The Killing of Renee Good and the Dual State

A Pattern More of Us Need to See

By Jerry LeClaire

The Trump regime (and any regime) that wants to consolidate autocratic rule needs to preserve the function of the normative state, the state that works by the rules and enforces most existing laws—at least as they apply to the majority of people. Such preservation is necessary to keep the majority of population thinking, “That wouldn’t ever happen to me. My life isn’t affected.” If the regime moves too quickly in collapsing the normative state they will face anxiety and unrest in the broad population.

Meanwhile the regime itself functions in a parallel prerogative state, a state in which the regime can (and does) flout the norms in which the majority of the population still blissfully lives and believes. The only rule in the prerogative state is to obey the regime. They keep the two states as separate as they can by gaslighting the population, telling people they did not see what they clearly saw.

As David French put it in a New York Times Opinion on Monday morning:

One of the most heartbreaking aspects of the ICE agent’s video of the fatal encounter between Renee Good and ICE is that it’s plain that Good thinks she’s still in the normative state. She has no idea of the peril she’s in.

She seems relaxed. She even seems to have told the agent that she’s not mad at him. In the normative state, your life almost never depends on immediate and unconditional compliance with police commands.

But she wasn’t in the normative state. She had crossed over the border to the prerogative state, and in that state you can be shot dead recklessly, irresponsibly and perhaps even illegally, and no one will pay the price. You [the shooter] might even be rewarded with more than $1 million in donations from friends and allies.

The concept of the dual state was first articulated by Ernst Fraenkel, a fugitive from the Nazis, in a book published in 1941 entitled “The Dual State, A Contribution to the Theory of Dictatorship”. (Read online for free here.) In late March of 2025, for reasons that should be obvious to everyone at this point, the book was featured in an article in the Atlantic by Aziz Huq, who teaches law at the University of Chicago:

The book explains how the Nazi regime managed to keep on track a capitalist economy governed by stable laws—and maintain a day-to-day normalcy for many of its citizens—while at the same time establishing a domain of lawlessness and state violence in order to realize its terrible vision of ethno-nationalism.

On Monday “The Dual State” framework was referenced in several articles and Sub Stacks, including that of Doug Muder of The Weekly Sift. Now I cannot get the framework out of my head. The video of the killing of Renee Good in Minneapolis on January 7th clearly exposed the prerogative state to many of us quietly living in the normative state. It remains to be seen if the Trump, Vance, Noem, and the commentators on Fox News and other right wing outlets can lie and gaslight their way into citizens of the United States believing that Jonathan Ross’s actions were justified—that the killing was really part of the normative state we ordinarily rely on rather than a gross example of the lawless prerogative state within which the Trump regime operates. Can this heinous murder captured on video be the turning point that spotlights the regime?

Contemplate The Dual State. Share its framework with anyone who will listen before it is too late. I see it as a fleshed out version of Martin Niemöller’s famous poem “First They Came”. People still living in the normative state need a wake-up.

The people of the state of Minnesota remain angry and on edge. I have no idea if it will come to pass, but they may be so on edge that they will participate in a general strike this Friday.

Keep to the high ground,

Jerry

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