On the nature of law, and its use in modern America

The following is a reddit post that ran longer than intended, but I think captures something I've been thinking about a lot.

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I think it's important that more people start to recognize a pervasive miscommunication that conceals one of the fundamental drivers of political conflict right now.

When a right-leaning person says that they support things like "law", "order", "law enforcement", or "the rule of law", they are not talking about a blind imposition of the official, written, government codes of law on all individuals regardless of circumstance.

They are talking about natural law. They believe that there is a specific way that all things are simply supposed to be. Who holds power to decide natural law is determined itself by this natural law, and the power they hold is owed to them by virtue of the fact that they intuit this law. They are attuned to how things should simply be, and know how to impose that on those who cannot sense it or choose to defy a social order that those in power simply know to be correct.

Who should marry whom? What opportunities, rights, and freedoms do each of us deserve? How much leisure time and to what compensation for our labors are each of us entitled? Natural law has decided all, and it is up to those who know it to impose it.

Ron DeSantis sees this law. Certain children don't know who they are supposed to be, and he will set them straight. Tucker Carlson knows this law. Certain Americans believe that they deserve assistance correcting historical inequities that place their children at a disadvantage in life, and Tucker's job is to alert those who know that these people deserve no such recompense because those inequities and their persistent legacy are the rightful inheritance of the recipients by natural law. They deserve the condition they're in. They were born to this injustice because the world IS as it is supposed to be and persist in it because they have yet to live their lives in a manner to which natural law bestows favor.

Arguments about the legitimacy of elections to the dangers of cancel culture all circle around the lack of awareness most people have that conservatives have largely agreed among themselves in the simple known rightness of their beliefs in how the world operates.

When Alejandro Villanueva says he enforces 'the law', he means he makes things how they should be. And how they should be is that he's in charge and the people who don't like that are by their defiance of natural law guilty of undermining the social order. And his attempts to isolate them from any power regardless of the written law IS an act of law enforcement.

Once you know to look for this use of language, the entire philosophy of people who claim to support "blue lives" but will support insurrection and violence towards those who oppose it makes sense. It's not hypocrisy. It's a different and terrifying meaning of the word "law".