their relationship and susceptibility to power and political influence.

These aren't universally positive attributes I'm not necessarily praising them. But militaries have come down into a very broad spectrum of positions around specific coups, revolutions, insurrections etc including abetting or openly joining them, both pro- and anti-democratic.

This is also why the second trump term has been so focused on officer purges! You definitely want the military to come down on your side and making sure all of its leadership is on your side is a reliable step if you can take it.

Americans should absolutely imo not be looking for their military to help them with the problems they're facing. But depending on the exact arrangement, people in other countries may have good reason to hope for that.

And definitely not religious preferences.

Our armed officers first and foremost protect capital. The constitution is what limits their conduct in that pursuit. I don’t believe that in a capitalist society any alternative is possible.

That’s not to say we shouldn’t have armed officers (or not have a capitalist society), we just shouldn’t allow rhetoric to convince us of some false ideal. The 3rd and 4th amendment have a spirit that should be much more embraced and expanded at the expense of law enforcement’s ability to do their “job”.

They've never done what they're "supposed" to do, though. While maybe not so egregious in the past, these eager violations from the police apparatus are a large part of why I'm an abolitionist.

> You're tacitly siding with whoever actually holds and wields the power.

No, I’m not doing that. I’m not even American. But I know that giving someone a weapon means they can eventually try to use it against you.

Both sides argument are springing up like weeds all over the various forums in the last couple weeks before a predicted major shift in Congress.

If you have deeply unpopular policies but only 1/3rd of the country is expected to vote, telling everyone their vote won't matter is the best stance to take.

> Or, more appropriately, on an election's notice.

That depends entirely on the degree to which those in power will respect the results of an election.

FBI in the 90's (maybe later). WACO, Ruby Ridge come to mind.