The Pink Police of San Diego
1st May 2021
I’d submit that the most important political observation of our time is James Poulos’s theory of the pink police state. A pink police state, as Poulos understands it, is a regime that abandons political freedoms in exchange for interpersonal ones — a regime that exists not to preserve political liberties as conventionally understood, but to guarantee social entitlements. The pink police state isn’t concerned so much with whether the trains run on time or whether would-be invaders are kept at bay. No, what really matters is whether the citizens are being sufficiently “nice” to each other.