Here’s the thing about violence, the state has an absolute monopoly on it. This might be the most important defining characteristic of a state, it’s the thing that’s allowed to do violence.

There will never come a time when the state says “our monopoly is over, you can do violence now.” They would march people into gas chambers and claim it was an important victory for law and order.

The state depends upon this social contract, we all agree to not be violent, they get to wield violence in the common interest. That’s sorta the deal.

If the question is “when will the average citizen be ok with violence against the state?” The answer is that for some it’s ok now, it’s been ok for a while. For some it will never be ok.

I think we are not yet at the point where a large portion of the population thinks it’s legitimate. But I don’t know how long that holds out. A lot of people will be unhappy or outraged with ICE but if they were truly targeting gang members or taking people in prison and deporting them, people aren’t likely to take up arms.

The quotas they are pursuing now are running headlong into reality. They can’t find 3000 people a day to disappear that are sufficiently marred by criminality that people will accept it. You tell a bunch of ICE agents and local cops they gotta start finding bodies, once they run out of the small number of people accused of crime in the immigrant population, they will start just looking for anyone to meet their quota. That’s why we are now seeing them raiding fields, and Home Depot parking lots.

People are a lot less accepting of this, community defense starts sounding very reasonable when it’s the nice guy that helped you build your deck and not a person rotting away in prison already.

Fascism’s great weakness is that it does not care about solving problems. The goal is to manufacture a convenient scape goat to blame problems on, then capture power by pledging to destroy that scape goat. Fascism does often achieve its aims, it destroys the scape goat, but since that had nothing to do with the original problem the problem persists. The bluff must continue though, so new scape goats are selected in an ever widening ring of state violence. The “worst of the worst” has already become “the guy willing to pick our food at slave wages.”

The question becomes, will the population become comfortable with the violence necessary to dismantle fascism before fascism destroys enough people that they can’t mount a sufficient resistance.