Republicans presumably value their safety from arbitrary violence as much as I do, but the Trump Administration, unlike its predecessor, is embracing Duterte. Why?
I think there are two reasons. First, the GOP tends to view drug abuse as being a moral failure, not a public health problem, which can be solved by vigorous law enforcement. (Alcohol abuse, of course, is on a completely different moral plane.) Second, Duterte didn’t increase the size of the state to deal with the issue-he privatized it! Yes, murdering drug dealers and abusers in the Philippines is properly viewed as a public-private partnership; the government provides the lists, legal immunity, and some resources, and the private sector takes it from there.
No wonder Trump likes it; it looks like his infrastructure plan.
Of course, the problem with privatizing criminal justice, apart from the question of whether the sanction is proportional to the crime, is that it permits private parties to act on inadequate evidence, and even to serve their own selfish interests under the pretext of fighting crime. And so, what you have in effect is the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre in slow motion.