The wave of protest and unrest in the wake of George Floyd’s killing by the police shows little sign of abating just yet. Unrest nationwide is, if anything, increasing as protesters are met with repression by the police. Civil unrest of this scope is unusual. The conjunction of mass protest and widespread disorder should be worrying to those in authority.
When property damage and theft happens as a side-effect of real mass protest, authorities in a democracy cannot baton, tear gas, or shoot their way to legitimacy. People want social order, but this isn’t like quelling a riot after a sports game. The key issue—as the Governor of Minnesota put it the other day—is that “there are more of them than us”. All the tactical gear in the world isn’t worth a damn, ultimately, if enough of the population ends up in open revolt against civil authority. There are just too many people.
That’s one reason the Army are on the scene already in DC. If the mobilization is large enough and it’s met with police repression and brutality—rather than some more accommodating strategy—then it will only take a few days before things seem to spin right out of control. The desire to present a “show of force” to protesters is understandable. It can be strategically sensible, too, insofar as it is aimed both at dealing with those in the streets and at securing the support of an approving audience who just want things to calm down. This calculus can change rapidly, however, as larger and larger numbers of people become directly and indirectly supportive of the protests.
Those actually running cities, and city police forces, are usually aware of this. Practical experience and decades of research makes it clear what’s at stake when “ordinary criminal behavior” is happening in the context of mass protest rather than as mere disorderly conduct. This is one of the reasons that authorities tend to blame “outside agitators” or “the media” or “protesters from out of state” as being the real cause of unrest. Protest organizers will do this too, often enough, blaming disorder on fringe groups or provocateurs who have illegitimately attached themselves to an otherwise peaceful protest. But if the bulk of a city’s population really is directly engaged in mass protest or indirectly supportive of it, and these protests are met with force by the authorities, then violent disorder will start to look less like pockets of disruption disapproved of by all and more like the loss of legitimacy.
In the United States, these pressures are exacerbated by racial stratification. The deep-seated racism of almost all aspects of U.S. life, and the residential racial segregation of many cities, makes it easier to mobilize the support of whites for the use of force in the name of social order. Even here, crises have been accommodated by efforts to redirect unrest towards an ordinary political process. The demand for social order without repression, after all, is not restricted to whites.
President Trump has no interest in routine politics. His instincts are authoritarian, his interest in the mechanics of governance is nil, and his attention span is minimal. He has been happy to cultivate the political support of the police and to egg on its paramilitary elements. Trump’s temperament intersects badly with long-term trends. The increasingly paramilitary culture (and equipment) of U.S. police forces has been noted by observers over the past twenty five years. The police were already aware that, thanks to astonishingly strong union contracts, weak internal oversight, and the doctrine of qualified immunity, individual officers would face no or minimal consequences for the use of excessive force, up to and including force that resulted in someone’s death.
Trump’s personal attitudes merely catalyzed what was already there. But it did so on both sides. Trump started out as a very unpopular leader and the scale of the economic crisis accompanying the COVID-19 pandemic has made everything much worse. Structurally, lockdown has put millions of people out of work. Contingently, the relatively small but highly visible wave of reopening protests threw the current unrest into sharp relief. In the former case, white protesters were allowed to vent their anger directly in the faces of police in ordinary uniform. Masked men with armalite rifles were permitted to walk onto the floor of state legislatures in the name of liberty. Such things are of course simply inconceivable in the context of black-led protest.
Thus were created the conditions for the fusion of mass protest and violent unrest. In the absence of mass mobilization for protest, imposing “Law and Order” by force is usually a politically successful tactic, at least in the short-run. The demand for order is the most basic demand of political life. But attempting to impose order by force when people are protesting in the streets en masse is much riskier, both for the leader wanting to “dominate” and for political institutions generally. A competent democratic leader may effectively de-escalate conflict and return it to the sphere of ordinary political struggle. Alternatively, a competent authoritarian may secure control of the police and military and get the backing of enough people to leave democracy behind. What you generally can’t do in a democracy, though, is “crush” or “dominate” real mass dissent purely by force without also causing political institutions to come crashing down around your head.
{ 104 comments }
Hidari 06.03.20 at 4:58 pm
I could be wrong about this, but my impression that the violent aspects of the protests are easing off? Certainly from what the New York Times says, today’s protests were mainly peaceful, and Mark Esper has ruled out the use of the Army on the streets.
It’s worth pointing out that the death toll from the LA riots in ’92 was 62, and that the death toll at the moment in the 2020 riots is 5 (so far) which is 5 too many, but puts things in perspective.
SamChevre 06.03.20 at 5:17 pm
In the former case, white protesters were allowed to vent their anger directly in the faces of police in ordinary uniform. Masked men with armalite rifles were permitted to walk onto the floor of state legislatures in the name of liberty. Such things are of course simply inconceivable in the context of black-led protest.
I am not as certain that this is entirely a black/white distinction, as there is also an orderly/disorderly distinction. (Richmond had both sorts of protests.) The armed protesters were VERY disciplined–I don’t think anyone threw so much as a paper wad toward the police or a window. The protest/riot last weekend included setting a house with children inside in a black neighborhood on fire, setting a city bus on fire (possibly injuring the driver–reports varied), and many, many cases of throwing objects of all kinds at the police.
It’s entirely possible to organize a protest that doesn’t turn into a riot.
Omega Centauri 06.03.20 at 5:59 pm
Its not clear how this is going to play out in terms of public attitudes. I’ve only my own conflicted feelings to consult. On the one hand, its clear this has gotten traction whereas other BLM protests have not. Thus there is the possibility for real change. On the other hand it has created an intolerable situation where several sorts of opportunists are causing real damage. Real fatigue is probably setting in too. “All right you made your point, now quit disrupting things and creating an environment that favors looters”. We also have the likely impact on the pandemic. These demonstrators are not taking sufficient social distancing measures trading off movement goals for personal and community health issues. Looking back a month from now, if a potent second wave of infection is causing real havoc and substantially delaying even limited re-opening, attitudes towards the movement may shift strongly against it. Too many unknowns to confidently predict how things will play out. But, don’t be surprised if this thing backfires bigtime.
PatinIowa 06.03.20 at 10:25 pm
I live in a predominantly white college town, with a Black mayor. The second ranking city official is an African refugee, a woman who wears a veil and has a distinctive accent.
The main demonstration had no uniformed police present. (I was there.) Except for the. reasons we were there, it was a lovely gathering.
It’s entirely possible for a municipality to interact with a protest in a way that doesn’t provoke a riot.
Later, about fifty younger people got into it with the police a bit. There was one window broken at, I believe, the city office building, by someone everyone who was there said was deranged, and whom people tried to stop.
I just went to the grocery store. It’s boarded up, because there was a rumor going around that three bus loads of “people from Chicago,” which is an Iowa dog whistle, were coming to loot in our town.
Seemingly responsible people believe that Black people from Chicago will drive past Michigan Avenue and Naperville to come loot us. Black people believe White people are racist.
I know what I think. You?
PatinIowa 06.03.20 at 10:27 pm
Editing error:
*Seemingly responsible White people … “
oldster 06.04.20 at 2:10 am
“The armed protesters were VERY disciplined–I don’t think anyone threw so much as a paper wad toward the police or a window. ”
Emphatically not true of some of the armed protestors, who confronted, yelled at, pushed, and struck police, only to have the police gently de-escalate the conflict.
Police know how to de-escalate. Watch it happen, when the suspect is white. Watch it happen when they buy Dylan Roof a meal after he gunned down 9 black people. Watch it happen when white people invade a state capitol and yell and scream.
The police know how to de-escalate. But when the protestors are black, they choose to escalate the violence instead.
Chip Daniels 06.04.20 at 2:59 am
I live in downtown Los Angeles in the heart of the protests and riots.
Those two words should not be used interchangeably.
I have personally witnessed how the marches which usually begin in the afternoon are a very mixed race affair, but as the evening wears on the composition of the crowd changes to younger, whiter, more aggressive and hooliganish.
The looting is done not as a spontaneous action, but by organized groups who trail along behind the marches like scavengers; They drive cars instead of walk, and the targeted stores are always a few blocks away from the main march, meaning they are not connected to the protest other than as parasites.
All of this is easily observable on tv, and makes it almost impossible to mount a credible charge that the protesters are just criminals and hooligans.
Last evening after the 6PM curfew, about 50 protesters gathered on the street outside my apartment and were surrounded by police, with backup from the National Guardsmen. The protesters were very young, maybe high school seniors or college age, mostly white middle class sort.
As the LAPD arrested them (without any violence thankfully) there were dozens of people leaning out of their windows of the surrounding buildings screaming furiously at the police and guardsmen: “Shame On You!” “Who Are You Protecting?” “Get Out Of Our Neighborhood!” and so on. The residents are mostly young white professionals.
I watched from a second floor window and was close enough to see the faces of the Guardsmen; Young, nervous, and most definitely uncomfortable in this role.
The shaming wasn’t from Iraqis or Al Queda or Taliban, these were young professional people, their fellow citizens, people who they might run into at church or a school parents meeting.
I can’t help but think that the fury and shaming of peers has an effect. Maybe the cops might sneer and mock among themselves but I doubt that any of the Guardsmen will go back home and brag to their friends about their time in LA, when the face who was screaming at him looked like his brother.
bad Jim 06.04.20 at 4:11 am
It’s going to be difficult to assess the extent to which the civil unrest contributes to a second wave of infection, since one was probably already underway in the wake of Memorial Day festivities and Pentecost church services.
Andres 06.04.20 at 5:45 am
Besides the injuries and the thankfully small number of deaths, there are numerous smaller side effects of the riots. Unfortunately, irritating and sanctimonious commentary on the protests is one such side effect:
“The armed protesters were VERY disciplined–I don’t think anyone threw so much as a paper wad toward the police or a window…It’s entirely possible to organize a protest that doesn’t turn into a riot.”
Of course, if the “protesters” are being supported by the powers that be as opposed to expressing outrage and opposition to those powers. The armed protesters demanding reopening behaved in a civilized manner because they think themselves as on the same group as the police monitors and the Republican politicians they were performing for. Would they have behaved in the same manner against a predominantly black police force led by black Democratic politicians, especially if the latter succeeded in passing some form of gun restriction legislation? Your guess is as good as mine. By contrast, the BLM protesters are driven by outrage against a racist police establishment and are not organized/led by a single political entity or even a tightly disciplined coalition of such entities. To expect that there will be no rioting under such circumstances is to live in a fantasy world, but then again, close to half of the U.S. already lives in such a fantasy world, thanks to Fox News and company.
“We also have the likely impact on the pandemic. These demonstrators are not taking sufficient social distancing measures trading off movement goals for personal and community health issues. Looking back a month from now, if a potent second wave of infection is causing real havoc and substantially delaying even limited re-opening, attitudes towards the movement may shift strongly against it.”
Yes, because it’s really irresponsible for very large crowds gathering in relatively small public spaces to not practice social distancing, and because everyone should have the skill of giving speeches or chanting loudly while wearing breath-restricting safety masks. Because people who are angry as hell and need to express that anger as a group large enough to no longer fear dying from the police should nevertheless still somehow be rational enough to show a healthy fear of COVID19. And of course the right-wing demonstrators who demand re-opening of the economy, guns in hand, are being quite moderate by comparison.
Just like in Chile, Brazil, Hong Kong, and other places, large numbers of people have decided, rightly or wrongly, that they would rather risk dying from COVID19 than risk either starving or homelessness because their diminished income is no longer sufficient to pay food and bills, or because they don’t want to live in a world where they can die from driving while black or making a face at a policeman while black, in the U.S. case, or dying in prison because you said something that pissed off the powers that be (in other countries). You can disagree with this decision, but to judge the deciders as behaving irresponsibly is to be seriously lacking in some basic elements of empathy and decency.
Chetan Murthy 06.04.20 at 5:50 am
SamChevre @ 2: “The armed protesters were VERY disciplined”
Well yes, and so were the BLM protestors most of the time. Until, y’know, the po-po started wilding on them. Or haven’t you seen the copious videos? And sure, we might believe that the po-po are attacking only out-of-control protestors, only we know that they’re also attacking clearly-identified journalists, along with camera crews, etc, etc. All clearly identified.
So here’s a different story that fits the facts: the po-po DON’T attack these WHITE gun-nut protestors, because they’re both on the same damn side. The po-po DO attack BLM protestors, b/c they’re the ENEMY. And journalists? Well, if you have the temerity to document the po-po on their wilding missions while they’re rioting, yeah, they’ll mess you up.
Oh also, copious documentation that the po-po are focusing on the nonviolent protestors, and leaving looters to do what they will. Gosh, does that remind me of anything? Oh, I remember now! ICE also focuses on law-abiding immigrants with families and jobs, and ignores the violent criminals. Gosh I wonder why? Maybe b/c if your goal is to fuck up people’s day, to put the fear of ICE (or the po-po) in some people, you’d best pick civilians, who won’t fight back. That’s what the po-po are doing, too: picking on nonviolent protestors, black people just going about their lives, and making sure they KNOW that if they try this shit ever again, there’ll be hell to pay. You don’t tell the po-po how to do their job, nosirreee you do not.
Chetan Murthy 06.04.20 at 6:24 am
SamChevre @ 2: “The armed protesters were VERY disciplinedâ€
I forgot to mention (b/c it was so obvious, but hey, you never can tell with people who prop up gun nuts): The very presence of such heavily-armed people was itself an act of terror. To pretend otherwise is bullshit.
MarkW 06.04.20 at 10:28 am
The good news here is that Trump in particular and Republicans in general are irrelevant the enacting the necessary reforms. That’s because policing in the U.S. is a local responsibility and Trump’s supporters are very thin on the ground in major cities (Chicago, for example, went for Clinton over Trump by a margin of 84 to 12). So although the Democrats who run America’s cities might have to wait until the current union contracts expire, they can refuse to negotiate new contracts containing those provisions that make it so difficult to discipline and fire bad, abusive cops like Derek Chauvin. And well before then, local officials can do things like getting rid of all the military gear and ending the use of dangerous nighttime SWAT raids like the one that killed Breonna Taylor. They can also stop ‘policing for profit’ by ending the use of asset forfeiture and excessive fines and fees to rip off vulnerable citizens. Will Trump and conservatives oppose these actions? Probably, but it doesn’t matter because Democratic officials who run the big cities really have no reason to respond to their concerns. In this instance, Democrats need to ignore Trump and just do what’s already in their power to do.
bruce wilder 06.04.20 at 12:54 pm
Americans are so propaganda-drenched, it is difficult to escape our assigned narratives long enough to take a gander at reality. Nothing is more stultifying than that greatest cliche of the American political discourse: blaming racism. We are so used to invoking it, we do not see how distracting and how paralyzing it is. (By design?)
Andres 06.04.20 at 6:06 pm
bruce @13: And Derek Chauvin was motivated by what? An abstract contempt for the rights of urban city dwellers? Is the greater likelihood of black people dying when encountering the police just a spurious correlation? Wishing racism away will not make it go away, no matter how much Fox News tells us otherwise.
Trader Joe 06.04.20 at 8:41 pm
@14 Andres
So what exactly is your ‘solution’ here? On multiple boards you seem content to defend crowds burning and looting things because “people are angry as hell” is there a point at which you will admit that the right to protest ends and the right for people to not have their property destroyed begins?
I’m not denying the outrage at all. I do get it and agree that by far the majority of protesters are doing the right things – but the lines of what people are angry about and what should be done about it are getting blurred. Its where this instance is superior to Michael Brown because that time there was ambiguity about what happened though this time there is not. That said even with a clear case of right and wrong, what’s the issue – racism? brutality? inequality? Yes, yes, yes might be the answer but they all demand different solutions.
Most people do want better (I want better), but right now all I hear is people yelling and breaking things. Is there any actual solution being proposed other than fire all the white racist cops and start over?
MarkW 06.04.20 at 9:04 pm
Andres @14: But we don’t have to make racism go away, we just need to either A) make the bad cops go away (whether they’re racist or just violent authoritarian a-holes) or B) make them behave much better (for fear of losing their jobs and cushy pensions). Or, obviously, some of both. And once the rules have truly changed and it’s clear that being able to smack people around with impunity is no longer one of the fringe benefits, then we should start attracting a different type of recruit.
nastywoman 06.05.20 at 5:19 am
@
”The demand for order is the most basic demand of political life”.
as the demand for chaos –
in the last ten years –
had become the most basic demand of the Intertubes –
and I know some guys who voted for Trump just for the ”LULZ” to see the whole deal go bet the cliff –
are…
you…?
sure….?!
oldster 06.05.20 at 11:20 am
One of the perverse pleasures of reading CT is that the commentariat skews so weird that when someone pooh-poohs racism, you cannot tell whether it’s for the normal reasons that people on other sites pooh-pooh racism — ie, because they are stone cold racists — or whether they have some récherché bee in their bonnet that has persuaded them that ackshualy the real problem is class not race, or ackshualy claims of racism are a propaganda front put forward by the cabal of international bankers, or ackshualy it’s explained by the intersectional imbrications of intersexual intertextuality, or god knows what.
When I see racist mistreatment of oppressed races by openly racist cops who spout violently racist ideology, then I am inclined to think that at least part of the blame should be assigned to … racism.
But that’s just the lazy uncritical thinking of propaganda-stultified old me, and I am sure that more profound critiques will expose my ignorance.
The fun lies in guessing where the critique will even come from. Trotsky? Mies? Butler? Deleuze? Picketty? Never a dull moment at Crooked Timber.
Ikonoclast 06.05.20 at 11:16 pm
The Black Lives Matter movement is very important and positive. The embedded and systemic racism in the USA, Australia and other countries is severe. However, even allowing for this, racism is still not the biggest issue overall. It’s an egregious symptom of an even bigger problem. Modern racism grew with the growth of modern capitalism; with its expropriation and oppression, its imperialism and colonialism. [1] Racism cannot ever be resolved under capitalism. While fighting racism we also have to go to the core and fight capitalism itself. Slavery, white supremacy and capitalism are inextricably tangled.
The inequalities both implemented by and further generated by capitalism underpin modern racism. Modern racism is structurally baked into the cake of capitalism and all capitalist inequality. Modern racism is not merely a civil order issue, or a policing issue or a justice issue. It’s a political economy issue. It is one form, and one of the worst, of the many forms of inequality under capitalism.
I’ll repeat it. We cannot solve racism under capitalism. This is just as we cannot solve the climate change crisis under capitalism. All of these terminal ills, for that it what they are if they remain untreated, are structurally guaranteed to continue under capitalism until capitalism itself collapses from its social and ecological unsustainability.
If people don’t want to face this yet (the ultimate complete untenability of capitalism) then they can take a step back and at least demand redress for economic inequality. Dealing with structural economic inequality will begin the process of rolling back capitalism and thus the other phenomena it plays such a large role in generating and determining, like racism. Of course, inequality will not be rolled back without the application of people power.
“The Apocalypse of Settler Colonialism: The Roots of Slavery, White Supremacy, and Capitalism in 17th Century North America and the Caribbean” – Gerald Horne.
“Virtually no part of the modern United States—the economy, education, constitutional law, religious institutions, sports, literature, economics, even protest movements—can be understood without first understanding the slavery and dispossession that laid its foundation. To that end, historian Gerald Horne digs deeply into Europe’s colonization of Africa and the New World, when, from Columbus’s arrival until the Civil War, some 13 million Africans and some 5 million Native Americans were forced to build and cultivate a society extolling “liberty and justice for all.†The seventeenth century was, according to Horne, an era when the roots of slavery, white supremacy, and capitalism became inextricably tangled into a complex history involving war and revolts in Europe, England’s conquest of the Scots and Irish, the development of formidable new weaponry able to ensure Europe’s colonial dominance, the rebel merchants of North America who created “these United States,†and the hordes of Europeans whose newfound opportunities in this “free†land amounted to “combat pay†for their efforts as “white†settlers.”
Omega Centauri 06.06.20 at 4:14 pm
15 Trader Joe.
A big part if the issue is the mythology surrounding the police. This has been sustained by political threat to any local politician who tries to push accountability by the police unions lobbying power. Accusations by the police union that a local politician is “against the police” have usually been fatal to his/her career. So accountability gets squashed. Now that myth has been killed -or at least severely damaged, and hopefully attempts at reform will now be allowed to proceed.
Hidari 06.06.20 at 5:27 pm
Maybe slightly off-topic, and who knows what will happen in November (‘events dear boy, events’) but Corey Robin’s comparison of Trump with Carter look better and better, at least at the moment.
Andres 06.06.20 at 5:43 pm
Trader Joe @15: I’m not saying there’s any solution other than the obvious gradual one: to remove bad policemen and make police departments more accountable to their local communities; though both will be made much more likely if mass disobedience makes clear to police and city governments that they have lost the trust of the communities they are policing. And I am obviously not saying that we have to let the rioters go unpunished (and needless to say, get irritated when anyone thinks that). Outrage is natural, but is not an excuse for violent acts; and businesses should have their property protected.
What I am saying, which you and a couple of other seem to be oblivious to, is that we cannot judge the rioters and preach to them that their actions are bad politics and bad health for that matter. It’s the kind of methodological individualist outlook on the world that I can’t stand, implying that only an individual’s decisions matter and not any of the circumstances that determined those decisions. Instead of preaching to rioters that their actions are counterproductive and worsen the pandemic effect, which however correct acts only to deny the legitimacy of their outrage, what is needed is to redirect the outrage into long-term action. And for that you need a network of on-the-ground activists that can channel outrage into civil disobedience instead of rioting. For you, me, and most of the other commenters on this site, our day jobs prevent us from doing such activism, but precisely because of that we should avoid getting on our high horse whenever we see the effects of the riots.
Mark Pontin 06.06.20 at 6:47 pm
oldster wrote: “…some récherché bee in their bonnet that has persuaded them that ackshualy the real problem is class not race, or ackshualy claims of racism are a propaganda front put forward by the cabal of international bankers.”
Wake up. There’s nothing récherché about the historical facts.
Racism in America was created by kleptocracy in America: in colonial Virginian times, the landlords who brought in the first Africans as slaves because they detested the costs of continuing to use indentured white folks as labor, and most especially those unpropertied white folks’ eventual preponderance in the lands the kleptocrats considered their own.
The U.S. declaration of independence in 1776 was written and enacted by more of those kleptocrats immediately after the Somerset case in 1772 made clear that the British empire would be winding down race-based slavery —
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Somerset_v_Stewart
And so it’s proceeded. U.S. history is not the history of democracy in America a la de Tocqueville, but mostly the history of kleptocracy in America.
We come to modern times and 2008, the greatest transfer of wealth from the masses of Americans to the kleptocracy in U.S. history.
You write mockingly: “ackshualy claims of racism are a propaganda front put forward by the cabal of international bankers.”
Clearly, the racism is truly built in to U.S. society at this point. Equally clearly, the kleptocracy had no problem installing the grandson of a vice-president of the Bank of Hawaii — a low-level member of the kleptocracy — in the presidency because he usefully happened to be nominally African-American and they could use that to shout “racist, racist” at anybody who pointed out that he was enabling the greatest transfer of wealth in U.S. history from the masses of Americans to the kleptocracy.
So, yes, just as in the old days the kleptocrats had no problems in creating race-based slavery to continue their rule, so today it “ackshualy” serves their purposes to have everyone pointing to racism and racists as the primary problem.
No. The real problem is, as it has always been, kleptocracy in America – the unbridled, psychopathic greed of the less than one percent of the population who exploit and loot the rest.
Chetan Murthy 06.06.20 at 9:57 pm
Trader Joe @ 15:
“Most people do want better (I want better), but right now all I hear is people yelling and breaking things. Is there any actual solution being proposed other than fire all the white racist cops and start over?”
Yes: https://www.vox.com/2020/6/5/21280402/8-cant-wait-explained-policing-reforms
That’s eight incremental steps. Of course, there are people arguing that that’s not enough, not anywhere near enough, and they’re right. But this is achievable -now-.
MarkW @ 12: actually, there are lots of things that Democratic mayors and governors cannot accomplish, because they’re determined at the federal level: Here’s two:
(1) qualified immunity: read about it: it’s a get-out-of-jail-free card. And SCOTUS has given it a green light over and over. Yeah, that needs to go.
(2) the ability of a cop who got fired in one jurisdiction, to get a job in another.
I’m sure there are other examples. For myself, I would want to see also the abolishing of city/state responsibility for police misconduct: if the cops aren’t going to police their own, then let them pay all damages (and lawyers fees) from their unions and pension funds.
But that shouldn’t obscure that Deray and others have a concrete list of actionable changes they want -now-. None of which involve “burn it all down and start again.”
Barry 06.06.20 at 10:22 pm
oldster 06.05.20 at 11:20 am
” One of the perverse pleasures of reading CT is that the commentariat skews so weird that when someone pooh-poohs racism, you cannot tell whether it’s for the normal reasons that people on other sites pooh-pooh racism — ie, because they are stone cold racists — or whether they have some récherché bee in their bonnet that has persuaded them that ackshualy the real problem is class not race, or ackshualy claims of racism are a propaganda front put forward by the cabal of international bankers, or ackshualy it’s explained by the intersectional imbrications of intersexual intertextuality, or god knows what.”
There’s a saying from the movie ‘ A Fish Called Wanda’, “Say what you want about National Socialism, but at least it’s an ethos”.
Some of these people (probably most) are simply racist, some are ‘racist curious’, some of ‘racist adjacent’, some people look for an oppressed group to defend, and decide that racist are the ones who need defense…………..
Forget it, it’s all racism, all the way down.
MarkW 06.07.20 at 1:25 pm
Chetan Murphy @ 22
“there are lots of things that Democratic mayors and governors cannot accomplish”
Perhaps, but there are a lot of reforms they could accomplish locally–arguably almost all of the most important ones. They can change local police contracts to make discipline and dismissal of bad cops much easier while modifying local rules for use of force. They can end the local use of SWAT raids like the one that killed Breonna Taylor. They can end the use of asset forfeiture locally to stop cops from ripping off citizens to pad department budgets. They can sell off their own forces armored cars and other military gear. And, yes, they can stop hiring cops from other departments who were fired for disciplinary reasons. No, they can’t stop the practice in general, but they can stop their own forces from hiring these bad cops.
Can they end qualified immunity? No. And that should be done (and probably will be — even before George Floyd, the Supreme Court was likely to take on qualified immunity cases this term). Yes, qualified immunity definitely should go, but it is a relatively small part of the overall problem. So by my count there’s actually just that one thing that state and local officials could accomplish on their own. Do you have more in mind?
divelly 06.07.20 at 1:42 pm
“…ability of a cop who got fired…”
E.G.
My cousin started as a FL State Trooper.
2 years on the job, he shot 2 motorists at a traffic stop.
It was ruled excessive force and he was asked to resign!
(imagine how egregious his behavior)
He was immediately hired as a Volusia County (Daytona Beach) Sheriff’s Deputy.
2 years later, same incident, same result.
Hired as Police Chief in a small Georgia town, from which position he retired.
Donald 06.07.20 at 3:48 pm
“ His instincts are authoritarian, his interest in the mechanics of governance is nil, and his attention span is minimal.â€
That last part is the good news. We might someday— maybe 2024– get a well disciplined fascist like Tom Cotton in there.
Stephen 06.07.20 at 4:13 pm
Ikonoclast@19: “England’s conquest of the Scots”.
As an Englishman with close Scots relatives, I would be interested to know when you believe this rather unusual event might have happened: and if it had ever happened, what it would have had to to with American slavery.
Sceptically yours
Stephen
nastywoman 06.07.20 at 5:13 pm
@18
”One of the perverse pleasures of reading CT is that the commentariat skews so weird that when someone pooh-poohs racism, you cannot tell whether it’s for the normal reasons”
@19
”Modern racism grew with the growth of modern capitalism…”
@21
”Racism in America was created by kleptocracy in America…”
@23
”Forget it, it’s all racism, all the way down..”
If all of the above was a dispute if ”racism” is more or less for ”normal reasons” or more ”political” – do you guys know – that blond and blue eyed girls have very little problems with ”racism” – while it is a completely different… thing with blond and blue eyed girls travelling with NOT blond and blue eyed guys – and the weird thing –
It’s NOT ”some capitalists” – who create the most problems for bond and but eyed girl who travel with NOT blond and blue eyed guys?
AND so – I want the ObamaTimes back.
https://youtu.be/vGg0myZ7B9g
Ebenezer Scrooge 06.07.20 at 5:55 pm
Chetan Murthy @ 22:
Qualified immunity is a federal doctrine, applicable to violations of federal rights. The states can impose whatever kind of tort liability on cops that they choose to impose. That the blue states haven’t done so means that they have not wanted to do so.
Same with prohibition. The State of Euphoria might not be able to stop its fired cops from working in the State of Despair, but it sure can affect what goes on within the borders of Euphoria. Although some state home rule provisions mean this might require a state constitutional amendment.
pajaro 06.07.20 at 11:36 pm
Barry,
I like the comment, but you have the movie quote wrong. The National Socialism comment is by Walter Sobchak (played by John Goodman) in The Big Lebowski.
JimV 06.08.20 at 1:51 am
The great quote as I heard it was delivered by John Goodman’s character in the bowling alley in “The Big Lebowski” by the Cohen brothers, followed by “Nihilists believe in nothing!”. I don’t recall it in “A Fish Called Wanda” although “Nitz” was quoted by Kevin Kline’s character.
Some other good quotes at random (you probably had to be there):
Why’d you leave go of him? You’re gonna need both hands!”–“Winter’s Bone”
“Connie, I’m stepping on it, around it, and through it!”–“Unstoppable”
“Do I look like I’m negotiating?”–“Michael Clayton”
J-D 06.08.20 at 8:15 am
In Caryl Churchill’s play Serious Money, set in the 1980s in (mostly) London, near the end one of the main characters (a banker working for a US investment bank) makes a major speech in which he says ‘And the Tories romped back home with a landslide victory for five more glorious years/(Which was useful but not essential, because it would take more than Labour to stop us)’
If somebody told me that in the US kleptocrats regard Republican victories as useful but not essential, because it will take more than the Democrats to stop them–well, that’s plausible.
But if somebody told me that McCain lost the 2008 Presidential election to Obama because that’s what the kleptocrats wanted, that they actively preferred Obama to McCain, that the election turned out that way because the kleptocrats deliberately arranged for it as part of their preferred plan–well, that’s not plausible.
J-D 06.08.20 at 8:20 am
Oddly enough, perhaps by pure chance, there is a speech from A Fish Called Wanda which is pertinent here. It’s the one in which Wanda says this to Otto: ‘Now let me correct you on a couple of things, OK? … Those are all mistakes, Otto. I looked them up.’
PeteW 06.08.20 at 11:20 am
@23
Barry, I think that movie is The Big Lebowski.
Trader Joe 06.08.20 at 11:50 am
@22 Chetan
Good link. Thanks for sharing. Its one of the most constructive discussions I’ve seen. Hopefully it will get some traction.
To be fair, the quality of protest improved quite a bit over the weekend…its the sort of outrage mixed with constructive criticism that has the potential to achieve results of the actual sort rather than the “do something symbolic” type that politicians so adore.
Gains won’t be achieved today or this week, even the best of these ideas (in the article) will take a bit of time to implement and see results but its a better dialogue and maybe the mean time to the next failure (which will also happen) can be longer than the days it currently seems to be.
Hidari 06.08.20 at 3:06 pm
@29: Definition of conquest: ‘the subjugation and assumption of control of a place or people by military force’. If you want to be pedantic you could put ‘threatened’ in front of ‘military’ but apart from that, yeah, that’s pretty much it. Of course one should really add ‘and Welsh’ at the end of the original statement.
Chetan Murthy 06.08.20 at 8:06 pm
This Amanda Marcotte piece resonated with me: https://www.rawstory.com/2020/06/black-lives-matter-activists-were-perfectly-positioned-to-expose-trump/
To MarkW and Ebenezer Scrooge, three things: when you point at “Democratic Governors&Mayors” and “Democratic States”, saying that they could enact changes, and since they do not, this means that they like things this way,
(1) Jesus, it’s like “Murc’s Law” all the way down. I mean, police unions
have agency in this. Are you not familiar with the way they handed deBlasio his balls in a pretty little box, during his first term? Jesus guys, try to keep up. Ditto, that thread from the MPLS city councilman — are you DENYING that these sorts of things happen? There is enormous evidence that police forces and unions are completely beyond democratic accountability.
(2) what you should be saying is “Democratic voters in Blue States and cities”. And yes, there are lots of liberals who believe the po-po are without stain, and vote that way. “Law and order” works on Dem voters, too. We get the tribunes we deserve. Don’t blame “the Dems” — blame white voters and their bad choices.
(3) And those voters are starting to shift. They see now that authoritarian police forces are a danger to their own pretty little lives, too.
One last thing: with you guys, it’s like when we learn that there are many anti-majoritarian choke-points (the EC, the Senate) in American federal government, you respond with “well, the Dems must want it that way, hengh hengh FART”. It’s a pretty juvenile way to approach structural problems in our government and polity. And it will accomplish nothing. It’s a good thing that BLM doesn’t have this sort of attitude.
Chetan Murthy 06.08.20 at 8:12 pm
Trader Joe @ 37: This sort of goes to the OP in a way. I too feared/felt that the po-po were bearing down with massive force (unchecked, unregulated, uncontrolled (hey, let’s slash a buncha tires why not?)) as a way of provoking the sort of fear-centered response that they got back in 1968: white voters running to the right, into Trump’s arms. But it seems like that didn’t happen, and in fact, more protestors came out and middle-class voters got more alarmed by the po-po than by the protestors.
And so, the police dialed it back -a- -lot-. They still let their cosplay Rambos (that guy in Seattle with a gun, that KKK guy in Virginia running people over) thru, but by and large, the mass lawlessness of last weeks’ police riots seems to have subsided. Not for a minute do I think that this is due to some change in the protestors: I think that what’s happened, is that somebody sat the leaders of these riots down, and told me: “you overplayed your hand, and now you’re costing us more than you’re gaining us: SHUT IT DOWN”. And so they did.
1.5 weeks ago I was afraid we were looking at a 21-century Kristallnacht; now, I have some modest hope.
Chetan Murthy 06.08.20 at 8:14 pm
Oof, I should have been careful to be precise: I meant to write “leaders of these police riots down and ….”.
J-D 06.08.20 at 11:28 pm
1650 and 1651?
Nope, I got nothing.
Hidari 06.09.20 at 10:14 am
‘1.5 weeks ago I was afraid we were looking at a 21-century Kristallnacht’
No you weren’t.
tm 06.09.20 at 2:58 pm
From what I can see, it seems that this movement is tremendously successful. Suddenly everybody agrees major reforms are needed. Trump’s hatefult rhetoric has no traction (Hidari 21 I’m taking the bait – when did President Carter call for deploying the army against protestors?). The trollish NYT opinion editor got fired over his poor publication standards. And even internationally the movement is getting traction and is taken very seriously, e. g. in France and Germany. Surprisingly good news so far.
Hidari 06.09.20 at 4:23 pm
‘when did President Carter call for deploying the army against protestors?’
When was Carter in a situation where he might have felt that that was necessary?
Stephen 06.09.20 at 4:50 pm
J-D @42: 1650-51 as possible dates for “England’s conquest of the Scotsâ€
That’s the most plausible I could come up with, but as you are no doubt aware the decisive event in 1651 was the battle of Worcester, fought in southern England some 220 miles away from the Scots border, where a Scottish army attempting to march on London and instal a government acceptable to the Scots Presbyterians was utterly destroyed. After which, a largely unresisted Commonwealth occupation of Scotland was inevitable.
Wikipedia is accurate on this occupation: “The rule of the Commonwealth and Protectorate was largely peaceful, apart from the Highlands. Moreover, there were no wholesale confiscations of land or property. Three out of every four Justices of the Peace in Commonwealth Scotland were Scots and the country was governed jointly by the English military authorities and a Scottish Council of State.â€
The most objectionable aspect of the occupation was perhaps the Kinless Loons: English judges imposed by the Commonwealth who attempted to decide cases according to the evidence and the law, rather than by the traditional Scots criterion of who is related to whom.
In any case, it all ended peacefully in 1660. I think if you asked the average Scot “Are you aware that your country was conquered by the English†you would be met with, at best, incomprehension.
We agree that, whatever happened, it had nothing to do with American slavery (nor, till 1799, with Scottish slavery).
Donald 06.09.20 at 4:58 pm
“The trollish NYT opinion editor got fired over his poor publication standards. “
I will wait before believing that there has been any significant change at the NYT. I assume Cotton’s fascist piece got so much attention because he wished to bring that attitude to a street near you, but the NYT has published worse.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/18/opinion/israel-defend-gaza-border.html
Here are the first two paragraphs—
“ It is customary to adopt an apologetic tone when scores of people have been killed, as they were this week in Gaza. But I will avoid this sanctimonious instinct and declare coldly: Israel had a clear objective when it was shooting, sometimes to kill, well-organized “demonstrators†near the border. Israel was determined to prevent these people — some of whom are believed to have been armed, most apparently encouraged by their radical government — from crossing the fence separating Israel from Gaza. That objective was achieved.
Of course, the death of humans is never a happy occasion. Still, I feel no need to engage in ingénue mourning. Guarding the border was more important than avoiding killing, and guarding the border is what Israel did successfully.â€
I don’t want to thread jack, but there has always been his unconscious assumption on the part of NYT editors that it’s okay to advocate for state terror overseas. I am genuinely glad that some draw the line at doing this at home, but this new found set of principles needs to be expanded somewhat.
Chetan Murthy 06.09.20 at 5:18 pm
Hidari @ 43: Uh, I beg to differ, Hidari, I went on record with those fears, over at LG&M. You can search for it, if you wish. Really, get that telepathy helmet to the shop, it doesn’t seem to be working.
Donald 06.09.20 at 5:24 pm
I want to apologizemif my previous post was too close to a thread jack. I follow the ugliness of US foreign policy much more than I have followed the police brutality issue, partly because I am a privileged white person and have that luxury ( though I did have a weird encounter with some state troopers decades ago). Because of this when I see people rightly being outraged about Cotton’s piece it is easy to recall numerous similar or worse pieces that came out in favor of some atrocious policy overseas. There is probably a strong correlation between people who are apologists for brutality at home and brutality abroad and we upper middle class whites can ignore both if we choose.
Hidari 06.09.20 at 7:18 pm
‘ I think if you asked the average Scot “Are you aware that your country was conquered by the English†you would be met with, at best, incomprehension.’
And the key phrase in that sentence is, of course, ‘I think’. Or, even more accurately ‘I think…..’
Andres 06.09.20 at 8:32 pm
Chethan Murthy @39: sigh I think I will have to coin something called Murthy’s Law: the belief that only the Democratic Party leadership’s opponents have agency and that the Dem leadership is totally constrained by circumstances into a pre-determined policy.
Look, I get that the Democratic party is constrained by outside factors such as the electoral map, the campaign financing system, the pre-George Floyd unaccountability of police unions, etc. None of those things excuse the Democratic party leadership from acting like a center-right political party (note: center-right means neither racist nor neoliberal, so don’t defend against the wrong accusation) on either domestic policy or foreign policy; I already spoke my piece on foreign policy in an earlier thread and won’t belabor that now.
It is true that the gerrymandered House and Senate prevent the Democrats from having effective policy-making power in Congress, resulting in both an emasculated healthcare reform and a hostile Supreme Court. It is true that the electoral college gerrymandering of votes plus the winner take-all compulsion on electors prevents a strongly left-wing candidate from hoping to be President, and often screws mainstream Democrats like Gore and HRC as well. It is true that a strongly left-wing candidate will scare away Wall Street campaign financing money. It is true that a highly conservative news media is hostile to strongly left-wing candidates. It is true that the virtual autonomy of police departments/unions has prevented effective Democratic oversight of police until now. None of those things are in dispute.
But what I have not heard from any recent prominent Democratic politician, not Obama, not HRC, not Gore, not Kerry, not Biden, not Cuomo or DeBlasio, not even Sanders and Warren for that matter, is that the combination of these constraints means that in effect the political system is rigged, and that therefore those who wish to defend economic and political justice need to peacefully take to the streets and organize systematic methods of disobedience. Over the past few weeks, it is the non-violent demonstrations that have led the Democratic party “leadership” rather than the other way around. All of the police reforms that are being carried out or proposed now have been proposed by on-the-ground activists and demonstrators; they have not been the initiative of higher-level Democratic politicians. And to the extent that Democratic politicians make statements in support of “rule of law” (a dog-whistle term similar to “states’ rights”, which points the police to committing violence with impunity), they are acting in a counterproductive manner, no matter how much they think they need to do so to maintain electability.
The last time the Democratic party led progressive economic change was during FDR’s era, and FDR was lucky in that he benefited from political backlash to the Republican-caused Great Depression and from the Democratic party’s still tacit support for segregation; racial equality was the one cause not addressed during his terms in office, though that dynamic started to change as early as 1948.
Since FDR, I would argue that there has only been one real progressive Democratic politician: Martin Luther King, and not surprisingly he never held any elected office. But he achieved something that JFK and Johnson could never have achieved on their own: the Civil Rights Act and the end of de jure segregation.
The Democratic party leadership is still committed to working exclusively within the rules of a highly undemocratic, quasi-authoritarian political system, and by doing so it is acting to validate that system. I hope that some Democratic politician in the future has the courage to challenge that system even if that means he cannot run for elected office.
To look at it from the very long-term perspective. there have only been three periods of truly transformative, progressive political change in the U.S.:
Early reconstruction in the aftermath of the Civil War.
The post 1932 New Deal.
The late 1950’s-1960’s civil rights movement.
Everything else has been status quo maintenance at best and often violent backsliding at worst. And none of these three transformative changes were accomplished exclusively by electoral means. Even the New Deal was backed up by waves of strikes and demonstrations by the unemployed to the point where Republicans started to worry about being stuck in 1794- or 1917-style cataclysms.
To believe that the Democratic party will by itself, using only electoral/legislative tools, be able to change the awful state of this country is to engage in highly wishful thinking, sorry to say. Of course, putting together a systematic civil disobedience campaign is incredibly hard work and also has the odds stacked against it, but it is, in my opinion, the only way to help push progressive politicians over the line.
Tm 06.09.20 at 8:33 pm
Donald, you are making my point. The NYT has published terrible stuff before but this time, there are consequences. This movement has the moral high ground and strong popular support. It can actually get results. Finally.
J-D 06.10.20 at 12:02 am
I don’t know what the average level of Scottish historical knowledge is, but I also don’t get how it’s supposed to be relevant. The 1650 battle of Dunbar and the 1651 siege of Dundee happened, independently of how many Scots are familiar with these facts.
Chetan Murthy 06.10.20 at 3:19 am
Andres @ 51:
“The last time the Democratic party led progressive economic change was during FDR’s era”
I fear we’re wandering off the OP. But still: uh, maybe your understanding of the history is …. mistaken. FDR is the one who famously said (to a bunch of activists who excoriated for his lassitude) “I agree with you; now make me do it”. We get the tribunes we deserve, and in the case of the Democratic Party today, the -electorate- is evolving faster than the party can keep up. Even in a small lily-white Texas town, we learned in American History that FDR’s policies were the BARE MINIMUM, and that when he got a chance (1937, IIRC), he reverted to balanced budgets and fiscal restraint, with the predictable dire results. We learned that in truth, his half-measures were enough to stave off revolution, but really, the thing that saved the American economy was WWII, which made massive Keynesianism palatable.
Another thing: you seem to have forgotten what happened in the 1980s, when it went in the opposite direction, and the Dems were locked-out of the Presidency for 20+ years (except for Carter, which was a special case — I mean, Nixon was … special). The Dems had to move to the right to -survive-. And just to be clear: the -first- job of a pol is to get elected: because if you can’t get elected, you can’t do -shit-.
Maybe listen to some political scientists and historians, eh? Those are actually fields of study with standards and people with deep knowledge. Also might want to look up “Green Lantern-ism”.
Chetan Murthy 06.10.20 at 3:26 am
Andres @ 50: Here’s another example: Here’s Jim Clyburn (very high-ranking Congressional Black Caucus) member, pushing back against “defund the police”.
https://thehill.com/homenews/house/501972-house-democratic-whip-pushes-back-on-calls-to-defund-police-we-need-to-focus
So what’s your theory here? Is is a turncoat? Been rich so long, he’s forgotten his roots? Or maybe, just maybe, he’s thinking about what is -achievable- with the electorate he goes to the ballot with, and not the electorate he -wishes- he had? Maybe, just maybe, his judgment about what the (white) American electorate will accept, is more …. dour than yours.
I know which judgment I’ll bet my money on.
P.S. And in case you think that perhaps he’s forgotten what it is, to be a black man in America, go google Senator Tim Scott and interactions with the police: you’ll find a video wherein he discusses the many, many times that Capitol Hill and Senate police and security have failed to recognize him (and assumed he wasn’t entitled to be where he was): Tim Scott, the only black Republican Senator, and the Senate parking garage attendant couldn’t recognize him. Imagine it. So no, there’s no way that Clyburn has forgotten what it is, to be a black man in America, notwithstanding his high office.
nastywoman 06.10.20 at 6:54 am
@51
”To believe that the Democratic party will by itself, using only electoral/legislative tools, be able to change the awful state of this country is to engage in highly wishful thinking, sorry to say. Of course, putting together a systematic civil disobedience campaign is incredibly hard work and also has the odds stacked against it, but it is, in my opinion, the only way to help push progressive politicians over the line”.
In other words you want some kind of ”revolution”?
Right?
Once upon a time I wanted that too – and then the REVOLUTION came –
much HUUUGER than I ever thought.
(- and perhaps you have missed that WORLD WIDE and COMPLETE deconstruction of the Status Quo? – if you were – in Sweden? in the last three month?)
As I was so lucky -(accidentally being locked down in Germany) that NO other than the impersonated Status Quo called ”Angela” – saved me from – how did you call it:
”the systematic civil disobedience campaign”
BUT I still sometimes dream about ”a good and not as deadly revolution” and as I know that my sister AOC will become the First Female US President – I don’t worry so much about the Democratic party.
Hidari 06.10.20 at 8:30 am
@51
Biden is more or less obviously running his campaign on the, so to speak, ‘covert’ slogan ‘I am not Donald Trump’.
One can imagine an Onion parody of the Presidential debates in which, on being asked any question on any topic whatsoever, Biden will say ‘blah blah blah blah blah etc. etc. blah blah drone drone drone but may I conclude by pointing out that I am not Donald Trump’ and that this his answer to any question on any topic.
Tm 06.10.20 at 12:22 pm
@Hidari I don’t get what this “comparison of Trump with Carter” business is about but it gives me an opportunity to let Carter himself speak:
“As a white male of the South, I know all too well the impact of segregation and injustice to African Americans. As a politician, I felt a responsibility to bring equity to my state and our country. In my 1974 inaugural address as Georgia’s governor, I said: “The time for racial discrimination is over.†With great sorrow and disappointment, I repeat those words today, nearly five decades later. Dehumanizing people debases us all; humanity is beautifully and almost infinitely diverse. The bonds of our common humanity must overcome the divisiveness of our fears and prejudices.
“Since leaving the White House in 1981, Rosalynn and I have strived to advance human rights in countries around the world. In this quest, we have seen that silence can be as deadly as violence. People of power, privilege, and moral conscience must stand up and say “no more†to a racially discriminatory police and justice system, immoral economic disparities between whites and blacks, and government actions that undermine our unified democracy. We are responsible for creating a world of peace and equality for ourselves and future generations.
So let’s imagine Jimmy Carter ordering a protest teargassed in order to hold a Bible for a photo op. He too might have come “in a situation where he might have felt that that was necessary”, yes? (I assume this is not the point you are trying to make but then what is your point?)
Hidari 06.10.20 at 2:26 pm
@58 https://www.jacobinmag.com/2017/07/donald-trump-republican-party-jimmy-carter
nastywoman 06.10.20 at 3:03 pm
@58
(I assume this is not the point you are trying to make but then what is your point?)
Hidari is one of these US Dudes who have this illusion that you can compare a Carter and a Trump – or a Obama and a Bush – or even an Obama and a Trump if you concentrate on just ONE issue: ”DRONES”!
Wait?
There were no DRONES in Carters Time BUT there was WAR –
Right?
And as I once was a Fan of Glenn Greenwald –
(before he started to yell: Obama is just like Bush!) I in the meantime have learned that a lot of different ”things” makes a Human being – and if you just like to stare at goats – I mean DRONES – you might have missed –
that it would have been important too –
to stare at ”Racism” too!
steven t johnson 06.10.20 at 3:13 pm
Several notes on the politics of disorder: First, the protesters and the looters are not the same category even if the mass media has been careful to identify them. This is right-wing, that is, mainstream, propaganda. For centuries, every time soldiers started looting, they had stopped fighting. Battles were apparently lost this way, as when the Persian right stopped at the Macedonian camp instead of swinging into the rear of Alexander’s center at Arbela (or Gaugamela if you prefer.)
Second, the “demands” are astonishingly non-political. There is an effort to focus on “defunding” the police. The point is that no one really knows what this means, any more than they know what it means to say “abolish the police.” There is a reason there is no specific demands, like disarm the police, or even demilitarize the police.
Third, the claim this movement is against “systemic racism” is pretty much false. Systemic racism is not about white supremacy as the purpose of white people and everything that currently exists is the product of their white supremacy. You could say things like the police tacitly turn poor black neighborhoods into open air drug marts so that locals can work for the banks that launder the profits, which are conspicuously not, not, not being taken by them. Or you could argue that community militias can maintain public order, while professionals without the power of arrest investigate crimes, then prosecutors petition militias to arrest the alleged perpetrators for trial. Or a dozen different things, very few of which anyone, especially not anyone wealthy and powerful, are interested in. Streaming “Just Mercy” for free isn’t a political debate, much less a political program.
Chatter about systemic racism at this point is meant to divert attention from politics, to turn it into a crusade against the evil minds. Telepathy not truly being available (even if you could trust the telepath not to lie,) this isn’t going to work. Good will won’t fix it.
About the only quasi-political analysis on offer is stuff like Mark Pontin. Kleptocracy, is not actually a thing. The claim that the Somerset decision meant the British Empire was threatening slavery in America (which includes the Caribbean by the way,) is nonsense. The slave trade wasn’t immediately threatened, much less slavery. Ending slavery in Scotland, effectively at least, waited til 1799. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colliers_and_Salters_(Scotland)_Act_1775)
Further, mass resistance in the colonies long preceded Somerset, in particular over the Stamp Act. In addition to the real, current, tangible threat to local vested interests from British taxation, the proclamation line of 1763, barring settlement where it would requires costly Indian wars, really did threaten the speculative interests of men like George Washington.
Most importantly, if Somerset’s imminent threat to slavery was the reason for wanting independence, then plainly the colonies most committed to slavery were the ones to take the lead. And the revolution would have broken out in South Carolina (as in the nineteenth century!) And the victory of the revolution for slavery would have resulted in the strengthening of slavery. The truth instead is the revolution started in New England. The counter-revolution, loyalism, was strongest in the slave South and New York City, the great entrepot of the South. And the victory of the revolution culminated in a wave of manhood suffrage and slave abolition.
Most of all, perhaps, if the slavers were intent on leaving the abolitionist British Empire long before it actually abolished anything, why on earth would they have united with colonies that were actually abolishing it? This is all bullshit, and bullshit isn’t politics, it’s just bullshit. Bullshit never helped anyone except swindlers.
[The Constitution was a sharp right-ward turn, not least because it was designed to support slavery in the South, while supposedly allowing the democratic parts of the country to do their own thing. The goal of unity was ultimately empire, of course. But anyone who tries to pretend democracy isn’t about “us” versus “them,” is lying. A major part of the problem is the counter-revolutionary commitment that pretends the Glorious Revolution or the Constitution or the Directory are desirable precisely because they suppress revolution. Thus, the convention in Philadelphia is held to be the culmination of the revolution, instead of its interment.]
Murc’s Law is more swindling twaddle from Lawyers, Guns and Money, always a go to place for gilded turds. Andres is correct about the implicit corollary of Murthy’s Law.
But I will add that there is a powerful tendency to blur political issues by falsely attributing agency to people who simply don’t have it. A particularly comical example is Scott Lemieux snarking about the Minnesota State Police slashing tires….to conclude this means the Minneapolis Police Department, a separate agency, should be defunded. But the bland assumption that white people do things like undermine local employment in black neighborhoods by denying them loans (redlining etc.) is pretty much the same thing.
The political principle is always the same: If “everybody” is guilty, then no one is guilty. And the point of this is the same, no matter what is claimed, namely, to leave things unchanged. Because systematically converting the evil souls of the people is not going to work, never has and never will and, as these kinds of people mutter quietly to themselve, “Thank God, it never will.” If you are doing real politics, you start naming names at some point.
Last and least, I think Andres forgets that Johnson (not so much Kennedy,) did rather more than suggested. Even more I think a large part of the reason was not King, nor even urban violence, but the competition with the USSR and China. Formal equality is very much a democratic thing, but real equality is the socialist thing.
Andres 06.10.20 at 5:35 pm
nastywoman: It’s hard to take umbrage with your comments if they make me smile even when they are intended as criticism; I think you’re just a softie deep down ;-)
Yes, call me naive, but I think a revolution is the ticket; not the 1650, 1794 or 1917 kind mind you, but the 1965 one. Without such a revolution, the deconstruction of the status quo as you call it will feature names like Orban, Erdogan, Bolsonara, Putin, etc; von clownsticks who have a little more between their ears than ours does. And only such a revolution, combined with the Republicans choosing a batshit crazy nominee who makes von clownsticks look mild (think Goldwater back then or Cotton now), will result in us having President AOC.
Of course I’ll take Impersonated Status Quo Angela, or any Democratic candidate over the Republicans or their European imitators. The problem is that in the U.S. unlike Germany, the political system has turned against candidates of the ISQ Angela type. Instead, we have von clownsticks, the Kill-Democracy Senate, and the Sexual Assault Supreme Court. You can thank Murdoch, Ailes, Koch and Lapierre Attorneys at Law for that; as long as they write the laws and the political discourse, any ISQ Angela-type candidate will accomplish exactly nothing even if they get into the White House.
Andres 06.10.20 at 5:57 pm
Chetan Murthy @54. Er, I think you are proving my point. What FDR said to A. Philip Randolph was more long-winded than your pithy summary, but he did say and it illustrates my point that Democratic politicians, even presidents, will not accomplish progressive political change or economic reform unless they are pressured from the ground up; the political system does not permit them to do so otherwise, and to believe the contrary is to be naïve. And of course, you need a president like FDR who is genuinely radical deep down rather than a status quo conservative such as the current and the last Dem presidential nominees.
Once again, with feeling: the New Deal happened not just because we were lucky enough to have FDR as the Democrat in the White House, but also because (1) Republican economic policies were in deep discredit after the Great Depression and (2) a wave of strikes and other labor organizing, plus peaceful demonstrations by the unemployed (punctuated by the actions of police-headed goons like MacArthur), made the pressure for economic reform impossible to resist. The Civil Rights Act happened not just because we had the right Democrat in the White House but because (a) there was a Democratic majority in Congress after Republicans had shot themselves in the foot by nominating Goldwater in 1964, and especially (b) because the civil disobedience spearheaded by King (and given extra media ammunition by Bull Connors and company) had effectively pressured Congress and LBJ to Get Civil Rights Reform Done.
But in both cases, the Democratic politicians did the officializing and rubber stamping rather than the leading. I will likely continue to criticize the Democratic leadership for in the foreseeable future because they do not push for their political base to engage in non-violent civil disobedience in the face of a deeply authoritarian and oligarchic political-economic system.
Andres 06.10.20 at 10:13 pm
Chethan Murthy @55. Is it me or did you not read the article you cite carefully enough? Here’s the part that sticks out at me:
“While speaking on NBC Tuesday, Clyburn cited the decision by officials in Camden, N.J., in 2012 to dissolve its police department due to systemic failures. Clyburn said that the case involving Camden was about “defunding a department” and that the city still funded policing in the area.
“No one defunded policing. They defunded a rotten department, as it should be,” Clyburn added. ”
Which means that Clyburn is not speaking out against defunding. He is only speaking out against defunding policing which is a very broad term, and which no intelligent protester is proposing. I mentioned earlier that local communities need to be ready to set up their own local police forces if the protest against racist policing turns out to be a long-haul struggle.
Here is the basic dichotomy. Police departments across the nation need to set out basic reforms. An incomplete portion of the laundry list includes:
Prohibiting chokeholds, tasers, and other potentially fatal subduing techniques.
Banning the carrying of lethal weapons (i.e., handguns) unless there is probable cause (and probable cause being more than just the officer’s say-so).
Banning vets with combat experience in Afghanistan and Iraq from doing on-the-street policing beats.
Zero tolerance (i.e. removal) for individual police officers that have been subject to multiple complaints.
Ending the extensive use of military hardware by police, as well as the more violent anti-riot hardware (e.g. rubber bullets).
Making police departments and police unions much more accountable (i.e. removable) to their city governments.
The clear message to individual police departments should be: either adopt such reforms or (a) be disbanded by your city government, or if the city government won’t do this, (b) face complete non-violent non-cooperation from the population being policed and (c) have local communities raise their own volunteer police forces as substitutes, while also refusing to pay taxes to state and city governments, and while also starting ostracism campaigns against the city police force, including businesses refusing to serve police officers.
Maybe Clyburn doesn’t have this radical strategy in mind when he opposes the defunding of all policing, but he does not oppose the defunding of individual police departments and the above paragraph is the logically consistent outcome of the conundrum: how to generate sufficient political pressure to end racist and/or violent police practices.
MarkW 06.10.20 at 10:13 pm
Chetan Murphy @39
“And those voters are starting to shift. They see now that authoritarian police forces are a danger to their own pretty little lives, too.”
OK — wouldn’t you at least expect that shift to happen earlier and faster among white urban Democrats than among white non-urban Republicans? And wouldn’t that shift make it easier for those urban areas to take on reform of their own police forces than it would be to do it nationwide (where the non-urban conservatives are likely to present a much greater obstacle)?
Chetan Murthy 06.11.20 at 12:17 am
Andres @ 50: And another example:
https://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2020/06/public-support-for-cutting-police-funding-is-low/
J-D 06.11.20 at 1:00 am
On the one hand, elected politicians do choose between courses of actions, and different politicians make different choices, so election results do make a difference. On the other hand, election results are not the only things that make a difference, and other activities as well as electoral politics have effects in social and political change.
At an individual level, people who want to contribute to social and political change may have sound strategic reasons to put their effort into electoral politics or into other activities or into both; neither is necessarily futile, but nothing is a panacea.
More specifically (and specifically for Americans), it’s folly to suppose that electing Democrats can ever be enough by itself to solve your country’s social and political problems and also folly to suppose that electing Democrats makes no difference at all.
Chetan Murthy 06.11.20 at 4:19 am
MarkW @ 63: “OK — wouldn’t you at least expect that shift to happen earlier and faster among white urban Democrats than among white non-urban Republicans?”
Until very recently, it didn’t happen among even white urban Democrats. We’ve all been caught by surprise, that so many white people are angry and demonstrating against police brutality and (!!) for Black Lives Matter. So sure, if white urban Democrats shift (and don’t backslide) we can hope for change in cities. But again: remember the cautionary lesson of deBlasio: he went from a campaign of “get the cops under control” to “yes sir Mr. Bad Lieutenant, thank you may I have another”. He’s pretty damn craven these days, isn’t he? Look at that mayor Brown in Buffalo, with his bootlicking behaviour towards the po-po. Another Democratic mayor. There’s that old saying about going bankrupt: “slowly at first, then all at once”. Hopefully, we’re in the “all at once” phase. Hopefully. Just …. I think it’s pretty unreasonable to expect politicians to be able to predict these things: nobody else did, either.
Look: I’m [pretty damn] brown. Browner than many, many American “black” people.
And all I know about the po-po, is that if (knock wood) the time comes, I will be screaming “I’m Indian, I’m not black” and praying that they don’t murder me. [And a relative said to me: “Don’t expect that to count for much.” And I don’t, but I’d still do .t]
And y’know, I’m both ashamed of that, and angry that that’s what it might come to. Because I don’t wanna be murdered. So when I defend the position that the (white) population is going to be hard to drag along, I hope you’ll understand that I wish they weren’t: I don’t want to be murdered. But I’m being realistic.
Another example: I live in SF. Recently (for reasons connected with Covid) I got a Nextdoor account. I had to disable that sucker after a few weeks: JESUS, what RACISTS. And this in oh-so-liberal San Francisco. I think committed leftists just don’t recognize how racist the general white population still is. Still Is*. You can’t drag ’em to be decent. You have to coax them along. Gently, or they’ll buck.
As someone noted, for SIX YEARS, BLM has bored those hard boards. Year-after-year, as their activists have been murdered, and it seemed like no progress was made. And now, all of a sudden, progress seems possible, maybe even likely. That’s GREAT! I don’t want to be murdered.
Andres 06.11.20 at 4:29 am
@64. Chetan seems to think that I am a die-hard advocate of defunding police departments. I like to think that I’m more flexible than that, and that the threat of defunding/disbandment will probably be more effective than its actual execution; only Minneapolis has disbanded its police, but that’s no guarantee that the list of demands such as those I placed above will be met. But the threat of defunding/disbandment needs to be maintained, as does pressure from non-cooperation/disobedience tactics. At this point, most city police departments have shown that simply presenting them with a list of demands by itself will only lead to minor and very incremental changes whereas what is needed is wholesale changes if people (not just blacks, btw) are to avoid being killed by policemen.
J-D 06.11.20 at 4:34 am
Pressure on elected politicians exerted in non-electoral forms can be effective in contributing to desired goals.
Is it strategically well advised for elected politicians to encourage that kind of pressure? How should they do so to be effective?
Chetan Murthy 06.11.20 at 6:28 am
Andres,
You’ve misunderstood my point (re: Clyburn). He’s unwilling to embrace the most extreme rhetoric. Instead, he’s supporting the obvious reforms, and when there are particularly egregious cases, he goes further. In short, he’s being careful, conservative, and not getting too far ahead of the electorate. Back to FDR. When you brought him up, he was the paragon example of a real Democratic leader, who actually -lead-. But in your second comment, he’s just following his electorate, bowing to pressure from them to do what’s right.
And then you get back on the track of “I will likely continue to criticize the Democratic leadership for in the foreseeable future because they do not push for their political base to engage in non-violent civil disobedience”. It’s as if you’ve forgotten what you wrote about Clyburn and FDR. Dem leaders CANNOT push their voters, their base, to engage in these actions — they are by definition, BY DEFINITION, law-breaking. They MUST do the “I can’t support their tactics, even when I support their goals; gee, can’t we all stay peaceful?” dance.
I don’t know where you live, but maybe you should get out more, and take the temperature of white voters Here in SF, it’s clear to me that there are waaaay more racists than one might fear. Also waaay more people who want to stuff the homeless someplace where the sun don’t shine, etc. It wouldn’t take too much “leading the base to engage in civil disobedience” for these racist NIMBY assholes (yeah, my neighbors) to to back to being GrOPers.
And (again) this brings me back to the OP. I know nobody likes to think of these things, esp. at a moment when it seems like BLM and the left has triumphed (not yet, not yet — nothing concrete has actually changed, not even in MPLS) but white voters are fragile and easily spooked. Bluntly put, we still have twenty years, maybe even forty, before we can ignore that basic and overriding fact. Whatever you do, you can’t scare them, or they’ll go back to voting for that knee on George Floyd’s neck.
nastywoman 06.11.20 at 9:07 am
@60
”And only such a revolution, combined with the Republicans choosing a batshit crazy nominee who makes von clownsticks look mild (think Goldwater back then or Cotton now), will result in us having President AOC”.
And I always thought – that only the proven ”unpolitical and emotional way” WE Americans chose our Presidents – will result in us having President AOC – as proven by Obama AND even by the Clownstick – a lot of Americans elected just for ”the Lulz” or because they were mad at teh gubernment –
and thought – the best way to destroy ”teh gubernment” was/is to erect somebody –
who promised to destroy ”teh gubernment”.
AND so – wasn’t the Clownstick already ”the Revolution” you weren’t waiting for? –
as somehow? – in your response – you didn’t mention the HUUUGE REVOLUTION
(the World Wide Pandemic) at all?!
And why is it – that some people – who just had to witness the Pandemic and/or how much Black Lives suddenly Matters -(not only in America but in the Whole Wide World) – don’t think that it is ”revolutionary”?
Or they think it is ”revolutionary” – but they (you?) still want some ”additional” or ”other” Revolution – which… supposedly? leads to same kind of sociopolitical change?
OR not?
As the comment that a ”Angela-type candidate will accomplish exactly nothing even if they get into the White House” is very… confusing? –
If you would think about – how many American Lives such a ”Angela-type President” could save in a Pandemic –
if we ever would have to deal with such a completely –
”Unforeseen Radical REVOLUTION”.
Hidari 06.11.20 at 11:19 am
‘Yes, call me naive, but I think a revolution is the ticket.’
Nothing has ever been achieved except by revolution. The farming (neolithic) revolution, the Christian revolution that led to the end of paganism, the revolution between (roughly) 1400 and (roughly) 1600 that led to the end of feudalism, the scientific revolution, the French and, yes American revolutions, the revolutions (for revolutions they were, although we don’t hear much about that from the middle class white pundit class) that brought down Communism in Europe.
What the ‘I don’t support revolutions’ mob are really baying for is for everyone to return to the hunter-gatherer systems we had in the upper neolithic. Fine, but say that, and don’t waste everyone’s time by pretending to be anti-revolutionary. What these people really mean of course (and their support for the revolutions of ’89, the so-called ‘Glorious Revolution’, the Protestant Revolution etc makes this clear) is that they are in favour of revolutions that support the side which they are in favour of.
tm 06.11.20 at 1:03 pm
Regarding “defunding the police”: The pseudodebate here strikes me as strange. Every radical movement makes seemingly “unrealistic” demands. Be realistic, demand the impossible. The wholesale abolition of the police seems unlikely (*). But a change in budget priorities? Not unrealistic at all (https://twitter.com/ArkansasWorker/status/1270149990082662400). The claim that BLM doesn’t have “specific demands” (stj 59) is absurd and I have to say appears malicious. Another self-styled avantgarde revolutionary telling teh activists on the street they are doing it all wrong, if only they followed the advice of the avantgarde cadres who know how to do revolution right, look at their impressive list of successes…
(*) I’m not aware of a state that doesn’t have some kind of police but there are huge differences between states and jurisdictions in terms of the resources allocated to the police, their training, equipment, and the incidence of police violence (e. g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_killings_by_law_enforcement_officers_by_country).
tm 06.11.20 at 1:09 pm
“Minneapolis announced on June 7 that it will dismantle its police force and rebuild law enforcement from the ground up. Police departments in cities ranging from Lincoln, Nebraska, to Denver, Colorado, have reached agreements with their communities to improve accountability for their law enforcement officers.
Beyond these policy changes are broad culture shifts. Across the South, cities have brought down Confederate monuments and removed other homages to former slaveowners — accelerating a process that began with the Charleston, South Carolina, church shooting in 2015.
Meanwhile, polling shows a sudden, seismic shift in public opinion: 57 percent of Americans and 49 percent of white respondents now believe that police are more likely to use excessive force against African Americans. In 2014, after Eric Garner died in police custody, only 33 percent of Americans and 26 percent of white respondents said so.
More than two-thirds of Americans believe that Floyd’s killing indicated broader issues in the way police treat black Americans, rather than just an isolated incident. By a two-to-one margin, voters are also more concerned by the actions of police in relation to Floyd’s killing than they are about violent protesters. (The protests have, by and large, been peaceful.)
And lawmakers at both the state and federal level are working on reform legislation. Democrats in Congress unveiled a sweeping police reform bill that would make lynching a federal crime, ban chokeholds, make it easier to charge officers with using excessive force, and curtail “qualified immunity†for those involved in wrongful injuries or deaths.
Activists have introduced detailed plans for meaningful police reform. Some have endorsed the 8 Can’t Wait reform platform, which includes remedies such as banning chokeholds, changing reporting protocols for use-of-force incidents, and mandating that police intervene when they witness misconduct. Others have called for even more radical measures: defunding or abolishing the police.
…
More details at
https://www.vox.com/2020/6/10/21283966/protests-george-floyd-police-reform-policy
steven t johnson 06.11.20 at 2:04 pm
Andres@60 “Yes, call me naive, but I think a revolution is the ticket; not the 1650, 1794 or 1917 kind mind you, but the 1965 one.”
Since the 1917 revolution in particular played a part in the motives for Johnson et al. to commit to cleaning up the act, this is blatantly wrong. Indeed, another key aspect, the democratic one, the role that black soldiers played in the Civil War and both world wars is overlooked. In a democracy, the need of the ruling class for soldiers plays a powerful role in legitimizing the masses’ claims for what owners perceive as privileges. The contribution of black veterans, not just your notion of people power, was huge in legitimizing all struggles.
Equally, pretending constitutional monarchy didn’t begin with dead kings and condemning “1650” falsifies history. There is a sense in which the horror at “1794” instead of horror at Napoleon’s war is entirely correct: Democracy is not about real equality, democracy is about national unity in conquest. You cannot pose as a friend of freedom while lying about where freedom comes from. I’ve already forgotten who, in the BHL thread, was so foolish as to say libertarians weren’t influential. But the belief that revolution is the enemy of freedom, instead of the foundation of freedom, that freedom comes from markets or ritual invocations of rights, is libertarian. As you are, here. No doubt you sincerely feel you are not. But given the overlap between sincerity and self-deceit, it is not even clear sincerity is a virtue.
Elsewhere, perhaps I am too much influenced by Lukacs’ “The Historical Novel,” but I can’t help but think the Waverley novels are an extended exercise in justifying accommodation to the English conquerors while still honoring as much as possible the Scottish heritage. The inarticulated claim the Act of Union was merely an administrative re-arrangement I think is contradicted by history. And of course, it is difficult to see anyone can honestly deny the Fifteen and the Forty-Five were not national rebellions.
Least, if I recall correctly Robin’s vision of Carter is drawn from the, well, let’s put it politely, eccentric history of Skowroneck. Apparently Carter is a failure for not being reelected, or because embassy, or something. I do not believe Carter was so ineffective as a conservative Democrat, as witness Volcker and Brzezinski, paving the way not just for Reagan/PATCO but Clinton/DLC politics. Robin I think believes Trump getting grief from his fellow entertainers means somehow he isn’t hasn’t huge effects, that for instance, using acting this or that is nothing but a sign of weakness. Taking Robin as a serious political analyst is a fraught enterprise, I think.
hix 06.11.20 at 5:14 pm
They could have picked just about any timepoint in history to try disorder, or oderly massdemonstrations for that matter and it would have been a better one. So why oh why now. There are a thousand reasons every year, so it can´t be that particular incident.
Chetan Murthy 06.12.20 at 12:44 am
Andres: “Chetan seems to think that I am a die-hard advocate of defunding police departments.”
Actually, no, I don’t think that at all. I believe that you hold Democratic pols to an impossible standard: to be to the left of, to be more progressive than, the people who vote them into office (which is not the same as their “base”, sadly). And I think you find them lacking, when they don’t do that. And this …. well, it’s not something you’re going to get in this world. The entire structure of our political system works against this, from the way campaign funding works, to the way free time on the part of constituents works, to …. well, everything. The best we can ask of our Democratic pols, is that they be fast-followers, and then it’s up to us to show them the way.
Chetan Murthy 06.12.20 at 2:23 am
hix @ 77: “So why oh why now”
Many people on many blogs have speculated about this. Two answers stand out (for me):
(1) many people are unemployed and without diversion (no sports, bars, restos, meetings in general): so they have time to think about these things. And esp. poorer people of color know they’re disproportionately endangered by the virus, so again, they have reasons to think about the injustices visited upon them.
(2) it’s like going bankrupt: “gradually, then suddenly.”
LFC 06.12.20 at 3:03 am
Re the mini-debate upthread on the American Revolution:
Is there any point in debating the American Revolution as if it were a classic social revolution along the lines of the French, Russian, or Chinese? Because it wasn’t. It was a political revolution whose main aim was breaking a colonial tie, not overthrowing a domestic regime judged reactionary, corrupt, and exploitative by its opponents. The American colonies had a class structure but it was probably somewhat less rigid than, say, the French class structure of the late 18th century, and the landed upper classes in the American colonies, or that portion of them that favored independence, far from being primarily one of the targets of revolutionary outrage, as in 1789 France, could instead present themselves, to all other classes in the colonies, as common victims of oppression by Crown and especially Parliament in London.
In this context, it makes rather little sense to refer, as steven t. johnson does @61, to the constitutional convention in Philadelphia as the “interment” of the Revolution. Even if the Constitution was in some respects a “rightward turn,” what was it interring? That great experiment in proletarian class consciousness and zeal the Articles of Confederation? I think “interment” is an overstatement, even if one thinks the Articles of Confederation period had radical seeds that its successor extinguished.
p.s. I must confess that I am, regrettably, about as unversed in the recent historiography of the American Revolution as it is possible to be, but I am emboldened to leave this particular comment partly because steven t. johnson rarely if ever deigns to back up his pronouncements with any references to any historian. So if I am ignorant of the recent historiography of the Am. Rev. (and I am), I am not sure steven t. johnson is much less so.
Jerry Vinokurov 06.12.20 at 4:14 am
The thing is, they didn’t actually do anything. They whined a lot and turned their backs on him and even did a work slowdown and then… nothing happened. If deBlasio had two neurons to rub together, he would have called their bluff then and there and maybe could have actually gotten some reforms through, but he’s a stupid, craven man and he folded to the NYPD at the merest hint of criticism.
Murc’s law is bullshit. We know the right wing has agency, and we also know what they do with that agency. Criticizing right wingers is of course rhetorically useful but you cannot shame the shameless. Democrats are, ostensibly, the liberal party, and therefore it is incumbent on them to do the right thing. Whining about being criticized even though Republicans are so much worse is the posture of the absolutely spineless.
But… they literally can!
Tm 06.12.20 at 6:41 am
Hidari 73 Let’s all study the tactics of the Neolithic revolutionaries more closely, we can learn from them how to overthrow capitalism within the next thousand years. Damn the liberal establishment with their naive belief in gradual change!
Hidari 06.12.20 at 7:20 am
There are about four or five basic ‘arguments’ (if you want to call them that….rhetorical tropes might be better) which ‘justify’, again if you want to use that word, why the Democrats are so shit. You could play a ‘Democrat Party Beach Bingo Drinking Game’ and just have a shot whenever they turn up in internet forum comments’ section, and you would end up very drunk.
Drifting around here, like a haze of almost dispersed poison gas, although one person (to give them credit) has had the nerve to actually state it: is Trope Number One: The Democrats would be dangerous left wing radicals, if only the electorate would let them.
This brings to mind the exciting and unusual idea that, left to their own devices, Walter Mondale and Dukakis would have gladly gone into elections with the election manifesto of ‘Peace! Bread! Land!’ or ‘All Power to the Soviets!’.
But! Alas and alack and allay. It was the pesky reactionary electorate, you see, that wouldn’t let them do that. The intentions of the DNC are dangerous and radical but they are always held back by the electorate, who insist on having dreadful reactionary opinions (many of them didn’t even go to University you know) and therefore, sadly and reluctantly, the Democrats have just been forced to water down their radicalness until they turn into a milk and water, washed out version of the Republicans, a sort of Republican Lite Party. Oh well, what a shame, never mind.
Brecht’s little poem ending ‘Why don’t the Government dissolve the people and elect another’ is a cliche now, but it seems to fit here.
Let’s not forget that in the midst of the largest uprising in a generation, the reaction of Presidential nominee Biden was to suggest that cops should stop shooting black people in the chest, and should shoot them in the leg instead. (to be fair, someone with more sense has now apparently realised what happens when Biden gets anywhere near a microphone and Biden now seems to have gone AWOL: perhaps he is taking a long planned for holiday or something).
Hidari 06.12.20 at 10:41 am
@82
As I pointed out clearly, where were the ‘liberal establishment’ in ’89, when there were radical fundamental overhauls of every aspects of civil society, ‘total’ revolutions that altered everything from the currency to society to, sometimes, even the dominant language spoken?
If liberals (who ‘hate’ revolutions) were consistent, these would be precisely the sort of revolutions they would hate.
But of course they applauded them widely/wildly because these the people in power at the end of these revolutions were people like them. So all the problems and difficulties were simply ignored.
nastywoman 06.12.20 at 12:02 pm
@83
”You could play a ‘Democrat Party Beach Bingo Drinking Game’ and just have a shot whenever they turn up in internet forum comments’ section, and you would end up very drunk”.
Oh my you obviously never played the ‘Trump Party Beach Bingo Drinking Game’ where everybody arrives already drunk.
AND that’s ”the thing” – if you would (sometimes?) reside in a country where ”the people” are used to differentiate between their political parties and politicians
AND mostly vote for ”the better choice” and not some absurd concept of ”lesser evil” you also – probably? – would be able to have see a real ”REVOLUTION” if there was one.
AND are you at least aware that nothing – NADA – is like B.V.? (Before the Virus)
NOT even the betting odds – that there won’t be any Biden versus Trump in Nov. as the odds are tremendously high that at least one of them will become a victim of the ”C19 Revolution”
(just joking – and I understand that was a nasty joke – but Hidari started the joking!)
nastywoman 06.12.20 at 12:16 pm
AND about:
@83 AGAIN!
”There are about four or five basic ‘arguments’ (if you want to call them that….rhetorical tropes might be better) which ‘justify’, again if you want to use that word, why the Democrats are so shit”.
I’m NOT very bright –
BUT!! even I’m able to understand why –
as you mentioned ”Biden” – why my sister AOC is so far less ”shit” -(in order to use the word you used) – than Biden.
BUT – as there is this German Fairy Tale of this US President – who steps in front of a mirror and asks the mirror:
“Spieglein, Spieglein an der Wand,
Wer ist die Schönste im ganzen Land?”
and the mirror responds::
“Mr. President, Ihr seid der Schönste hier,
Aber Biden ist tausendmal schöner als Ihr.”
Tm 06.12.20 at 4:34 pm
Hidari claims that Mondale and Dukakis would have won if only they had been further to the left. Sure. And why did Clinton win?
In the UK, Thatcher and her successor won four elections if I recall correctly against credible Labour candidates, until arch-neoliberal Blair turned the electoral tables. Kohl too won four convincing elections in Germany on his neoliberal platform and was succeeded by Schroeder, now best remembered for Hartz IV and bombing Belgrade. Similar stuff happened in other countries. French voters seemed to defy the reactionary Zeitgeist in 1980 by electing the first socialist president ever, only to vote in a neoliberal parliament just two years later.
To folks like Hidari, none of this indicates that voters actually got what they wanted, that neoliberal politicians won elections because enough voters liked neoliberal policies, to the point that social democratic parties only started winning again when they themselves turned neoliberal. Sure we can denounce these parties, it’s easy enough, but to claim that voters were without agency, innocent victims of establishment machinations, is batshit crazy. And also completely un-Marxist.
Tm 06.12.20 at 4:42 pm
Sorry Mitterand won in 1981, not 1980, and the parliamentary defeat was in 1986 but austerity started already in 1984.
Hidari 06.12.20 at 7:15 pm
‘Hidari claims that Mondale and Dukakis would have won if only they had been further to the left.’
No I didn’t.
‘Sure we can denounce these parties, it’s easy enough.’
Well I’m always up for the easy option.
J-D 06.13.20 at 12:18 am
François Mitterrand (with a double T and a double R) was not France’s first Socialist President ever. Alexandre Millerand (with a double L and a single R) might be considered France’s first Socialist President ever (from 1920 to 1924), although it might be argued that he had ceased to be a Socialist by the time he became President, in which case France’s first Socialist President ever (from 1947 to 1954) was Vincent Auriol.
J-D 06.13.20 at 12:24 am
I pass no judgement either way on their credibility, but for the record Labour was led at the 1979 election by Jim Callaghan, at the 1983 election by Michael Foot, and at the 1987 and 1992 elections by Neil Kinnock. (Also for the record, Thatcher’s successor as Conservative leader and Prime Minister was John Major, still alive at seventy-seven. Today a rooster, tomorrow a feather duster.)
Chetan Murthy 06.13.20 at 2:14 am
Tm @ 87: “to claim that voters were without agency, innocent victims of establishment machinations, is batshit crazy. And also completely un-Marxist.”
I gotta say, for a lotta “leftier-than-thou” in this comment-section [Hidari, but also others], this, this, this. The voters are without agency, innocent victims of Democrat [sic, b/c slur] machinations. Nancy Pelosi, she is surely the bete noire of our age.
Tm 06.13.20 at 11:35 am
I stand corrected about Auriol. Under the fourth Republic, the president had little actual power. What I wish to point out is that postwar France (and also prewar France) until Mitterrand’s election in 1981 was heavily dominated by right wing governments.
Hidari 06.13.20 at 5:12 pm
I’m going to back out now because too many of what one might call Professional Democrats are on the scene (whose attitude towards the DNC is roughly same the as dead eyed Stalinist zealots in the 1930s was towards the Russian Communist Party) but I will point out that I deliberately exaggerated the idea of the electorate being wholly to blame for the Democrats’ general uselessness for, ahem, humorous purposes and at least two people have turned up and gone ‘Yes he’s right! That’s it! That’s exactly how things are!’.
Anyway enjoy the rest of the thread and I just can’t wait till November, when things will all go swimmingly for the Democrats, I’m sure.
Just like the last time.
Andres 06.13.20 at 6:54 pm
Quick postscript: In discussing the democratic base, I would even include those white voters who with a blank slate might have once voted Democratic, but who have now been manipulated by the Murdoch-Koch megaphone into voting Republican because they have been convinced that the Democrats are an elitist pro-corporate party. These voters are obviously misled, but they are not completely wrong.
Andres 06.13.20 at 7:52 pm
Please correct me if I misunderstand your points, nastywoman @72; there are Swedish Chef soliloquies that are easier for me to understand than yours, if not funnier.
Correct, 1965 is not the only type of revolution. It is not even the only type of non-violent revolution. But what makes a revolution is the active participation of a large share of the population not as passive voters (i.e., working within the rules), but as a group who moves to disobey the existing rules in order to create new ones. By that standard, the Clownstick’s voting base is not revolutionary: they can vote and even intimidate, but they will not be disposed to systematically break the rules of a system that they think is set up to favor them over the dark-skinned riff-raff.
The pandemic is only the prelude to a revolution if you grant agency to the Great Beautiful Bitch Mother Nature (plus her pet gerbil named Malthus), who is firing a warning shot across our bow and telling us that she will get truly medieval on us if we don’t stop pouring CO2 into the atmosphere, draining aquifers, polluting our oceans, and encroaching into non-domesticated ecosystems. If you do grant agency, then we are admitting that there are some revolutions that make the human race worse off and might even extinguish it; not all revolutions are progressive sigh.
My condolences with being stuck with Mrs. Merkel as your local head of state if only for a little while longer; the Clownstick is a bull-headed con man turned idiot and bully, but at least he has style and character. I even grant you that the Swabian housewife may have saved some more lives than the Clownstick if she had been in the White House and her English passably good. But she would still have had to work within the rules of the U.S. political-economic clown show: e.g. highly oligopolistic pharmaceutical and PPE markets, deadlocked Congress with presumably hostile Republican party, lockdown policy conducted by 51+ regional governments as well as the federal government, a medical system more used to treating old-age diseases than pandemics, and a general complacency about pandemics common to most non-Asian, non-African countries until this year. So while a decent POTUS would have saved more lives, I doubt they could have gotten the US off lightly as happened in Korea or Switzerland for example.
Which in more general terms brings to mind the importance of politicians doing their best to change the political system while also working within its rules. As I keep pointing out to Murthy’s Law, it is true that political leaders have limited agency especially if they are not corporate lapdogs, but that does not excuse leaders from at the very least saying in public what they think is the right thing to do, and from pointing out when laws are aimed against the mission statement of the Constitution (to form a more perfect union etc.) and should therefore be publicly and non-violently disobeyed. That such a position might lose you an election may be a good reason for not running for office, but is not a reason for keeping silent.
J-D 06.14.20 at 6:06 am
The Chancellor is head of government but not head of State; Germany’s head of State is the President (currently Frank-Walter Steinmeier).
Chetan Murthy 06.14.20 at 8:42 am
Andres @ 93: “but who have now been manipulated by the Murdoch-Koch megaphone into voting Republican because they have been convinced that the Democrats are an elitist pro-corporate party.”
OK, now you’re just playing games, right? There are no such voters. Numerous studies have found that those voters who “switched” to von Clownstick were motivated by racism and misogyny, not by some belief that the Dems are elitists.
And then you try to disqualify yourself again: “that does not excuse leaders from at the very least saying in public what they think is the right thing to do, and from pointing out when laws are aimed against the mission statement of the Constitution (to form a more perfect union etc.) and should therefore be publicly and non-violently disobeyed. ”
Publicly exhorting one’s voters to break the law has never been a good look for a politician. It typically is a fantastic way to lose an election. And whatever else you might or might not understand about elections, one thing, I would hope, is clear: if you don’t win, you don’t get to govern, and at that point, unless you intend violent revolution, all your political ideas, plus $2.50, will get you an espresso at Starbucks.
Tm 06.14.20 at 12:27 pm
J-D 90 I stand corrected concerning Auriol. Of course, in the Fourth Republic, the office of president was mostly ceremonial.
Tm 06.14.20 at 7:11 pm
J-D 95: More to the point, the “Swabian housewife†Chancellor (Andres) is a PhD physicist who grew up in the German Democratic Republic.
Thanks Andres for giving us such a deep insight into your misogynistic, cynical mind. Praising Trump’s “style and character†while trivializing the horrendous Covid-19 death toll among mostly poor and minority Americans for which he bears a great deal of direct responsibility, after casually demeaning one of the most capable heads of government of our time on account of her being a woman, and all within two sentences – Good job!
Tm 06.14.20 at 8:05 pm
J-D 95: More to the point, the “Swabian housewife†Chancellor (Andres) is a PhD physicist who grew up in the German Democratic Republic.
Thanks Andres for giving us such a deep insight into your misogynistic, cynical mind. Praising Trump’s “style and character†while trivializing the horrendous Covid-19 death toll among mostly poor and minority Americans for which he bears a great deal of direct responsibility, after casually demeaning one of the most capable heads of government of our time on account of her being a woman, and all within two sentences – Good job!
One more point: the US isn’t the only country with a federal system. Chancellor Merkel as well has to work with numerous state governments, as does the Swiss government and many others.
J-D 06.14.20 at 11:14 pm
Of course, but if the question is not ‘Who was the first Socialist to be President of France?’ but rather ‘Who was the first Socialist to head a French government?’ then again the answer is not François Mitterrand. A case could be made that the answer would be Aristide Briand, but if he is considered not to have been a Socialist then (because the same must apply to other members of Briand’s party) the answer is Léon Blum.
Andres 06.15.20 at 8:14 pm
J-D: I stand corrected on the Germany’s head of state. The annoying thing is that I did know this but forgot about it in the heat of replying. Which is always a problem when writing comments: since comments are posted in another web-page layer, one unconsciously tends to think that they are not as important as actual articles. This unconscious tendency needs to be fought against.
Andres 06.15.20 at 8:33 pm
For some reason, the comment process did not post a few of my replies, but nevertheless I will try to respond to some of Chetan Murthy’s points:
@98: “OK, now you’re just playing games, right? There are no such voters. Numerous studies have found that those voters who “switched†to von Clownstick were motivated by racism and misogyny, not by some belief that the Dems are elitists.”
When I play games, I go play chess on the internet; I comment for other reasons. First, you should cite where those numerous studies can be found, and I’m not sure they say what you think they do. The most plausible hypothesis is that if you are a racist, you are more likely to have voted Republican for much longer, at least since the 1980’s given the Democratic party’s nominal commitment to civil rights, affirmative action, and other forms of racial leveling. It is only if something other than racism is your primary motivation that you are likely to have switched from voting Democratic to voting Republican over the last decade. If the unnamed, unlinked studies you cite prove that voters in 2016 switched from Democratic to Republican because of racism, then I will concede your point; but my guess is that the studies only show that un-switched Republican voters are primarily driven by racism.
And the argument over the primary motivation of Republican voters is tangential. The fact remains that neither Carter, Clinton, nor Obama pushed for policies that would reverse the decline of mid- and low-tier cities in the U.S., a decline driven predominantly by globalization and U.S. de-industrialization. That many residents in these cities would then wrongly but plausibly see the Democrats as a party of academic and financial elites is an all-too likely outcome. The real problem is that these residents then had no choice other than to either throw away their votes by not voting or voting for third parties, or to vote Republican.
“Publicly exhorting one’s voters to break the law has never been a good look for a politician. It typically is a fantastic way to lose an election. And whatever else you might or might not understand about elections, one thing, I would hope, is clear: if you don’t win, you don’t get to govern, and at that point, unless you intend violent revolution, all your political ideas, plus $2.50, will get you an espresso at Starbucks.”
Your obsession with “winning” and “electability” indicates that you are still stuck in the mindset that this is a fair and objective political system. It is not; it is in fact rigged. Not by anything as crass as ballot stuffing, but by an emergent combination of factors: the gerrymandered congress, the electoral college, voter suppression policies by Republicans, campaign financing, a blatantly partisan selection process for the judiciary branch, and external corporate control of the news media. This combination of factors means that anyone who gets elected to the White House or Congress will be someone who doesn’t displease the major corporations, especially Wall Street, energy, and maybe software. Exceptions like Sanders and AOC are few and far between.
And in case you didn’t read carefully, I even conceded your point that a politician running for elected office is likely to lose that election if he or she supports civil disobedience. Which is why a politician who does so should be one that is either no longer active in elections or not a conventional politician in the sense of running for elected office. The idea is to not accept the political center and its distribution as given: to do your best shift it especially when the injustice in the system becomes blatant enough for everyone to see, as in the past few weeks. And you can’t shift the political center by undertaking minor political reforms: the Civil Rights Act did not get passed just because the Democrats had a change of heart but because images of massive civil disobedience and police violence shifted the political center.
Ok, this will be my last post on this thread. To make sure that this is not personal, I will state that Chetan is not alone: lots of commenters get their hackles up when anyone criticizes the Democratic leadership because they believe the Democratic party to be the only legitimate opposition to the thugs currently in power. Even though I’m starting to lose patience with such a position, I can at least understand where it is coming from; the debate here is not about where but about how.
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