Backlash Politics

Heshel: I sympathize with your feelings entirely. But ….. well-ordered “lawn order” isn’t necessary for oppression; hell, it’s actually better for them, to hire a buncha yahoos and let ’em rip with no rules, right? Sigh.

One thing I’ve been thinking about: for generations people of color have put up with this oppression in America and continued to believe in the promise of the rule of law, and equal protection thereunder. One wonders if they’ll keep it up for the next 2-3 generations, if the GrOPers manage to pull off their National KKKonservative State. I mean, when you realize you’re in the majority, and still under the boot, the day comes when you decide to throw it off with violence. Thank goodness I’m old enough I won’t be around to find out.

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Ken L

Why do you think Republicans will be called on to explain and, if they are, will deign to engage in argument?

Riots won’t last til November though.

@ Holbo #7

Do they though? The closest analogue I can think of is the LA riots in 1992 and that didn’t help Bush, if anything it hurt.

I don’t know, all of this seems premised on the notion of a shared “mainstream” in political discourse that transcended the cleavages of the culture wars. I’m not convinced such a cultural consensus exists outside of the fevered dreams of the Buttigieg worshippers or the genteel pandering of Shields and Brooks.

Certainly Obama “should” have been that great unifier, but he wasn’t. The white suburbanites were supposed to welcome the chance to “get past” racism once and for all, but they just couldn’t. Obama won on the margins with a strong youth turnout and unbelievably lopsided minority support, but just because you can outvote racism, doesn’t mean you can vote out the racists. At least, not for long.

There has never been much neutral ground in American political discourse that isn’t vaguely phony and reactive — the sham bipartisanship of sucking up to power and wealth, whoever has it. Technocrats and plutocrats provide the perfect allies and shields for white supremacy because they embrace the logic of hierarchy and elite exceptionalism (where would “wonks” be without it?) while remaining self-righteously anti-political. They’re just doing their jobs, after all (Why can’t those people get that?). Any political challenge to white supremacy that succeeds will do so in spite of the mainstream consesnsus or the national “mood” or whatever euphemism we use for the dizzyibg double-talk of the distraction industry. Like with the Civil Rights Movement, the problem isn’t really with being heard, it’s cutting through the noise.

Personally, I think Trump’s “Silent Majority” isn’t a new version of Nixon’s 70s bloc, but actually largely the same people (and some of their kids), just 40 years older and still fighting a culture war they really thought they’d have won by now. Instead their grandkids (or somebody’s grandkids) are out warring on Christmas and getting gay married by lady pastors.

The median Fox News viewer is about 70. They’ve seen an incredible amount of social upheaval in their lives and opposed almost all of it. They were raised on the reactionary propaganda of a postwar “consensus” that never was. They went from Dragnet and Andy Griffith to Dirty Harry and Charles Bronson and now decades of CSI and Law & Order. Those and the nightly news, which is often worse. If you ask them about the crime rate, they think it’s still going up. Social discourse is worse than ever. Public morality is in shambles. Crime is out of control. Illegals are taking over. Liberals are letting it happen or worse, causing it. It’s a disaster and someone has to do something about it.

It’s not enough to just counter ideological and institutional white supremacy. Most of these people (somehow) don’t think they’re racist. They’re not looking to oppress anyone. They just grew up at a time when all social unrest was blamed on uppity minorities and big government liberal idiots trying to change things too fast and have never grown out of that mindset. Maybe they’ll change their thinking, but most of them would rather die, and they’ll get their way eventually.

In the mean time, we have to contend with a situation where the most reactionary and out of touch voting bloc – elderly affluent whites — is also the most powerful in our increasingly gerontocratic electorate. The staggering turnout imbalance between old white folks and young people of color (often about 5-1) has concealed the fact that the US is already run by a minority government with a weak democratic mandate.

If there were a “fuck voting” party, it would blow the other two out of the water. It would also be about 20 years younger and a whole lot less WASP-y. That’s where the true swing voters are and where the future of our country will be written (if their votes are counted, anyway). All these belated efforts to win back the Reagan Democrats are just a distraction from the real organizing work that needs to be done with people who haven’t already made up their minds Sanders shouldn’t have had to mount an “insurgency” to get the Democratic party to notice that young people have our own issues and all the subsequent establishment crowing about how young people didn’t “show up” for him just underscores the extent to which the young and poor have been deliberately shut out of the process. If we change that, we change everything all at once. The Fox News set is terrified of us for a reason, after all. It’s time we reminded ourselves what that is.

Interesting: so you simultaneously believe Republicans want:

‘holy shit, those people are out of control and we need law and order. Maybe that cop went too far but they arrested him. These riots show sometimes you gotta get rough.’

and:

“I expect Trumpists will be satisfied to see communities burn, pointing out how it is hurting those communities.”

and both in the same post.

If consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, you have a big, big brain….

anon

ph and Fake Dave are the most blatant about their contempt and hatred for humanity for electing Trump. Since Trump didn’t actually win the election, this is more about them than humanity.

On the general principle of white backlash? White backlash didn’t beat Obama in 2012 and it didn’t beat Clinton in 2016. I have not idea why anyone thinks the real factors in Trump’s Electoral College victory wasn’t first of all the Electoral College and the massive support from the wealthy, especially the free publicity from the media and the abstention Fake Dave admires so much (especially the drop off in black turnout.)

Nobody has done anything about the Electoral College or the Supreme Court and the candidate who talked the most about about that, Buttigieg, is perhaps the most hated white supremacist of them all. The overwhelming majority of political players, the acceptable ones anyway, believe the essence of democracy is overruling the majority lest the majority be so totalitarian as to mess with property. That’s why everyone elese hates Venezuela so much.

As to the whether Trump will be supported by the wealthy, I think it is clear the real Democratic Party, its rich donor-investor base, has split, largely for Trump. The remaining rich people like Bloomberg and Steyer have more interest in buying out the shell than supporting it. I’m sorry but I’m increasingly convinced reading twitter damages your brain, leaving you twitterpated. The correct response to Trump is to ignore him. The media will never starve him of free publicity.

And I think events are being misreported as we speak. The narrative is already that these are riots by the protesters. As I recall the Kerner Commission pointed out that most “race riots” involved white men entering black neighborhoods. The role of police attacking people and shop keepers attacking people and police/cryptofascist friends of police playing provocateur and police simply letting black neighborhoods burn (to heighten the contradictions, a ploy not limited to would-be leftists) is already omitted from the mainstream narrative. There is some pushback, but pushback practically never changes the record. People pushed back against the WMD in Iraq too. One of the shameful glories of bourgeois democracy is that you don’t need to censor the press, you just need to own it or pay for its advertising.

The last element in Trump’s victory, turnout, is being minimized as we speak. The white=white supremacy principle is not a very useful one. But the ferocious commitment to this kind of politics means that everything being said right now is about how no blacks should vote for white candidates.

By the way, if Trump’s imaginary victory were actually due to the filthy whites (all white supremacists,) getting all riled up and turning out for their vicarious tyrant, then a right wing economics, social liberal who sucked up to conservatives to keep them too somnolent to vote…why such a candidate really would be path to victory. But that’s not what happened and that’s why Biden can easily lose to Trump. I think this is not a problem for the one-time Democratic Party rich donor-investment base, because I think they’ve mostly gone over to Trump. Trump true support is the rich. Abusing white suburbanites for creating Trump is just a personal pleasure, not a serious political analysis.

My opinion, of course.

JH@8 “Yet the hell of it is: riots favor Republicans because they freak out white people and scared white people vote R. Nobody wants a ‘nice guy’ when there are riots that scare them.”

Absolutely true, indeed. But the question, from the currently, almost intolerably difficult present situation, might be: how can you convince those white people who are scared of incendiary black riots (I would suggest, the great majority but not all) that they are wrong to feel that way, that really there is nothing there for them to be afraid of?

A question that is much easier to pose than to answer.

@Hidari

The Nixon landslide was 1972. By contrast, the 1968 election, following on a summer of civil “unrest” or whatever word you prefer, was quite close, at least in the popular if not the electoral college vote, iirc. But as you suggest there are multiple factors at play here.

Chetan Murthy@2:

. I mean, when you realize you’re in the majority, and still under the boot, the day comes when you decide to throw it off with violence. Thank goodness I’m old enough I won’t be around to find out.

It shouldn’t take this kind of unrest to make the first point obvious; last year 19 unarmed black Americans were killed by police, but 38 unarmed white Americans were as well. The key difference is that a very large tranche of white Americans don’t view the sort of white Americans routinely killed as really being part of the majority because they don’t share the same socioeconomic class as them. Ofc, that sort of class bias is also why many white Americans don’t care about black Americans being killed either, because race is all too often treated as shorthand for class in interactions with police – so if police are killing them, they simply must be poor, predatory criminals who brought it on themselves.

As to the second point, unless you’re going to die of old age later today, you’re not too old to see this come to pass. Fascist groups of various persuasions and motivations are currently working to provoke live-fire responses from police in Minneapolis to let them “justifiably” shoot back and start the boogaloo. These aren’t all idle keyboard warriors, either (though some certainly are); there’s been plenty of sightings of far-right accelerationist provocateurs on the ground trying to escalate the situation.

I feel that there is a missed opportunity for class solidarity across racial lines in this.

From Wikipedia: “A database collected by The Guardian found that 1093 people in 2016 were killed by the police. The rate of fatal police shootings per million was 10.13 for Native Americans, 6.6 for black people, 3.23 for Hispanics; 2.9 for white people and 1.17 for Asians.[31] By total, police more frequently killed whites than any other race or ethnicity.”

Blacks are twice as likely to be killed by police as whites, who, in turn, are three times more likely to be killed by police than are Asians. So yes, there is an apparent racial component to this. But I wonder what the data would look like if you controlled for income, education, or other indicators of class. (I don’t have the answer, but I do know that Asians have higher incomes on average in the US, and they are the race the least likely to be killed by police.) Clearly, the police killings of blacks are not the modern-day equivalent of lynchings, where race–specifically, being black–was the overwhelming “risk factor.” There are just too many whites being killed, more in absolute numbers than blacks, for that to be the case. And whites are far more likely to be killed than Asians, so there is more to this than simple “white supremacy.”

I have seen international comparisons that show that the US is totally off the charts compared with other countries in killings of citizens by police. That seems to be the most glaring take away from the data.

While black families are more at risk to feel the pain of losing a loved one at the hands of the police, there are a LOT of white families feeling the pain as well. So looking at this solely through the lens of race seems like a mistake. There is a great opportunity here to reach across racial lines to address a common problem that, I think, is probably based on class.

Covington, Hands-up – the problem of being sure about highly incomplete narratives is a lesson some clearly feel the need to learn and relearn.

Just watched a video of ‘white men in MAGA hats looting stores in Cleveland in broad daylight, no doubt doing so to incite a race war on the direction of the WH.

50 percent of the comments here are reasoned and sensible, others among the silliest and self-indulgent I’ve read anywhere.

The big, ugly other shoe about to drop are the actual events leading up to the death of George Floyd. Understanding why and how he died has already been determined in the court of public opinion, as it was with the Covington kids. Hoping to deflect some of the outrage, the bosses decided to can the officers involved and to charge the officer who had his knee on the neck of Floyd with 3rd degree murder.

What does this mean? Well, if the video that’s surfaced purporting to show Floyd resisting arrest after being placed in a police cruiser turns out to be real, questions of justifiable force will change the legal landscape. Sadly, all the rioting and after the fact denunciations from one side and the next won’t bring Floyd back to life.

Believing that anyone wanted Floyd dead is, to my mind, a sign of a very troubled mind. I had a chat with a liberal who began the conversation by stating that Trump secretly wanted black people do die during the COVID epidemic, noting that of course he’d never admit publicly to the fact.

Nobody deserves to die as George Floyd did for any reason. Rioting isn’t going to help. Rushing to judgement is going to help. Proving the police wanted to kill Floyd is going to be extremely difficult. Charges will be reduced to manslaughter. Selling out to white supremacy, or a rushed prosecutorial decision initially. Firing the four officers involved? If Floyd resisted arrest, the fired officers will have a case for wrongful dismissal. More selling out to white supremacy, or a rushed decision to appease the mob?

Trump didn’t really win the election, 9/11 was an inside job, HRC ran a secret pedophile ring from the basement of a pizza shop, Trump is a Putin agent, Obama is a secret supporter of the Caliphate, COVID is a Chinese plot.

All this crap was alive and serves as a welcome distraction from the hard work of addressing real problems that exist in America and in other nations. Whether Trump wins or loses on the back of this current mess is immaterial, in a very real sense.

He’s already amply demonstrated the limits of his powers. Ditto Obama, ditto Bush and Clinton. The Lone Ranger isn’t coming.

We’re on our own.

One thing that bothers me about these protests (not that the protesters will care too much about what I think, but still), is that I’m not at all clear what the actual demands are. The Arab Spring protests had fairly clear demands (the people demand the end of the regime) and in Tunisia and Egypt at least, they got that (although it didn’t last long in Egypt).

The huge protests against the Iraq War had a very clear demand (‘stop the war’) which they didn’t get.

Occupy, contrary to popular belief, had a fairly clear and coherent set of demands (they didn’t get any of them, obviously). Same with the recent ‘Extinction Rebellion’ and the Gilet Jaunes (i.e. you could click on the relevant websites and find out what these people wanted). For ER and the GJ, of course, so far, their demands have not been met, or at least not fully.

What do the protesters want? And I don’t mean in terms of vague platitudes like ‘end police violence’ or ‘stop killing black people’: anyone could argue for that. I mean what specific policies are they asking for?

And before anyone starts to on about ‘revolutionary energy’ and ‘organising’ and so on: remember the women’s march of 2017* which remain the largest protests in American history. Did they succeed? Or fail? The question is of course meaningless, as they didn’t have any demands, so there is no possibility of ascertaining whether or not those demands were met.

*not many people do.

@18

To clarify, I don’t admire non-voters. I find them exasperating. I spent a year of my life trying to get San Diegans to vote for a mayor who would actually represent most of us only to get slaughtered in a special election with record low turnout. I’ve talked to hundreds, if not thousands,, of admitted nonvoters and hundreds more who said they would vote but evidently didn’t. It sucks when people don’t come through for us and the excuses they give for opting out are universally bullshit. Some people truly believe the bullshit, others just don’t want to admit how clueless they are. Hard experience has taught me that disenfranchisement is a state of mind. People don’t know how the political system works or believe it is rigged against them. It’s actually not easy to steal an election and get away with it, but as long as people think it is, it can have the same effect.

All of the above discussion is nice, but the fact is people who riot aren’t terribly concerned with the facts – they are tired of watching the same $hit over and over and having nothing get done about it.

Protesters are different. Protesters tend to have an interest in facts, debate and incremental social change. That’s why they protest, they still believe in the system. Rioters do not believe in the system, that’s why they riot.

Protesters help the democratic party. They always have. They call social issues to attention and by measures move the conversation towards addressing them (rarely as fast as anyone wants).

Riots on the other hand make most people shake their heads, especially people who know the value of a good protest. Riots are why the police put up barricades and bring shields and clubs when organized protests are set up (most of which are peaceful).

Holbo has it right. If the riots persist, it will be a positive for the Rs. Looting stores, smashing shop windows – that doesn’t stick it to the man. It sticks it to the sorry hourly wage people who have to clean-up after it. Burning a bus (Richmond, VA) sticks it to the mostly low wage workers who need buses to get to work.

Riots are just stupid. Protests can have value.

ph: “Believing that anyone wanted Floyd dead is, to my mind, a sign of a very troubled mind. ”

They killed him, quite deliberately. And the particular killer has a record, over many years, with nobody on the force holding him accountable.

“I had a chat with a liberal who began the conversation by stating that Trump secretly wanted black people do die during the COVID epidemic, noting that of course he’d never admit publicly to the fact.”

Of course he does. And white people, if it benefits him.

Trader Joe @34: You make it sound as if riots are a deliberate but incorrect decision by the rioters. They are not. It is precisely because they are an unorganized, uncoordinated, and spontaneous reaction to police brutality (as well as to economic exclusion) that you cannot classify riots as a political tactic. By all means punish those individuals who looted stores or engaged in physical violence, but to use the rioting as a reason to judge the rioters and accuse them of political stupidity is to miss the point entirely.

As an old white guy in a suburb/exurb, I in no sense feel a sense of danger from the unrest. Sadness mainly. I’m fully on the side of the demonstraters. OTOH, I’m very unhappy at the too frequent violation of social distancing. We, and especially they are going to pay a high cost for this. I think once panic about the second wave sets in, that it will have a major effect on what people think about this whole episode.

It is extremely difficult to even -read- this thread, when moral imbeciles like ph post here. Or maybe I should say: I’m so fucking infuriated, I can’t read past his excrement.

My theory is that Trump has become the Pennywise of the white affluent liberal brain. He is strong, lives in the sewers, and the adults can’t see him. The suburban householders, this November, are going to be living in a 40 million unemployed society plus. Their kids are going to definitely be home, their jobs are going to be part time, their healthcare is going to be in shreds, but otherwise, it is just like 1968. Those who voted for Trump will vote for Trump, come hell or high water – but suburbanites will have other things to think about than the luxury of indulging their always vibrant racism. And along comes Biden, with his compromise shoot em in the leg position, and his promise that if they close their eyes and wish hard, everything will go back to normal. Americans characteristically love this plea. Tinkerbell will come alive, Iraq will be a bountiful American ally, and all good things will come back once again to the suburban set.
But it will be hard, cause if Pennywise has a stake in his heart, are we supposed to like do something?
There, too, the Dems have the answer: they never do anything. So everything will return to normal in the land of dreamy dreams. Until the t party beta upsets the Dems in 2022, against all expectations. Who knew that the expert hand of Larry Summers on the tiller at the state department wouldnt be wildly popular? And so we nudge into the apocalypse.

Bob @26: “Clearly, the police killings of blacks are not the modern-day equivalent of lynchings, where race–specifically, being black–was the overwhelming “risk factor.””

Bullshit. 100% bullshit. What do we know? We know that white parents don’t tell their children how to behave around cops, so that they don’t get murdered. We. Know. This. We know that black parents MOST DEFINITELY tell their children this. We. Know. This.

Also, we know that many times studies come out that claim to show that white people are killed by po-po just as much as black people are; every time, when the details are delved-into, it turns out that the study was flawed.

I call bullshit. Stop gaslighting.

Gorgonzola Petrovna @ 47: Yes indeed it did. And this is an instructive lesson. What does it teach is? It teaches us that the police are not under civilian control. Not at all. Indeed, we have documented proof that in MPLS the police punished city councilors who tried to rein them in, by going slow on calls in their districts, and telling complainers to call their city councilors. Here you go:

https://twitter.com/MplsWard3/status/1267891869691850754

And what did the massive country-wide “police riot” teach us? That Trump already has his army of Brownshirts …. everywhere, in every population center, patrolling our streets day and night. So yeah, when “it happens here”, he has his Sturmabteilung, ready to go.

“It teaches us that the police are not under civilian control. Not at all.”

Were those four cops under control of Medaria Arradondo, the Chief of MPD? Or was Mr Arradondo completely powerless, as they were they hired, managed, and mind-controlled by Vladimir Putin and his minion Donald Trump? Or is Mr Arradondo himself (together with Jacob Frey, the mayor?) mind-controlled by Vladimir Putin? Enlighten me.

Gorgonzola Petrovna @ 50: “Enlighten me.”

Russian bot. Or sealion. either way, you’re not discussing in good faith. I posted the thread from Steve Fletcher (MPLS city councilman) which would have answered questions. If you did a -modicum- of research into what’s actually happening in MPLS right now, you’d (again) know the answers to your questions.

Sealion. Or worse.