Law-and-order discourse legitimated repressive state power made to seem normal and inevitable.

Evidence

PTC called this “transition from this tightening of control at the end of the 1960s into the full repressive ‘closure’ of 1970” (256) the drift into “the Law-and-Order Society” or, more simply, “Towards the ‘Exceptional State’ ” (268). This was “the combined effect of the ‘law-and-order’ led from on high, the sharpening of the legal engine … [and] the steady percolation of a conspiratorial reading of Britain’s ‘troubles’ ” (274). It legitimated “the recourse to the law, to constraint and statutory power” (273) as a way of effecting what could no longer be achieved by consent. “It … groomed the society for the extensive exercise of the repressive side of state power. It made this routinisation of control normal, natural, and thus right and inevitable. It legitimated the duty of the state … to ‘go campaigning’ ” (273). — Hall, Stuart, Essential Essays, Volume 1, 1065

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to Gramsci’s concept of hegemony and the distinction between rule by consent versus coercion, central to Hall’s intellectual project; resonates with the Frankfurt School’s account of legitimation. — connects to: Political figures who mock power while holding it normalize class rule — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 2263