Four thoughts on our current crisis
Notes on our current crisis as the nation is swept over with protests, riots, and a growing backlash against them.
Hello friends,
In this week's newsletter:
1) Four thoughts on our current crisis as the nation is swept over with protests, riots, and a growing backlash against them.
2) A Vox article I wrote about criminologists' concerns about spreading curfews across the US.
Important housekeeping: I was told by several people that last week's newsletter ended up going straight to their junk folders, which is unfortunate, and I hope it's not a consistent problem with this new email service. So here is last week's newsletter in case you missed it, and please add my email address — zeeshanaleem2@gmail.com — to your list of contacts / address book to prevent it from happening in the future!
4 thoughts on the protests, riots and the backlash
1. Keep your eye on the ball
There are a couple things I mean by this: First, there is a relentless torrent of highly consequential news developments happening right now, and, contrary to my usual position that people should regulate their news intake, I'd say it's very important to be extra attentive on a daily basis for the coming days. The rapid spread of urban curfews, Trump's announcement that he's considering using the Insurrection Act of 1807 to deploy troops in American cities, the coalescing of violent accelerationists on the left and the right, and the endurance of rioting have created a situation where things could turn extremely dark, very quickly. I'd say it's important to watch closely, discuss with peers, and adjust response strategies swiftly based on new information.
The second thing I mean by this is to emphasize a point I've made before: guilt is not a political program. I'm seeing lots of talk about introspection and reading lists on racism and black history, and there's value to that in some contexts, but I cannot overstate how misguided that is as a response to what's unfolding minute-by-minute in front of us. If you're seeing potentially once-in-a-generation uprisings for a just cause, widespread police violence, and a president calling for the use of overwhelming force to suppress them, the way to be useful in this moment is not to be binge-reading about the Civil Rights movement — it's working on the one right in front of you. You can use your body, your money, your voice, your networks and organizations to think about meaningful solidarity, effective dissent, and forming the right political and policy priorities. It's also a good reason to join or link up with organizations like a local DSA chapter.
2. Trump's law-and-order manifesto should be setting off alarms
I think Trump's Monday night speech on civil unrest is one of the most chilling pieces of oratory to come out of the man's mouth since he's been in national politics. If you haven't watched it, I strongly recommend watching it immediately (it's on C-SPAN here). In his speech, Trump declares himself "your president of law and order; calls the rioting "domestic terror"; refers to the loss of life as "a crime against God"; calls for the National Guard to "dominate the streets"; boasts about dispatching "thousands and thousands of heavily armed soldiers" to stop rioting; and inexplicably said that he was striving to protect American's Second Amendment rights — a non-sequitur whose most obvious function is to suggest that his political base should be thinking about their guns at a time of social unrest. As he delivered his remarks, federal law enforcement officials and military police officers fired projectiles and tear gas on peaceful protestors, in order to clear the way for him to walk to a nearby church for an awkward photo shoot in which he brandished a Bible for the cameras. A priest and a seminarian were expelled from the church prior to the photo shoot.
It was a law-and-order manifesto that strongly echoed his menacing 2016 RNC speech — but the difference is this time he has power, and a crisis.
Multiple Democratic lawmakers have deemed Trump's speech "fascist," former CIA analysts said it reminds them of "what happens in countries before a collapse." The administration is worrying me on two levels with its talk about cracking down on rioters: First, there's the specter of authoritarian repression. The Insurrection Act gives military units active law-enforcement status, and it can be used over the objection of a governor. It was most famously used to enforce desegregation in the mid-20th century, but it's also been used to suppress riots — it was last used in 1992 during the Rodney King riots. Trump has reportedly back off of considering deployment in the immediate future, but the threat has been made and it's still there. The FBI is setting up command posts in cities across the country.
The second concern is Trump's informal encouragement of law enforcement and right-wing vigilantes to view protestors as terrorists and to use overwhelming force against them. While his bluster on Twitter isn't a formal command, it's a cue to the police and counter-protestors to behave brutally. Trump is breaking taboos and giving license to his political base to fly off the handle — something that should be worrying not only in the immediate future but in the years ahead.
3. The outside agitator trope is insidious.
Many well-intentioned progressive protestors and politicians in both parties are converging on a strange trope: the notion that much or most of the rioting is really fueled some kind of inauthentic actor: an agent provocateur (undercover cop), a "privileged white anarchist," or a right-wing extremists. Depending on who's saying it, the framing and meaning are different, but it's all troubling.
I've seen a narrative emerge among progressives in the streets that peaceful protests fueled primarily by black people / people of color are being hijacked by white anarchists who view the situation as an opportunity to start fires, smash windows, fight with the police, and loot. This narrative argues that the white anarchists act boldly because they have the privilege of not fearing police brutality, and that they're undermining the "true" spirit of the protests to advance their niche political goals. Crucially, this dovetails with a narrative from Republican and Democratic politicians saying that "outsider" antifa anarchists have been the underlying cause of a lot of the disturbance we've seen, and are fueling the most destructive behavior.
While it's indisputable that protestors can afford to be more cavalier about breaking the law based on their racial and socioeconomic background, this analysis is wrong for a number of reasons. It's factually incorrect: while there are plenty of white anarchists running around, there's an abundance of photo and video evidence that people of color are heavily involved in property destruction and violent confrontations and so on. And initial reports from the Minneapolis police that most people arrested for rioting from out of state — implicitly presumed to be white lefties — turned out to be false.
It's not just inaccurate, though. It's also a set of claims that efface the political agency and intentions of black protestors. The implications of these — again, factually inaccurate — narratives is that white anarchists are coming in with a political agenda and hijacking and corrupting black protests. White anarchists are organized and ideological; black protestors have inchoate anger. White anarchists want to abolish the state; black protestors are merely angry and desperate and searching for an outlet.
In reality, white anarchists don't have a monopoly on consciously held militance. As Mark Bray, a historian at Rutgers University, told NBC News, there is "a strong police abolitionist sentiment throughout these protests that comes predominantly from the black radical tradition but also to some extent, from the anarchist tradition. And a lot of people out in the streets want to try to create a world without police."
Whether you call yourself antifa or not, setting a police station on fire is a radical rejection of American law enforcement. Whether you were radicalized through Bakunin, or Malcolm X, or both, or neither, smashing the windows of corporate chain stores is a very specific signal regarding the economic establishment. Note that random houses aren't being set on fire, and that street fights are directed at the police not just random civilians. This is not to deny the reality that one can bring apolitical intentions to looting, that small businesses have been vandalized, or that some militant behavior is poorly thought-out. But the clear patterns in who and what are being targeted in city after city has to feature prominently in analysis — and reminds us why, as the historian E.P. Thompson famously argued, that the very term "riot" obscures the historical reality that people have often used property destruction and violence as a form of direct action with clear goals. Simply put, there are people involved in these protests from a wide variety of backgrounds who are uninterested in piecemeal reform on mass incarceration and the degradation of the human spirit that surrounds it.
I want to dig a little more into the Democratic and Republican politicians who have been talking about "outside agitators" and claiming that anarchists crossing state lines have undermined "real" community peaceful protests. There's a history here — I recommend reading this article by Judd Legum in Popular Information. As Legum explains, the outside agitator trope has been employed historically by the political class to delegitimize big uprisings and downplay widely held grievances by blaming them on a small set of "outsiders" — a tactic that Martin Luther King Jr., who himself was deemed an outside agitator in Selma, explicitly rejected. It also helps create a rhetorical foundation for harsher crackdowns — governments can quash mass protests in the name of protecting their community from outsiders.
Moreover, it defies common sense when we're talking about protests in over 300 cities across the country, and scores of reported riots. How could they be primarily coordinated by "outsider" units of antifa, which is not an organization, but a description for an ideological orientation and protest style — and which operates through loose and often spontaneous networks?"
The last point I'll make is that people should be extremely skeptical of claims circulating on social media that undercover cops were starting the chaos. Umbrella man in Minneapolis was indeed a strange guy — and I wouldn't be surprised if he was a police officer. But suggesting that police departments across the country are systematically and covertly inciting riots is an extraordinary claim that both defies common sense (undercover cops at protests mainly try to surveil movements and identify leaders) and requires extraordinary evidence. A couple oddly edited videos online with no verifiable source do not "prove" this is happening across the board.
4. Strive to distinguish between the ethics of rioting and the efficacy of rioting.There is an ongoing debate about whether rioting will produce a backlash that ultimately backfires for any black liberation agenda. I've been reading about the issue, but I don't have a settled opinion on the matter. Some articles I'm reading include:
New York Magazine's Zak Cheney-Rice on how the rioters are not in the business of trying to gain sympathy — and reflect how inadequate peaceful efforts have been.
Princeton University's Omar Wasow arguing that he's found "a causal relationship between violent protests and the shift away from the Democratic coalition" in the 60s.
Historian of white backlash Rick Perlstein argue that "It’s simply incorrect to argue that mass political violence inevitably spurs a backlash that benefits conservatives."
The only thing I'll add for now is that much of the focus has been on the electoral scene, and I think inadequate attention has been paid to life outside of it. The argument put to me on Twitter is that riots are uniquely powerful in their ability to generate "serious debate." Undoubtedly. But one can lose a debate. One one side you have a predominantly right-wing federal government, the full power of the repressive state apparatus and an enthusiastic white nationalist movement that's primed for vigilante violence; on the other side you have a series of protests that are not exceptionally large in overall numbers and are — like the Black Lives Matter protests of years past — highly spontaneous, horizontally-organized, and lacking institutional infrastructure. The left overall is poorly organized. Power is stacked clearly in favor of the right.A measured use of government resources to suppress riots isn't cause for alarm, but an aggressive expansion of executive power, citizen surveillance, and legal penalties for dissident behavior is. My natural inclination is to caution against alarmism, but Trump's full-fledged embrace of authoritarian symbology makes it irresponsible to not game out a lot of scenarios. Some of them are very bleak.
Dozens of cities across the country are imposing curfews. Do they work?
I spoke to a few experts for this article for Vox on why they're concerning.