If nothing else, a rather embarrassing display of Brand's new age proclivities. If it was that alone, it would be best to pass over in silence. I But, "love the police", what's that about?
I've made my feelings about our constabulary known before. I'm more interested in Brand's politics of love. The four-letter word only gets a mention at the end of his video, but was integral to the subsequent rough and tumble on Twitter under the #lovethepolice hashtag. And love has been a recurrent theme in Brand's political pronouncements and writings.
Love, for Brand, is a warm fuzzy feeling. It is antithetical to anger: witness his deplorable commentary on an enraged woman, rounded off with an amateur psychiatric diagnosis. He is not alone in this: love is - by common popular consensus - a feeling. It makes one happy, and therefore causes thoughts of conflict or dissatisfaction to recede. This is only good news in a certain sense: if the state we take to be characteristic of our most intimate relationships is an emotion, then it inherits all the uncertainties and fluctuations of emotions: alien creatures that they often are. Nor is there any prospect for a politics of love that is anything other than deeply reactionary, reconciling us to our lot, at best encouraging us to win round our oppressors with fine words and coy smiles. The problem here is that, at the end of the day, when you have put a flower in the policeman's gun, he still has a gun.
For good reason then, a lot of left-wingers regard any use of the 'l' word in politics with suspicion. It speaks of patronising demands for the cooling of anger and the seeing of reason. Thus, for instance, one of Christie Moore's better covers:
Interestingly, there's an older understanding of love (what it is about the modern age that causes it to be de-emphasised is an interesting question). For Aquinas, as for an entire classical tradition, love is the willing of another's good. This is not simply a matter of feeling; love might render certain feelings appropriate, but then again the warm fuzzies might stop me being sufficiently clear sighted to see how to promote your good. It is certainly less fickle than is love on a purely emotive understanding. Nor is it a matter of doing whatever will make you immediately happy, or of treading the path of least resistance. Indeed, Aquinas - who considers himself bound to love his neighbours - takes this love to be compatible in some cases (a just war, for instance) with fighting them. If you are damaging yourself by oppressing and exploiting then I should stop you. And that might not be a pretty affair. Such is love.
This older politics of love, I would argue, finds its modern continuation in Marxism. For Marx, the bourgeoisie are alienated - they fail to flourish as human beings (or to realise their species-being, in the slightly less poetic terminology of the 1844 Manuscripts) because of the very social relations which consist in their exploitation of the working class. It's just that, tragically, this alienation can only be overcome by the victorious struggle of the working class against that same bourgeoisie. Appeals for social peace simply prolong the mutual agony.
The hard work of love involves a disillusioned confrontation with dehumanising power - yes, even when it is wearing a police uniform. Only on the other side of that will we be able to indulge the Brands of this world, for whom presently there is seemingly no structural injustice so great that matters can't be improved by a hug.
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