What is uniquely bad about the state of Missouri is that the state knew and acknowledged that these men were not guilty of the crimes that they were being accused of. The state specifically sought to prevent clemency for innocent people.
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It’s often called the “sheepdog mentality” but I prefer to swap out “mentality” for “delusion”: The basic idea is that there are three types of people: the vast majority of people are sheep, (fundamentally harmless and fairly useless) who are preyed upon by wolves (bad people) and must be protected by sheepdogs (“good guys” who are willing to use violence.)
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In short, Hawley is conflating the moderate position – “defund the police” – with the more radical position of “abolish the police.” These two policy positions are different, and while a number of police abolitionists view defunding as a good first step, there are also many people who support defunding without supporting abolition. Conflating the two is thus a way of discrediting the moderate position.
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Before I really get going on the speculation, though, I want to talk about the end-of-history fallacy. There is a tendency to assume that the present state of affairs is somehow the final form of the world, that history is the story of how this current moment emerged. But the monstrosity of our current moment is making this harder and harder to swallow: the covers have been ripped off and we can see the poorly-made Rube Goldberg machine of history for what it is.
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